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I have to say this shows why Goldhawk is an amazing studio. There's a real willingness to try new ideas, but without necessarily committing to them - you can admit when something simply doesn't work. And offering refunds to people who specifically wanted now-changed features is very admirable and honest. On the gameplay front, while I liked the bold ideas behind the "shadow war" on the Geoscape and all that, I'm also really pleased with where the game is headed now. X1 is one of my favourite games, and I'm definitely in the camp that will be pretty happy with an improved X1. While the strategy layer is currently an almost exact copy of X1, I'm very happy about the improved tactical layer. There's a bunch of really small improvements but it adds up, and the boxy destructible UFOs are my favourite feature.

I would be okay with making the soldiers fall down and be unrecoverable during the mission (the current 'dead' state) a 'badly wounded' state with a 75% chance of survival with a permanent scar of some kind. Some of those scars could be mixed: Faster reactions but lower accuracy for the jittery soldier, or immunity to mind war but vulnerability to other forms of morale loss, in addition to the strictly worse ones. Since those scars would replace death, the balance issue would be in avoiding having the penalties be too weak, and soldiers being used as ablative armor being too possible.