Sable Wyvern

Wow, that was quick. Good work and thanks.

Well, nowhere in Africa, Australia, South-East Asia, South America, Central America or Southern Europe. Yes, there could be more use of Arctic maps in parts of Northern America, northern Europe and Russia, but if coding in variable map types for any given location would have involved significant work, I can understand why efforts were directed elsewhere.

Given that the game takes place in both hemispheres ... how do you reach this conclusion? It starts in Autumn/Spring and moves into Winter/Summer although none of those designations mean a great deal in the tropical regions ... and a lot of places in the world dont get snow during winter in any event.

Who are you and what have you done to my internet? This kind of reasonable and level-headed response after being told you can't have what you want is scary.

Minor nitpick almost certainly not worth fixing: that rifle/pistol range is a serious safety hazard and would never be placed where it is.

Do I have to register with Desura to get my Steam key? I have an original pre-order (back from before the two price brackets and the Paypal kerfuffle), as well as two Kickstarter keys. I have yet to try and make use of any of those keys, but it might finally be time to get my copy of the game and pass my other two keys along to the people I've promised them to. Edit - Never mind:

That is the most awesome thing I've read all day.

I certainly would prefer not to have to be restarting the game while developing air combat skills. If I mismanage my resources, or become impatient in ground combat that's one thing. A learning curve for air combat with a hefty and inevitable penalty for failure is another entirely. People are talking about dumbing down the game, but however much some people may like the air combat as it currently stands, I doubt very much that "difficult air combat with significant consequences for failure" is a major selling point for the majority of X-Com veterans.

The sniper in my tabletop X-Com GURPS game believes that dollars per kill is a brilliant stat

This is one thing that really bugged me in the recent EU release. I frequently went into a mission without my preferred equipment because I couldn't be bothered deselecting one guy and then rotating through everyone else to find out who had the piece of equipment I was after. I suspect I will be taking Xenonauts more seriously, and will go through the hassle if I have to, but would prefer a simpler approach.

Want the target suppressed and alive, use a flashbang. Flashbangs are non-lethal munition and that is their role in the real world. That's not poor planning, it's just the way it is. Frags should not be generating meaningful amounts of smoke, and I would definitely not like to see them functioning even as a shoddy substitute for a smoke grenade.

Do we have stun weapons? I haven't been following the development all that closely, but I thought there were no melee weapons. If there are melee or very short range stun weapons, then flashbangs definitely have a role, and there's no reason to try and make them superior to a frag grenade in any respect (although an increase in throwing range, as you suggest, would probably be reasonable). Their advantage is that you don't kill your target but do leave him vulnerable to capture, and if you're upset that a frag grenade is "better", then just use a frag grenade and accept that you may well kill your target.

IRL, there's really no reason to use flashbangs unless you want to avoid inflicting permanent injury. There's certainly no real world justification for them to have a larger suppresion area than a fragmentation grenade. Personally, I don't like flashbangs being included in games unless they're there because their non-lethal property is actually useful. However, since we have them, they do need to provide some utility over normal grenades; it just needs to be accepted that it's not going to be a realistic utility.

Highly concentrated, very hot laser beams that, again, should only have to expend a very small proportion of their energy burning through the particulates in smoke.

If your laser can burn through advanced alien armour, I don't see how it could spend more than a picosecond or so reflecting or refracting before your glass window is an exploded molten mess.