Whoa. That's a lot of ideas, a lot not without merit, but... don't swamp the poor modder. When you're looking at that kind of time and work for things all of which rely on one another, you're looking at a totally different class.

If a modder's happy with ideas and starts talking over possibilities, it can become something like this, but suggesting an entire class reroll from scratch like this is- unfeasable.

That kind of work, you should probably be writing mods yourself - and if you base it on someone else's class, ask their permission first - or else using the general mod forums to find modders who'd be interested in doing those kinds of classes.

Also, hate to break it to you, but the Hyperthreading concept of not ignoring turn-end actions is simply not possible in that form - the event manager in XCOM removes all AP as a turn-end action is used - the only times those are altered are A) abilities that physically change ALL the related skills (such as the pistol one) to either follow a seperate branch of commands or a different ability altogether or B) Inspire (the psi ability) because it adds 1 AP to a soldier then and there, meaning that if they have already ended their turn, they get a bonus action then. Changin the 'End Turn' means changing every single ability that can end turns, and that's not something a modder would punish themselves with without having a full team to work on it and a good reason to do so - and for the sake of one skill is NOT a good reason.

An issue with the change of everything to ammo costs is that there are also ways round that, even in the vanilla game. One weapon mod to increase clip size and another to get free reloads and suddenly you have enough firepower to level a facility single-handed, so to speak, or else their costs are too high for them to function without those mods.

As a modder myself, I recommend channelling these ideas and trying modding yourself. Concepts are great and good fun to work with, but you soon learn the limitations of what can and can't be done - and all modders began that way too: one little idea or tweak that would make the game so much better or improve on something.

But until you've done some and know what kind of timescale and work you're talking about, keep the suggestions a little simpler!

Firstly, it's not a reroll of the entire class in the slightest.

The first four suggestions are almost directly related to ability cost balance:
- Switch most HP costs to Ammo costs
- Switch (edited to most) Charge mechanics to Ammo costs
- Lower cooldowns for pacing reasons
- Tweak Nep Bull to be more related to the above changes

Concerns about the ways around the ammo costs?
Are any of the HP-costing abilities, as written, really THAT much more powerful than what the other classes already have *without* an HP cost?

Being able to get around it.... that's even part of the point. You have to devote resources towards fixing that problem via autoloaders (which have limitted uses) and extended mags (which, while always active, don't completely eliminate ammo). This is only something that is not a problem if you have the ability to slap a ton of mods onto a weapon. At the vanilla 2-3 mod cap (I believe it was 2-3), you're looking at both of those and having maybe a slot left- that means you're going to be lacking a scope, stock, or repeater.

Meanwhile HP costs are far FAR too steep for anything that's supposed to be "bread and butter". Restoring HP requires either Nep Bull (which is the absolute best choice at that tier in the current impl), a gremlin with heal (which means no zap), or a medkit (which eats inventory space)- which means it's a difficult thing to do that often "wastes" healing potential in the interest of not accidentally dying. And if that wasn't bad enough, it'll wound the soldier after the mission, meaning you're getting multiple days where they're unavailable for duty, all because you wanted to use an ability that other classes would do with ammo and a cooldown.

However, leaving the HP cost on HDD keeps HDD as an "oh ♥♥♥♥" button- what you hit when you really need to win the day.



So onto to the fifth (final) suggestion I gave: What to tweak on HDD.

The author, in a comment, stated he wanted it to be a sort of all-in. I actually like that idea- burn health to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ a situation; if you succeed you're still wounded but at least you aren't dead, and if you fail, well, gg-no-re.

But I felt like it didn't really give much. I mean, 3 HP for an okay buff that felt like it was being held back by being the squaddie ability, but pretty much had to be the squaddie ability?

So I thought on how I'd implement more of an all-in. Something that might be able to nix the BAR from FUBAR. That's how I came up with the idea to add an AP refresh of some sort, a cooldown refresh, and an ammo restore to it- to allow her to spend more HP to increase her problem solving ability.

