Alpaca

That really helps a lot. Thank you! Even better that it will improve even more. Great to hear. I agree, but it is probably too hard to give a good in game reason why you can't shoot down the first ship of a certain type. Now I am curious if a few other points will be addressed as well: No mind probes: I can see why psionics had to go, but mind probes were not only very original, but also very useful in distinguishing aliens... Probably suboptimal use of TUs though. Best is probably being able to hover over the alien and see what his most probable rank is. I did notice differences in aliens, but they are still hard to classify. I think it would be great if you can click on a character and can see his stats in combat, and maybe also armor rating and statistics about shots, kills, spent TUs, reflection values. Allows you to game the experience system even more . Personally I think it would be more immersive if you couldn't have a squad consisting of only Colonels. However, the original (XCOM) solution for promotion was maybe more elegant, but also extremely exploitive. I really liked the suggestion I saw on this forum to make soldier starting stat distribution Gaussian with a minimum average for your first 8 btw. I was only wondering about bravery (and to a lesser extend reflection). Bravery seems pretty hard to raise systematically. Maybe make the standard deviation smaller for bravery and maybe the expected starting value a bit higher than the other stats. Edited: Maybe max number of Colonels should be equal to the number of bases (maybe with an offset). And the number of Commanders to that of Colonels (times 2?!). And Majors to Commanders etc.

Recently, I discovered Xenonauts. I have just played a little with 21V5 + patch, and apart from a few bugs (stability issues, base building scrolling -e.g. selecting the quantum cryptology center- is really confusing, and a few weapon related ones -% to hit- that I think are already fixed in V6), a few inconveniences (e.g. not being able to see how far you can walk and still shoot, not being able to click on the soldiers in order to see their stats), and the long loading times of battles, I really enjoyed the game. A really good remake! Nevertheless, I was surprised how the scoring worked, and supposed it to be buggy. I was even more surprised when I discovered, that it was working as intended. I really like the idea of focusing more on air combat and allowing to skip trivial missions. Nevertheless, I think it should be worked on. It should not be easy to skip terror missions, base attacks and base defenses by shooting down the UFO. Maybe something like this would help improve the game: -Make the ships corresponding to terror missions, base attack and base construction way stronger. So, you can't shoot them down early. Give big rewards for great successes during those missions. -Reward conquering a landed vessel properly, because now you better wait and hope you can down it later. -Fix the bug that 0/0 civilians being rescued leads to terrible performance rating. This really kills immersion even if it is not used. Those small tweaks would already greatly enhance the game I guess. Furthermore, I think it would be better if you could only airstrike the weaker ships. I think best couple it to certain technologies (e.g. missiles etc) and maybe earlier successes. So, you always have option of airstriking, but if insufficient power it warns you that several aliens will/might survive the strike. Maybe give half of the relationship bonus for shooting down the UFO and half for successfully airstriking. But it indeed might lead to too many mandatory missions.