XCOM 2 Mod Recs: Content Mods

By 'content mods', I mean mods that make major additions or modifications to gameplay; new classes, new Items, new enemies, that kind of thing. I don't mean stuff like purely-cosmetic mods, or mods that add in soldier voice packs, or custom music.

I've tried quite a lot such mods at this point, but most didn't 'stick'; if I recommend a content mod, that's not 'I played it one time, thought it was okay, and now feel like sharing it for some reason'. That's 'I enjoyed it enough to do at least two full runs with it, and will do still more in the future, I like it that much'. So keep that in mind.


Ever felt like some of the aliens should want to fight against the oppression of their Ethereal overlords? Then this mod is for you. Or the base-game version, I guess, but that one is very buggy, unsupported, and has noticeably worse balance. (It technically has more content, but whatever)

Anyway, the War of the Chosen version gives you the ability to recruit soldier-class-versions of Sectoids, Vipers, Mutons, and Andromedons. They've all got two full lanes of skills, filling them out with a mixture of 'actual enemy skills' (eg Mindspin, Counterattack), skills borrowed from regular classes, and a few cases of completely original skills broadly inspired by the actual enemy. They also have a lot of the functionality you might expect -or might not, whatever- like being able to get Training Center bonus skills, form Bonds with other soldiers, use standard Items, equip Weapon Attachments to their primary weapons, hack objectives, and even carry bodies.

Mind, their animations on several of these don't exist or have very weird, funky effects, with Sectoids in particular clearly tapping regular human animations for purposes like throwing grenades, and something about the way this is handled results in very off-putting Sectoids, distorting their face, among other things. Hacking also has no guarantee you'll be able to see the hack pad on all the aliens, and by extension you might not be able to interact with it with your mouse. Extended Information can at least be used to see what your options are...

The balance on the four is unfortunately iffy, both internally and cross-comparing the four. Andromedons are, surprisingly enough, fairly bad; they automatically break Concealment on moving, even if there's nothing around for Wall Smash to affect, Wall Smash itself is really easy to screw yourself with (eg by smashing a soldier's Cover who is out of action points, or by trying to take cover against a vehicle only for it to instantly blow up on your Andromedon), and their level benefits are fairly lackluster, so they're always pretty bad, overall worse than the standard classes.

Mutons start out mediocre, being basically a bad Ranger, and their first level doesn't help, as Suppression and Return Fire are both poor skills. If you get one leveled up they get pretty good overall, with natural ability to combine Untouchable and Implacable, but they never fully escape the Ranger's shadow. They're fun if you get that far, but playing-to-win-wise? Probably skip.

Vipers start out above-average, with innate Dodge, superior Mobility, innate Bind, Tongue Pull acting as their secondary weapon, and no major tradeoffs. They unfortunately overall degrade as a run goes on; their level-up options are largely okay-to-terrible, Bind/Tongue Pull loses relevance as enemy HP rises (They never upgrade) and invalid targets proliferate, and past the early game they're perpetually hampered by the fact that their weapon upgrades are tied to upgrading your Sniper Rifles, putting them behind when first progressing to magnetics and really leaving them in the lurch at the beam tier since there's normally little reason to upgrade Sniper Rifles to that tier when you can just loot the Darklance. They remain okay even at the end of the game simply due to their strong start ablating these issues some, and in particular their ability to flank and whatnot is unparalleled, but they do struggle a little to pull their weight at that point. Still overall better off than Mutons, though.

Sectoids are, amusingly, unequivocally the best playable alien. At Squaddie they're bad, with Melee Weakness built in, animating Psi Zombies being a dubious use of a turn, their primary weapon being comparable in strength to a Bullpup, and functionally no secondary weapon... but at Corporal they can take Marauder (Or Mindspin, but... why would you?), which is not only inherently a strong skill but then combines well with their overall focus on abilities that don't care about Cover and barely care about position: if you're going to use Fuse to set off a grenade, or Dominate someone, or are in reach to drop Void Rift on your preferred targets, why not fire off a shot first? Movement isn't relevant to any of those after all. The fact that so many of their abilities are borrowed from Psi Operatives also helps, since their competition takes a while to exist and costs a lot of resources to bring online. Also helping is that their primary weapon runs off Pistol upgrades, which are cheap and accessible. A Colonel Sectoid is probably overall a bit better than a Colonel of a regular class.

One nice thing abut the mod is it handles the consideration of gear by giving the aliens their own gear and then borrowing the Resistance soldier Armor logic so it's no resource burden: Sectoids have their blaster improved by Pistol upgrades, Mutons have their rifle improved by Rifle upgrades, Vipers have their rifle improved by Sniper Rifle upgrades, Andromedons have their gun improved by Cannon upgrades, and of course they all have their Armor upgraded by Predator and Warden Armor purchases. It's really nice! If a bit unfortunate the in-game interface doesn't communicate this info (As well as the previously-covered balance awkwardness), but still, it's a nice, elegant solution that sidesteps a lot of the potential design problems from adding in playable versions of aliens.

