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The "access lift" upkeep is actually the representation of the core cost for the base itself. That's why it costs so much. You can think of it as the cost to maintain the lift, ventilation, surface access entrance ways/buildings, surface security etc. Then the cost as a comparison makes more sense.

Reality vs game need certain level of abstraction. On top, you need to make it so that rules are fun to use. Mandatory knee on end of round is not fun. It is bad design. As long as game do not have prone position (for simplicity reason) then kneel is only available "the_stable_position". Because we don not want bad design of mandatory kneel for everyone, we need to find a group of weapons which has different usage, then grant this weapon group advantage over rest. e.g. special group of weapons has bipod. As long as kneel is "the_stable_position" then we grant acc bonus for stable position to this group. For creating a dilemma situation (Reaper is incoming, do I rather knee to get acc bonus or stand to get better melee defence ? ) it is smart to add also disadvantage for kneel in some situation. As long as kneeling is generally submissive position, and not very good suited for melee fight against standing opponent, it is very reasonable to set disadvantage to kneel in melee. There is no need for question "is it possible to fight on kneel?" . Of course it is(, with some disadvantge). The issue here is, make a rule which makes sense, is readable and is acceptable abstraction of an engagement.

Having started a new campaign to celebrate the Milestone 2 drop, one thing I'm really noticing on the introductory cleaner missions in the bases is how painful walls make it to view the map, especially when you're moving through hallways on missions like the "retrieve the supplies from your old base" mission. There's the stripe-y green "unit behind wall" feature through to show you your units behind barriers, but I still find myself constantly rotating the camera to get a better view of what's going on- sometimes even if I'm just trying to see what's going on in a single corridor. The same criticism applies to some of the taller cover, as well. There's a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to render walls that might be obscuring vision of the map with transparency- just look for some X-Com 2 streams on Twitch, for example, and watch what happens when the tactical view is panning over buildings. Another older-school solution is to just have a toggle button on the UI that just chops off the rendering of walls and doors at knee-height so that you can see a barrier but they don't obscure any cover or units behind them, the same way you currently have a button to toggle roofs. (worth considering still rendering the frames of windows when active in this case, so it's obvious where holes that can be shot through are)

I really love the idea of giving HMGs an explicit "suppressive fire" mode that just had a guaranteed cone of suppression in addition to whatever damage it might land. HMGs feel kind of weird at the moment. The basic DPS weapons of SG/rifle/sniper offer clear range/mobility/damage tradeoffs. Explosives have a clear niche for AoE and dealing with cover and obstacles. Pistols have a clear role as a secondary weapon for people who don't have a good primary DPS gun. HMGs, OTOH, have a weird mix of niches as unreliable suppression, unreliable cover removal, and situational DPS against huge targets. If you give them a button that makes them act like flash grenades but in a long range cone then they get a more clear role as the thing that'll lay down suppression of clumped enemies at range. The cone can also be quite narrow near the soldier, making flashbangs a better close range suppression. (in addition to the fact that they're not taking up your primary weapon slot) Maybe they don't even need a separate button- just make it part of the "long burst" feature and render the suppression cone on the map while you're aiming.

Then what is the difference between a weapon with a large cartridge clip and a weapon with a small cartridge clip, if the need to reload the weapon does not create a pause in shooting? Wouldn't it be easier then to make an endless supply of ammunition in the weapon so that there would be no pauses in shooting?