And it felt like they were often in the same location on those maps.
They do, and they have set patrol routes that are curiously small. If you run one guy up and aggro a pod, you can just run back to your group and deal with that pod and you'll never run into the other ones. I played vanilla nuCOM2 this way, which was probably good to learn the ropes on. However, by the end, I was getting bored and had figured out the OW creep shit. There are however some mods that add in more maps to offset this issue of predictability. Looks like I'm running four mods just dedicated to extra maps.
I think the rational was to stop people from gunning aliens down in the first turn since they start in the open.
And this is a part of where the mods come in. At least, for 2; all I know is nu-2 shit. There's one called Dynamic Encounter Zones that both changes where the aliums can spawn and changes their patrol patterns... by essentially widening out the range of possibilities. It turns out where a pod spawns and how it patrols are actually somewhat random, but decided at the generation of a map based on certain realms of 'acceptable' movement. This mod vastly widens the realm of acceptable spawn and movement so that you could have them stacked atop each other moseying around, or far and wide apart - walking anywhere on the map.
I'm relatively certain there is, but I haven't gone looking for that specifically just yet.
There's both Ruler Reactions Revised and several chosen fixes to clean these up without necessarily making them easy cakewalks.
Ruler Reactions Revised re-works ruler reactions: movement will never trigger a reaction, reloading or hacking or evacing will never trigger a reaction. Defensive actions - overwatch, hunker down, healing, using a shield, so-on have a 50% chance to give the ruler a reaction. And offensive attacks will always give the ruler a reaction -- so you avoid the issue of 'just gun the thing down before it can respond' without it shooting every time you make a step. The berserker one still seems to get cheesed by stacking poison and acid grenades some of the time, though: it just bugs out and stands still.
As for the chosen, the big one is Wrath of the Chosen AI Pack. It gives them 3 action points, turns don't end when firing, chosen can daze and abduct in the same round if you're not careful, and broadly makes them less prone to stupid AI decisions. The sniper gains long watch & sentinel and can fire on his own from fog of war half the map away, and I'm not sure if mods like Gotcha (which show when you will walk into overwatch fire, as LoS is really fucking wonky in nu2) show where he can fire. Assassin actually fires the stupid gun she has, and is smarter about staying in cover while using it to flank - and using the sword in the same turn as shooting. Warlock will actually use his damn rifle and do more than summon zombies. This stacks with another fix, A Better Chosen. It continues to improve their AI alongside giving them more abilities and behaviors.
To compensate for some of those offsets, there's other ones to pump in: Restored Chosen Traits puts back in some shit that didn't make the final cut, which I guess was because the devs thought they were too mean or something? As well, there's the Chosen No Forced Bleedout Tweak, which means the Chosen will actually kill your soldiers rather than just inconveniencing you. Chosen Weaponry Fix also gives them the perks of their unique weapons, which previously they didn't benefit from (yet XCOM did).
The "pod" system systematically undercuts the tactical battlesystem since all strategies boil down to "activate pod when ready, don't activate pods if not ready." The AI cannot initiate anything, the player is always in total control.
Yellow Alert Gameplay is a mod that fixes this one up. So by default, pods are either green or red. They've not spotted XCOM and they're taking a leisurely stroll, or they've spotted XCOM and they're running to gun you down and be the hero. Yellow Alert changes that up quite a bit - once you break concealment and do something to get one pod's attention, other pods are assigned jobs. This ranges from making their way to the objective and guarding it, guarding the evac zone and attacking you if you get close, making their way to x-com to face them head on to making their way around the side of xcom and flanking it based on the last enemy sighting.
In addition, all pods will react based on their determined job calls to finding corpses, seeing an ally taking damage, hearing sound, hearing civilians yell (even after you've initially broken concealment), seeing an explosion, or seeing alerted allies. This last one is important - enemies will run away, and this mod ensures that they actually come back with the assistance of another pod rather than just hunkering down in some corner of the map doing nothing until the player triggers another pod.
