Ninja

If they change it I would prefer that to be done on difficulty settings. The game should be as realistic for players who want to experience the realism of facing a high probability of dying, because they were shot with a plasma rifle from a highly advanced alien lifeform prior to developing the technological capability to mitigate such weapons destructive prowess against the frailty of human flesh. The early game danger creates the intense atmosphere that creates the immersion that most of us appreciate about the experience.

Did you take out the alien outpost? This happened to me in game after I destroyed the alien outpost. I reloaded an auto save from before that and left it and UFO's kept spawning, waited awhile, took it out several ib game months later and the same thing happened.

When the alien outpost is taken out- the game stops spawning UFO's

Downed large enemy ships have a missing space in between the teleport room and the cockpit where the final alien unit is on that map. It is just a black emptiness with no doors or ability to pass through this area to access the cockpit in order to kill that last unit to capture the ship.

Something similar happened to me in a few different scenarios- the fix I have found is to go back a couple auto saves/combat turns in this example and make a different decision/movement action. This happened on a combat scenario similar to the one you described and on the map screen when I was trying to commence a mission of a downed aircraft. In all cases trying to reload from the last save til the crash would only cause a crash each time. So the trick when you encounter this is to do something different. I fly back to base and sold off that downed aircraft, the next aircraft I went to worked fine. In the combat, there was a room with large brain alien and another , kept crashing when the alien creature moved out of sight into corner, so I reloaded two turns earlier and came from different direction and killed it before it could move. Hope that helps you keep your saved game, now I can't get past taking out the crew of a large downed ship because the top room has an entire missing section in the middle that prevents me from getting to the cockpit where only a single enemy remains. Every large ship has this model problem. Not sure why they would leave that out- makes no sense, as you cannot win and take the needed resources from the ship- and when you reach this portion of the game NO smaller ships come back, no more abduction missions, also when I take out the outpost no more ufos come period- I waited over a year and nothing else happened in the game.