Some thoughts on ground mission grind

Your Hunter shouldn't be getting killed too often. I use mine like a scout soldier, it moves and looks around, but I make sure that it is back under cover if there is more than one alien that can shoot at it AND I make sure my soldiers are around to engage and kill anything it spots. You can't move it out into the open and leave it there between turns. The aliens LOVE to fire at vehicles because they know how dangerous they are.

It wasn't killed too often, exactly because I learned to use it the way you suggest. I found the fact that its vision wasn't affected at night very useful. But, during the day when that didn't make the mission substantially easier, I didn't think it paid off. It costs as much as six soldiers, doesn't gain experience, replaces two soldiers and can't go into buildings. I don't know. I guess on the more open maps, such as arctic ones, it might make sense to bring it along even during the day.

In any case, the grind problem that I'm talking about is only mitigated if you bring a Hunter.

However, I expect those $10k for a soldier might be too much and as such wrong. Having missions that barely pay off puts players into a certain mindset and it's one that I'd say doesn't fit the game. Soldiers should by dying in this game. Maybe making soldier hire cost be different from upkeep (or even make it zero) could make an interesting difference here. That'd make it more obvious that soldiers are what they are, cannon fodder.

That's a very interesting take on this. It would still feel wrong that there is a trade-off between boredom and speed, but at least speeding things up by sending scouts to their likely deaths wouldn't be grave in terms of finance. As people on this forum say, "Into the meatgrinder, my rookie minions!".

(That's an invitation to join, if it wasn't clear.)

From Monday onwards, it's back to Real Life for me, and I won't be playing a minute of video games for at least six months, and quite possibly longer. That includes not finishing my playthrough of Xenonauts. So, as much as I'd love to help out, and even learn something new in the process myself, I unfortunately have to decline.

Let's see, just from the top of my head: ...

Whoa... If that's just off the top of your head, I don't even want to think about what others are out there. I see how some of those can speed things up. I also can see how removing these exploits would provide for a more exciting and challenging game, when you actually engage the aliens (though the problem of many turns of sweeping an empty map would remain).

Edit: here is another exploit which you can't fix - position your soldiers on teleporters to make sure aliens can't use them.

In the new X-CE, aliens telefrag your soldiers if they step through and your soldier is there.

It wasn't killed too often, exactly because I learned to use it the way you suggest. I found the fact that its vision wasn't affected at night very useful. But, during the day when that didn't make the mission substantially easier, I didn't think it paid off. It costs as much as six soldiers, doesn't gain experience, replaces two soldiers and can't go into buildings. I don't know. I guess on the more open maps, such as arctic ones, it might make sense to bring it along even during the day.

In any case, the grind problem that I'm talking about is only mitigated if you bring a Hunter.

For the sake of it, I've decided to try a Ground Combat with full shotgunners, and then a game with full rocketeers. I'll get around to it on Sundayish.

I'm all for careful movement and all that too. I tend to move carefully and still have the occasional what I'd consider to be lucky reaction shot and whatnot take someone out. I kind of just accept that in conflict there are going to be losses and it's unrealistic to expect otherwise, and don't overdo the caution to keep my mission lengths reasonable.

I think a big difference is map design and alien deployment. In new XCOM the maps are designed to be less about hide and seek (compared to say, Silent Storm at the opposite end of the spectrum where tediously looking for that last machine gun wielding dude in a closet can take forever). The "pod" thing and how aliens scatter to cover in XCOM means you usually deal with succinct battles of a tight scope - as someone else said, little tactical puzzles, where how you move on the large scale matters but the little battles are what really count and it's more about resolving those battles than meticulously scouring maps for that one straggler. You still have to move around the map carefully (mostly to avoid popping too many pods at once since that's very bad) but it's more about exposing the next battle area than it is to carefully avoid that one hidden mob from wrecking someone.

The pod thing in XCOM if you haven't played it enough is basically this. When you encounter aliens they are usually in groups that are just chilling, and as soon as you encounter them they scatter, usually into cover - THEN combat begins with your people acting first. So you almost never get the drop on them and they don't get the drop on you, and assuming you're moving your people from cover to cover and they scatter to cover, both sides basically start in decent locations and it's kind of a fair fight - which in some ways is cool, and in some ways it's kind of goofy, but it does do away with the "one dude in a closet with a machine gun" offing someone blindly thing.

In Xenonauts the aliens can seemingly be anywhere so there's always that chance of running in to one where you least expect it - which is very different from new XCOM.

Side note - Long War mod for XCOM makes the tactical much better IMO and shows how good that type of system can be (although the overall kick in the nuts difficulty of LW is a bit much for my tastes and other people I know who've tried it couldn't take it at all). LW still has the pod thing but mixes in more patrolling aliens and calls for help that can spice up battles into the realms of super nasty.