lagrath

Heavies are the best class in Warspace mod. Reduced damage from normal shots, even more HP from heavy armors, shoot twice a turn, 3 rockets each, double damage versus all mech units...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/08/solomon-vows-firaxis-on-xcoms-second-wave-add-on/ On one hand, Fireaxis is keeping an eye on the mods and it's quickly affecting the vanilla version! Awesome! Maybe some day we'll see the military retexture mod and Warspace mode integrated into the steam version. On the other hand: if they think modders are so great, why make the steam online mode break mods and why make it so hard to suddenly update mods for compatibility when new versions of the game come out?

Yeah, that was my conclusion also. However, marathon mode, as far as I know, just makes things take longer to research, mainly...it doesn't explain why the first few months have very easy troops and UFOs, and then suddenly overnight it skips to mostly mutons, chrysalids, and only various UFOs that can't be killed by even multiple interceptors. It would feel much better if it got harder a little earlier, but not super-hard quite as fast. I ended up compensating for not being able to shoot down UFOs by making satellites much harder to detect and panic easier to keep down, which in turn made the game feel too easy again....the big panic increases and satellites being shot down easily early on make things much more exciting, so maybe if I'd been able to get to interceptor powerups faster it would be less catastrophic... I really need to try 1.60 without marathon mode, haha. Oh well- I'm having a wonky experience, with marathon making everything much harder but some of my specific DGC tweaks making things significantly easier...

I wanted to add some feedback about 1.60 concerning my experience about Warspace 1.60 on ironman impossible marathon mode: I'm learning that marathon + impossible + warspace suddenly makes month 4 UFOs insane overkill and makes it actually impossible to beat the game, due to Warspace 1.60's changes to UFOs and total dependency on powerups for aircraft (that will take like 6 months to get to thanks to insane research times of Warspace + marathon mode). Marathon mode seems to multiply on top of Warspace's extra long time to research anything, making it impossible to get the air weapons/powerups without which you can't do anything to the UFOs that suddenly pop up. I went from holding my own and doing well (invested heavily in interceptors and rushing to the NA bonus) to being annihilated no matter what, on every continent. For the first 3 months, you see UFOs that take you 1-2 interceptors to shoot down. Undefended satellites will very likely get shot down- fair enough: I never had a single satellite shot down in my vanilla classic run, since I get stealth satellites before that ever started happening. It's also nice that you can't shoot everything down with just 1 interceptor all the time. However, after the first 3 months suddenly Warspace 1.60 spawns only UFOs that are impossible to shoot down. These start dropping mutons on all their missions, even though the game up to this point only had sectoids and floaters on missions! These swarm every continent and you can't shoot them down even if you invested in having 3 interceptors ready. I had 10 fights in month 4 with 3 interceptors sent at ship at a time and even on the fights where every hit landed not a single UFO went down! After you fail to shoot them down, they blow up your satellites basically 100% for sure. As if this wasn't bad enough by itself, this causes that whole continent and the country that lost coverage in particular to panic like crazy. As if THAT wasn't bad enough, Warspace 1.60 lets countries leave the Council permanently with just 4/5 panic, much less 5/5 panic. So basically you go from aliens and UFOs that can be countered with the proper investment in troops/aircraft to, in the next month, the sudden appearance of crazy UFOs that are invulnerable, spawn constantly, and drop aliens that are a huge ramp-up in difficulty (especially when the removal of enemy AI limits means multiple patrols will constantly wander into your fights with the mutons). I'm surviving the squad fights fairly well because I rushed for vests and carapace armor (which are mandatory versus thin men and mutons since Warspace 1.60 ramps up plasma crits even more it seems like)...but of course this means I am months away from researching the powerups and air weapons that 1.60 apparently makes mandatory for UFOs in month 4! In sum: In order to survive the 1.60 changes in light of marathon mode, I think I need to go into the DGC.mod and tone down the appearance rate of tougher/mid-level UFOs, their health/speed, the cost of satellites (still around 150 spacebucks even with like 35 engineers), the odds of satellites being shot down in the early game when you are like 6 months away from stealth satellites, and the research time of marathon mode in general. I'm not sure how to do all this but hopefully it is as easy as changing other things about the game.

It would be awesome if you could add torch and aim as psychic abilities (I don't know whether it is possible to mod the amount of max abilities you can have for a class or psychic, or to replace existing powers, or whether that is hardcoded).

Already posted this in the comments section to the mod itself, but here are what I see/am experiencing as the big, big drawbacks to the mod (which, as far as I know, will not be improved or changed in 1.60 this Saturday): -Overwatch doesn't seem to trigger properly. I often have enemies moving within LOS of my soldiers with my whole squad on overwatch and not one of them firing. I just had a sectiod move adjacent to one of my guys with the whole squad on overwatch, no one fires, and then the sectoid one-shots my guy! Overwatch not working properly seems like an insane flaw. -Plasma weaponry seems to be even better than before- on the opening mission, the sectoid plasma pistols crit my full health squad members for 6/8 or 8/8 HP in one shot! -Laser weapons, ironically, seem to still be bad....they are supposed to serve as a bridge between normal weapons and plasma, requiring a significant investment of resources and time to research and produce. This should result in a clear upgrade to the default weapons that rewards players with a big boost in early game and mid game competitiveness with the aliens until plasma is unlocked. XCOM vanilla is extremely disappointing for someone like me that played Apocalypse about 7 times and is used to a slow, steady progression in many tiers of equipment until late game, and Warspace continues rather than fixes this glaring issue. -The recovery time is really way too much. I've spoken with many people who have tried Warspace and they all quit because the heal times were simply way too prohibitive (especially when compounded with other things like the strength of plasma weapons and the increased cost/time it takes to gear out your troops with the armor need to keep up HP and not get auto-infirmary'd by 1 plasma crit). After 1.60 is released, I will be trying to figure out how to edit the mod to fix these values myself (though I have no idea how to mod anything, much less mod a mod). If I can't figure out how, I'll/ put XCOM on a shelf for now... Edit: Figured out that the defaultgamecore file is in the normal folder of the source, figured out how to do everything using the DGC reference guide...guess I will be getting 1.60 and modding it for my own tastes!