[[v19 Experimental / Ground combat] Almost impossible to hit aliens inside UFO's]

I must admit that I've not noticed anything weird regarding this but I tend to open the door and use snipers to kill the aliens hiding behind cover. It stops me from being under reaction fire as the snipers can be a fair distance away and the sniper rifles penetrate most cover as well. If that isn't an option I'll usually try grenades one tile next to where the alien is hiding so that they don't need to try throw over cover.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 2]

You shouldn't be penalized for doing more in the game at any point. If you progress the aliens quicker due to the player being 'better' you are treading a very thin line between challenging them and making sure only the true masochistic amongst us will play.

I think instead we should aim to implement a difficulty curve so that new players to the game and genre can win the game on easy most of the time without being beat into the dirt and then have the other difficulty options multiply the negative impacts that effectively speed up the 'ticker' that governs what weapons and ships/alien races the Alien commander has available to use. You are then effectively saying that on the harder difficulties there is less room for error. Once you get that nailed as a base level of difficulty then you can alter the tactics that the aliens use on the other difficulties and fine tune things for each difficulty. Such as working on the triggers at which the aliens will assault your base (they should be required to successfully scout it first!) or send out air superiority mission and the number of active UFO's that can be in play at a single time.

On a total tangent.. how hard would it be to let the player play as the aliens? Maybe you could track data from that and use that to help build the AI?

[Geoscape Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 3]

My main issue with the aerial combat just now is that I'm finding it hard to justify having condors around at all.

They should still be usefull but in my current playthrough I've got 3 Mig's and 3 Condor at my initial base and I just throw the MiG's at everything. They can take out fighter squadrons without any risk at all. A squad of 3 can take out Medium ships. I suppose the condor could be used vs the bombers but a single volley from a MiG takes them down anyway. The other thing is that the condor really struggles to actually engage some ships as well which doesn't help when you want to send a mixed squadron with say 2 Condor and a MiG.

Really the only time I find myself using the condor is when the MiG's are already out fighting or just back from an engagement.

Maybe I'm taking a brute force approach to this but prior to this patch I was quite happy with using condor for some things and MiG's for others but the Condor are too slow, don't do enough damage and are too frail. I would rather be using 6 MiG's just now at the end of the day over splitting it 50/50 on hanger space. Having said that I have disabled escorts due to the bug with that atm so Condor might be useful against ships with escorts but I just don't see it happening.