Gauddlike

I think I would enjoy the air combat more if you made a perspective switch. Instead of top down twitchy shooter flip it to a side scroller with lanes. It could be either a real time with pause or a turn based game. The UFO is on the right, the interceptors are on the left (the other way round if it is your transport being chased, maybe enemy interceptors could even be behind your fighters if they are protecting the UFO target). The field is split into 5+ "altitude" rows/lanes. Different UFOs might have defensive turrets/shield arcs that mean you have to choose a less optimal lane for protection from turrets or shots into weak points. i.e. bombers are well protected from above but no shields below, bigger UFOs take up multiple lanes so you can choose to hit the bridge level or engine level etc. Maybe the number of lanes can even scale depending on the enemy size? TrashMan suggested varying altitude could give you a bonus, this could tie in here. How about the enemy can have different objectives and tactics so bombers try to fly low to drop bombs so if you take too long to kill them your relations might suffer more, supply ships try to charge their engines then escape off the top of the screen, battleships try to camp in the middle of the screen to maximise firepower and cover their weak points so you have to trick them into moving etc. Chaff, flares, mines, battleship super hyper laser beams etc can all be fired along these lanes meaning you have to manoeuvre between lanes to avoid them even if that is a less optimal position. Your craft can have meaningful upgrades, weapons can have different effects (like cannons that spray across multiple lanes, missiles that can evade countermeasures across lanes, big heavy dumbfire torpedoes that just fly straight). As for assets all you need is a bunch of background layers like mountains, distant cities, or forests to scroll past and side on images of the aircraft instead of top down.

I haven't yet been able to play the new builds due to increased work commitments but just looking a the pictures is there any reason the Skyhawk couldn't have more doors? If each side of the aircraft was basically a pair of double doors that the soldiers could choose to open when they needed to disembark then many of the problems people have suggested might well go away. I can't think of any real world aircraft with double sliding side doors but as this is a fictional one how about doors that split horizontally to give an access ramp/steps when open? You could choose who to disembark first, where to disembark from, and you wouldn't really need to shuffle troops inside the dropship in a lot of situations anymore. Think kind of like the old dropship but you could open and close the sides as you needed. You could even make those doors tough but destructible if you wanted to encourage people to move out rather than bunker down.

Maybe losing your habitation dome should make people slowly start leaving the organisation until the current population reaches your maximum. Unless you were really unlucky losing the building wouldn't immediately make you lose all of the people who lived there, especially if they all worked on other bases or had time to evacuate. It would give you time to start rebuilding your housing without absolutely flattening your production and research instantly.

I really disliked the X1 air combat game, so much so that after the first couple of playthroughs I autoresolved every fight. I go back to X1 every few months but I haven't played an air combat in years. I found controlling the aircraft an exercise in frustration, the UI was terrible, the graphics were eye melting, and worst of all the whole process was tedious and and took me completely out of the flow of the rest of the game. Having got that out of the way I am looking forward to seeing how this can be improved for the new game. I feel that having more variation on the loadout of your fighters will add an interesting aspect to the game that was lacking from the original. I also like Chris suggestion that the craft be treated more like ground troops in the way the basic airframe can be destroyed but the expensive and time consuming to produce equipment can be saved to be reused. I found losing an aircraft or squadron to be such a massive setback in X1. That it happened in a part of the game I already didn't enjoy was my primary reason for giving up on a campaign. I would prefer pilots to be a separate entity to their aircraft purely because developing some kind of attachment to your soldiers was always a big part of this type of game to me. If I find I have a favourite fighter/pilot that has pulled off a bunch of near miraculous wins and narrow escapes I would feel a bit of a traitor dropping them for a shiny new plane/pilot combo just because I need a power boost. My main feeling on an improvement to the air combat would be for the UFO AI to be improved and for your aircraft to have access to the same. I would much prefer to give orders to the aircraft and leave them to execute them than to have to frantically click or spam pause to give individual instructions. I doubt it is in the scope of what Chris is envisioning but giving a plane a target and telling it to attack aggressively (straight in to optimal range, fire all weapons as able), attack cautiously (stay at longer range, run in to fire missiles then retreat out of range), jam this target, stay out of range etc and then for its pilot to actually do it could feel significantly better. Even Battlefleet Gothic Armada with its fairly basic AI feels like the ship captains can follow orders and you only really need to pause to respond to something really unexpected or to issue a special command.

I didn't vote because none of the options really covered my feelings. I am not 100% on board with the current air combat model yet but I absolutely hated the X1 air combat. It was the absolute low point of the game for me so I am really happy they will be changing it. Bobit covers it pretty well above. If the current very basic air combat gets a few more feature passes and the kind of polish the rest of the game looks like getting then I don't see how it can fail to be an improvement. At worst I will continue ignoring the air combat and autoresolving every fight as in X1.

