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Chris has mentioned that they are going to improve enemy AI in Milestone 7. Let's give them some ideas: (And @Gijs-Jan, this is not me bitching about poor AI, but more of a testament of how much I love the game and hope it to be the best it can possible become) Cleaner agents are regular men. They should try to preserve their life better and not make kamikaze strikes of certain death just to score a hit. They should crouch to be harder targets. Agents shouldn't have LOS edge in night missions (no sure if fixed already) Cleaner soldiers are fine as they are. Mantids are skittish. They should camp more and use their TU to shoot symbiots around them (even if there's no visible xenonauts to shoot) to create a swarm. Wraith is a sniper. Should prefer higher ground and try to keep distance. Always move to a new spot when hit. Should move next to a servitor when low of health. Psyon should stay indoors, move better to support triangulation, preserve life (retreat) actively and move in tight packs with sectons and psyons Secton should stay indoors, move better to support triangulation, preserve life (retreat) actively and move in tight packs with sectons and psyons Servitor should move to heal wounded units more actively. Andron should never take a step back. To support this tactic, they should have tougher armor. Reapers are not menacing enough. Maybe move in packs and try to keep out of players sight more actively so they could use the element of surprise more. Sebillian should avoid indoors and higher ground. Doesn't prioritize cover. Always uses all TU shooting if there are any enemies in effective fire range, even if the % to hit is low. If low on health tries to move out of players LOS to get healed but never retreats any further. In general, the game needs a lot more back and forth gameplay where every player turn doesn't end in a situation where all visible aliens are killed. They should move more (other than towards the player), heal, flank, try to find better positions, take cover, find allies, run back in the UFO, stay in good firing positions etc... Player tends to have more units in any given single firefight which leads to a somewhat "one note" combat experience. What I'm maybe also trying to say is that there needs to be more unpredictable behavior where I can't really know how the mission is going to play out. Currently I can pretty much see how the mission goes in advance: missions tend to be quite front-loaded where getting out of the dropship is the toughest fight. Then you spread out, kill the few remaining, scattered lonely aliens, find the UFO, where there always seems to be too few aliens to put up a proper fight. Especially mid to large UFOs are a little boring and predictable to raid as there are simply too few aliens and the AI doesn't understand how to camp and be defensive/stand ground properly. Alien races also feel too samey. Differentiate their abilities and stats to make them really stand out from each other. It's a single player game, so fun should always trump perfect balance. What else can you guys come up with?

I played after a long time of not playing and things are much better than even a year ago. The cut scenes are nice, the little dialog for important story missions, and I can finally defeat the aliens (Endgame Mission). I used to grab the laser weapon for aircraft and drop everything else until plasma (I think that was the late game weapon that replaced the laser), and I still like the weapon but it doesn't seem like such a massive upgrade over everything, including missiles, so the air combat seems balanced now. As you progress in the missions it seems like they tend to concentrate around your landing craft more and more, like before, which means about mid game the missions are 2 or 3 turns of very careful commands with 10 or so turns after that of mopping up the remaining 4 or 5 aliens. This has been a common thing and most Xcom like games tend to do this in order to boost the intensity without throwing a ton of enemies at you and eating up your limited supplies. The only thing I would be careful with for this is the cyberdrones, as a bunch of automatic explosive rounds on turn 1 or two while you are getting your guys out of the craft is a bit unfair (and why in the real world they don't drop the door on an APC in front of the enemy if they can help it, but instead do it near the combat and have them transit into combat using spacing and cover). I have only encountered this once in my playthrough, and I made sure to rush the best armor for my guys so they ended up surviving and winning the mission (lost all my MARS though, but that tends to happen on most of my missions since I use them for the risky stuff). Grenades seem to follow the same aiming rules as the guns, so if someone is throwing a grenade through a window and has a poor chance due to that they might drop the nade at their feet instead of hitting any of the obstacles that make the throw hard. Trying to shoot over the shoulder of the guy in front of you that is also kneeling sometimes doesn't happen, unlike Xenonauts 1, though the UI tells you this might be the case. All of these are pretty minor quibbles, and I am very happy with the game. I am more than happy to back your next game, no matter what it is at this point.