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Today we've pushed out an update for Closed Beta Build V5 on GOG and Steam and Xsolla, fixing many of the annoying issues in the build. Ground Combat Changes: Fixed terror mission victory conditions (and abort functionality) being broken in loaded games. Fixed a crash when a unit with a Combat Shield was selected by the player. Fixed a crash when shooting that was caused by miss shots trying to clip through the floor. Fixed a crash when moving the fire cursor off the playable parts of the map. Fixed stunned aliens not playing their death animation if they had previously taken normal damage. The icons on the top-right button row of the new UI have been updated so they are a little clearer. The soldier portraits at the top of the screen now fade out when a soldier is killed, and their TU bar is reduced to 0. The soldier portraits at the top of the screen no longer occasionally set the active soldier to a random unrelated soldier when you move the mouse over them. Clicking either the primary or secondary weapon image will now activate force-fire mode for that weapon as it did in our previous UI. The camera will now focus on the action a bit more effectively during the alien turn. The camera focus behaviour on selecting a soldier now mirrors what we had in X1; the biggest change here is that clicking a soldier in-world to select them or single-pressing a selection hotkey will not focus the camera on them. This makes it easier to move multiple soldiers at once, or shoot at the same target with multiple soldiers. Rotating a soldier as their last action now correctly updates their vision cone during the enemy turn. Move shot preview mode (Shift + Ctrl if a move path has been placed) is now functional again. The flag image is no longer bright pink if a soldier is not selected in the GC UI. The windows on the sawmills on the Boreal maps can now be seen and shot through. Fixed a bug where the raise / lower camera buttons would instead raise or lower the camera two levels. Fixed an issue where the fire mode TU cost preview would sometimes show the wrong values. Fixed an issue where suppressed units wouldn't crouch if they lacked the TU to do so, and the player would be told "Insufficient TU Available To Crouch" if this affected an alien. Carrying enough grenades to start a second row of action buttons on the right side of the new combat UI no longer partially forces the right-hand weapon panel off the bottom of the screen. Strategy Changes: Geoscape Log entries are now in the correct order after loading a save game. Fixed an issue where units would sometimes be promoted after battle but it wouldn't feed through to the strategy layer. Fixed a bug where moving soldiers in the dropship could break the scroll order on the Soldier Equip screen. Fixed a bug where the soldier icon in the dropship arrangement screen could get out of sync with the positioning of the corresponding soldier portrait / equipment element. Please let us know if you encounter any further bugs. We were expecting there to be a lot of bugs in the ground combat as a result of the new UI and the save / load, and we weren't disappointed! We're still working on fixing some but please let us know if you encounter further issues, as we may consider putting out a second hotfix if there are any critical issues in this build. EDIT - Xsolla issues should now have been fixed.

I think he is referring to the fact that in early X2 development, the Geoscape was supposed to be turn-based, too. But they scratched that and moved back to the real-time Geoscape. There was some old blog-post about this in the features forum that is now hidden.

All the walls of texts, and nothing really changed in the end. Geoscape is still real-time by any sane, workable definition. Either way, planes work very differently for humans, so even if you made air combat turn-based, it would STILL require a separate set of mechanics anyway. Same holds true for geoscape. The time, scale and requirements of all 3 are completely different.