I personally always use Allies Unknown with it (Which requires More Resistance Order Pages, in addition to the Community Highlander), as I prefer its recruitment mechanics, but Playable XCOM 2 Aliens does work on its own for recruitment and all.

By far one of my favorite XCOM 2 mods, in spite of its issues.

It's too bad it got little support and nobody else has ever taken up a similar torch; a more refined version could've been downright amazing.



Reclasses the Bolt Caster as a Sniper Rifle, ie makes it Sharpshooter-exclusive and modifies its range profile to Long, but leaves it at 1 action point to fire and bumps up its damage by 1 at each tier (So it's still 2 damage ahead of its peer weapons), as I laid out as one possible solution to the Bolt Caster's problems in the DLC Gear post.

Even though this was actually my idea and indeed this particular mod was made at my request, I've been caught off guard at how effective a patch this is to both the Bolt Caster and to the Sharpshooter class. I'd broadly expected it to help a fair amount for the following reasons;

-The Sharpshooter is the only class in the game to reliably have a regular-shot-variant skill that increases damage output without expending additional ammo. (Deadeye) Indeed, the Reaper is the only other class to have any skills that are a variant on regular shooting without expending additional ammo, period. (Sting, more arguably Remote Start) ie Sharpshooters have the only damage-boosting skill in the entire game that the Bolt Caster can benefit from. This matters quite a bit since the Alien Rulers have tons of HP and the Bolt Caster is meant to be an anti-Alien Ruler tool, and is also a big part of why the Bolt Caster normally falls off as you progress; sure, it does more damage than an equivalent Rifle, but not by enough to do more damage than a Rapid Fired Rifle, which is what it's ultimately competing with.

-The Sniper Rifle and the Bolt Caster already have overlapping problems. The easiest example to explain is the consideration of flanking: the Sniper Rifle normally can't be fired after a move, and enemies endeavor to avoid being flanked, so usually a Sharpshooter isn't going to get flanking shots with their primary weapon. The Bolt Caster runs into the same problem in sustained combat, since you can't reload, move, and fire in one turn off 2 action points. As such, a Sharpshooter switching from a Sniper Rifle to the Snipecaster is making fewer actual tradeoffs than a Specialist switching from a regular Rifle to the regular Bolt Caster is making; they already had trouble getting flanking shots, and in fact the Snipecaster is better at getting flank shots than regular Sniper Rifles, since it can at least go for the flank in the initial phase of combat, before it gets bogged down by the continuous need to reload.

-The Sharpshooter carrying a Pistol means that the Bolt Caster instantly running out of ammo when fired doesn't leave the Sharpshooter in as bad a position as a Specialist, whose non-shooting offensive options are all anti-robot oriented and only one of them doesn't have a very limited number of charges; the Sharpshooter can still move to flank a weakened target and shoot it with their Pistol, instead of reloading and firing without moving and hoping it hits.

-The Sharpshooter's Pistol skills are very powerful in the first place, enough so for a high-level Sharpshooter to be viable off basically just those, and so much like a Psi Operative a Sharpshooter can at worst treat the Bolt Caster as basically their secondary weapon broken out for specific situations, where a Specialist really needs their primary weapon usable on a reliable basis.

I had utterly failed to consider the following points that catapult the concept from 'better than the current state, but probably still overall undesirable to actually use the Bolt Caster past maybe the very early game' to 'I'm using this mod forever';

-Squadsight shots means, in conjunction with a Concealed scout, more opportunities to fire on targets in the open because their pod hasn't activated yet. Between the Sharpshooter's naturally high Aim and the Bolt Caster's Aim boost, this leads to 100% accurate shots at Squadsight distances shockingly readily; a Squaddie Sharpshooter already has a base Aim of 100 with the Bolt Caster, and then at Corporal it rises to 104, ie leaving them perfectly accurate with even 2 tiles of Squadsighting. At Colonel, they'll be perfectly accurate even with 5 tiles of Squadsight, and furthermore it's really easy for them to take to high ground and maneuver to fire on a target in the same turn (Where normally a Sharpshooter is out of luck if their starting position doesn't already have a clear shot), at which point they gain 10 tiles of perfectly accurate Squadsight shots! Put another way, a Squaddie Sharpshooter with the Bolt Caster can get perfectly accurate Squadsight shots on elite enemies who have 10 innate Defense, from up to 5 tiles out. Suddenly it's actually viable for a Sharpshooter to take to high ground and make kills from Squadsight distances! And this is all before slapping on a Perception PCS, keep in mind; a Superior Perception PCS adds 6-8 more tiles of perfect accuracy!

