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The gameplay is good. I prefer thinking about the whole map over the x-com reboot's series of mini encounters. Don't rush to move all your units off the plane. It provides excellent cover. When I have very experienced units I avoid moving them out of it until I have swept the area they are moving into. I usually have at least two low value units with shields to take point and act as mobile cover if one of the better units is left exposed. If they stay alive long enough to improve, they get a different loadout and graduate from being scouts/mobile cover. Robots are also ok for exploring ahead. Injured/damaged/shieldless units fall back.

Perhaps they should redouble their defences in this scenario, both in terms of personnel in the station and defences against approaching ships. The first line of their defence is concealment, so once they are alerted to that being compromised, they should react. How long do they take to launch a resupply mission? Not sure if there is anything to indicate how long it takes them to launch missions before they appear on the map. Or how adaptable missions are. Should UFOs that appear be diverted to protect the compromised base, for example?

I imagined the fighters not leaving wreckage because they were small enough to be obliterated, not because of their classification as escorts. I think the Defender should be small on the radar so it fits in with this idea.

I never noticed a commanding officer mechanic. Is it that your highest ranked soldier is your c/o and losing them causes a squad-wide morale hit? I think my c/os would usually have been snipers who would stay way way back from the action (not even leaving the dropship until their way was definitely clear. I guess I wouldn't have lost many as a result.

I skip accelerated too and make plenty of lasers because upgrades make lifespan greater than other guns. That coupled with armour ,elting means i still field some fairly late in the game

Throw grenades at them. Splash damage will break their cloak.

I think this usually happens when you try to throw it too far and the arc shows that it will hit the ceiling. Might be better to use lower arcs and reduce indoor throwing range accordingly. Needs to be more clear that this is what is happening. I remember being caught in the same way when I tried to lob one through a door in the cleaners base and and just blew up my own soldiers on the edges of it.

I really enjoyed my playthrough of 5.5/5.6. I haven't liked the sound of any of the alien nerfs since then. I'd vote for reverting most of them back to how they were in that release. Probably the only exception is that I like the idea of wraiths going invisible/invisible at range after being hit, which has been suggested by a couple of people. I certainly hope the cloaking field will be changed from its current on/off implementation, one way or another. I don't even remember the eternals having a cloaking field. I don't see why that should be a big issue anyway unless your problem is that you one-shot everything too easily. My usual strategy of hitting anything with a cloak with splash damage would have stopped it being a significant problem anyway. Terror missions are appropriately challenging and I liked the way you got swarmed at the start. They usually seemed to be on the same map was the only thing. Hopefully that was fixed, if it was a bug, or more maps and greater chances of having different maps are there now otherwise. Maybe the game difficulty options would be the appropriate place to change things about alien difficulty. Don't remember how granular the options were. A separate setting for the campaign and for the battles might work well, if it isn't already there. Didn't use colossus armour enough to remember much about it or have an opinion really. Wrt squad size and mission length: I was happy to spend quite a long time on missions, while generally skipping UFOs unless I had a specific reason to do them. I guess that is where a lot of the tedium manifests for people who prefer to do them. Perhaps smaller squads specifically for investigating UFOs would work well, so those missions are shorter. I'd probably do more of them then. Mind control barely featured in my games. In the old x-com games I remember it being a major factor early on and it added a sense of dread that is not present in xenonauts 2. [I wondered if my age just meant I don't feel dread while playing games any more, but then I remembered deciding not to play silent hill 2 any more last year for the sake of my heart, so that is not it.] This is more of an observation than a suggestion though as I quite enjoyed the game as a relaxing experience focused on tactical gameplay with units that felt more like pieces in a board game than characters in a story.

Strongly agree with changing the on-off wraith mechanic. The first thing I look for when I look at these updates is whether that has been changed. [Caveat is that I have not played the game since it was introduced, but I'm pretty confident I would dislike it as much as I imagine.] I liked the original mechanic and the need to factor hitting them once successfully into plans (even if that largely was just yeeting a grenade near them). Off by default and activating on hit feels like it makes sense, but might make them to hard to kill and affect game balance, which I guess is why it only lasted one version iirc. The suggestion above of changing it to reduce spot range while active sounds like it could work well. (Maybe more than two squares so it happens more frequently?) Shadow form if hit on player's turn until it has a chance to move with reduced hit chance, then effectively invisible if outside the reduced spot range. Forcing players to go look for them feels right. I think this would be a fun mechanic.

