X – Improved Combat System
ICS makes combat in RimWorld more dynamic, authentic and spectacular. Weapons shoot faster, more accurately, and farther. Your characters and enemies have learned to hit targets that are not too far away from them. The armor really protects, and power armor greatly expands the possibilities. Mechanoids are as dangerous as their description suggests.
ICS is basically a collection of patches that fix the combat system and everything related to it. The mod has good compatibility as it does not interfere with the game mechanics, but just adjusts some values. Conflicts are only possible if another mod affects the same thing as ICS.
Some patches are universal, others apply only to specific mods. ICS is created for builds based on mods from the Vanilla Expanded series. Weapon and armor patches are written only for them.
Nothing prevents you from installing other mods as well. There will be no technical problems. Just weapons and armor from them will be weaker compared to those modified by ICS. All new Vanilla Expanded mods will receive support (if needed). Support for other mods is not planned. There are good reasons for this (in a nutshell, I don’t like them and I don’t want to waste my time on them). ICS is exclusive to the Vanilla Expanded series.
The marksmanship curve has been rewritten (to level 14) to make inexperienced shooters more likely to hit.
The basic marksmanship of turrets and mechanoids has been increased to level 14.
In humans, the shooting skill level also increases the aiming and reloading speed.
A limit has been set to reduce aiming and reloading time to 20%.
All melee attacks are twice as fast (they also have a reduction limit).
The probability of dodging melee attacks has been seriously increased.
Bullets and arrows do reduced damage to structures – this makes up for the fact that turrets and walls have no armor parameter.
The effect of quality on all weapon and armor parameters is reduced (to 25% at legendary level), the effect on cost is also reduced.
Poor condition of weapons and armor worsens their parameters.
Basic armor parameters are increased (based on common sense, the average increase was 1.5 times). Protection of legendary level armor (taking into account the reduction of the impact of quality from 80% to 25%) will be about the same as in vanilla. That is, the balance is not broken, but shifted in favor of enemies who can not afford high quality equipment.
Not only does power armor provide excellent protection, it also greatly expands your capabilities: it saves you from toxic gases, increases your speed, increases your carrying capacity, helmets increase accuracy and reduce aiming time, suits increase reload speed and increase melee damage. Since Power Armor is greatly enhanced, its cost has been increased slightly for balance purposes.
Protection of creatures with natural armor has been increased.
Characteristics of bionics that grant natural armor have been changed.
Accuracy has been rebalanced. All weapons have 100% accuracy at point-blank range (up to three squares away). Then it decreases evenly, mimicking ballistics. The lower the dispersion, the more accurate the weapon. This is noticeable at long distances, in close combat the difference between a shotgun and a sniper rifle is not great.
The distance at which a weapon is capable of firing is increased. Examples: pistol – 25.9, assault rifle – 50.9, sniper rifle – 75.9.
The flight speed of bullets, arrows, grenades, rockets, etc. has been increased.
The speed of aiming and reloading weapons has been doubled.
Rocket launchers are now reusable. Damage reduced from 50 to 24 (damage of a rocket fired by a rocket turret). Explosion radius reduced.
Since version 1.5, the mod has integrated "Full Armor – Hands and Feet" – the armor also covers hands and feet.
ICS contains patches for other mods. They affect weapons, armor, turrets, psi abilities, and creatures with natural armor. All mods in the Vanilla Expanded series (those with something to change) are supported: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1884025115
There are also patches for Sarg Bjornson’s alpha mods.
I also recommend installing the "Projectile Bullet Retexture" and "Muzzle Flash" mods. They make shooting much more colorful.
– Isn’t this a simplified version of CE? If mods require a patch, what’s the difference between this and CE?
– "A simplified version of CE" – Yes, you could say that. My mod is made for those who, like me, are not satisfied with CE. Don’t get me wrong, CE is a great mod. However, there are a lot of things about it that I don’t like.
"If mods require a patch" – you brought up a very interesting topic! Let me answer it in detail. Originally, my mod was a small list of patches that automatically improved all weapons and armor (it’s not hard to do, really). However, the result was unsatisfactory. The problem is that many characteristics of weapons and armor are originally written very illogical – if you automatically increase or decrease some characteristic, this illogic will remain. So the only way to create a quality mod to change the combat system is to write support patches for each mod. That’s exactly what CE authors do. Why do you think there has never been a worthy competitor to CE over the years? There are very few mods in the workshop besides CE that change the combat system. The problem is precisely the need to patch a lot of third-party mods.
I faced the same problem. Initially, I planned to gradually expand the list of supported mods. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a much more time-consuming task than originally seen. Besides, very few users were interested in my mod. So there was no sense to waste effort, time and nerves on writing patches that most likely will not be useful to anyone. That’s why this decision was made. ICS – ONLY Vanilla Expanded.
To summarize, ICS may be of interest to players who meet the following conditions: their mod builds are based on the Vanilla Expanded series, players want to improve the combat aspect of the game, for some reason these players do not want to use CE. People who are happy with CE don’t need ICS.
(Picture generated by the "Kandinsky" neural network. If you would like to download the image without the caption, you can do so here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3136816410)
