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Close air support would be very hard to balance, gameplay-wise. That's because close air support is designed to be completely unfair and unbalanced.

Yes, that's exactly the way it is. I have already thought about it when I saw there is a free battlescape demo. It wouldn't be a good idea after the KS campaign and I'd recommend against it. It's going to be fine with higher tier for beta. But also I think it would be good to make any physical goods at all, even if only very expansive. Like a printed version of geoscape Earth view with a logo and signed by devs (one version copied and the other one signed personally). If you get few dozens backers it won't be too much time consuming, so you could even hire someone to do it. Probably no more than two days of work. Maybe A3 rolled prints? Priced as needed. It could be beneficial as the marketing goes, too. The presence of anything signed by authors can make a good impression on customers. Like possibility of getting signed book or a CD.

Yeah I wouldn't advocate using air support in-mission, that would feel like cheating. But I think that there could be some potential for the level of armament your dropship has to affect the drop you can actually make.

It's definitely something we can consider. It's pretty easy to change between both ways of doing it, it's just a question of whether more players prefer to have the alien gear sold automatically or whether they'd like to do it themselves from the base stores at a later date!