Sectoid Navigator

What if the act of screening recruits has a sliding cost associated with it? You get a certain number of potential recruits vetted every month for free. You can increase the number of candidates by paying money. You could also work in a way to increase the quality of the soldiers vetted using this method. If wanted your pool to only contain soldiers in the upper 25% statistically, you have to pay a cost equal to vetting four times as many soldiers under 'normal' vetting procedures. The idea is that your HR guys are having to screen four times as many candidates to create a pool of top-quarter soldiers. Depending on how far you take this, you could even be screening for the top 1%, but each such soldier would cost 100x as much (and would still die if shot in the face with a plasma gun).

Or even set it so that right clicking on the icon or cause it to scroll through all the items usable in the soldier's inventory. There's lots of solutions, we should never have to explicitly model every hand motion of our soldiers via player input.

Absolutely agree with Gazz and Myth on this one. The challenge should come from things like the alien AI, their superior technology, and the race against the alien progress ticker. Ballooning a 3-click task into a 13-click task isn't challenging or interesting, it's just a pain in the ass. As for the AP tax that you pay for multiple uses, maybe we can rig it so that multiple consecutive uses don't incur the fetch and stow costs.

Personally, I won't be satisfied until Xenonaughts models every possible thing that the soldiers could do with the available technology. I want soldiers dual-wielding heavy machineguns while riding bicycles so that they can shoot the aliens twice as much while also running them over. Also, I want spikes on the bike wheels so the aliens get impaled while also getting shot and run over, except that the spikes are coated with a poison that is also an acid that is also on fire, so as the aliens are getting shot and run over and impaled, they are also getting poisoned and dissolved and set on fire, and as the soldier passes by he says mean things that hurts the alien's feelings and makes him cry.