I feel if multiple bases are a thing then base assaults should be something you will definitely have to contend with and be concerned about. You need a mechanic that can't be easily negated by a player being strong in one field. Kind of borrowing from Stargate here but that isn't always a bad thing. Assume for a second that ATLAS base was set up to research an alien artefact but was mothballed when the project had its funding pulled. If when the aliens began to arrive that artefact was found to be a teleportation device (shared the same energy signature as alien arrivals?) it would make sense that it became the central base for Xenoanuts to fall back to. You could get around the inability of humans to reverse engineer the tech by requiring another gateway to be captured from an alien base and keyed in to our new teleport network before it could be used to create a new Xenonauts base. Base assaults could then take place more like Stargate assaults in SG1. The aliens hack into your network, find the codes to open your gate and bombard whatever defences you have until they break through, preventing your base from contributing to the global effort or being reinforced at the same time. To begin with these assaults could be purely to lock down your gate and take a base temporarily offline but later in the game could lead to an all out ground assault. Research projects can be used to increase your defences, or they could help you track the hack back to an alien base with the only sure way to stop the raid being to take out its point of origin. Either way you wouldn't be able to negate all base assaults just by shooting down too many alien craft.

Ignoring the first part of Chris post for now as that is really down to him to decide if he thinks it's worthwhile. From the points above the first, second, and fourth can be removed by keeping a global pool of support staff. If your bases are all connected by alien gateways then being redeployed could be as simple as popping through the gate to your new office. If you want to keep housing as a limiting factor then just make each base have to support the current number of allocated support staff. The third point is interesting but could be worked around in the same way. If you can almost instantly travel from one base to another then the home base of a soldier only matters when that base is cut off from the network, for example when a base is attacked. Any other time your team can assemble from anywhere in any combination. The only limit would be what kind of transport is available in the closest base.

Multiple bases with meaningful defences and chance of alien attack sounds more interesting to me. I also agree with earlier posts that if you can have multiple bases then it would feel out of place to be limited to only one dropship/squad. Even speaking as someone who rarely feels moved to have more than a single active team in X1 or earlier x-com games I would feel artificially limited by that. Also agree that a global pool of support personnel is fine. If you want housing to have an effect then each base just needs enough housing for the currently allocated support, everyone else is just passing through or offsite.

I don't really need to see a graphical representation of the missile damage. Adding a single line to the bottom of those anomaly messages with a bit of semi randomised text might be enough. Something like 'UFO spotted scouting power plant, local military inflict heavy damage', 'Military base bombed by UFO, local guerrillas retaliate for light damage', 'UFO reported mutilating livestock, local civilians attack for minimal damage'. The messages could be weighted to give a good idea of the state of the conflict. In my examples the local forces descriptive term changes depending on the strength tier of the region. Maybe military > militia > guerrillas > civilians or whatever terms seem appropriate. I would like a log to be available though so you could look back through the event reports. You might be able to use them to make a decision on where to place your next base. if one region is holding out well you could choose to go there if you are struggling to make your battle easier or go elsewhere if they need your support.

If the aliens have been using predominantly plasma weapons for centuries then maybe all of their armour is designed with those weapons in mind. It would be like humans predominantly having armour that protects against bullet impacts. It is what we know to be the major threat so why design around anything else. Their own weapons would likely be better than anything we have in theory but in practice if even their light armour protects them from that kind of damage then it would be pretty pointless using them in most situations. You might consider picking up that alien plasma shotgun if you got into a close quarters fight and only had a sniper rifle or rocket launcher (or vice versa) but in general you would ditch it after the fight for something more effective, unless you were into keeping trophies. It does beg the question why we would bother creating our own plasma weapons. Maybe not all aliens got the plasma memo, or once they adapt their armour to kinetic or laser resist then plasma damage becomes more viable. Maybe our own plasma weapons are just variations of the alien weapons that remove the ergonomic issues.

I started a new game on V1.3 and did nothing but forward time to produce laser rifles. I have had this bug show up once out of many repeats and I can't seem to reproduce it atm. Additionally if I put the laser rifle in my pack instead of hands it is not automatically loaded and cannot be manually loaded. Moving it from hands to pack unloads it. *edit* The research job unlocks the infinite batteries rather than the laser rifle production job. I would guess that to be the problem here. I have tried MANY production jobs with no issues. I am going to try running the research job repeatedly and then checking the armoury to see if the batteries appear as they should each time. *edit2* Lost count of how many times I have tried both producing laser rifles and researching laser weapons. I cannot reproduce this and have still only seen it once.

Sorry I didn't reply, been away for a few days. To confirm; the new build does resolve my issue.

I haven't reproduced this one, just want to ask the OP if the last alien stunned itself or was killed by reaction fire? Might make a difference.

If the targeted crash site despawns while the Skyranger is on route it just continues flying away on the same heading. It will disappear off the edge of the map and eventually cause a CTD. Save file attached has a Skyranger en route to a site that will despawn before arrival, just accelerate time. Crash_site_despawn.json

Just to add to this if you remove the profitable goods after adding the laser rifles then you can no longer perform any actions such as change the amounts or type of production, accelerate time, launch interceptors, equip soldiers etc. You have to force the game to shut down.