I've always been fond of the idea to be able in some way to "tweak" soldiers.
In most X-Com games, how hard is it really to load up a bunch of rookies with Pistols, mind control and strip a bunch of Mutons/Lobstermen/just raid Sirius five hundred times in one day, and make them parade back and forth in front of them until they're all maxed out beasts of war? The entire theme of Aliens I always found is not "puny humans against super-powerful aliens" as much as it's "super-strong humans against limitless numbers of puny aliens", which is just how I like it. So the idea of genetically "improved" humans seems actually to fit MORE readily into the X-Com mould than some people seem willing to think.
The aim of UFO was more than just sending endless numbers of men to die in UFO battles all day, you researched the alien technologies, researched your own improvements to them, until not only were you
equal to the very aliens you faced, but towards the end of each game (with trained Psi units, heavy defensive armour, flight capability, not to mention average stat levels - and this is purely in UFO) you
exceed them. You build Avengers can take out two Battleships in a sitting, craft weapons that exceed the best they have to offer, and all your guys can fly to boot.
So, to get back on topic, with genetic modification (I'll simply bunch nanotech with the process here, since the only way to accomplish large-scale modifications on a non-embryonic lifeform is through bacterial or nanite manipulation).
To "improve" a soldier shouldn't be so drastic as Schwick suggests, the idea of different fields is good, (though the metal endoskeleton misses out the slight problem that without your bone marrow, the body lacks any way to actually produce new blood cells so you die in three days. =
, but possibly in a variety of subtle ways.
First off, the balances:
1: Each soldier has a concealed "tolerance" stat, and each "improvement" bears a cost based against this. This is the general amount of manipulation their body can take before they may start rejecting their own body tissue and die in a bloody mess on the floor and everyone has to bring their own mop.
Since this could be carried out by a simple blood test, the level of tolerance of every soldier is automatically known upon recieving the tech to want to know tolerance in the first place.
Exceeding this by even a little (and getting lucky and them not dying) can lead to random effects such as momentary blindness (a random chance of severely fluffing a shot), various psychoses through the mission (well, we're all familiar with THOSE), permanent psionic deadbeat (A strength of 0, a skill of 0, both unraisable. Have fun in those bases!
), quicker energy loss from movement, crippled (straight forward reduced strength, or TUs, or energy, or accuracy, or reduced reflexes et cetera)....
These effects are chosen only at inception, once "finished" without dangerous effects, the character is settled.
I'm sure everyone can think of more ways of torturing their poor rookie test subjects of course.
Suddenly even awful soldiers have another chance to be great, another "Psi-esque" stat that can suddenly differentiate soldiers who had previously been identical, whilst the potential benefits of overloading soldiers a little past their tolerances can easily outweigh the chance of their being "flawed". Conversely
every death due to biological failure is a huge score reduction.
The average tolerance should be similar to the Psi stats type of range. Exceptionally high 100s, and exceptionally low <10's would be rare, but not unheard of.
2: Each soldier can only undergo improvement
once and once only. If you research ocular enhancement and rush to fit in someone for the procedure, they can't be reworked on once you get cardiovascular upgrades, even if they did have more tolerance available to them.
Tactics fun when you are forced to decide whether to upgrade and get that bonus now before you do that alien base, or try for a supersoldier once you've mastered every tech and are just killing time before heading up to Thanatos.
3: In mutations, I refer to increasing the "potential" of a soldier, the closer the modified unit was to their original maximum, the lower the increase they can achieve - habits are already formed, training already done its work, getting old....
For example, a rookie just hired and immediately put to improved eyesight will have the basic accuracy bonus, and the maximum increase in potential. The 100 Psi Strength Commander you've had in every battle since day one, who has every stat maxed out barring a meager "Seventy-nine" in Time Units, if given the same treatment will gain
only the accuracy bonus, and no magically increased maximum.
Yet more tactics, the potential need for dropping all the "old guard" to create an all-new rookie force from scratch in the late game is a tempting prospect for the perfectionist.
4: The aforementioned funding cuts, even outright war and raids by religious nuts and humanitarians alike is a great idea, which I'll refer to in detail a little later as related to each "tier" of artificial evolution.
To cover simply, if "discovered" (take them on a terror mission, or a randomly generated media reporter breaks in and snaps a picture of your base, which should happen even when you're not doing anything wrong, just for a larf), your funding can stand to be reduced or cut entirely if you've made a bunch of school-girl hunting tentacle fiends, but if you've done the equivalent of making your soldiers take steroids, then the media wouldn't really care, and nor would any funding countries, but you might lose $$$$ from the Vatican. This would be magnified (and snoops far more likely) at higher difficulty levels.
