Fixes, tweaks, and changes
Change some basic mechanics, clean up how the UI displays some information, free the camera, and speed up load times.
Reliable smoke
Reliable Smoke deals with how unreliable XCOM’s smoke grenade indicator can be, ensuring that all smokes provide exactly as much defense coverage as they claim to. Flamethrower Panic Fix allows your flamers to properly panic enemies as intended (no, ADVENT is not so brave that they laugh in the face of hellfire). Patrol when Revealed rounds out this set of unofficial patches, removing an issue that caused enemy patrols to annoyingly camp on top of you when you spotted them while concealed.
LOS Preview Ability
In a similar vein to Gotcha is LOS Preview Ability, granting an ability that you can place on top of enemies and positions to preview exactly what they can see—no more being surprised when a Muton draws a bead on you through two separate windows and over a car hood.
Show Health Values
Show Health Values is another great choice for people who value perfect information, summing up friendly and enemy healthbars into numeric form for easy reading.
Stabilize Me!
Stabilize Me! is a nice upgrade to the game’s medical system, allowing you to use the medkit of a downed trooper to stop them from bleeding out—it’s a sensible tweak you’re likely to appreciate when your only medic goes down.
Better Shieldwall
Better Shieldwall gives a similarly reasonable boost to an otherwise ignored ability, allowing the lategame WAR Suit ability to provide cover to its wearer, not just allies around them.
PanicMod_AlwaysHunker
PanicMod_AlwaysHunker is another voice of reason, ensuring panicked soldiers will always go to ground on the spot instead of shooting or running in a random direction. While it can initially be amusing to watch cowardly troops run into the line of fire instead of away from it, this Commander tired of such unnecessary deaths a long time ago.
EU Aim Rolls
EU Aim Rolls is a brilliant piece of work that fixes a host of issues you likely weren’t even aware of. Long story short: in vanilla XCOM 2, the chance to hit and chance to crit shares a single roll, meaning if you have a 10% to hit and a 10% to crit, you can only crit or miss. This mod separates the rolls as it should be, while also removing a bunch of other problems you’ll be happy to avoid. Ever seen an on-target grenade decide to miss an Archon? Install this mod and you’ll never have to experience such nightmares.
Gotcha (Flank Preview Evolved)
Gotcha (Flank Preview Evolved) is essential—it upgrades X2’s line of sight indicator to properly reflect whether you’ll flank an enemy from your new position or, even more importantly, if you’ll be able to hack/shoot objective items and even if your sniper will have a squadsight angle on distant targets.
Advent Officer: Call in Reinforcements
Here's a mod for the enemy: this allows Advent Captains to call in reinforcements when his squad has been entirely wiped out. It ups the challenge for you, sure, but it's tempered by the fact that the captain can only use this ability once. You can customize the type of reinforcements that are called, and they'll arrive at a random spot in line of sight.
ShowMeTheSkills
Tired of hunting through your soldiers' info in an effort to remember which particular grunt has that one skill you're looking for? This mod nicely makes all that information immediately visible in the squad selection menu. It's highly customizable as well, so you can have it display stats as well as perks, and even dictate where the information will appear to avoid the menu getting too cluttered.
Stop Wasting My Time
Have you’ve noticed XCOM 2 inexplicably waits for a few seconds after certain actions? There’s often a 1-3 second pause after your soldiers fire their weapons, throw grenades, make a kill, or take cover. This mod snips out those weird little delays in the action, making combat a much smoother experience.
Numeric Health Display
Heath bars are so passé. Here in the future we like cold, hard data. Now you can see the precise numerical value of health, armor, and shields. It even comes with a configuration file so you can customize the size, position, and color of your digits.
Free camera rotation
Adds the ability to rotate the camera using the Q and E keys, lets you zoom with the T and G keys, and enables free camera movement controlled by your mouse. You can also remap the keybindings and configure the zoom and step speed. Now there’s all sorts of new ways to watch your squad die horribly.
True Retroactive AWC
The Advanced Warfare Center provides a chance for your soldiers to earn random but valuable perks. Currently, however, the way it works in XCOM 2 is a bit misleading: a random, hidden perk is selected for each soldier when the AWC is built, or when a soldier is recruited. This mod tweaks the AWC so that soldiers don’t permanently lose their chance at an extra perk if that perk is of ‘lower rank’ than their current rank.
Upgrade Reminder
If you find yourself occasionally forgetting to actually use all the cool stuff you find during missions, this mod adds icons to the squad loadout screen to remind you if an upgrade is available. You can customize the color and size of the icons to fit your needs.
Evac All
If you’re tired of individually evacuating your troops, this mod can make it a one-click affair. An ‘Evac All’ button is added to your soldiers’ ability bars when they’re in an evac zone, and clicking it will spirit away both them and any other soldiers in the zone. Speaking of group hugs, there’s also an Overwatch All mod.
True Concealment
There are a few mods that tamper with the mission timer, but this one feels the most fair. As long as your squad remains concealed, the clock doesn’t start ticking. Once someone is spotted, the countdown begins. It also gives you a bit more time, but there’s a version of it that keeps the default timers if you prefer.
