Hey Johnny, first up, I'd just like to say this mod is pretty fantastic. I'm playing the 2.0 version at the moment and the extra mechanics really add a lot of depth to the game, and, in my humble opinion, make it much more fun and honestly a lot closer to what it should have been to start with. Making Assault troopers that can actually manage to kill enemies without having to let themselves be flanked, Infantry being a solid core trooper than you'd be a fool to do without, and taking Snipers from "Godlike" to merely another solid choice are all incredibly welcome changes, along with the vast variety of loadouts that are possible to fit your troopers with. The "Exhaustion" mechanic is a very good one, forcing me to actually rotate my squads (though some months actually have so many missions as to force me down to rookies, lest I put my big guns out for a bloody month), leading to careful tactical organizations. The number of missions can also be pretty daunting, but fun and challenging. That said, I do have some constructive criticism here. Mainly concerning the Arc Thrower, and the rewards from missions. I know XCOM is one of those ball-crushingly difficult old-school games, but it seems a little unbalanced when I am receiving so few rewards in the form of alloys and weapon fragments that by the time Mutons are showing up, I scarcely have one or two laser weapons to my name, and no upgraded armor whatsoever. The sheer inability for basic ballistic weaponry to deal with higher-HP enemies, especially in groups, and even when using the Enhanced Ballistic item, changes the game from "Challenging" to "Meatgrinder". I know they're supposed to be rarer resources in this mod, but I have literally done missions where I have gotten scarcely a couple of fragments from about a dozen aliens, when most research projects require more than 20, and that's for the smaller ones. It may just be me, but I find that rather unreasonably rare of a reward rate. The other point is the Arc Thrower, most notably in that it is nigh-useless in most situations now. At most, a 50% chance to stun means that not only do you have the difficulty of setting up your stun in the first place, but that when you try it it probably won't work, and you only get one shot at it. This would probably not be such an issue, thanks to the enhanced stun range, except that ALL of the Plasma weapon researches require captured weaponry, some of it from horrifyingly powerful enemies. I've lost more than a few troopers trying to capture even low-level aliens like Thin Men, because even those damned Carbines (Good rename btw) are quite powerful, especially after a couple of months. The base stun chance I can kind of understand, but I would suggest the Improved Arc Thrower project dramatically increase the stun chance, preferably at LEAST up to 75% or so for a 1HP enemy, because at the moment it is a waste of good research materials, providing a mere 3% increase in performance. I really hate criticising, because this is one of the best mods I've ever had the pleasure to play, taking the core game and improving upon it in nearly every aspect. But these mechanics I feel warrant a bit of a look, if only because they occasionally change the game from "Challenging" to "Infuriating", and as I'm sure we can all agree, making the game enjoyable is the real goal. Well, that's my piece, hopefully it's some helpful feedback. Keep up the fantastic work on the mod, please!
