Comassion

I think this works really well. It's simple and should be easy to program, and with the radius you'll also be able to suppress targets without actually seeing them (example - you suspect there's an alien in a building, so you fire into that building a bunch before you storm it). With suppression mechanics in place, you can now turn MG and other burst accuracy way down - let 'em spray and pray for suppression, mainly, unless you're at short range.

Could also add Korea in there for NATO, Chinese and Korean troops. They'd be older guys, but experience is more important than age.

Agreed, despite the realism factor I think the flat map / flat radars / flat flight trajectories just plain works for a nice simplistic view of what's going on. Programming in proper curved stuff (or even an approximation thereof) won't really enhance my gameplay experience any - there's a ton of other areas I'd rather the team focus on.

I'd be nice if mapmakers could also associate a textual briefing with their maps. That could give maps a lot of character and a little preview of what the player is in for. Make it optional, so if there's no .txt briefing file then the default briefing loads.

Yes. These are presumably some of the top scientists / soldiers / engineers on the planet, and not only are they working with alien tech, you're putting them in a base that makes an alien invasion very angry, so this isn't just their salary - there's extreme hazard pay, background checks, medical insurance, cost of living, surveillance, cost and maintenance of their very expensive equipment, tools, and experiments, retirement benefits, and so on and so forth. In the end, while people might feel that's a little high for 'salaries', I do think it's very odd when all of Europe is contributing less than half a million dollars to a program meant to save the Earth. I'd much rather see them contributing 3 million.

I'm just saying they should multiply everything by 10, solely on the basis of theme. Income, salaries, costs, all of it. No re-balancing required since the ratio for everything is the same.

Looking around at costs and such, I feel like multiplying many of the existing money amounts by 10 would better bring them in line with the true financial cost of that item - for instance, the MiG would cost 2.5 million instead of 250K, which is still probably on the cheap side, but feels more like the cost for a modern aircraft than 250K does. As for salaries, it's probably fine to be paying employees of this organization exorbitant amounts - you're getting the best of the best.

I found the grenades themselves to also be pretty unimpressive - just for fun I tossed one in the middle of my own troopers in the Chinook, just to see what would happen. It got a couple, but most were still standing after being right next to a grenade blast. It took three to get 'em all.

I prefer flat - I like being able to see the whole world at once, and honestly, the military HQ screen would probably look that way.

Against some of the faster UFOs I was trying to send F-17s (because they're better at killing them), and MiGs. I found that only the MiGs could reliably intercept, but they were having trouble killing their targets, so what I ended up doing was sending the MiGs separately from the F-17s (so the UFO was being pursued by different intercept groups). One thing I found was that if both these groups were able to intercept the UFO together (MiG arrives, tell it to tail target, F-17s arrive, tell them to engage, they engage without MiG.) That would be nice to implement. The other thing I found that's actually a bug is that when one of these groups destroys the UFO I get the message 'UFO has escaped into space', I'm assuming because the non-engaging group suddenly loses their target when the engaging group brings down the UFO. I don't recall if it ever happened in conjunction with a crash site, I think most of these combats destroyed the UFO entirely (or over water).

I'm seeing this too - also, my first ten 'assigned' scientists to projects don't count against my assigned numbers, only beyond that do I see the available scientists go down.

So I was doing my first scout recovery mission and I had an incident where I was faced with an alien in a building (I think it was one of the Ceseans?). Please save any derogatory comments on my playing skill for the end. So two Xenonauts walked up to the doorway of this house, and one opens the door and fires and misses. Then I managed my TU's badly and the alien shot and killed him. The next Xenonaut walks up to the door and gets killed by reaction fire in the same tile as the first (He was either killed or brought to near-0 health, but either way he fell down). I sent a third Xenonaut to the tile just beyond where those two xenonauts fell. Reaction fire would have hit him too, except for the first bug - it hit one of the dead Xenonauts in the tile in front of the living guy (The shot stopped in their tile and I saw one of them 'die' again). It only happened once - after that Xenonauts and the alien fired through the tile several times without repeating the effect. It didn't help - I left the Xenonaut there to shoot into the house and he got waxed too. Not learning my lesson, I sent in a fourth to die. I finished it by sending in a vehicle (also, I'm pretty sure that I had 'secured' the UFO for five turns by now, to no avail). At the mission's end, it said three of the four 'dead' were killed in action (0% health), and one had survived (1% health). However, when I went to the menu in the base after the Chinook arrived, I noticed that both the wounded and all the 'dead' soldiers had been returned to base and were recovering (from 0% health - takes 17 days to come back from the dead, apparently.)

I think having news events pop up ('New French SAM downs first alien craft!') that herald the decline and eventual end of the minor alien craft types would be very cool, and give you the feel that the rest of the world is fighting alongside you.

I think straight-up attacking other humans would take the focus off the main game and be un-thematic. Xenonauts as an organization has their hands full fighting an alien invasion - dealing with insurgent groups are well beyond the scope of their jurisdiction. The only place I could see this being an interesting feature is when a militia or elite government forces are also trying to get the goodies at a crash site before the 'official' organization does. Since they are already implementing native soldiers, it might not be too difficult to make them hostile to both sides.

Disclaimer: I haven't played the game at all yet. I've just been reading design threads. I found out that currently if you overkill an alien ship during air combat, there's zero chance of obtaining a crash site from it. Since you have early elements like the MiG that players can obtain (and will want to) that will overkill some of the early craft, players who haven't done their research are going to definitely be doing this (or it'll happen out of necessity in an air combat). Instead of reducing the chance of getting a crash site from overkill results, I think you should consider simply reducing (but not eliminating) the chance of getting a crash site - say, if the damage is over the 'overkill threshold', drop the chance of getting a wreck by 30-50% or so (you could even have tiers, where each 5% above the overkill level drops the chance by 10%, so if players are using a nuke or something against a small scout then it'll be completely gone every time). Savvy players are still rewarded for being careful about how they attack alien vessels, but non-savvy players don't get screwed out of crash sites entirely.