I'm bored and i'm on a trip without access to my PC, so here are a few words about A Better Advent version two point oh.


FAQ

What's that?
The last big patch for ABA. It's going to be huge in content, refining pretty much everything in the mod. And then some. My mission statement is making the definitive enemy mod, the one to put that side of XCOM2 modding to rest for the foreseeable future.

When do we get it?
It's done when it's done. Yes i realize that was Duke Nukem Forevers tagline. Yes i realize how that turned out. When i started working on 2.0, i thought it would take about a month. Now i am two weeks in and i think i need another 6 weeks or so. The feature list is constantly growing and i want to do things properly. That takes time.

You mentioned a feature list?
Sure. Note that nothing on this list is final and that i will likely add and remove stuff frequently.
- Full integration of the Long War Alien Pack. This is not going to be a straight port, they will be completely re-evaluated how they fit into ABAs context. Some are going to be almost unchanged (Drones, Hivequeen), some are going to be merged with ABA units (LWRocketeer + LWGrenadier = ABA Demolitionist) and yet others are going to be completely rebuilt to the point where they share only the theme, but not the mechanics (Gunner, Muton Elite).
- Rebalancing of ABA enemies on all fronts. This includes everything from gamestats over spawnweights and forcelevels to ability sets. Advent units will get additional abilities from tier to tier, adding to the feel that the enemy too is evolving. Variants of Non-Advent units will be balanced as if they were higher tiers of the base alien. For Sectoids, this will mean that vanilla Sectoids are tier 1, Soldiers and Mindbenders are tier 2, Captains, Negators and Puppeteers are tier 3. Finally, in the endgame all variants will appear again as Primes. Similar things will be done with the other aliens.
- Better compatibility. Two things: Everything from the All The Enemies! plugin that isnt loadorder dependant is going to be pulled into the main mod. That includes the followerlists. I had been using my own ranges for spawnweights that were very different from vanilla and made adjustments to other enemy mods necessary. That's going to change as well, so most enemy mods are going to work with ABA just fine, even without ATE! installed.
- Bug, animation and visualisation fixes. I am going to do my best to fix the last issues that ABA has on the technical side. I don't think i will be able to fix the slow enemy Gremlins, but everything else should be possible.
- A complete documentation of the units including important stats and all abilities at all tiers.

What's the catch?
The changes go deep enough that the update would break ongoing campaigns with ABA 1.x.
Therefore, i will likely publish ABA2.0 as it's own brandnew mod on the workshop, leaving this one up as a legacy version. This decision isn't final yet, i am exploring other options. I will likely not be able to say more about this before i get closer to being finished.

End of FAQ.

I will be posting here regularly with screenshots or to talk about other stuff i am working on. As i am on mobile right now and don't have my files with me, i can only direct you to the three spoilers i posted earlier last week in the comments and on reddit, showing off the Demolitionist, the Gatling Trooper and the Chryssalid lineup. I'll link them here properly when i'm home.

Finally, i want to invite you guys to give me your comments. I am still mid-development, so if you have good ideas please let me know. I won't be able to do even more new aliens, as the lineup is already so much bigger than i ever anticipated when i started on ABA in February. But tweaksor abilities for existing aliens is very possible.

o/ Cheers