-This tendency to take shots on targets in the open furthermore means the Bolt Caster expects to crit pretty regularly -even before accounting for Sharpshooters getting passive crit boosts- and so can semi-reliably pick off quite tough targets before they ever get to act, such as Mutons in the early portion of a run.

-Furthermore, since missed shots don't trigger pods, using Deadeye to fish for a kill when you're not under time pressure is actually a very safe thing to do. This applies to normal Sniper Rifle shots, of course, but the point is this is a wrinkle in the 'Deadeye is part of why Snipecaster makes sense' element that hadn't occurred to me before using this mod.

-The Sharpshooter does have Kill Zone and Serial, with Kill Zone being more or less worthless with a 1-ammo weapon and Serial clearly preferring a regular Sniper Rifle... but these are both fairly late skills, with Serial in particular being one of the Sharpshooter's Colonel skills. As such, in War of the Chosen it takes quite a while for either of these to matter! Deadeye, meanwhile, is actually one of the Sharpshooter's early skills, making its utility with the Bolt Caster relevant for a much larger portion of a run!

-Serial does more bluntly favors a Sniper Rifle over the Snipecaster, but it can still let you kill something, reload, kill something else, and reload again, so it's not like it's actually useless to the Snipecaster. Furthermore, this favoring is more mixed than I'm making it sound, as the Snipecaster's boosted damage lets it reliably grab kills a Sniper Rifle couldn't count on getting. It's also worth noting that Serial can be framed as a damage-boosting shooting skill (In that if you kill something with Serial active, the damage you do to the next target can be credited to Serial), and so one can accurately say the Sharpshooter has two damage-boosting skills that work with the Snipecaster, vs Specialists and Rangers still having no skills for enhancing shooting damage that work with the Bolt Caster.

-Pistol access means the Sharpshooter can contribute Overwatch fire without risking wasting a Bolt Caster shot. This might sound like a small thing, but it's not unusual for pods wandering into sight and getting caught in Overwatch fire to end up with an enemy taking a hit from a Rifle or Cannon or Shotgun and surviving, but on low enough health that if a Pistol shot catches them they'll outright die. And then your Sharpshooter can still move and fire the Bolt Caster at someone else (Because they were on Pistol Overwatch), where a Specialist who Overwatched with the Bolt Caster would need to reload.

-Death From Above is arguably unfavorable to the Bolt Caster, but only slightly, in that a Sniper Rifle can fire, Death From Above trigger, and then fire a Pistol or move, three turns in a row before needing a reload, whereas the Bolt Caster needs to reload every time it triggers Death From Above... but this can still be used to fire 'for free', in the sense of moving, killing something, and then reloading to repeat the cycle next turn, or firing the Pistol with intent to reload on the following turn. This actually does a surprising amount to alleviate the Bolt Caster's ammo problems!

-Granting the Sharpshooter the Snipecaster directly addresses one of the Sharpshooter's big design flaws: that they're designed around having an inherently clunky weapon type (Sniper Rifles), and its disadvantages are nearly universally relevant (Demanding 2 action points, having an inferior range category, to a lesser extent having only 3 ammo) while it only really has the one advantage (Squadsight) that isn't even that great/isn't necessarily being leveraged on any given turn. Sniper Rifles are actually objectively weaker than Shotguns, and exactly as strong as Cannons, leaving Sniper Rifles in a terrible place even if we ignore that technological progression always places Sniper Rifles as late to upgrade. (ie for a while in a given run, you'll be comparing a Conventional Sniper Rifle to the magnetic Shotgun, and even the Mag Rifle is stronger than a Conventional Sniper Rifle!) The Snipecaster more properly turns the Sharpshooter into an awkward-but-powerful class, with a damage advantage, ignoring Dodge on targets, and having a chance to Stun survivors; altogether this means the Sharpshooter is suddenly on pretty even footing with the other classes, instead of being the clear loser.

-By a similar token, the Bolt Caster's damage advantage directly fixes the Sharpshooter's tuning problems with Pistol spam tending to pull ahead of firing the primary weapon; simply adding Dragon or Venom Rounds to the mix still leaves one Bolt Caster shot ahead of two Pistol shots, so even when you're deciding between 'fire Pistol twice' and 'reload the Bolt Caster and fire it', the Bolt Caster comes out ahead on damage, pushing Pistol usage more to considerations like finishing off weakened targets without needing a reload, rather than Pistol spam being a default and primary weapon shots the exception.

Altogether, this very small change breathes a shocking amount of life into both the Bolt Caster and the Sharpshooter class.

It's fantastic.

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And that's it for content recs for the moment -there'll be more such rec posts someday, as I get thoughts organized, not to mention mods getting released.

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