***MODDING UPDATE***
Firaxis has recently enabled a file check which phones home and downloads a default exe if it notices any changes in your files. This is not a problem with my mod or any other mod, in order to bypass it you must follow the steps in this thread to continue using mods.

I have no idea if this will effect multiplayer play or not. Use at your own risk!
***MODDING UPDATE***






I was unsatisfied with a lot of the mods being created which stripped the difficulty from the game in favor of "balance", so I created my own. I did not make any sweeping changes to items, no double inventory slots, no weapon flattening to make them all viable, reduction to enemy stats. Nothing silly.

This is to be played on the Impossible difficulty setting for the additional spawns, all Classic difficulty settings have been transferred over to Impossible minus the AI tweaks for a little extra fun (I retained impossible grenade throwing, thin man spit & cyberdisc deathblossom for added lethality).

-Enabled Second Wave. Must have completed the game once on your own or found an alternative method to unlock it in game.
-Fixed Marathon
-Unshackled the AI so they can utilize all of their units per turn.
-Changed the difficulty of modifiers of Impossible to that of Classic.
-Slightly increased hospitalization times for injured soldiers to keep with the Marathon style. Blame Vahlen for throwing away all of those alien surgery tables and stasis tanks, not me.
-Enabled vision (and interception) of UFO's carrying out abduction and terror missions as long as you have satellite coverage.
-Changed Heavy Weapons accuracy progression to that of Supports as they rank up. Heavies are allowed to be OP too, go to bed Sniper. If this doesn't suit your fancy just delete all of the values as that's basically what the heavy had to begin with. (exaggerating, but seriously, they got MAYBE a grand total of 10 accuracy. Come on, be realistic.)
-Normalized rookie HP. Rookies will have the proper HP for their difficulty level (classic 4+1, normal and below 5+1)
-Chryssalid kills will always mutate into zombies regardless of vision. In my opinion, terror missions are horribly designed. There's absolutely zero incentive to save civilians since your performance only effects the end mission score which effects nothing beyond your own personal pride. In a perfect world, nation funding would be dynamic and fluctuate heavily depending on mission performance but it doesn't work like that. Terror missions are basically abduction missions with with an active AI the way the game SHOULD be by default on every mission and this change makes it significantly harder to play passive/defensive on terror missions and incentivizes trying to save as many as you can because each civilian killed is a chryssalid added.
-Logical panic progression.
Panic creeps up slowly, giving you time to react before it spirals while maintaining the urgency of having to frequently build satellites but allows you to do more than JUST build satellites. This was absolutely required for Marathon play as it's unplayable otherwise.
Abduction Ignored (the ones you didn't choose) = country +1 continent +1
Abduction Completed = country -3 continent -3
Satellited Added = country -2 continent -1
UFO Ignored = country +2
UFO Escaped = country +1
UFO Shot Down = country -1
UFO Assaulted = country -1
Alien Base = global -3
I'm still in the process of testing this but so far it seems to strike a nice balance between urgency of getting your satellites up and base buildings. Like I said, Marathon wasn't complete and without panic or satellite changes it was unplayable because you couldn't field satellites quick enough due to the increased costs. I chose the panic route because I want to actually PLAY the game instead of churning out satellites like a cheat code. I still feel that the geoscape is way too easy but I did what I could, it's really hard to test without debugging tools.
-Closed the stat gap for "Not Created Equal" Second Wave option so it wouldn't make stupidly powerful or weak rookies (80 AIM!! WHAT!!). I understand that's the "point", but in game it's just stupid hiring 20 soldiers and 18 of them having less than 30 willpower and 50 aim, as it seems to trend at the low end. It wouldn't be so bad if dismissing soldiers wasn't such a tedious process.
-Workshop Minimum changed to 5 from 6 so you can actually decide which abduction mission you want first instead of going straight for engineers.
-Lab Adjacency Bonus increased significantly (1.1 -> 1.5 1.3) because lets face it, labs are useless. They are still useless in Marathon. Now hopefully less useless.
-Friendly Fire from panic toned down a little bit (value of 5 -> 3) because I can't find the pointer for Impossible soldier panic threshold and soldiers are a big bag of nerves on Impossible. I don't want to totally remove the danger of panic from the game so don't stub your toe, your friend might shoot you. ;_;
-UFO sightings increased to help manage panic directly (see above) & indirectly via grey market sells (base funding). You will be constantly starved for cash and research materials forcing you to visit the grey market often and make decisions on what you need to do next. This is a good thing as it was totally absent in the vanilla game.
-More Council missions. There should now be 2 council missions per month to assist with panic. After much playing, I have come to the conclusion that this section of the ini does not do what it is assumed to do.
-Added several difficulty choices so you can have impossible level enemy count + unshackled AI no matter what your skill is.

Classic - Classic
Medium - Classic values halved
Normal - Normal difficulty
Easy - -5 aim/crit penalty

Please note; I did not look at things below impossible designation (we'll call it that, since it's no longer a difficulty but rather the option we will be choosing). I'm not sure how this effects choosing anything other than Impossible during game creation. I will not be updating this frequently unless I notice something absolutely game breaking in my own play or read a suggestion I like. Like how to make the Geoscape more engaging.


Since I basically picked apart both of their ini's for the features that I wanted, credits go to:
BlackAlpha of Warspace Extension for many great ideas that I borrowed
GrenadeMagnet of Implassic for not being one of the 15 other ezmode mods and giving me a starting point to look at