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This has been interesting to read, but I have a question to ask. How many people here have played ALTAR Interactive's AfterX series of X-Com-like games? ALTAR Interactive tried doing many of the things that people have suggested here. In Aftershock, there was a large array of competing weapon types - projectile, laser, plasma, psi, sonic and warp, with each type being introduced later in the game. Each weapon tier was different in terms of damage, range and accuracy. They also introduced ammo types and modifications for each weapon type, and every enemy type had different resistance types to the different weapon tiers. But the takeaway from AfterX was people used projectile weapons throughout most of the game. Accuracy didn't matter. Want an accurate weapon? Make a scope and a gyrostabiliser and stick it on a rifle. Raw damage didn't matter. Put AP or explosive or Acid rounds in a projectile weapon and go for headshots (the only kind of shot) with your snipers. ALTAR did to Aftershock what usually only modders do after a game has been released but it was easy to boil down from the massive list of STUFF which weapons were the most accurate, fired the most shots and did the most damage with the appropriate mods (it was projectile weapons - the first tier that you get - all the way). In Afterlight, they dialed back the weapon types, but projectiles STILL lead the way. The ALTAR experiment over 3 games shows that trying to vary things based on key statistics doesn't work. What happens is that the weapons with the best stats bubble up from the pool and everything else is ignored. You end up with perhaps the sniper rifle from lasers, the assault rifle from projectiles, the shotgun-esque weapon from plasma etc. etc. If weapons from different tiers were intended to be the same but different, then those differences have to be radically different but not keyed to stats, as keying them to stats didn't work in the AfterX series. Furthermore, the differences in later stage tiers have to be sufficiently enticing for people for put work and time into them. Let's take.. plasma weapons, for example. A nice late-tier weapon. If a plasma weapon did as much damage as an earlier stage laser, what would set it apart? Perhaps the plasma weapon sets things on fire. cover, for example. Or people. Perhaps instead it instantly destroys terrain, so you can destroy cover quickly with a plasma weapon Perhaps all plasma bullets have a 1-tile detonation radius. Perhaps it does everything. Take lasers. Why would I put research into lasers when I have guns? Perhaps lasers are a beam rather than a bullet style of weapon, which affect every tile they cross into. Perhaps laser have infinite ammo, and overheat harming the operator. Perhaps lasers can blind enemies. Perhaps all of the above. Who knows! But for different tiers to be the same but different, extra effort would have to be put into having those tiers behave differently on the battlefield.

Thanks for the post, it must have been difficult if English isn't your first language I like some of your ideas: The idea that prices for an item decrease when you sell more of them. It has probably been suggested before, but it is a cool way of balancing the money that could be made from manufacturing for profit or farming UFO crash sites for money. The interface for equipping your soldiers will be better in Xenonauts 2, it has a top layer that displays your squad and their armours and lets you arrange them in the dropship and then you can click on a soldier to customise the equipment of that soldier. However I think most of the ideas for the Geoscape are too complicated. The length of the game and the amount of information you would need to display on the Geoscape screen means that I don't think we want to add that much more simulation to the regions themselves. For the ground combat - the 3D shooting cone was something we tried, but it does not work very well because the hit % you get from each tile is often quite different from what you expect it to be (due to the shapes of the different intervening objects). That means that the player has to check all of the tiles to see which will give them the best shot, which takes a long time. In the current system it is much easier to guess what the hit % will be just by looking.