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My bases have been attacked several times and not once has the Laser or Plasma Batteries hit the ship. Both of them at both of my bases read that they have MISSED and the ship was at 100% health upon landing.

I have played many X-Com-a-likes that have been released into the wild. All have their various strengths and weaknesses. All have taken the basic forumla and in some cases tweaked in, in some cases advanced it, and in others, changed it beyond all recognition. However, I believe I can safely say that every X-Comish game that has ever been released has neither changed nor advanced, but merely tweaked the base defence mission. I will touch only lightly on base defence missions themselves. Others have done that before me. Chris has already spoken about what he wants to change and tweak in base defence missions. What I would like to talk about is the stage before the base defence mission - the point where the base opens up with whatever defences you decided to build, in the hopes of shooting down the attacking UFO. Game over. Insert coin to try again. Ha ha. Sorry, did I say defences you had built? What defences. In X-Comish games to date, an attacking enemy ship is usually built along the lines of "like Titanic but with guns.". The chances of early to mid-tier base defences shooting down an attacking alien ship are laughable at best, and moronic at worst when you realise how much money and space you devoted to the equivalent of a ground based peashooter. Base defence philosophy is usually more centered around setting the design of your base so it minimises the number of spawn points which can get access to the rest of your base. Then mining the hell out of the choke point. Uh, sir? They're coming through the air ducts! But this defence and design philosophy poisons the rest of the game. When you develop ImaCharginMahLazor-grade base defences, the little thoughts that tickle in the back of the mind are: 1) Will it really shoot down invading ships? 2) Hey, I scored big time in the last base attack. Sure hope it happens again! In fact, the general uselessness of base defences has lead to some developers not bothering at all and cutting straight to the ground-based combat. Take UFO: Aftermath, where you build garrisons with friendly AI troopers, rather than focus on long-range pew pew. Chris has already written how aliens will be injured/killed on a percentage chance based upon how much damage is done to the alien vessel before it lands. I would like to propose an evolution of this concept, which gives increased value to early-tier batteries while not underplaying the importance of base defence missions. My proposal is this: permit defence batteries to shoot at discrete portions of alien ships, rather than at an amorphous whole, and apply a varying effect on the subsequent base defence mission if the portion of the ship the batteries shot is is destroyed. For example, let us say that an alien ship has a hull, engines, cargo space and navigation. Each has it's own level of HP. If you choose to shoot at the hull (most HP, easiest to hit) and bring it to zero, the ship is destroyed. Shoot the engine (moderate HP, moderately hard to hit), the ship crash-lands and the mission becomes a recovery mission. Shoot cargo space (moderate HP, easy to hit) and x percent of aliens are killed/injured. Shoot navigation (least HP, hardest to hit) the alien ship doesn't land where it should and the player can pick the spawn point for the aliens in the subsequent base defence. I'm sure there are many permutations of discrete alien parts each different alien ship could have (for example, large alien ships might have two engines, or multiple cargo areas) but that's the basic idea. It adds value to defences from early to late tier. Early tier defences, while having no chance of taking down an invading ship would stand of chance of destroying minor but critical elements of the invading vessel which then positively influences the subsequent base defence mission. More effective late tier defences can elminate major components, enabling the player to dictate the strategic direction of base defence missions. And it does all this without taking away the importance of base defence.