Reiver

Isn't the entire point of X:CE that it's baseline Xenonauts with extra features and a handful of bugfixes? Which is to say, no drawback to vanilla beyond some GUI prettyness?

Be aware that this is a game that plays out over months and years, and even the high-speed interceptions take minutes at a time, before time acceleration brings it back up to a playable speed. 'realtime' is plenty slow enough for the strategic map, because your targets will be moving pixels at best.

Y'know, the bug reminds me of one thing I always wanted: Bases in lost regions suffer more frequent raids, potentially with hostile Local Forces helping out. Would this be moddable, or a matter for X:CE?

Esc. The menu does it, I believe.

Warband is absolutely my favourite of the series - it emphasises and expands what was great about the original, whilst its sequels seem to mostly advance the technology era - which is not ideal in a game where massed ranged fire was the least enjoyable thing to face. So very many mods. I hope they eventually come back and try a M&B Warband II, but I doubt they get enough sales for sufficient redevelopment to justify it - direct sequels tend to be comparatively expensive.

What would a bomber do in an airstrike? I ask because I had always presumed airstrikes were done via local forces, hence why you were getting paid - you were handing over 'ownership' of the site to the locals, who promptly blew the hell out of it. "Thanks for that! Here's a cheque. *napalm*"

That both sounds and looks really promising, Chris! Are you still inclined towards keeping the 'minor action', or is that being discarded?

Remember though that Enemy Within doesn't deal with multiple transports nor base defense operations while your assault crew is out. There can be very good reasons to keep soldiers on hand with advanced weapons, and even better ones to let your home guard rock your finite reserves of lasers once your away team is packin' plasma. Other than the aforementioned juggling of roles, I'm not sure how you'd go about a solution to this from a UI perspective, even ignoring the technical limitations.

The direction you're headed with Small Game is pretty promising. Good luck with it!

Do the command centers continue to hold troops once you have crew quarters established?

It is and it isn't - after all, you'd want a splash screen to pop up and note that stuff is being busted on landing, so you need intact examples of each UFO in order to properly study them. This is both consistent with the original (In which you needed to do this if you wanted to see Elerium any time soon), and with real world missions; the british in WWII sent a commando raid to capture a german radar, after all. You're after intact UFOs so your scientists can analyse them and harvest their parts, nothing more weird about deliberately letting them live than there is on using nonlethal weapons to capture alien officers; it's just hardware instead of wetware this time.

... wait, Civilian deaths aren't penalised? Huh. I've been avoiding them on general principle, so that's... interesting.

Oh wow, kudos to Skitso. Does he get a little badge for his efforts?

Y'know, one thought I'd had while playing through last time was that an option could have been to make crash sites miss vital equipment - and perhaps a science popup after the first time you did one warning you so - while the 'live' saucers had the real bounty. This would encourage you to actually let some land, and scramble a strike squad to do the harder missions in order to get the pay, whilst also meaning you'd be more time-constrained on how many you could do per wave (because live sites are shorter lived than crash ones). Was this paradigm tested at all during development? It feels like something that on paper could certainly encourage variety, but maybe it'd fall apart. Hm.

Which is probably fair, all told. We don't need to refuel nuclear reactors all that quickly either.