5: Time and money: In order to both make scientists necessary after everything has been researched (rather than sackable to make more room for engineers like the original), each soldier would function in much the same way as a manufacturing job.
Total man hours for a true biological nightmare could easily rival an advanced ship equivalent in total man hours as scientists need to occupy themselves monitoring feeds, maintaining them, entering the formula.... Naturally, these scientists couldn't research during this time, nor could the soldier be sent on missions until they were "finished". Cancelling equally, is not an option, so don't mod your whole force all at once.
Equally, given the general facilities needed for such activities, special "biological containment lab" facilities would need to be produced, with a maximum of two men modified per BCL rather than taking up "lab space". These rooms would be pricey and slow to complete, and obviously compete with other rooms for base space.
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I'm more than open to suggestions on any further limitations to what should be a lucrative and deep "side quest" type path down the techtree, but I'd like to add to the earlier (and excellent) idea of moral tiers with rather more sinister endings:
"X-Corps independence and Alien alliance". Cast out from all economic ties and alliances with a planet that both hates and fears them, yet too powerful for any country to remove them, X-Corps is faced with two choices, either continue their original mission without the aid of any human support (Can't recruit more men of any of the three categories, must pay black market prices for everything else), eventually winning at terrible cost and then remaining trapped and aloof on a world that hates and fears them....
Or ally with the alien forces, turning superior X-Corps firepower towards destroying and burning entire cities to the ground until the last vestiges of free humanity are dominated under X-Corps' control, and then humans joining the legion alien creatures assaulting their NEXT world, though how human they might be is rather questionable.
Both "dark" endings signify the need for an entirely new mission type. The X-Corps terror mission. Assault human cities, stunning civilians and armed force members to bring back to base or simply killing them for kicks. The only way X-Corps can recruit new members is to abduct them, mind dominate them, and put them to work. Or simply throw them in the cloning vat to fuel the modification vats. It's all good.
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And now, the actual improvements, I'm staying clear of different levels of sophistication to each improvement in true UFO fashion (You can't research hyper-efficient laser sniper rifles, can you?).
Light Modification:
These improvements require fairly low tolerance levels (say needing an average of 10 tolerance each), and aren't terribly likely to offend that many people. Minor improvements aren't terribly immoral or "challenging the bounds between humanity and monstrosity", and shouldn't really have that much of a "darkening" influence on one's ending.
Minor modifications are essentially genetic "tune-ups", improving vision, tweaking the cortex and other such elevated abilities are as far as such things go. In gameplay terms, sticking solely to these or lower should remain challenging, but your conscience will be clean.
Improved Vision - microscopic eye surgery grants the patient 22/22 vision, and provides up to around a +2 bonus to the shot accuracy stat, but improves the overall "potential" (read: maximum) by up to an additional 8, for a total improvement of 10 by the end of a rookie career.
An important, but less stat based improvement is an improvement in night vision by two squares and general nighttime accuracy. Not as good as an alien's, but better than nothing.
Efficient Metabolism - Muscle tissue engineered to function better anaerobically and be more resistant to lactic acid buildups combined with improved pulmonary efficiency allow greater strength and speed in the patient, providing +1 Time Unit and +1 Strength, with a further +5 potential to each. A rookie "bionaut" (bio-enhanced soldier) with this upgrade can potentially run a square further than an equivalent soldier every turn once fully trained.
Super Circulatory System - The heart's size and efficiency increases, whilst blood vessels are infiltrated by a series of cutoff valves which slow blood loss and aid recovery.
Combined with this a store of platelet fuelled nanites occupies the bloodstream, swiftly serving to regenerate tissue damage and lost limbs.
The Super Circulatory System essentially serves as a "negative" fatal wound. Each turn, if health is lower than maximum, the bionaut regains 1 point of health. If health is full, but other stats were reduced due to injury, these are recovered upon complete regeneration. The bionaut also has a 5% chance of a fatal wound being healed each turn instead of their 1 health per turn regeneration.
Due to the invasive nature of this procedure, it takes [15] tolerance as opposed to the average [10].
Improved Glandular Response - Outputs of adrenalin, endorphins and other hormones are controlled by resident nanite populations in the enlarged glands and released as appropriate to stabilise the moods of a soldier. Bravery is increased by 1, and a potential of an additional 4. In addition to this, the soldier regains a small amount of morale each turn, and morale recovery from panic and beserk is doubled.
Due to the relatively small and comparatively uninvasive nature of the nanite colonies, IGR treatment requires only [5] tolerance.
