[WotC] Mimic Beacon Overhaul
The Mimic Beacon has a bad reputation. It’s widely seen as overpowered cheese, and a lot of this is down to how the AI reacts to it. Any alien who sees a Mimic Beacon is literally forced to attack it, and their high durability means they’ll often eat several shots before they expire.
This mod does away with the old mechanics and attempts to turn the Mimic Beacon into a tactically interesting utility item on par with XCOM’s other options.
Reworks the Mimic Beacon into the new Decoy Beacon. Enemies will mistake a Decoy Beacon for an armed XCOM soldier: they’ll shoot it if it’s the easiest target, they’ll try to flank it, and they’ll try to avoid being flanked by it. This means you can use decoys to scare enemies into running your Overwatch traps!
Decoys die in one hit (it’s a hologram, not a SPARK!) but can now use cover. Be careful putting them in too good a position though: enemies usually prioritise the easiest target, so if your soldiers are more exposed than your decoy ADVENT may target them instead.
This means the position of the Decoy now matters: throw it into bad cover to draw enemy fire, or throw it behind the enemy to spook them into repositioning. You can pull a lot of tricks by placing the Decoy creatively.
The Decoy Beacon isn’t anywhere near as strong as the vanilla Mimic Beacon, but it’s a lot more flexible and hopefully a lot more interesting to use.
- Decoys now use regular targeting: they benefit from cover and attacks on them can miss.
- Decoy HP reduced from 12 to 1, but Decoy duration increased from 1 turn to 12.
- The special Mimic Beacon targeting AI is now completely disabled. The AI should no longer drop everything to mindlessly shoot at the decoy. Decoys now have a small defence penalty to slightly encourage the AI to target them given equal cover.
- Decoy throw range increased from 10 to 15.
- Charges increased to 2.
All these changes are configurable.
Fully compatible with A Better ADVENT and ADVENT Avenger’s AI series.
