The majority of implementations of the alchemical free energy methods rely on either a single-or a dual-topology scheme for performing the alchemical transmutations. The strict dual topology scheme requires duplication of the system with atoms corresponding to the two end-states present at all stages, albeit not interacting with each other. This makes it difficult to obtain converged results and requires the application of spatial restraints. On the other hand, the single topology implementation requires introducing "dummy" atoms and becomes trickier as the two molecules become increasingly chemically dissimilar. Specially noteworthy are cases which involve changing the sizes of rings. To overcome these issues, a hybrid single-dual-topology approach has been introduced. However, it has a complicated implementation (currently only available with NAMD) and remains to be tested and validated using a large dataset. The modified dual topology scheme employed in our TIES protocol overcomes the above issues in both the single and the dual topology schemes.