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Yeah, so this entire discussion needs to be carried out with it clear from the outset that the aliens currently in Xenonauts 2 hardly have any AI at the moment. They're capable of reacting to the situation in front of them in a basic manner but beyond that there's nothing; I suspect the game will feel quite different when we start giving them patrol behaviours. We're likely to use an AI system modelled on classic X-Com, at least with regards to movement around the map (once an alien sights one of your units it goes into "combat mode" and abandons its previous goals). But essentially waypoints are painted into the various parts of the map that indicate good positions (in terms of cover / sight lines) and aliens will move between these waypoints. Each alien does a random roll at the start of each turn to see if it moves or stands still in "sniper" mode and saves its TU for overwatch, or if it'll move to a waypoint a certain number of TU away and then look around for hostile targets. There's a little more to it than that, but the idea is pretty simple and you can see in X-Com that it works rather well. It means that aliens are almost always in a good position when they start a battle (in X-Com they're often stood looking out of windows and so forth, which almost never happens in X1), and that they tend to spread through a map in a sensible but unpredictable manner. Obviously defensive aliens will be limited to staying within the UFO, but particularly in the larger UFOs they'll still have waypoints to go to within the craft. The advantage to doing it this way rather than X1's heat-map approach is that you get more sensible patrolling behaviour. In X1 we gave units desires for certain things, like wanting to be in cover or open areas with good sight lines, and then let them go their own way and find those things within the map. But once they found a place they liked, they often wouldn't move - so there was relatively little chance that an alien would walk outside the UFO and check if anyone was standing there, or an alien would patrol through a house and look out of the windows as it went. Theoretically in X2 we'll just need to paint in the appropriate waypoint and aliens will do that sort of thing automatically. So yeah, I think in classic X-Com the AI was actually much better at not getting stuck in the edges and corners than our guys in X2 current are - it was just very good at picking good places to lurk in wait for your soldiers, because those places had been chosen in advance by the map designer.

Thanks Chris, it's very useful to see the thinking behind some decisions. With that, I can make some more specific comments. Very interesting, because I never got the impression that the intention was to give you energy weapons. My feeling was that converted weapons exist as a cheaply manufactured suboptimal solution, as in, you'd rather have lasers, but can use converted weapons to save money and workshop hours, at the expense of having less suitable weapons. Hence the high TU costs. So it might work to make that the niche - cheap, limited by alien ammo, rather powerful, a bit unwieldy. If there's time, a solid pass on the economy would be on my wishlist. I often played X1 with a small personal mod that basically decreased Alloys and Alenium from missions, and increased the amounts required for production. It would be great to have a real resource economy. And a great opportunity to make landed UFOs more attractive by increasing Alloy rewards from them. I would say in general, a good starting point is to assume X1 provided twice as many alloys as it should have. Okay, I think that's a solid goal. I don't think it works well though. The early X-Com battles also took place on bigger maps, versus more aliens. The maps in Xenonauts are smaller, more concentrated, with more functional cover, and alien crews are smaller. With 10 soldiers, I don't find it to be more of a bloodbath, on the contrary, I am taking fewer losses because it's easier to fire a lot of bullets at each alien, or use other tactical options. This being another key difference versus the original X-Com, that game didn't have much weapon variety. Due to the weapon variety in Xenonauts, the two extra soldiers remove some tough planning choices (do I take a grenade launcher or another rifle? now I can have both!), which leads to less bloodbath. Instead, I would say you can recapture the same idea by making losses likely across more early battles. You shouldn't be in highly upgraded gear on your third mission. This ties somewhat into the previous point with alloys, but also it's about tech requirements in general. Give players more missions with just the basic equipment, ensure slower introduction of lasers and other gear, and you'll recreate that desperate X-Com feeling differently.

@Ruggerman. This is your opportunity to discuss the current balance of the game and your gameplay experience. Seeing as Chris will look at this feedback and evaluate it as part of the changes he plans to make during his pass through the game, would you not think that your time would be spent better actually commenting on your experience of the game as I have done rather than making as usual, throwaway comments that have no context or relation to the thread you post them in. I mean, if you want to throw away the opportunity to tell Chris about your experiences of the game and its current balance and then only later, after Chris makes his changes whine and dribble when it's too damn late then be my guest.