XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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Ucross

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Ucross

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About this mod

This mod decreases every xcom soldier's aim and will by 1 each turn during a battle.

Requirements
Permissions and credits
The Gist of it:
This mod decreases every xcom soldier's aim and will by 1 each turn for the duration of a battle.   The longer the battle, the more the green fog will affect your soldiers; the shorter the battle, the less effect it will have.

The Gameplay: Green Fog encourages faster play and discourages slower play
The main reason is to encourage the player to be aggressive.   For example, when walking up to a downed UFO about to trigger the outsider you may think that it would be prudent to approach the UFO from the other side.   To do so can take 10 minutes of re-positioning.  Some players will feel obliged to do so because it is tactically the superior move.  With Green Fog enabled that extra time spent in the green fog makes it a poor choice.  

Sometimes you've triggered a pod and they disappear off into the distance when you're in a great position to engage them.  Rather than chasing them down and triggering other pods it may be smarter to just sit in position for 30 turns overwatching until those enemies reappear.  This is boring but effective. With Green Fog this may now be a poor tactical option as the effect on your soldiers aim/will may be far worse than just moving forward and engaging other pods.

When you expose enemies at a distance with battle scanners, concealment scouts, or other vision enhancing tools you can pick them off slowly with a squad-sight sniper.  This takes a while, but the AI is not very competent at responding to it so you can effectively down entire pods this way with some form of impunity.  With Green Fog enabled this would take so long that it would be quite costly to your aim/will and would likely not be worth it.

A final example is when you are out of battle scanners and other vision devices.   It is now tactically superior to slowly advance on enemies 1 tile at a time.  This is incredibly tedious though.  So much so that no one would realistically ever do this.   However, you may move quite slowly towards the unknown to try to maximize the initial engagement.   Again, with green fog it may not be tactically superior to move extra slow as the time is ticking.

There are many more examples to come up with.  In my experience, these are some of the worst aspects of xcom because they can be very tedious/boring.  Green Fog should help minimize/eliminate the majority of them so that your game of xcom is fast and action packed. 

The Tough Missions: Green Fog makes the longer / bigger missions harder
In my opinion, alien base assaults and large UFOs often felt similar to smaller missions, they just took longer.   This felt somewhat anti-climatic.  Some of the hardest missions for me seemed to be swarming missions on a small and tight map.  I felt like the big missions should be significantly harder and did not like that some convenience store abductions were harder than large landed ufos and base assaults.   With Green Fog this is unlikely to be the case.  If a quick mission took 10 turns your soldiers would be fighting the last pod at -10 aim/will.   The longer missions might take around 30 turns and your soldiers will be fighting the last pod at a 30 aim/will deficit.   Thus, those big/long missions should be the hardest ones when Green Fog is turned on.   If a battle takes too long it may even be wiser to retreat than to try to push through it.  This makes the alien base assaults especially challenging.

The Realism: How does it fit into the game?
The idea is there is a green fog emitted from those alien canisters and alien ships that make humans less capable the longer they are exposed to it.   It also helps explain why soldiers are so fatigued after each mission that they need 4-5 days of rest.  It's so obvious that this is what the makers of the game intended that it must have been an accident when they left Green Fog out!  ;)

Installation:
Use PatcherGUI to install.
Tested with LWb15. Should also work fine for other versions of LW.  Likely requires LW to work.

Thanks:
Thanks so much to WGhost and Alandauron for their help! =D Couldn't have done it without them.
Also tremendous thanks to johnnylump and Amineri and everyone else who has made LW such an amazing game.