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Thanks for the comments guys, I skimmed them just now and will re-read later in a day or two - my first extended playthrough at the weekend ended up mostly flagging up bugs and missing features more than it did bad game balance. I'm hoping I can focus on the gameplay more when I do another session tomorrow or the day after. A few thoughts that spring to mind, though: Dropship: Firstly, we're most likely changing the dropship design again, this time back to a Chinook. My gameplay session over the weekend convinced me that having a dropship with a 1m raised floor was too annoying when you were trying to maneuver troops because you can't click through the raised floor to hit the lower tile immediately behind it, which means moving soldiers around the far side of the dropship is a real pain unless you want to rotate the camera. With a flat floor movement isn't impeded in any way and the process is just much cleaner. Once you assume you want a ground-level floor then the shape of the Chinook works much better. This change means the return of the large 3x6 cargo hold of the Chinook, giving room to maneuver your troops around and arrange them in different parts of the dropship. It also means we can change the dropship troop capacity very easily. I think there's an argument for 10 starting soldiers (more on that below) but if we want to revert to 8 it's not a problem. Converted Alien Weapons: Secondly, I'm not quite sure what we're going to do with the converted alien weapons. The concept for them was that they gave you an easy path into energy weapons so you could tackle kinetic-resistant Androns more easily if you didn't go for early Laser Weapons ... but I don't really think they have an interesting niche. I'm also not sure it's viable to build much gameplay around needing to use certain weapons against certain alien races; I think it might just be better to dial back the alien resistances a bit (to maybe 30% rather than 50%) so fighting aliens with the "wrong" weapons is still possible, it's just a bit harder. In that situation there's not much point having converted alien weapons at all. Alloys: I think instead the early game could be made more interesting by drip-feeding items in the early game, so when you research new weapons or upgrades you don't simply go to your workshop and build 12 of them over three days so your team is fully kitted with them for the next battle but instead you gain the resources needed to do so over the course of two or three battles. This means you'd have to choose which soldiers get the best gear and you feel like there's progression after every battle rather than every few battles like in X1. I guess early on this probably means only getting a few Alloys each mission and giving the player lots of things that require Alloys - I don't really feel X1 did that particularly well. Lethality / 10 Soldiers: The logic behind having more soldiers and the higher damage on the ballistic weapons is that I wanted to recapture a bit more of the spirit of X-Com, where battles are often a total bloodbath in the early stages of the game, but the enemies often go down in just a few shots, but you get a LOT more soldiers on those missions. The increased lethality also makes overwatch more important; I remember someone pointing out that in X1 by the late game there wasn't much point using overwatch at all because there was effectively zero chance overwatch could kill an enemy in one shot, which means there's very little you can do to protect (for example) a doorway against an alien bursting through and shooting your guys ... the best you can realistically do is wound that alien before it shoots you. I think it's a fair point. So the idea is more soldiers and more deadly weapons, but also more weapons with similarly deadly weapons. I'm open to discussion on those points but that was the thinking behind it.

I agree that some aliens definitely seem to move a lot more, and Brutes seem to do this more than most. Not that I necessarily want them shooting more as they seem to be a good sight more accurate than my soldiers are, but they aren't really doing what you'd expect them to do. Of course, if they were to be a lot more RAWR and shoot a lot more, I'd want a smaller number on a mission until I get the chance to handle one. As it is, even with some converted alien weapons I often have to devote half my squad to one Brute simply because I cannot get enough hits to put it down. I'm not sure I agree. There is quite a bit of randomisation with damage which doesn't make it a sure kill. I've got hits with sniper rifles and done less than 20 damage, and then done 50 with a regular rifle. It's not until you get to laser weapons that you can generally one shot kill anything, and even then it's mostly just Psyons with the laser sniper. And given how much Sebillians can regenerate, I've seen Brutes come back over 100 hp in a turn, I don't want to become even more frustrated than I already am with taking one down with ballistic weapons. In my last alien raid mission in 9.0 I think it took me 4 turns to kill a Brute. Given the way they swarm your ship, which I really like as it's realistic, you'd get massacred every time if ballistic weapons were nerfed. I agree that I barely use them. The only advantage they have is as a backup weapon for the HEVY Launcher or LMG when you simply don't have enough TUs left to fire the other weapon - or you really don't want overwatch fire with the HEVY. I do also use them with the soldier carrying the shield, but by the time I get that I usually have the converted plasma pistol which I think makes a lot more sense. That said, at anything other than very short range they miss a lot, and do need something to make them more useful in the game.