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I guess I'll put my two cents in about suppression. Keep in mind, I've only played the recent demo, and not any closed beta build of any kind. I went over some of my thoughts in the demo thoughts topic, but I'll expand on it a little bit here. In X1, I never really saw suppression as something the player can use to benefit their fight against the aliens. It was never reliable enough to trigger whenever I wanted to, with the exception of flashbangs, and it was easier to just kill the alien outright. Thus, suppression by gun fire was never a strategic consideration for me because I have to assume that it won't happen because of how unreliable it is. I also think that suppression was a "win more" mechanic, but not for the player. I often got ambushed by the aliens and they seem to always suppress me when I am on the backfoot. I have very little means of coming back from an ambush because my soldier do not have the tus to do much. Also, it is not uncommon for my soldiers to be suppressed 2 turns in a row if they don't die first. The mechanic does not benefit the player very much imo because it is too unreliable for me to use consistently and too likely to occur when it is the alien turn. I also saw a little bit of this happen in the recent demo, but to a smaller extent. The aliens suppressed me much more often than I did to them. I think suppression should be rebalanced to allow the player a little more control over the mechanic in some way. Even if it makes the game easier somewhat, I think it would be good to allow the player to better make use of such an important mechanic.

Tangentially related to suppression, can we have the return of the X1 feature where aliens started with half their TUs on the first turn of a combat mission? In X2 especially, aliens are often within sight of the dropship and it is IMO annoying to shoot at them and be immediately hit with reaction fire. Later on reaction fire is perfectly fine but feels more frustrating than challenging on the first turn of some missions.

This sounds like an excellent solution to me. It accomplishes what feels right to me (near-dead aliens being easy to stun) and avoids the stunned-by-actual-guns problem. On suppression, I'm surprised you're suddenly having second thoughts. Going back to X1, I thought suppression was one of the clear major improvements compared to the original X-Com. It's a very useful tactical tool, you spend some actions that are unlikely to kill the alien but you weaken the alien for the next turn. Suppression makes them fire less on their turn, and eliminates reaction fire, so it's great for situations when you cannot kill the alien outright. It mostly works the same way in the final version of X1, each bullet applies a (small) amount of suppression along its trajectory, and then I think a bit more around the impact point. So the trajectory suppression lets you suppress your own soldiers by firing too close to them, and the impact-point suppression means you're likely to suppress the target by hitting the ground in front of it with a few bullets. I like gunfire suppression as well as long as it's a dedicated gun / fire mode. The current LMG is pretty good IMO with two fire modes, but the 10-round mode is a bit too weak at suppression and the 3-round mode a bit too weak at actual combat. I'd make the 3-round burst more accurate, boosting it in a direct combat role, and I'd make the 10-round mode more reliable at suppression, though I think the current 10-round burst is almost good enough at it. X1's mechanics resulted in the occasional suppression from concentrated non-LMG fire, too. That doesn't really feel important but an Xcom-style game benefits from such rare interactions.