Zim

Welcome! I approve of your approach of goal-oriented path-finding. I especially like your assigning goals to civilians instead of the usual random movement. Since '94 I've wanted civis to actually try to hide or move to the dropship for protection from behind the xcom lines.

I always liked the concept of the hidden movement phase. In XCOM1/2, it served to give you an idea of how many enemies were around and, in cases where they were close to your LOS, generally where they were. Now certainly, the old XCOM scheme might not be the best way to implement this. I think what would work well would be something that didn't pull you to a splash screen but left you in the map screen. When sounds occur that are outside of your LOS, it could switch to center on the soldier who was closest to indicate who had heard the sound ... possibly with some sort of direction indication; perhaps only as narrow as a 60 degree window. This would allow you the tiny bits of information the hidden movement phase is supposed to give you, keeping the paranoia engaged, but not switching back and forth between a static splash screen.

It's been quite awhile since I've looked at the pre-release. I seem to get stuck on either Gathering Information or Preparing. EDIT: After rebooting the computer and restarting Desura, it does not get stuck there anymore, However, it keeps stopping the DL with server connection problems. I'm going ahead and getting the stand-alone version.