I haven't fiddled with the progression in any way yet, but I did mess with adding more variety to pod composition:

http://pastebin.com/4X7mUJwS

I added pod varients that include bosses and terror units, made all pods available in 3 different sizes which come in weak, normal, or strong versions, and added some special types - Swarms, which are large numbers of enemies at significantly lower than the current force level, and Elite pods, which are single enemies (or rarely pods of 2) that are significantly higher than the current force level.

I've only played one game so far, so there is still some tinkering to be done, but I found it worked pretty well. (One thing that needs a lot more testing is the Elite pods - They are quite rare, so the only one I got in my first test game was an early MEC that just got killed on overwatch)

As for now, it seems like waves are relatively sensible, until the game decides it's funny to spawn three pods of four stun lancers and their officer all at once. Haven't made it past wave 6. There needs to be UI fixes, especially relating to one-use items. There's also the slight issue of unconscious units-- there isn't a way to revive them without the specialist perk.

However, there is a cute thing I've found out-- this mod works amazingly with Grimy's Loot Mod! Murder a pod, get a box. Open the box, then figure out what the hell you got because there's no UI notification.

Yeah, I need to figure out good ways to 'refill' ammo & health quickly, been focussing on other more breaking bugs but I'll get onto this one soon. Just having an experimentation night tonight after bug fixes.

Also thanks for the balance FowlJ, I might try a round of that. :)

Great mod, I was hoping someone would make one of these! I played through wave 10 and have a few points of feedback.

1) The perks Heavy Ordanance (2 uses for grenade in grenade only slot) and Field Medic (2 extra charges for medkits) were bugged for me and didn't work.

2) I think the cost of additional soldiers was also bugged for me. For the first 2 rounds (I think) they were cheap and I bought 2 and 1 died (leaving me with 5). After that it jumped to and remained at the max cost of 2000 even though I only had the 5 soldiers. I purchased 2 at that cost and it still held constant at 2000.

3) Don't know how its supposed to work, but my soldiers health stayed the same between missions unless they leveled up, in which case it replenished.

4) Again, don't know how its supposed to work but medkits and flashbangs were only good for 1 use (removing them and giving them back to soldiers in between rounds didn't work like it did with grenades and rockets). If this is working as designed it seems fair enough for those items since they are cheap, but if the same is true for proving ground grenades (I forgot to test it) then that is unbalanced at their current cost.

5) Is there a way to revive soldiers knocked uncouncious by stun lancers in between rounds? As it is a stun lancer has a chance to functionally one-hit-kill anyone unless you have a revival protocol specialist to cure the unconcious status. With how prevelant stun lancers were (at least for me), this seems a bit unbalanced. Though I didn't get a chance to test it I expect a similar issue might be in place for units that are bleeding out and stabaized by someoneone without revivial protocal where those soldiers would never recover and be useable again.

6) I also experienced issues I've seen others mention including increasing lag as I got further (likely due to all the corpses), gremlins multiplying and and hanging about, and at least one portal visual which never went away after teleporting in the enemies.

7) The balance seemed reasonable to me for the 10 waves I played (I kept the default settings). I was playing on commander difficulty (assuming you got to pick. I'm pretty sure I remember doing this but not 100% certain). During those waves I had 1 KIA in round 2 and 1 knocked-out by a stun lancer in round 8. After round 3 or so none of my soldiers were ever close to losing all thier health but it was challenging enough to remain entertaining. It is worth noting though that this waswith a 2000 supply cost to recruit more soldiers. Had that cost been what its supposed to be I would have had several more soldiers and probably would have coasted through the waves. For reference I have beaten XCOM 2 on Commander Ironman, XCOM:EU on Classic Ironman, and have several hundred hours in the Long War mod for XCOM:EW (a failed impossible and brutal campaign, and a classic ironman in the late midgame and going pretty well), so I'm a pretty experienced XCOM player and, depending on your target audience, may not be who you are attempting to balance this for.

Hope some of this is helpful. Thanks for making this great mod and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

@ 4) I don't know if items being one use is intentional (and it would be nice to not have ghost items sitting around in the inventory if that was the case) but I like it, even for experimental items. Experimental grenades and heavy weapons could *maybe* be a bit cheaper, to make them more competetive with unlimited use exp. ammo and vests, but I like that you don't just roll until you get whatever you like best and then never buy another one - it keeps things fresh.

Is it intended that soldier health and armor keeps increasing? By the time I hit wave 16 I had soldiers with 6 armor and 40 health, which seemed a bit OP. Also one of my soldiers was killed and then got resurrected in the next preparation phase - not sure if that is supposed to be that way.

ava that was a bug I thought I had resolved a version or two ago, make sure your mod is completely up to date, I'm not sure how steam works in this regard, I might drop a screen listener in to put a version number on the Home Screen, so I can be 100% sure.

1. Take out any research that is useless. Take them out, or make them cost 99999 so it's known not to buy them.

2. Fix all the images.

3. After building, reasearching, purchasing items, the Supplies number doesn't go down right away causing confusion on how much Supplies you actually have. Implement something that fixes this.

4. Effects persist through at the end of the wave, such as unconsious, stun, ect. Implement something that takes those effects of all players.

5. Healing. I think the party should NOT be fully healed after each Wave, instead they are healed for a static number of HP based on Rank and Number of waves. This should make it progressively harder, as you don't get healed fully each time.

6. Optimization. I'm not really sure what can be done here, but after 17 waves, the game became extremely laggy. Lots of dead Aliens, lots of broken structures, lots of available units, lots of the map not in fog of war. I tried lowering settings and other things on my computer, it didn't help. (4790k + GTX 970)

Possible fix for #6. Make it where you change maps ever X number of waves, this should do it.

I really enjoyed this mod! I just played through a couple of waves, so take this with a grain of salt, but here goes

1. The images. I didn't really mind but some people might.

2. There were a lot of useless proving ground projects (Skulljack) and a few research options.

3. Like vSyNd said, the supply didn't go down when you purchased something so that was quite annoying.

4. When buying the squad upgrade of mag weapons, for one round after the weapons were bought the models didn't show up in my hands. Not really gamebreaking but slightly annoying because it took my troops a longer time to "shoot" (Although it did make for some funny moments where my soldiers killed Advent with their minds)

5. I would have played a lot more if I didn't get completely screwed by stun lancers. Please make unconscious people wake up after a wave or two because that was impossible without them.

It was a great mod. All in all I had a lot of fun with it! Keep up the good work.

I am up to wave 20 at the moment and i haven't seen any terror units, is there any reason for that?