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I'm aware that pilots will be added to X2, with various stats and permadeath. Would it be possible to have these pilots actually in the front of the dropship at mission start— possibly used to scout out the ground in front? Perhaps they could even hunker down/take fire?

Ah, yes. That project did have something set up incorrectly on it. That'll be fixed in the hotfix!

I agree massively with all of these suggestions

1. Suppression is necessary. 2. Friendly fire should have a lower probability of "suppression" (soldiers trust their commander). 3. The probability of suppression depends on the courage and experience of the soldier. On a brave soldier who has participated in many battles, the suppression effect should not work. 4. Suppression should also work as an evasion effect. Namely: a soldier in a "depressed" state has a lower (significantly lower) chance of getting a bullet. 5. The best way to realize the "suppression" effect is as follows: the soldier lies down on the ground. To get up again, he needs extra AP action points. (Add animation of soldiers lying on the ground) 6. When the first bullet from a machine-gun burst flies nearby (very close), the soldier can activate the "suppression" mode, as a result of which all subsequent bullets from the queue (and all enemy bullets on this turn) (turn) have a significantly lower chance of hitting the soldier than if the soldier was in a normal state.

@ChrisPersonally, I think the grenade arcs are fine as they are. Regarding stunning - I have found the stun gun to be a waste of space; I hit a standard secton with 6 shots and it was still standing so I gave up and stabbed him to death lol. Also, the suppression mechanic doesn't really seem to work well. My own troops get suppressed all the time even from fire from my own troops, but it is very uncommon for even heavy weapon fire to make even weak aliens get their heads down. I recall a discussion about this forever ago when we were talking about heavy weapon accuracy. The point you made was that the point of them was to give high suppression, but I don't find it does. The same should go for grenades/rockets!

A couple more thoughts. I know grenade arcs are an incredible pain in the rear, but I find some of the current arcs unsatisfying. You can throw grenades over many tiles of intervening cover, such as over a building or over one of those jungle plant clumps on a tropical map. Such a throw means the arc would be very high at its highest point, which indeed the graphical preview confirms, but those arcs are well beyond what seems realistic. It just messes with my expectations as a player, on both sides. I was on the receiving side of a very surprising Wraith grenade on a jungle map, and I several times found my soldiers being able to make throws that intuitively felt impossible. A height ceiling might be in order there - grenades are powerful in any case, and they probably work better if they're limited to paths that are somewhat realistic. Throwing grenades over walls or hedges is good, being able to throw them over wide buildings is too much. It's a grenade, not a mortar. On the economy side, I'm getting the feeling that manufacturing is impossible to keep up with. There's a lot to manufacture and, having built a third Workshop at my main base (with adjacency bonus), I'm constantly behind. It's great that you have to pick priorities and can't build everything easily, but I am not sure if the balance is right. Even the basic Angel interceptor is buildable (unlike X1), and we have to build aircraft weapons as well. Early on we get access to Accelerated guns but building a full set of those is slow so more gets researched, and some time into a campaign I find myself very behind on manufacturing. I don't have a full set of the latest weapons for my team, I don't have Alenium missiles on all my planes, I can't even think about upgrades like Alenium Generators. Perhaps that's intentional or I'm not playing right, but my intuition is that manufacturing is about 20% too slow - though I certainly love that it's overall tougher and requires more planning than X1. Stunning aliens is weird, you can have a nearly-dead alien survive smoke inhalation and stun gun fire. I understand they have different health/stun pools but it would feel more intuitive if the stun pool also dropped as their health drop, to some extent. A badly wounded alien shouldn't be too difficult to stun.

@Chris, regarding suppression discussion, I agree with @Solver. It worked nice enough in X1 and would be quite easy to tweak the balance from there. Artificially limiting suppression to flashbangs (and similar) just feels too gamey and something I'd expect to see in a more board game styled games like Firaxis' Xcom. I'd also argue that changing starting dropship's unit capacity from 10 to 8 would lessen the "suppress to win" situations as player wouldn't have superiority regarding unit numbers quite so often.