Heinlager

In the proposed system you can still grind every mission and be rewarded for it. All that has changed is that you have to manage fatigue while doing so. Its not just that you might need, say, more teams, if you are skilled enough to pull off crash sites with a half strength team you would be rewarded with twice the return on investment! Do you stop your A team from resting because you need them to fight a terror site thats just popped up? Importantly the system seems to be leaving open player choice, it may be viable to have different play styles with players finishing 25-100% of crash sites. For me, the strategic interacting with the tactical is the Xcom secret sauce. I would instead argue a risk with adding a fatigue system is extra complexity, another thing to learn and master is a double edged sword. Is it adding enough to the game to justify the cognitive load? Is it balanced? All part of the gamble of game development, each feature must be executed well!

Well you'd have to pay to recruit and maintain a second team, so probably wouldn't be till mid game. If players choose to invest early in a second team they aren't getting more interceptors or research done. Won't help having three teams if you cant shoot down the ufos. Of course maybe rushing a second team will be a valid strategy. I think the balance issue Chris is outlining applies more to the early game, the constraint of the fatigue system might result in some interesting choices later on.

For the training I think rather then the rate changing perhaps the training cap/limit would change. At first you would only get 1 level (or 5% improvement) from training. Then each autopsy could add 1 level to the cap. That way you can link the effective minimum level of soldiers to research/progression. Thematically it maintains there is no substitute for battlefield experience while still reflecting that basic training/tactics has also improved. Its an interesting underlying balancing act, how do you reward players leveling up and preserving their squad versus letting them recover from setbacks. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

I think its is more important (and easier) to address this issue by making the missions not feel like a grind.

You could do that, however you would have to adjust the balance for each build. However the words "balance" and "adjust" wouldn't really do justice the hours it would take to adjust the balance on a game like xcom. Yes it is something you could iterate with each release but it is a drain on resources. So Ic an understand why they might not despite it's benefits. Did you finish the original, because I always end up skipping missions halfway through the game. It kind of a common complaint which I thought you were alluring to earlier. I agree, and I'm sure the xenonauts team does as well. The trouble is how to you convert that subjective desire in to the game. Is it and average of 1 mission per researched item? 2? 5? That's where the skill in designing a game comes in I guess. For example I thought Apoc had a very decent mission load, where the Aliens would attack once a week and you'd have more or less missions depending on how much you would have to clean up. Each week the Aliens brought in bigger and stronger ships. It didn't get boring and the progression was great, but the if you missed certain easier ships they never came back (or not till much later) and you missed out on essential research! I think there was a news post on this. It showed an influence map for taking cover. Also the races themselves will act differently. Varied and effective are often at odds in AI having different creatures do different thing is an elegant solution imo. I hope its a challenge. It's not Xcom unless you take constant casualties I see no problem with the way xcom games always have, by linking it to the tech tree and certain missions. It's one of the great design decisions that made the first game so successful. Look you can't model real life. You would have thousands of scientists from hundreds of fields working on the things in Xcom if it was real. Yes you could try going 1/2 way and have a few branches (like in apoc) but is that something worth spending player time micromanaging? Really its a farce that the commander of the tactical missions would have anything to do with logistics and base management (or would even meet one of the scientists let alone recruit them), however it's a computer game and we get to play around with all the fun parts. Even if they have some great concepts (which Im sure they do) deciding what's even worth being there is hard. You have to balance the usefulness of such interactions without making them essential. Look at the civilisation series part of why it doesn't take 10 hours each turn is because every time they add something for the player to do they take something else away. FTL doesn't mean instant transmission. Well it can, but it's all theoretical so you can just make up what you want it to be. Even if the have the capability to get here maybe there are other circumstances. They are in caught up in a civil war with one faction looking for a planet to escape to and they can't spare too many ships. Or a crippling resource shortage has them scouring the galaxy and they can not afford to risk moving all their ships until the are sure of the reward. Maybe their FTL drives just take months to move their biggest ships, it's not real so whatever. I would argue; the less context, the less explanation the better. They are "Alien" everything they do is beyond our understanding. We are insects to them, barely worth the effort. Everything answered should raise more questions.