I strongly agree with the above, whilst I got about 30 seconds load time, I'm running it off a SSD.
And also had the issues of unresponsive soldiers, for a game like Xenonauts, it's really really annoying.
But I'm impressed how much has been done with the game since I last looked at it, making decent progress. Though my look at the game ended with another crash when I clicked the vehicle tab so I didn't get to see much.