While reading a little of the posts on the forum and also some guides around the web as I'm playing X1 I realized one thing. You play a global organization, military global organization and like X-Com (fireaxis series) you save the world with 1 squad basically.
I know in X1 you can make more squads but it's considered "suboptimal" but in realistic setting this shouldn't be suboptimal at all, this should be the core strategy to have global reach. So there is this one part that the game tries to be realistic in a way and the other part that it enforces and encourages the unrealistic "one team to save them all" approach. Especially that this team was a rookie (private) team. I know that starting soldiers are higher than privates but that's not the point.
The game sells the notion that I command an military organization tasked to save the globe = whole globe - from aliens. The strategy part wants to make a lot of bases with strike teams in each one of them. And then you find out it's not really what the game meant with the global thing
Ok. I'm starting to ranting so fast forward to my idea:
Stop telling people that you are commanding a regular team. Make it loud and clear that this is a team made from the best operatives available.
Problem? Ugh the military ranks. The "private" screams with "a regular guy" thing. Maybe substitute them with something fictional that would be characteristic for the xenonauts? Make an entry level guy already (storywise) an exceptional operative that could be even in high military rank but in the eyes of xenonauts he is an Initiate or something.
This also means - no secondary strike teams. Or maybe an expensive option to make more.
Instead - recon teams - or scout teams, or regular teams or something. Soldiers you hire but not manage, they can have their military ranks. They can be spread around the world in air bases etc.
This Recon Teams serve a purpose - because I remember that the goal in X2 was to limit how many missions one can take and limit how many crashsites one can visit - make recon teams go first. Take the closest airbse and order a recon team to scout ahead. They might find out that the crashsite had zero survivors - so no need to call in the main team.
They might find little resistance and have % of success to be able to handle it - like auto-resolving air combat. So you setup recon teams around the globe and send them around to investigate. You could also make "unknown" events and let recon team to reveal what is it. When things go ugly you send the A-list, The Team, the guys you level up, equip and who are ready to deal with the hardest cases.
This would make Players feel like they command something and at the same time it would serve a kind of explanation why it has to be this one specific team that has to fly on the other side of the globe to check yet another crashsite - it's because you have send a recon team and what you had is "you lost signal from the recon team that reached the site..."
This of course means that the recon teams would be relatively cheap.
Motivation of this idea:
Take Stargate - they send SG-1 on missions, but in many episodes there is a hint that there are much more teams that operate, we just don't see the boring stuff, we see the A-list guys doing important things. We occasionally see how other teams need support, get lost, get killed, or where they lend a hand to the a-list team. This makes the whole idea of SGC an actual military organization not only a SG-1 team alone.
A game that serves similar "trick" is Titanfall - it's an FPS game where you are an exceptional soldier on the battlefield - a pilot of a mech. And matches are 5 vs 5. So... exceptional not really... especially in the setting about war. So what kind of a war that would be if the battles are resolved with 5 soldiers? So in Titanfall there are AI grunts walking around in bigger numbers (like 5 in a team) and they actually fight each other, they try to shoot the player character with poor results. You can even see a scripted event where for example two grunts are grappling on the ground and you might kill one in order to save the other. They are easy target and - they spawn constantly. This makes you feel like in actually combat and you feel exceptional because you have this frame of reference.
This would be the reason for Reacon Teams - to serve as a frame of reference, they wouldn't require management, equipping them etc. but at the same time gives you a reason why you have one strike team that has to fly around the globe. Yes, they would die a lot, but that's their purpose. Those are the grunts. Reacon teams could also serve more purposes like secure some strategic places so that a mission could be unlocked - for example having to take out outposts before you launch a strike on the alien base. The more outposts are secured the less bonus the alien defense force will have.
Also if people wouldn't like the idea of actually making and sending the teams - make them automatic - just a kind of animation on geoscape or text here and there. After shooting down an UFO show a small dropship land nearby and show a text: "A reacon team has secured the crashsite, no survivors found" or "A reacon team near XYZ gone missing..." which gives you a feeling that this huge organization actually has soldiers not only 8 badasses that have to save the world.
