KristmasKthulhu

I'm actually hoping for someone to figure out a way to get rid of all the cutscenes. At the risk of sounding like I'm about to tell you kids to get off my lawn, there was no need for cutscenes in the original, and there's definitely no need for them now. As far as I'm concerned, not having new cutscenes would be perfect for any map/mission add-ons that I would look into downloading.

I personally really like larger squads. In the original XCOM you had tons of space on the Skyranger because there was no way to prevent your soldiers from dying constantly. I've stopped playing the new XCOM because there were tons of little things that bug me, and I've been trying to figure out how to fix them before finishing. But to answer your question, no, having six soldiers off the bat does not make the game too easy (at least early on). I've still had complete unit wipes against Mutons on Classic. But an easier way of getting six squad members at the start of the game is to just increase Skyranger_Capacity to six instead of jumping through hoops with the OTS. It's under Headquarters Values in the XComGame.exe.

Tested eWP_Unlimited Ammo, and it does let you have a bottomless magazine. Just have to start a new game when you change things around in the .exe.

Related to the subject of modding weapons, this made me realize that there are ways of allowing more variety in loadouts even if we can't add more item slots at the moment. You can add a property to the Arc Thrower to have it take up a pistol slot with "eWP_Pistol," and allow it to be equipped along with frag grenades, medi kits, and the like, it just takes up the slot of your pistol, which is something I'm more than okay with.

Does anyone have experience using the Unreal Development Kit? I get the feeling it's going to be the only way we can change some of the more annoying aspects of this game. I'm trying to open the .upk packages in \CookedPCConsole\ to examine their contents, but am getting errors that are drawing blanks whenever I try to google solutions.

Well, I managed to get a change in the DefaultEngine.ini to affect the game. I was trying to get rid of the closeups on packs of enemies when you first make contact, and tried commenting out what I thought might be the lines which cause that, along with the startup screens for Firaxis, 2k games, etc. Commenting alone didn't do anything, so I tried replacing the + on the start of the line with a -, and just like that, the startup screens no longer show up. The enemy zoom-in still happens, so I'm working on that, but hey it's a start.

I actually find the idea of hyper advanced 70's hardware delightful, but my first concern with modding is definitely going to be tweaking some of the more annoying parts of the game before going to purely cosmetic changes.

Tested this and the only file from the Xcom/XcomGame/Config directory that the game actually needs to properly load is DefaultEngine.ini You can literally delete the entire contents of the directory except for this one file and the game still starts up just fine. So at least that much is actually being used... Earlier today I messed around with DefaultNameList.ini, commented out every American name except Bob, started a new game, and both males from the USA were named Bob, so the game does reference the files whether or not they're necessary to load. Looking around in other directories, I found another config folder for XCOM. It's under My Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\Config. It's possible that when the files are missing from the main directory, it can just grab them from here (except DefaultEngine) and run normally. Here's a comparison of the files in the separate config directories. The contents of the same-named files are similar, though not identical, but I have no idea what that actually means.