DersitePhantom

I wasn't really planning to add Meld as a requirement, but even the other stuff is still a good point. I don't want to make the whole process shorter, as that would risk making the other interrogations come too quickly and shortening research times too early on. Though, as I said, laser weapons would also be made less reliable, so rushing them may not be as useful. I'd need to do some testing, but maybe just shortening Psi Lab construction time and testing time enough would work? If 10-15 days were cut off from that, and maybe as much from the other aspects, Psi would hopefully be available soon enough to be useful, and level up to remain relevant into the later game.

Hmm. Perhaps increasing the Psi XP requirements for each level, such that the third tier cannot be achieved within the early game? And perhaps a buff to early game alien will would be able to find a compromise between Mindfray being a guaranteed insta-kill and downright useless.

As I said, this would go along side several other changes. In order to boost the relative usefulness of Psi abilities in my playthroughs I intend to reduce the reliability of ballistic and laser weapons (making a near-guaranteed 5 damage from mindfray look much better) and severely increase alien health (so dealing with aliens temporarily with panic or adding to your fire-power with mind control is more practical.) The problem is that I can't accurately find how to balance these unless I can actually go through the early game with Psi soldiers. So yeah, balancing the game to make early Psi abilities useful, but not overpowered, would take some work, but I think it would be interesting and worthwhile.

It's been a long time since I've been around here, so I'm not entirely aware on what is currently plausible, but after playing through a game with Enemy Within, I have a change that I would be very interested in making, but am unsure of how to implement. With Gene mods and MEC troopers placed so early on the tech tree, I'd like the ability to construct the Psionic Labs around the same time. Ideally, it would become available from interrogating a Sectoid. This is to go with some other changes to up the difficulty that I already know how to make, but I really want to be able to choose one of the three paths for each soldier to add greater diversity throughout the game.

What are you talking about? You can see the chance to hit before locking in the move.

While this is an interesting idea, what you're asking for is practically impossible. With the way XCOM is coded, modding anything serious is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and making entirely new, complicated systems is definitely not going to happen any time soon. Also, in regards to the recommendation of increased squad size; it has been tried extensively before, but it could not be done. You can browse the mod talk sub forum if you want to look at was has been accomplished so far, and what can be done currently.

It really is vital to start going for as many sats as possible immediately, as they pay off massively in the long term.

After you've shot down a UFO, whether you actually do the crash site mission or not doesn't impact panic at all, so feel free to ignore and wait for some easier missions if it would be too hard for you with you're current setup.

I've just finished playing through a 1.62 Impossible Hardcore game, and am just about to start an Impossible Hardcore Second Wave game. In my experience, at least for the hardcore version, you should not severely weaken Battleships. As it stands in 1.62, it is possible to take down battleships pretty reliably as long as you have a decent number of well equipped interceptors and some power-ups for them (I absolutely adore how you've made them actually useful by the way), and I think that's just about the way it should be. If you want to make the strategic game a bit easier, I would recommend instead decreasing the maintenance cost of the interceptors: thereby allowing one to maintain a significant fleet of craft while also having a decent monthly income. In regards to suggestions, I think that rebalancing psychic abilities would be a good addition. Currently, the only real reason to get psychic abilities is to win the game. If you could buff mindfray (Increasing the aim penalty it imposes? Increasing the damage it does? Increasing the innate defensive bonuses and lowering the will of some late game alien types?), then they would be much more useful. Also, the changes you made to panic (specifically, severely decreasing the chance of firing at an ally) make psi-panic practically useless, as there is a significant chance that it just gives the enemy a free shot at you, I'm not sure how you would deal with that (making panic more likely to cause a unit to run out of cover? This is tough because any change to panic affects all panic in alien and humans). Psi inspiration has the potential to be really useful as a defence against psychic enemies, but due to it's inconvenience of use and how short the effect lasts, it's not that practical. I think mind control and telekinetic field are probably fine (though telekinetic field is practically the same as a smoke grenade, and so is kind of obsolete, and mind control is so difficult to use since you can't shoot ally units and, unlike in UFO defence, you can't disarm them either). Rift is pretty good, but only being able to use it in the last mission is kind of silly; I don't think modifying the exp needed to get rift would be a problem, but it would need to be de-buffed severely (decreasing the damage it does would probably be a good start) in order to avoid it being too powerful, and I have no idea how that would affect story progression (I think that you could still use the Gollop chamber as a level four psychic to find the Temple Ship). If you were to do changes such as these to psionic abilities, then you would have course have to make the gift rarer and require more work to find (decreasing psi gift chance and reducing the capacity of the psionic training facilities might work) Anyway, these ideas are just from my experience, and may not be possible or practical. PS: thank you so much for making this mod, I can hardly play XCOM any more without it.