Difficulty mechanics

[FMod]

What kept bugging me in the game is the large number of aliens leading to boring repetitive taking down one spawn pack after another. Hence I've been thinking for a long while about making a mod that cranking up all enemies to make for challenging gameplay with fewer opponents.

Seeing how it doesn't seem possible to reduce the number of spawns (or is it?)

 

Guys at Ufopaedia have assembled the following info on difficulty levels: http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Difficulty_%28EU2012%29

 

Normal

Base global panic starts at 0

Most minor alien activity raises panic by 1 in left unchecked with some events doing up to 3

No more than 5 Aliens at a time may engage the player in tactical mission

Alien AI is limited (aliens can skip their turn, run away or take suboptimal moves for no reason)

Soldiers have standard 5 hitpoints

Soldiers cost $10

XCOM HQ has 35 units of starting power.

XCOM HQ starts with an Officer Training School.

 

I struck out things that are in the ini and so take no effort to mod out.

A greater concern is cheating for you when down to 4 soldiers:

 

On normal with 4 or fewer soldiers, or easy with precisely 4:

Chance to hit is 120% of displayed value

For hits that have at least a 50% chance of hitting, chance to hit is increased by 15% (absolute) per consecutive miss

Alien chance to hit is reduced by 10% (absolute) for each consecutive hit.

 

I would actually like that mechanic - chance to hit increasing with consecutive misses - if it wasn't tied to soldier count.

Any chance for modding these mechanics?

Reduce the bonus, or change the soldier count threshold (to 1 - you've lost anyway at that point), or best of all both (e.g. bonus to 5% and threshold to 6 soldiers)?

 

 

I've never seriously played on normal or easy (a few missions that didn't give me enough taste), so, also, a few more questions if anyone has that experience:

* I know there are fewer enemies. How do they spawn - smaller packs or fewer packs of the same size?

* So aliens don't plan perfectly below Classic. But just how bad do they act? Is it something that feels like it makes aliens less predictable, and maybe even actually does - or do they simply become morons?