GeneralArmchair

Thanks for that insight. I suspected that the information you found was in one of the .upks after the discussion about psi chances in "finding the first step", but never found the time to dl the necessary utilities to check them myself. I'm looking forward to the day that the mod community can repack the .upks.

All the maps are preconstructed. I'm not sure how the game handles pre-round damage. I don't know if it randomly blows stuff up at the start or if it loads up a preconstructed "damaged" map.

I suppose the first step would be to re-enable free aim as an overpowered mechanic in a paper-mache world. The next step would be hardening that world to realistic levels so that you can't simply tunnel through everything with basic assault rifles. It would certainly help make the cover system more realistic. What the cover is made out of should be extremely important, while it currently is almost a non-issue. In a better system, the choice between the man sized "soup-of-the-day" sign and a chest high cinder-block wall next to it is a no-brainer. But in their weird system currently implemented, the soup sign is better simply it is "full" cover rather than "half" cover.

That's easily fixed by adding multiple levels of resiliency to cover. If the aliens are hiding behind the "full cover" of the large "soup-of-the-day" chalkboard in the local restaurant, then you SHOULD be able to spend 1 shot destroying it and blasting the exposed alien with the next. If the aliens are taking cover behind a brick wall, the odds of you vaporizing their cover with that one shot should diminish accordingly. If they're hiding behind a piece of UFO alien alloy wreckage, then you should pretty much be wasting your time trying to destroy the cover. If the devs think that free-aim is overpowered and breaks the game, then they have only themselves to blame for making their world out of paper-mache. I was surprised when a mere frag grenade destroyed the exterior wall of a UFO. Dumbfounded when stray fire did the same. The exterior walls were nearly invincible in the classic game. It took a blaster launcher to punch a small single tile hole in the wall. The interior walls were only slightly weaker. A heavy plasma could melt them, sometimes....after like a full magazine's worth of attempts.

If it is any consolation, the color 'customization' in the DLC is extremely restrictive. Rather than picking the colors for your troops, you get to choose from a few dozen preset color combinations, most of which look like a toddler vomited finger paints on the soldier. It can be useful for giving you CO and medics different color schemes, but for the most part you aren't missing anything.

By default, the ratio of female to male recruits seems to be a pitiful 1:10 (That isn't a hard number, that's what I've observed from playing). I personally hate the gears-of-war style bodies they gave the male troopers. In the long term, I'm hoping for custom trooper models, but that's a much larger task. In the short term I will be happy with more female troopers in my force. I've seen some discussion about modifying the .ini files and editing resources in the .exe file. I'm hoping that somewhere in some file is a simple variable that controls whether a new recruit is male or female. I've done a very brief search through some of the .ini files, but I didn't see the variable. I'm hoping that someone here has either already determined how to adjust the gender ratio, or can point me down the right path to find it myself.