XCOM 2
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[WotC] Mimic Beacon Overhaul
   
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105.110 KB
15 Oct, 2020 @ 9:50pm
3 May, 2021 @ 1:33pm
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[WotC] Mimic Beacon Overhaul

Description
Overview
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.

Features
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.

Changes
  • 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.

Compatibility
Fully compatible with A Better ADVENT and ADVENT Avenger's AI series.
35 Comments
Bawkdragon 23 Jan @ 2:17pm 
Part of me thinks it odd that has zero hit points, since the shots go right through, they would not destroy it. While the foes would realize it fake after realizing the shots go through, I assume that would take time, aka the one round time limit,
cowardlykings 22 Dec, 2023 @ 1:16am 
This is one of the first non qol mods I fell in love with when I was looking at the workshop. It makes the game do much more fun.
Am i a joke to you? 10 Aug, 2022 @ 11:58pm 
@Troch22 yes it does
Lago  [author] 2 Feb, 2022 @ 2:19pm 
That depends if LWotC edits Mimic Beacons itself.
Latis 2 Feb, 2022 @ 1:07pm 
Should this work fine with LWOTC?
TROCH22 8 Oct, 2021 @ 2:43pm 
Does it break concealment when tossing one of these decoys ?
ZJwh5S 4 May, 2021 @ 2:54pm 
Yup that did it. Unsubscribed and re-subscribed and now I can configure the charges. Thanks.
Lago  [author] 4 May, 2021 @ 1:39pm 
I've heard of a bug where the Steam Workshop doesn't update files properly. The the configuration options should be in XComGameData_SoldierSkills.ini. Unsubscribing and resubscribing may fix it.
ZJwh5S 4 May, 2021 @ 12:17pm 
Hi Lago, I see there was an update May 3:

"Updated the mod with configurable charges.

The default has been increased to 2 to make the Decoy Beacon a bit more competitive with perk-boosted utility items."

But I don't see where to configure these charges. I didn't find any lines in the .ini files to do this and even though I've updated to May 3rd version of this mod, the Last Modified dates of my files are October 21.
Lago  [author] 27 Dec, 2020 @ 8:25am 
It has -5 Defence, which has a similar effect to Mark: the AI should generally favour shooting at the beacon if in equal cover to your soldiers.