Infinitum

In a setting happily throwing faster than light travel, psychic powers and plasma weaponry at you that does seem to be a rather minor issue to unsuspend disbelief over. Give the Aliens a thingy. Have the player research it. Problem solved. Also for what it's worth, giving soldiers unrestricted LOS and implementing opaque smoke is a lovely idea and I think the developers should strive to make it implementable by modding.

Just having the Tier 1 planes come in infinite supply strikes me as a sensible approach (with a small delay to simulate transportation and allowing the offending UFO to escape). It's easily explained as the founding nations slowly building up their own fleets of modified interceptors, and simultaneously handwaves why they will be able to suddenly deal with the popcorn spaceships later on. Losing income and goodwill due to lack of missions is penalty enough early on, and it would still allow the player to interact after losing everything in a bad encounter lategame (until the good planes can be replaced that is). I guess its too late to rebrand the Xenonauts as a heavily armed joint aquisition and R&D operation rather than the last spoke of earthling resistance, but that's about the only way I can suspend disbelief given the setting.

Agreeing with the OP (as I did on every previous thread begrudging it).

Except that there aren't any choices involved with constructing ammo - if you're running low the correct move is assigning engineers taking precedence over anything. Always. I guess you could call players forgetting to check and getting consecutively screwed a feature as well but I digress. Having the player perform manual tasks just for the sake of it might add immersion at the cost of always adding superflous padding. Not worth it. Now, if there indeed were different kinds of ammunition available it could actually contribute to the managing part of the game. As it is now? I could do without it.

I don't much care for the squadsight or the way the game handles fog of war. Having everyone in the game be simultaneously myopic and able to telepathically broadcast their vision range strikes me as curious and curiouser for a game lauding itself a simulation.

I've mentioned this before somewhere but I'd personally like to see all stats except bravery frozen, and then make it so that low bravery had a higher impact in-game. For an instance, riled soldiers could be getting penalties to all their other stats that get progressively worse the more panicky they get, eventually making them physically unfit to continue the mission (even disregarding the amusingly erratic behaviour they currently display). Extra points for making low-bravery soldiers lose morale for relatively minor things compared to the hardened veterans, such as seeing civilian corpses, seeing aliens or getting minor wounds. Again, as you have touched upon the soldiers should already be at or close enough to their physical peak (not to mention the cream of the crop according to the background) - the only thing they could conceivably attain is experience in fighting the unknown. The intended effect would be that players would hire soldiers with stats corresponding to their intended role, losing a good soldier would still hurt (since there's no guarantee a good replacement will be rolled), veteran soldiers still outclass rookies since the rookies won't last in protracted combat and the soldiers by the end of the game kick ass because they're all outta gum rather than having had the Charles Atlas's combat regimen training . Also, still despise micromanaging my soldiers purely in order to gain stats. Eff that.

How does one begin to describe it.. imagine a sequel to Deus ex (first person shooter with RPG character development elements), except the mechanics and aesthethics are more akin to Ghost in the Shell mixed with Warhammer 40k mixed with Serious Sam, and in addition it borrows (read: steals unabashedly) from every other sci-fi and punk setting imaginable from Doom to Alien to Blade Runner. Gameplay is.. interesting. The game sports a ludicrous amount of researchable weapons, armor classes, psychic powers and hacking and allows you to experiment with these on respawning waves of enemies. However the setting is disjointed as hell, the story incomprehensible, everyone speaks in gibberish - both in the literal sense in that they went with a nonsense language in lieu of full voiceacting, and in that the localisation and quality of writing makes all characters read like frustrated 15-year olds with attention deficit disorder. Also, most of the levels and enemies are obviously drawn from separate mod projects and the animators' backlogs. So yeah, it's a bag of everything. I wouldn't necessarily call it a good game, but you definetly want to try it at least once. If only because it lets you play around with swords that explode people and handguns that can down attack gunships.

As per thread title. Noticed I didn't have any Jackal Armors remaining in stock but wanted to see whether it'd still equip my weapons loadout. Cue desktop.

Technically unless it serves to drain rainwater it's a chimera. /themoreyouknow

As per thread title. Hitting an adjacent tile gives a decent chance of incapacitating aliens (Caesan and Sebilian alike) by the smoke generated. This kind of breaks the research sequence as stun weapons become superflous, and gives super early access to advanced medpacks and damage bonuses. I'm guessing not intended?

Would the game engine allow seeing (and targeting) unit outlines through interfering terrain? If so, that would probably be the cleanest fix here.

Obviously. Still, not knowing what lies yonder can be achieved by other means than core game mechanics, especially unintuitive ones. Examples would be more winding map design, more set pieces breaking LOS (such as denser forests) and fires/smoke scattered across the map. Yes, X-com did work in the same way what with spotting/sniping being the go-to tactic for pretty much every situation, but I see no reason why a simulation in 2013 should adhere to 20 year old design decisions (functional remake or no). Should be easy to mod in at the very least.

tbh I think the LOS range of troops during daylight hours should be functionally infinite with current map sizes. Having helmets should reduce the vision cone, sure, but 20 meters effective sight range? That's some serious myopia right there.

Made a bug report to the same effect. The remove roof function should make all walls/props transparent (or invisible should the artists be busy) for easy selection of units.

As I'm sure have been pointed out before, units placed behind containers and the like cannot be targeted directly, and the remove walls button does nothing to alleviate this. It'd be better to have it remove ALL terrain outlines except enemies to remove the need for pixel-hunting.