These are IDEAS. Not "do it this way" demands, but suggestions for what could be done. They were intended to spark discussion on what could be done to bolster HDD as a panic button.

Since it failed that (with you at least), and you decided Hyperthreading was unimplementable, I guess I can discuss implementation with you instead.

- HDD's Ammo Cost Reduction would be primarily applied to the abilities on the character, which just means some logic to check for the HDD buff when they run, and restore 1 ammo if it's present. Shooting still costs ammo, but that's a respectable partial implementation that was honestly my original intent by it (just not clarified in the short version given). Cross class skills would also fail to get the cost reduction, but you might be able to hitch the ammo-restore effect onto the way you do Hyperthreading.

- GC would probably be the simplest, making it a 1 HP no CD free action with a negative ammo cost that internally checks to see if there's room in the mag (so no overflow).

- Defrag was the one I actually didn't think would be possible in any real capacity, as there's nothing in-game currently (that I remember) that works remotely like that. It would be almost entirely new code, likely relying on a custom cooldown tracker that would be better implemented as a scaling HP cost (+1 per "overheat" cast) for each ability, having the overheat tracking buff's duration be the "cooldown", and incorperating that directly into every custom ability she gets- with Defrag no longer being a thing. This would leave only cross class skills in the wind, but that's kinda the catch we're running with.

- Hyperthreading, however....
I think you're getting hung up on matching the exact wording.

Firstly, we'd want to split the problem.
-- Movement is easy to solve by simply adding its own variant of Hyperthreading that just grants a movement AP. Best to do that right away, save us the trouble of worrying about it.
-- Reloading and Item Usage are both reasonable bans from this effect; the former because of GC being a thing, and the latter because that would allow equipped medkits to be an extender for a single sprint- rather than relying on contributions from the rest of the squad.

Now we're to the hard part: offensive actions.
You claim only Inspiration can do it by hitting after the end turn event is called, but...
-- Is there no way to hook into this soldier's OnTurnEnd?
-- If not that, how does Death from Above, Serial, and Reaper do it? Hooking into every single ability in the game both seems unlikely and borderline idiotic of a way to work those abilities. You also might be able to hack the desired effect with Death From Above and some clever tweaking.
-- Could we only implement it within our own class abilities, and then have HDD grant a custom Fire Primary that uses this hook?

The first might not exist, and I believe you implied that.
The middle one you actually didn't even touch on, so I'm not sure what to think.
The last one is the most restrictive implementation of Hyperthreading, but even then, it's still reasonable: you would only be allowed to Hyperthread CPU abilities.



As for your "you don't know the timescale or work involved" and "Do it yourself" lines.
I actually do know the timescale and the amount of work. I'm a professional programmer. It's how I make my living.

As for why I won't do it myself?
Firstly, this isn't my creation. I was merely giving a suggestion of what could be done to make it more fun / dramatic and closer to what I feel the original goal of HDD was supposed to be.

But much more importantly.... Because Unrealscript (or at least, this dialect of it, as I don't have prior experience with US) is the most uncomfortably esoteric language I have ever had the displeasure of working with.
Do...Until but no Do...While, no declaration hoisting even though that is TRIVIAL to handle with the compiler, no Declare-and-Set operations (see: no declaration hoisting)... and those were the first obtuse design choices I noticed when I was fiddling with a hack for AWC perk rerolling.

I have to deal with enough terrible GA code at work. I don't want to beat my head against a language that has every indication it was *designed* by a grad student. It's almost as bad as Apple's Swift 2 APIs. Most languagess call string.replace() just that. Swift 2? string.stringByReplacingOccurencesOfString(). But at least Swift 2's core syntax isn't obtuse- it's merely the APIs that are- and I can alias those.
I'd have to write a precompiler to fix the problems with Unrealscript.

Color me triggered. Heh.