A Better ADVENT was released first on February, the 20th of 2016. Since then, it appeared in different versions, with some spinoffs, many of them discontinued.
To clear up some confusion around the mods you can find on my Steam Workshop, here’s an overview of mods in the “A Better Everything” series.
Actively supported and developed standalone modules
- A Better ADVENT: War of the Chosen: The main ABA mod for War of the Chosen. This has all the enemies and their AI.
- A Better Barracks: TLE: This is an overhaul for the classes and items in the game. It has a lot of interconnected content and changes the game a lot. It is also largely incompatible with other item and class mods, so use at your own discretion.
- A Better Chosen: Changing up the Chosen to be more interesting with new behaviors, perks and strengths while not making them super powerful.
- A Better Militia: Changes the role of the militia soldiers in retaliation missions. Instead of being capable alien snipers themselves, these militia use flashbangs and suppression to buy time for the player to have his Big Damn Heroes moment.
Plugins and other mods dependent on ABA:WotC
- A Better Campaign: This plugin for ABA:WotC adds changes to the mission setup and pod compositions to make for more interesting enemy encounters.
- A Better Campaign PLUS: The same as A Better Campaign, but with increased enemy pod sizes.
- ABA: Better DLC: This is an addon for ABA:WotC that adds a few enemy variants requiring DLC (Alien Hunters, Shen’s Last Gift) content.
- ABA: Better Missions: This is an addon for ABA:WotC that adds new mission variants.
- ABA: Better Missions PLUS: Like ABA:BM, but specifically made to be used with the increased pod size from A Better Campaign PLUS.
- A Baby’s ADVENT: A plugin for ABA:WotC that deactivates the Prime Reaction mechanic. For people too scared of a real fight.
Other actively supported mods
- A Better AI: This is a standalone version of the enhanced AI from A Better ADVENT without the enemy overhaul. It’s built for maximum compatibility and is able to improve any modlist that doesn’t already run an AI overhaul.
Discontinued ABA mods, only limited support and development
- “A Better ADVENT 2“: This is the main ABA mod for vanilla XCOM2. It has all the features of ABA1 and its plugins (Better Pods, AllTheEnemies!) included. Development now focuses on the WotC version, but this mod should work fine for vanilla XCOM.
Discontinued ABA mods, no longer actively supported
- “A Better ADVENT 1“: This is the initial release of the mod. It contained new enemies and AI, with no other features. In order to grow into what it is today, the mod needed to be discontinued and the new version of the mod published under new name. This mod still works, but has not seen any updates ever since moving on to ABA2.
- “ABA: Better Pods“: The first in the line of “Better Pods” mods, this is a plugin for ABA1 that adds changes to missions and pod makeup like the scaling squadsizes and the restrictions to ruler appearance.
- “ABA: Better Pods PLUS“: Same as “ABA: Better Pods”, but the podsizes were further increased by one due to popular request.
- “XCOM: Better Pods“: A try to get the Better Pods features into the vanilla game without requiring ABA1. Completely outdated, shouldn’t be used anymore.
- “XCOM: Better Pods PLUS“: Better Pods PLUS for vanilla. Completely outdated, should not be used anymore.
- “ABA: All The Enemies!“: A compatibility module that can be used to plug all other enemy mods into ABA1.
- “Long War: ABA Guest Enemies“: A mod that adds some of the ABA enemies into Long War 2. The only of the ABA related mods that is LW2 compatible. The number of enemies in this mod is fairly small, the selection was limited to units that don’t upset LW2’s balancing too much.