Wired Reflexes - the nerve cells of the bionaut are modified and rewired in such a way as to give split-second reaction times to the point of seeming clairevoyance, as a result gaining an increase of 3 to Reaction, with a further 12 extra potential for the stat.
As an added bonus, the trooper regains 0-5 TU's at the end of their turn, after movement as a result of their obscene reaction speed. A lucky bionaut might get to reflexively duck a shot even after running across the whole map the turn before.
Psionic Buffer - A one off trade off, the psionic buffer modification to the brain alters psionic brain patterns to ways incompatible with psionic influence. This zeroes and prevents the raising of psionic skill (behaving as though the bionaut were an untrained psi talent), but doubles the psionic strength of the unit against mind control and panic attempts.
Psi Scream Brain Modification - The Psi Scream modification to the brain affords the bionaut a 5 increase to both strength and skill, and allows them to function without a psi-amp so long as they keep one hand free to focus their mental powers.
When combined with a Psi-Amp however, the bionaut may attempt a mental "scream" after which the enhancement is named, directly attacking the mind of the target to deal 1-10 stun damage for every successful scream (a function which operates similarly to attacking morale).
This is the most invasive and dangerous procedure to still be classified as "minor", due to the dangerous manipulation of the brain involved.
Naturally, as Psi Buffer is in direct contrast to this, the two enhancements are mutually exclusive.
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Medium Modification
Here, humans have started to walk the fine line between utilitarianism and "playing God". Large-scale alterations to the human body to achieve battlefield results start to weaken the sense of "us versus them", and the morality of subjecting soldiers to a lifetime as freaks starts to emerge.
As these manipulations are fairly major, the average tolerance required per improvement is 25.
Compound Eyes - Whilst otherwise normal, the eyes of the individual are changed in function and structure to those of a Grey; large, pupilless black orbs. These eyes view in several spectrums, including infra red, eliminating nighttime vision and smoke penalties, as well as granting the same accuracy bonus as Enhanced Vision.
Battle Claw - Mimicking the effective lethality of Spawn attacks, the Battle Claw upgrade grants the bionaut a single chitin covered arm ending in a vicious barbed pincer, and can be selected twice, with 25 tolerance each. (If only selected once, the poor bionaut would be a tad imbalanced...)
Each claw may effect a melee attack for 10% TU cost and 100% accuracy, dealing armour piercing damage equal to the Bionaut's strength score with each attack.
If both hands are made into claws, a 15% TU cost double attack becomes available, dealing double strength as damage.
As the obvious downside, these claws cannot wield guns or other melee weapons, though they can throw grenades. A cloaked claw-bionaut would be a dangerous toy indeed.
Chitinite Armour - Another grudging nod to the efficacy of the Alien war machine, natural biological plates are fused to the soldier's endoskeleton to create a living artificial exoskeletal armour, highly resistant to plasma fire, though vulnerable to armour piercing weaponry.
Front: 80 Sides: 60 Back: 70 Under: 50 - Though Chitinite Armour effectively prevents the user wearing any other armour, all plasma weapons are at half effect when calculating damage against it. Due to its "construction" and biological nature, it does not prevent fire damage.
Chameleonism - Similar to cloaking technology, the skin of the bionaut adapts almost instantly to its surroundings, rendering it blurred and difficult to see.
If the bionaut has not attacked during its turn, and is more than 10 "square equivalents" from a unit, it is effectively invisible to that unit. Intelligent and observant human controllers might notice the blurry features of a camouflaged unit (or a piece of scenery that LOOKS like one), and open fire on it with reckless abandon, but there is no "alert" (little red flashy box equivalent from UFO) about its visibility.
As an extension, the chameleonic unit's constant shifting colours grants shooters a penalty akin to firing through permanent solid smoke cover.
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Extreme Modification:
Humanity crosses the line, then urinates upon it. The tolerance required here is high, 50 tolerance minimum, but given that some forms of extreme modification create entirely new biological weapon units, this is sometimes irrelevant.
Getting caught with one of these things on your base is easily comparable to losing a craft or worse. Each. Heavy loss of funding, outright hostility and the darkside endings are all you can really expect from this level of technology, but at least you can be assured your troops will tear through aliens like butter. And being evil is fun too.
Ovipostor - The bottom half of the bionaut's face is mutated into something like a hidious fly, a long curled ovipostor, or egg implanter, curls from where their mouth used to be. Ovipostor granted bionauts can no longer eat naturally, and require intravenous feeding to survive.
