Hi there,
I love Xenonauts 2 so far and think it's a nice improvement over the first one but those abduction missions just annoy me to hell
Not sure if I'm the only one who dislikes them that much but in my humble opinion, it's quite boring to just rush to 5 abduction tubes and open them.
It'd be awesome if the player had to recover unconscious civilians from the tubes and then carry them to the Dropship with a stretcher (which would have to be carried by two soldiers) or maybe, a bit of a more simple method, by putting the unconscious civilians into a soldier's inventory.
While carrying a civilian, it'd only be possible to use the secondary weapon; or the main gun with a heavy accuracy handicap.
That way, the suspense would increase enormously (in my humble opinion) because, not only would you have to protect the soldier/soldiers who is/are carrying the civilian but also be short on one or two soldiers because they'd be busy carrying the unconscious civilian to the dropship - it would be kind of a similar approach to the data stick missions but I think, it'd make me care for/about those civilians a bit more than in the current abduction missions.
...plus, maybe you could add some benefits, like getting some intel with each rescued civilian - for example, the civilian could tell you how the aliens are operating during their missions which could make future missions for the player a bit easier or something like that.