Fair comment on all....I have a fresh crisp and heavily starched pair of Bigboy trousers on order so I can cope with the terror missions, though as with my point regarding grenades, throwing them from inside the skyranger will at the moment result in my lads on the ground being enveloped in smoke, but the tactic is sound from previous XCOM games.
I did have a thought regarding money. The threads do mention here and there regarding selling...fair enough, but might I suggest something rather morre interesting.
Patents!!
Sadly not an original idea but from a line from Men In Black.
J - 'So who pays for all this?'
K - 'We own patents on a few gadgets we confiscated from out-of-states visitors, velco, microwave ovens, liposuction.'
The fun thing here is that a patent would provide another source on periodic payment and even better, your game is set in 79, which gives huge scope for connecting alien tech with 79/80's technological advances. Personally, I remember 79 and besides Abba, Voyager 1, Another Brick in the Wall and the Stylophone, it sucked. But I can definitely see how alien artifacts could have shaped the yuppie soaked affluence of the 80's...in the UK at least.
As for the personalisation, I grew up playing role play games, which nowadays have reached the level of twee or quaint, but did focus the player on the character sheet and tinkering with it was almost as fun as actually playing the game. The ability to adjust character stats or train for bonus skills is my idea of personalisation, not just having portraits. Fair enough I understand that widening the focus on individual soldier skills would require similar balancing with aliens, a coding nightmare I would imagine for a game designer, but a little more might be nice.
We don't want a single soldier trained and tweaked so he is the Chuck Norris of the alien asskicking world, but having specialised training choices was a good part of the most recent XCOM game, which I felt helped me attach to the soldiers rather than just being drones under the CRASH styling.