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About me: First game ever purchased was xcom:tftd in 1995 so yah, I am an older player, been playing a lot of games, also a programmer now by trade. First impressions of Xenonauts 2: I am really enjoying it and the direction, however I would caution to not get to hung up on restricting yourselves to what came before (Xenonauts 1, xcom etc.). They were great games but I would challenge you to use this game to not just reskin those games but to expand on them. Suggestion 1: Soldier Rescue Mission: I just did this for the first time and had a helicopter filled with 9/9 guys sent out. Mission didn't warn me until I arrived to start it that I needed 3 slots open to rescue them. I land, look at my helicopter and it visually appears to be half empty. Okay, I should be good to go I think. Nope, did the whole mission, post wrap up, shows my new guys etc it seems. But they don't appear when I am back at base. I think you need a pop up warning before launching the mission that three slots in the helicopter should be left open for rescue. AND a pop up after returning that person x, y... couldn't be rescued because there was not enough room on the helicopter or something. I like the idea of the mission though. Just doesn't feel intuitive. Also, what happens if you don't have room for the new guys in your base living quarters? Praise 1: I am enjoying the missions with time limits, rescue captives etc. I am glad there are not TOO many of them, but they feel exactly the right timing for turns etc. I often find I need to push my troops a bit faster than I kinda want to try and reach all objectives on the map before the deadline shows up or the enemies start spawning more etc. I wouldn't want it any shorter for turns, but don't feel the need for longer either. (I am playing on normal / soldier difficulty) Suggestion 2: Strategy layer changes: I realize the way the game is set up (and this harkens back to prior games of this nature) Building "wide" (multiple bases) was always an excellent strategy to maintain control over the spread out area's of the planet. I'd like to see an alternative strategy supported as well however. Building "tall" (one single larger base) There have always been a few issues with the nature of the game design that prevents this. Mostly, problem 1: UFO's are detected by radar which has a range, problem 2: fighters have a limited range for fuel, problem 3: base is limited in size. Problem 1 might be addressed by allowing the building of a specialized radar plane that can fly out to a player designated spot and hold station for an extended period of time providing radar coverage in that area, before returning for fuel. Problem 2 could be resolved by building some form of either in flight refueling or more slots as you've already added for extended fuel tanks perhaps. Problem 3 is a bit more difficult, but perhaps there can be a base expansion addon that can be purchased or a special mission that gives the player the option to expand the size of a single base they have or start a second base location as a reward. (perhaps that one off mission is the ONLY way to get the larger base in the game) If you can find enough balance between the two strategies it would add more replayability depth to the game encouraging players to try different options on later play throughs. Suggestion 3: Helicopter feels empty: I don't like the fact half my helicopter is always empty but I cannot add more troops to it (at least at the start of the game). I like the variable upgrade slots to the jets, let's add something like that with the helicopter's as well. Perhaps one upgrade could be extra jump seats to allow a few extra soldier slots or something. Suggestion 4: zoom in/zoom out of camera: sometimes I feel like I cannot see enough detail and would like the option to zoom the camera in a bit, or maybe out a bit from the base zoom of the game. To go along with this, I'd love to have the camera be able to change angle to more of a top down view at times as well. Sometimes all four directions don't give a good sight on an area. Suggestion 5: Fully customize soldiers: I often enjoy creating one soldier as "me" in the game. Giving them my name, etc. off the start of the campaign and then see if I can advance them and keep them alive. I also sometimes create other soldiers as well. I am happy we can change their names, but I'd love to also be able to change their country of origin, age, and picture. For picture you could give the option to pick from one of the other games portraits that matches a sprite. Or have them pick a sprite, then upload their own portrait image to go along with it. Suggestion 6: Multiplayer co-op: This I realize is pie in the sky big ask... But I have to try. When I first bought the xcom game, my friend and I would take turns at my house playing missions on the same computer. We ended up each making our own squad. I would love to have a coop option in the game. One way to do this is to have the players each control a base in the game at the start. Funds could be split, or ufo frequency could be scaled up with two players (or maybe a bit of both). When missions happen, one player would control part of the soldier and the other would control the other part. The players could choose who controls which (maybe player that controls that helicopter/squad could "gift" control of some units to the other player during the mission). Both players take turns simultaneously, then when both end a turn, the aliens go, then back to players etc. I really feel making it co-op would really up the interest in the game. Suggestion 7: button to reserve set amount of time units. (like in the old xcom days) maybe allow the player to set how many time units they want reserved. Suggestion 8: Allow me to jump into a soldiers specific "armory screen" by clicking on their side portrait in the soldier screen. I feel like I am constantly needing to navigate between these two screens when making decisions about my squad. Who's healthy or not, which soldiers should be in which roles by comparing the squads stats, as a result what gear I want them to have, or maybe I just want to change their names, but I cannot from the soldier screen. Suggestion 9: Soldier assignments (to helicopters from unassigned) feels clunky and slow for some reason. I don't know if I want the option to just click drag their names and drop them onto the helicopter or what. Removing from a helicopter feels fast and easy, but adding them to a helicopter doesn't feel as clean for some reason. Also, finding the screen to change their location in the helicopter seems like it should have a quicker option from the armory screen or something to modify. Suggestion 10: Magnetic weapons seem like a waste of time: Xcom had this problem I recall. You start game, you get option of lasers, you barely get lasers built and you use them maybe two missions and then they are essentially outdated by plasma weapons. In this game it feels like magnetic weapons are falling into the same trap. It feels like a actual waste of resources and time to invest into them at all, as you almost should always just skip over them to the next weapon type. Now, I haven't seen if milestone 2 stretches this time frame out more yet. But, what if you added more tradeoff's between them. Give magnetic weapons more of their own niche area where they are better than other weapons enough that you might want to still have at least one equipped in your squad, or have a backup pistol of it or something. Maybe they are really good at taking down a certain type of enemy that's hard to beat as they have some sort of natural resistance to the better typical weapons the squad would use later in the game. It's possible this is already the case and I just haven't reached that point to discover it yet. Thanks for an enjoyable game!

That's a good point, yes. I think that upgrades in game as in real life are done to keep aircraft/weapons relevant for longer (keeping them relevent to the entire endgame doesn't make sense, however). Perhaps include a certain amount of training/orientation time for pilots converting from the Angel to the newer aircraft you have built? Does that just complicate things a bit more? How far do you go down this line? All this really does is handicap the player a bit, forcing them to use the Angel for a bit longer.

Nope, quite right, the Mig 25 was built to intersept the XB70. But it IS the starting aircraft. I think we're thinking more of trying to keep the starting aircraft relevant in some way. If we had an F16 as a starting aircraft as well it would be more relevent as you say (as in Xen1). The Mig 25 is basically a flying brick. With regards to your last point though, think about WWII. As aircraft got more powerful and held more weapons, their turn radius got larger... A Spitfire will out turn an F-16. Okay, it may not be able to do anything to it, but it can certainly out turn it :-)

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)

A machine gun must have exactly the same weight as a machine gun in reality.

There are 8,000,000,000 people living on planet Earth. Some of them will go to protect themselves, their friends, their relatives, the whole of humanity from complete destruction, even if these people will not be paid money. There should be many, many soldiers in the game. The soldiers in the game should be very cheap in content. The only thing that should be expensive: monetary compensation in case of death of soldiers.