Skitso

Thanks for the detailed answer. Few thoughts: Is it actually beneficial for everyone to be able to wear to most modern armour as soon as it comes available? I've felt that the units have already becoming too homogenous after few months in the campaign. Having part of your team wearing older tech (both armor and weapons) gives much needed diversity. Armour module buff could be a certain percentage of the armour it's attached to, instead of a flat value? Carrying capacity is too generous already - at least for grenade spamming. I can also have most of my troops always carry a medkit without it feeling like I need to leave something out for it.

Could you open up the thinking behind this change a bit? Soldiers have way too much carrying capacity as it is, so removing armour modules make inventory management even more trivial. I would like there to be even more choises to be made what units can carry. You could have each armour have different inventory grid size, but is it a better way to balance it?

Would probably make more sense if the autopsy report is displayed after interrogation at least?

Have I mentioned original X-Com somewhere?

Old system gets my vote. If I remember correctly, @Chris once justified the new system by saying that splitting your scientists to multiple projects just postpones everything and it's always the most optimal to focus to one one project at a time. I kinda disagree, as there was a diminishing returns in play in X1 and it was a cool little detail to try to optimize research: As the research was closing it's completition, I started to move scientists to other projects where they could contribute more effectively.

Not true. This bug has been in the game always.

Smoke doesn't block LOS, but just reduces accuracy.

Melee attack hit animations, hit reaction animations and damage/stun numbers are all out of sync. Makes it look and feel unsatisfying.

Hmm, yeah... but wouldn't it make more sense for those people to play Jagged Alliance or similar tactical games instead, where the point is to try to preserve your units? That kind of slow and methodical gameplay is not what xcom styled games (including Xenonauts) are about. It's generally a bad idea to add all possible game mechanics people enjoy in a single game just because. X2 doesn't have prone for a reason, same with corner peaking. On the other hand Xenonauts have some mechanics other ganes don't have.

It would certainly break the pacing as it would further encourage even slower, more careful and reaction fire dependant game style. In xcom styled games, players troops are mostly expendable cannon fodder, so why bother? Regarding sound design, I completely agree. It kinda sucks currently.

Or make the globe slightly transparent? Changing the geoscape is probably out of the question at this point, but maybe a paid DLC might be a possibility?

I'm not sure if making gameplay/campaign progress decisions based on the fear of Steam refunds is the correct way to do it. (While I certainly understand the reasoning) ....and if you really, really want to have an abduction mission as the 2nd mission, make an exception in it's rules for the first time. For the record, I personally enjoy trying to save the people while avoiding aliens as much as possible until they teleport away.

This caught my eye... jetpack would be extremely useful if the maps were just more vertical and being higher grounds provided more buffs. Changing accelerated weapons to being an upgrade to ballistics sounds like a good idea, but I'd like the upgrads to be weapon type specific. Similar upgrade path to armor doesn't sound like an improvement Item upgrades sound sweet. More the better. Regarding the module system, I kinda enjoy the Tetris mini game we have atm, where I need to balance my backpack between modules, weapons, grenades and other items. Changing the abduction missions to be one more "kill all aliens" mission feels a step in a wrong direction. Regarding the cleaner mission chain and progression: Gathering intel for intitial progress is fine and I love the mission (best map so far), but the daily automatic percentage gain after that feels somewhat gamey and boring. You should add more quick and simple cleaner missions where player could earn that progression instead, capture additional intel, capture and interrogate cleaners etc. I also suggested somewhere that cleaners could be added to crash site missions to clean the wreck and alien corpses. This would add a nice new dynamic to those missions where the more player waits before raiding the site, the more there would be cleaners. Avoiding these add-on cleaners could also push people to do these crash site missions at night, before cleaners arrive. Edit: Here's my initial suggestion

Mapping, as far as I'm aware, is out of the scope of the modding tools unfortunately.

I agree with above. I've also given some thought on the other cover issues... here's two suggestions: cover value should decrease the further it is from the target. firing from higher ground should decrease cover values on lower levels. The larger the height difference, the lower the cover values.