It is also a monster/enemy replacer mod that randomly replaces enemies and guns with new ones, similar to AEOD, but with the emphasis of Doom friendly ones being used only. That's right, no enemies from other games, only weapons and guns that fit doom well are used in this mod.
I've seen a lot of Randomizer mods and one thing that always bugged me about them is that they always made doom harder, not easier. Look at mods like Complex Doom, HXRTC, etc... All of them make you take way too much damage.. So for me playing stuff like Alien Vendetta in them is not possible, being a subpar doom player....
I needed something to rebalance the game, add new enemies and weapons and also add in RPG elements as well... Doom RPG+RLA do this but they are again too difficult (especially at higher levels when you take more damage from enemies than at lower levels). I wanted something with similar features to Doom RPG+RLA/HXRTC but balanced for people who aren't great at the game so that They can survive harder mapsets without dying 5-10+ times per level in tough maps that throw hordes of revenants, arachnotrons, hell knights and barons and archviles at the player.
To Rebalance the game, Improved Doom makes a lot of big changes to the game, not limited to:
-Rebalanced Skill levels. No longer do you have a skill setting that encompasses a specific enemy damage factor and enemy count. Enemy counts in skill settings are choseable seperate from the enemy damage. You have the following skill settings due to this:
Easy Enemy Count, Low Damage
Medium Enemy Count, Low Damage
Hard Enemy Count, Low Damage
Easy Enemy Count, Medium Damage
Hard Enemy Count, Medium Damage
Easy Enemy Count, High Damage
Hard Enemy Count, High Damage
-The enemy damage factors for the skill settings are reduced to make it bearable in tough maps.
The first 3 difficulties are pathetically easy and you take only 10% damage. Medium makes you take 30% damage and hard makes you take 50% damage.
-A built in upgrade system allows you to upgrade character abilities at any time, it only requires that you have money (given when you level up - that's right there are levelups like in RPG games in this). You can upgrade your characters Movement Speed (which starts slow), Damage Resistance (which can start low or high, see above), Max Health and Armor. Each upgrade costs a certain amount of money. I found that once I upgraded my players Damage Resistance a lot, even cyberdemons could not easily kill me. This makes the game Potentially way easier but it depends on how you use your upgrades... If you don't put a single point into damage resistance upgrades it will be a challenge, much more difficult than doom in that reguard. But if you put tons of Damage Resistance upgrades onto your player, you will be an absolute god of doom.
-Cyborg Powers... If the last feature didn't make you think this will be piss easy, than this will..
You get cyborg powers as you level up not limited to:
-Cybernetic Movement Boost : Makes you move faster
-Cybernetic Shield : Makes you invulnerable for 30 seconds, by erecting a forcefield around you...
-Cybernetic Healing : Allows you to heal yourself without the need of medkits. Upgrades for this
can make this a full heal ability later.
-Cybernetic Flight : Allows you to fly around
-Cybernetic Health Regen : Allows you to slowly regen your health...
-Cybernetic Weapon firerate Increase : Doubles the firerate of all weapons.
-Cybernetic Weapon Damage Increase : Makes you do 4 times as much damage
-Cybernetic Time Freeze : Freezes time for 10 seconds.
You can select which power to use with defined keys in the commands section and use another defined key to use that selected power. Downside is that there is a 30-60 second cooldown period for all powers so you can't use them like crazy. But careful, strategic use of forcefield, damage increase or firerate increase can make maps easier.
-Enemies have less health than mormal. On Easy difficulties (first 4 skill settings), they have 50% heath and on medium skills (next 2 skills) they have 75% of their normal health, and on hard they have 90% of their normal health.
-Insanely overpowered guns...
All of your default weapons are insanely suped up. All shotguns minus the new quadshotgun are semi-automatic now, chaingun is a killing machine, rocket launcher fires way faster, so does the BFG and the plasma does a lot more damage than it used to. Add really overpowered custom weapons to that and you get a kickass arsenal.
Improved doom does random spawning well and it uses a lot of new enemies and guns found on the beastiary but another thing it adds are enemies not found on the beastiary such as Doom 64 enemies and custom ones that are from old megawads dehacked patches but converted to Decorate or custom ones made by me to be difficult.
The mod is mostly finished. I am doing some long term testing in slaughterwads to see if it is bearable for me. Starting with Alien Vendetta. So far I've gotten through maps01-03 of it and died only 2 times thanks to low damage resistance on map01. Maps02-03 I died not once and that was due to me putting tons of points into damage resistance.
Screenshots:
A release for this mod is planned later on next month.....
Stay tuned...