The use of the Ovipostor is two-fold. Firstly, any successful melee attack by the bionaut against an enemy has a 20% chance of creating a zombie of the appropriate species if it successfully damages. Secondly, if your bionaut happens upon a body - dead or unconscious, it can pick it up and hold it in its hand (or near equivalent), spending half of its TUs to infest the body, which swiftly dies if it wasn't already.
Next turn the body explodes to realise a mutant biokiller, genetically engineered alien killer.
TU: 60 Acc: 0 Throw Acc: 0 Bravery: 100 Strength: 10 Energy: 120 Health: 20 Psi: -
This BioTerminator is under your control, and completely expendable, exploding on death into a little puddle of formless goo, they only live a few hours, but as long as they do they can be used as the ultimate scout-fodder or to distract reaction fire from the bionaut themselves.
Notionally a "human/spawn" bionaut could be made with twin claw, chitinite armour and the Ovipostor modifications, but would require >100 tolerance to do so.
Chimera
A particularly twisted and inhumane experiment inspired by the Raptor (if they're still the same biology as their inspiration), the fusion process uses both available slots in the biolab and two soldiers to combine into a horrific mutant hybrid, a heavy biological tank with double copies of every organ and propels itself about on an obscene mixture of hands and legs. A mixture of psi-controlled turret weapons can be fitted on the resultant chimera bionaut(s?). To all extents and purposes, the two soldiers have become a heavy weapons platform, then fused with a thick, leathery hide and in-built psi enhancers, even aliens have reason to fear.
One of the few mutation projects that rewards latecomers, the Chimera project combines 60% of each of the two soldiers' stats together to form a single heavy artillery unit, replete with a high accuracy heavy laser mount and missile launcher (or their upgraded equivalent), and comparatively light armour (50, 40, 50, 30), but is immune to mortal wounds, cannot improve, and "costs" two soldiers.
Due to the severity of the change, no other biological manipulation may have been formerly practiced upon, or currently in effect on either of the patients.
Satyrian "upgrade"
Turning to our enemies once again, a human variant on the Satyrian anti-gravity design, made possible by our advances in biology, has been perfected, allowing bionauts to sail serenely over the battlefield raining death down upon enemies.
Obviously enough, this allows the bionaut to fly. Though the floater modification renders armour unwearable, as the bionaut no longer has any major organs left, all damage is halved automatically, and can potentially be combined with chitinite armour.
Pyropsionics
A dangerous brain experiment gone wrong, Pyropsionics has granted the bionaut not only +10 to both Psi Strength and Skill, and the ability to use any free hand to use psionics, but also, when using a psi-amp device, the ability to use the Enflame ability for 10%TUs a use.
With the same principle as a pistol, Enflame shoots a fireball, intended to cause the victim to burst into flames. On a hitting a target it is instantly set ablaze, and the fireball explodes into a 3x3 square, possibly lighting other creatures/scenery ablaze too.
Whenever the bionaut stands in one place for more than a turn, the ground beneath them is set ablaze if it is flammable, as will the ground of all victims of the bionaut just to start the barbecue going.
As always, this psionics modification is mutually exclusive of all others. It also grants 100% immunity to fire and IC rounds.
Though technically not an "Extreme Modification", belonging more in the Medium range, the tech involved is high, and the tolerance requirement 50, so I'm dumping it here.
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I suppose there are a few more possibilities, but keeping things comparatively simple, this fairly small number seemed a good one to stop at. As ever, feel free to comment, read, suggest and critique if you think I messed up balance or missed something. Hopefully it provides something of a mean that could add something to the game for everyone to enjoy.
Edit: Ah yes, with all that I forgot aliens. Why not have them simply have a set number of "slots" with which to include a random variant of some of these mods in each?
For example, a beginner Sectoid encountered within the first week (and a Soldier) wouldn't have any available slots - Soldiers are cannon fodder after all, but a Squad Leader might have, for example, a single slot of 10, which for one might be improved eyesight, for another might be efficient metabolism. At superhuman, even early soldiers might get one, whilst commanders might fill all ten! Chameleonic Chrysalids ought to keep you alert though.
It might even be racially selected, with more going into psi for Cloaks and greys, durability and healing for mutons and snakemen et cetera.
The clones thing was basically just a cop out for having universal template stats anyway, why not use this to both up the challenge AND add a little variety?
Edited by Sinscale17, 07 February 2005 - 03:50 PM.
) to fight alien ... so following that idea I was thing of nano-machine ... firstly u make it reaserchable at same lvl as laser and then u make it more power after more elaboratedparticul research ...
I can still be reached at cpl.facehugger@gmail.com, and via PM. Preferably the former.