It also somewhat fixes the overwatch cheese by refunding units action points when they trigger. Overwatching from concealment still gives you a big benefit since you'll usually have them out in the open when that triggers, but it makes it much less efficient to do so when you aren't in concealment - shots from that far away are rarely accurate, and they will almost always be given enough action points to move into better cover beyond just their initial scatter - or even to fire on you rather than just sitting around, if they barely moved in the first place.
One exception is if you plug in the Chimera Classes mod (more classes with more expansive choices of abilities, styled like the hero classes) alongside Second Wave Plus. You can give a commando the ability to fire as many overwatch shots as they have ammo, provided that they manage to hit with each overwatch shot. When you get them a perk that gives them bonuses on reaction shots, one that allows them to trigger OW on any action, and you naturally roll godly RNG from SW+, you can have a single unit that singlehandedly annihilates squads. One with AP rounds noticed a sectopod was moving, and he fired a shot for every single tile that it moved and killed it before it finished its move.)
This mod also gives more action points to reinforcements that land, so they have a full turn and they're an actual threat. Apparently it recommends that you fiddle around with other enemy mod files to ensure that those reinforcements don't fire on the same turn they land, but I've just left it that way. It cheesed me the first time it happened, but I just alt-f4'd once I realized the change (ironman) and instead moved my units to cover on that turn's re-do. On the whole it makes reinforcements a lot more stressful and dangerous, rather than the joke that they are in the base game. Especially once you plug in the additional enemy type mods - never know what'll pop up.
The AI would try to move the enemies into view, causing them to get gunned down by the 5 guys on overwatch. Any survivors could be swept up easily, and worst case scenario you could fall back on grenade spam. I find this tactic tedious and try to play the game as intended.
I somewhat wonder if the Lost weren't introduced to the game to fix a lot of these issues, though by making the lost take their turn after the aliens, they mostly just cancel most of the aliens' overwatches rather than my squad's. I think Yellow Alert does fix a lot of the issues with overwatch creep (and the grenade spam thing gets fixed with grenade/rocket scatter mods), but I will also say that the various Raider faction mods make this way less effective when they pop up.
Although Raiders can fight with any unit on the map and you might think to let them and Advent duke it out, Raiders and Resistance Strategic Spawning is another mod that fixes this by having raider factions spawn on the edges of the map and slowly work their way in. More importantly, yellow alert allows raiders to trigger advent and vice-versa without the player having vision of either -- and a triggered unit's LoS is big enough that they will usually avoid walking into obvious overwatch pits. Further, having several groups moving from several positions usually makes those pits less efficient since you're usually open on one side to flanking. Raider mods can be a bit of performance hog, though.
I like in particular the Raider Faction: Marauders and Avent Psi Ops mods for making OW spam dangerous. Marauders are basically just Skirmishers, so they have the pull attack. One of the three Commando units in the Psi Ops mod also has a pull attack, so if you sit around expecting them to come to you, it's pretty likely that they'll just grab someone and turn the tables. Honestly though, just some of the AI fixes (or extra enemy units, like some offered in A Better Advent more specialized for dealing with camping players) resolve a lot of the issues with nucom2's somewhat repetitive sit-and-wait gameplay.
It's funny we talk about disabling the timer in NuCom2. That was literally the first thing I did after the first couple of missions. Just made the game wholly unfun.
A big charm for me in this game is that you can fail missions and the game doesn't just end, so I actually like the timers. I don't always get the goal achieved, and sometimes I even consciously make the decision to fail because I know I'd have to put the soldiers into way too much danger in order to get it done. There are other times where I just barely get to the thing on time and take great risks to do so, and it feels like it really pays off.
Wait that's rare? IS my luck really this bad that I've had quite a few mission where atleast 2-3 aliens are outside the skyranger ready to potshot the first unlucky meat shield to walk out.