I don't like this idea as a gameplay mechanic or as a lore mechanic. I don't think it has a historical basis either. Wikipedia says there were over 100k Polish soldiers fighting for the allies in ww2 and the free french forces were over a million strong.

In my playthrough on 5.5/5.6 on veteran I needed to spam reduce tension to stay alive. I didn't mind this, felt it provided tension, but I did wonder if the mechanic was too strong and I "should" have lost the game.

Russian propaganda. But yeah you can shoot birds with shotguns so I guess they're suitable for shooting drones too. But birds and drones have low hit points and no armour.

I mean the constraint in what you can equip means variety in your units. Iirc I'd have some with just a pistol and grenades, or a rifle. More variety of units -> more variety of gameplay.

I think it is good as-is.

Sounds good to me? Why does it have to be possible to tell different ranks apart while they're cloaked?

Can't see the wraith toggle being better than the cloaked until damaged behaviour. That was fun and felt like it made sense. Toggle sounds more simplistic to deal with and would feel arbitrary. Likewise can't see change in type of fire by cyberdrone being an improvement (away from scattered grenades). Both sound like things to make battles easier and more homogenous. More fun to deal with a variety of enemies requiring different tactics. It's fun to pick out the biggest threats and respond accordingly.

Personally, I was happy with my experience of playing through both 4.27 and 5.5.

I think my game took over 30 hours, and I never spent operation points on raiding UFOs. I thought it was long enough as is. More different missions and maps would be welcome - all my terror missions seemed to be on the same map - but necessary increased repetition wouldn't be imo. I had two labs from the get-go and so I went through techs very quickly. I didn't produce any accelerated weapons and only a few Gauss ones. I did produce a lot of lasers that I kept using until I was able to replace everything with fusion. So I experienced tech becoming yesterday's news quickly, but I wasn't put off by that. A speed setting in the configuration at the start might be the best option, similar to Civilization or the Long War in the x-com reboot (probably - I never played this because I don't like slower pacing as much).

Spreading your units out and prioritizing cyberdromes as targets prevents them being unmanageable early on. Late game armour mitigates their danger a lot. They also tend to blow themselves up if approaching or inside buildings. I like the terror missions as they are tbh, apart from the way they always seemed to be on the same map.

You throw the smoke at your unit to create cover, not at the enemy.

I agree with preventing teleporter 'being the mole in whack-a-mole' cheese, speaking as someone who exploited it mercilessly. It wouldn't prevent storming control rooms without heavy losses. Organize units at the teleporter and lead with low ranks, shields and suppression grenades. It shouldn't be an easy thing to do anyway. I guess if robots can travel through teleporters, then so could primed grenades. Not suggesting enabling this because it would just replace one form of teleporter spam with another. Perhaps robots shouldn't be able to use teleporters. One teleporter use per unit per turn might be a simple working solution. As discussed, another option would be to limit the number of teleports per teleporter instead of per unit, though I suspect this would just draw things out rather than solve things. Or teleporters could be made unidirectional, though that would involve more significant changes. The one teleport-per-unit solution is probably the best of these options.

That mission where you rescue the soldiers didn't happen for me in 5.4/5.5 play through. I was wondering if it was a bug or if it was removed.

Yes, I also skip accelerated weapons.

I agree with this concept. As it is, I skip accelerated in favour of getting lasers asap.

Up to you really. You can complete the game using the experimental branch. I did so and enjoyed it. I played it because I wanted to play over Xmas, had appropriate expectations wrt bugs and balance, I liked getting the opportunity to give feedback at this stage - and I'd just been looking forward to it. I will probably play it again at some stage when it is released fully. If you don't see yourself wanting to do that then it probably makes sense to wait. Btw you cannot play your v4.x savegame with v5.x.