New to the game - a few observations.

I'm new to the game, after having stumbled across it a short while ago.

Honestly, I loved XCOM: EU/EW, and I loaded this up on my not-so-capable laptop (Intel HD3000, yay!) with much trepidation wondering just how good it could be.

I was stunned. I love it. I think it's great - although I'm finding the funding side a little challenging early on (how on earth can you pay for planes AND build weapons that actually kill the bad guys?), the game as a whole is brilliant.

There are a few small concerns which are minor annoyances:

1) Clicking on "Load Game" and some other menu items doesn't give an indication that a command has been acknowledged. There is a couple of seconds delay where you aren't sure if it got the message.

2) The weight bar on the soldier is grey. The background is grey. Why? I better solution would have been either a contrasting box around the bars, or a different contrasting colour to indicate the amount of weight left. Also, a weight encumbrance limit also displayed numerically net to the current weight held is far superior to just the bar. It's not like the exact figure is a secret, so let's just have it displayed too?

3) Font sizes are small on a 13" screen. I sometimes have to crane my neck very close to distinguish between certain numbers in particular. I suspect there isn't much that could be done about this, though.

4) Aliens can throw grenades from the other side of a locked door during a base assault. Rather rude, don't you think?

5) Occasionally I find an injured soldier put back to the "Unassigned" pool loses all their weapon loadout. Very annoying to have to fix up a couple of soldiers every new mission.

6) When you elect to "Intercept" a downed UFO, attack a base or respond to a terror mission, you should spring to the team loadout/selection screen before your dropship is dispatched. Extra points if you can move them around the dropship at the same time. Manually going into five different screens to effect simple changes should be easier.

7) It should be made clear when it is the "civilians" turn, rather than lumping them in with the aliens. Then you could add a "skip showing civilian turn" to stop me from being forced to watch sixteen townsfolk run around clutching their heads.

8) When you launch from Steam, there is no "Xenonauts Loading" splash screen, and on this dinky machine it takes around fifteen seconds to get to the launcher. Never sure it's actually loading unless I saw the Steam notification window that pops up briefly.

9) Names for aircraft could be longer, and the font a little smaller in the air combat screen. As it is, the names now are cut off at the top. A smaller font would allow for longer names and still not be too big for the window.

10) Sometimes I wish there was management for pilots, too. Not much; just some areas of expertise they could improve in (navigation efficiency to decrease fuel consumption, combat roll efficiency on fuel and distance traversed, g-force tolerance to improve turning rate slightly, things like that). So losing aircraft gives you a small chance to lose a pilot, too - a rather more permanent and displeasing outcome making you want to not fail at air combat). Either give hangars a pilot living area of make living quarters slightly bigger to compensate. Transferring them between bases should be an available option too. (This is highly unlikely to see the light of day, I know, but it would add another dimension to the game without increasing difficulty and something more to hold on to when you play.)

11) When switching between the Vanilla and X:CE, I ended up with duplicate mods (One from Steam Workshop and one from X:CE). Deleting one deletes them both. Shouldn't there be two separate mod lists 'corralled' away from one another?

12) Switched back from X:CE to Vanilla due to some other issues - it spirited away my saved games!

Well, I hope someone sees this and decides to do something with it. I am aware that 1.5x was supposed to be the final release, but this game is really good. With some polish it could be brilliant.

In other news, whenever you switch from X:CE to Vanilla and then back again - it re-downloads the entire 221 megabytes?

Wow, Steam need to fix that.

4) Aliens can throw grenades from the other side of a locked door during a base assault. Rather rude, don't you think?

is this a confirmed bug? Happened to me as well once, didn't lose anything too big at that time, but it was really annoying.

Happened to me three times.

That said, I've had aliens throw grenades through walls (yes, the roof was intact) many, many times. Conventional wisdom says if you peg a pineapple at a solid wall, it bounces back towards you. But no, they phase through the solid objects as if they weren't there.