Making Light Scout Ground Combat More Dangerous

Would it be possible to add the 0-1 alien guards to the Light Scout, a set of equipment for the non-combatants that includes a plasma rifle, or making the plasma pistol more deadly. Maybe this is the effect of having played the Alpha for so much, but the first half a month of ground combat seems incredibly monotonous fighting light scouts and the one or three aliens with plasma pistols in the light scout pose absolutely no threat to even unarmored Xenonauts personnel. Looking at the technology tree, it seems that the effect of earlier plasma rifles might be an earlier ability to research Alien Plasma Technology, but since that should be available once you shoot down the first scout anyways it does not seem like it would create much of an advantage for the player.

Also it's not like the player is going to be able to afford to build plasma tech until later anyway, so...I'd definitely be okay with this.

If the alien guard gets introduced, possibly you might want to roll out alien grenades as well (for the guard), to discourage lazy thinking and poor squad tactics among players.

The game will get harder and more fun when the AI gets smarter.

Maybe hard mode can make more enemies spawn per UFO.

I think this is more a problem with the plasma pistol, so they could consider boosting the damage or lowering the AP cost so it's a threat (also, we could try the higher difficulty levels to see if it gets nastier.)

One thing they could add would be alien grenades to these missions once the AI starts throwing them - that could put a crimp in your plans.

Ya... as spinal says, the initial battles are just that, initial battles. Keep in mind that we've been playing these battles over and over, and most of us have experience from previous X-Com games. To us, they're too easy. To new players, though, I feel they're just right.