I have been following Brutal AI (version 6.6.3) by the user Xilmi over at OpenXcom for a couple of weeks now, and recently I decided to take the plunge myself with the mods from my own compilation The Ultimate X-com Experience. At first, not much is changed, as this modification only makes changes to the AI, mostly concentrated on battle tactics. However, as soon as I got my first ground battle, the AI improvements showed themselves very quickly.
While I find X-com and the OpenXcom mods fun, the AI has always been on the more “predictable” side (to be nice), and this is regardless of the mods I have tried. Brutal AI changes all this, and apparently, it works with all modifications from the get-go, which is very impressive.
So, when I went on my first mission I wasn’t too worried, but I quickly noticed an unsettling quiet when I was disembarking my men from the ship. No lonesome aliens randomly running around – what is this? I soon spotted the enemy UFO and slowly started to make my way over there. As a grand surprise, I suddenly started to take rapid fire from the far side of the ship – extremely long-range fire from an enemy I couldn’t see. Two of the men got instantly disintegrated from superheated plasma. Yeah, this will require a different style of tactics, and very fast!
This modification, in very broad terms, makes the AI work as a team, instead of just being a scattered force for you to clean up. What surprised me is how exciting and terrifying it makes the gameplay. The X-com gameplay for us veterans might have run a bit stale otherwise. What I noticed the AI doing (besides working together, and remaining together) is that they now used suppressing fire to scary effect. They tried to flank me while keeping some in a defensive position pinning my men down. And when in an actual firefight, they popped in and out of cover, instead of standing out in the open. Smoke doesn’t seem to be OP as it was before. Aliens probed the smoke I had laid out and ambushed my men in close quarters. They also seemed to fire randomly into the cloud, devastating the tactics employed by smoke. Suddenly, real tactics were required to survive, and heavy use of grenades to burn the aliens out.
Now, the installation is a bit different from the normal mods, as the download is a complete version of OpenXcom Extended. However, it’s easy to replace the files, and it makes no changes to how the mod works. You can still use them, as myself were playing with the mods from the Ultimate X-com Experience. So far, I’m very impressed with the AI, and I got to say, it was a much-needed change. There are so many mods out for OpenXcom, but it took all these years for a proper AI modification. And thank God, it’s finally here, at least!
Here are some of the more notable settings that I’m using:
The mod itself activated, of course. You can’t turn it off with this OXCE installation, so beware of that.
Lots of different options here. I found option 3 to be the most exciting. Since you can do the same to them. Fair rules and all.
Option 2 seems the most appealing to me. I don’t want them to be hiding all the time, some should, but not everyone. I have a feeling it would become rather static, and painful quickly, as in required to go through every house and outhouse on the map in search of hiding aliens.
I’m going to play around some more with Brutal AI, but I’m captivated already. I don’t think I could go back to the old style of combat, now that the aliens are actually fighting back as a team instead of just standing around not doing much. I will also have to update the Ultimate X-com Experience to include this phenomenal mod once I have tried it out more.
You can find the thread for Brutal AI here: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10967.0.html
And the download for the mod is here: https://github.com/Xilmi/OpenXcom/releases
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 