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Yeah, I'd probably prefer some sort of turn based gameplay for air combat over the X1 system but the X1 system wasn't that terrible. The main thing you'd want to avoid (IMO) in a turn based gamed is any sort of gameplay that relied upon twitch based skill. The two are oil and water. The X1 system was palatable for me because the resolution was slow enough (and had a pause feature) that the twitch factor wasn't that high. Would have preferred a turn based option though. Perhaps something like turn based with simultaneous execution would work well. You issue a general order/manuver to each of your planes for your turn, the A.I. does the same and the computer executes both sides orders simultaneously and plots the results for the turn. One thing that could also be neat if the game moved to a less arcade style system would be the possibility of actually recruiting pilots and assigning them to your planes (like you assign soldiers to your transports). Better/more experienced pilots could execute their orders more effectively or possibly even open up whole new manuvers that the player had access to order the plane to do when flown by that pilot. Just a thought.

Talking about knifes, why is the combat knife so large that it takes 6 slots in the back pack to store, when it should have a scabbard on the belt??

Personally I prefer the wear-down and control when weak method. Didn't know about the second turn thing, though the popup is also so dang fast I can barely tell it happened.

So one old, familiar balance issue - mind control is currently instant. That doesn't work well. It's not balanced, and more importantly, it does not feel fun or reasonable. One soldier that gets taken over is very likely to kill one teammate immediately, perhaps two. We've been through this with X1, where basically everyone hated mind control working like that, and it had to be changed in a patch.

I am with Chris here in the sense that I feel that X2 should not have the same air game as X1. As awesome as it was, it does not really fit into a turn-based tactical game, and I have read numerous accounts of people who disliked it because of how hard it was to get into. Having played FiraXCOM 1 and 2 I still feel it is the superior system compared to these two. FiraXCOM 1 was a joke of a game (watch and pray for luck, maybe use a consumable from time to time) and 2 abandoned it completely, both of which are no viable options for X2, I hope. I don't know how to solve the issue with the air game, which is aggravated by the fact that I have not yet played the X2 version. But I encourage the Goldhawk team to take their time, orient on how real air combat in the Cold War period worked (and extraploate with cool SciFi abilities from there) and focus on tactical gameplay without any reaction component. Elements of these encounters could be position, orientation, speed, height, aircraft design (determining minimum and maximum values as well as change rate of parameters), pilot experience and loadout.

It'd be best to hold off on any judgements for a while longer, as the two areas you're talking about (the base and the air combat) are the areas where we've not yet implemented our ideas in full or playtested them very much. We'll be discussing the base mechanics in more detail with the next update in 2-3 weeks.