Here is my entry for June:
"A New Alliance"
The AI/Biped I'm submitting from this mod is the Armored Marine.
Here is a summary of the changes:
- Equipped with a pistol
- Immune to falling damage
- Energy shielding technology is new for them, and while they made them about twice as strong as the elites, the shields were not fully integrated into the marines' armor. They do not disappear like they would in a normal state and with full systems integration. They are always visible when up.
- Improved accuracy and very fast firing rate with pistol, although they prefer to use their unlimited supply of frag grenades.
- Can see about 1.5x the default distance of visibility.
- Drops a higher percentage of ammunition.
- Proportional changes between normal and advanced marines.
- Various tweaks such as shield leak percentage and shield behavior (I think I broke the actv tag when trying to use the bitmask "swarm" behavior).
Story:
UNSC finally unravels covenant shielding technology, and the discovery causes "unphforseen" consequences to our advantage. Seeing little chance of victory at this turn of events, a band of rebels within the covenant forces defects to the human side of the war and convinces many others to follow them. The covenant forces are now crippled, but there is still strong resistance in some areas of the island. Intel reports that the largest resistance is a beach-side group of hunters still confident in their own strength against all other species. We'll drop you in behind their lines of defense. After you're done securing the beach, follow Cortana's instructions to gain access to the map room in order to flush out the remaining forces loyal to the covenant.
But be careful: this new alliance is very delicate. Things could go very bad for us if you shoot at our new friends.
If you want to see the armored marines in additional combat situations and want to remove the alliance, you can swap the following as indicated in Eschaton:

Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.