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So I should preface this post by saying I am a die-hard X-Com fan. I don't know when I first played it, 1995 or so, but I've been dusting it off every few years ever since. It's still loaded in my steam library, and since buying the newest update, I've got about 60 hours into it. That said, Xenonauts (v20.8) just feels ... wrong. I've seen it mentioned and alluded to in other posts, but this game as it stands is all about air superiority, and almost nothing else. Why are there SO MANY UFOs? Why do I need to have 6+ Hangars in each base just to keep up? And why were interceptors made into rock/paper/scissors? The Foxtrot is an "upgrade", but has the hardest time killing the easiest UFO? Why? What's the point? And now all of the favor has been moved to shooting down UFOs, so you hardly need to do ground combat at all. I'm actually finding it really annoying. The tedium of X-Com and doing ground missions you didn't really need has been replaced by the tedium of shooting down wave after wave of UFOs. There' just.. too.. many.. X-Com was a game about tactical turn-based ground combat. This is not. The ground combat is there, but that's no longer what this game is about. There are other things that could be fixed. I'm not sure why "manufacturing for money" was taken out. It was a viable strategy that added depth to the game. The early to mid tech-tree is so thin that there's no point in stacking scientists, which was a valid strategy that added depth to the game. But none of that matters if the game is not about ground combat and fighting aliens, and instead about massing interceptors and playing the waypoint, roll, launch missile game. I think it's great you guys took what was basically an afterthought in X-Com (air combat) and made it more interesting. But there is way, way too much focus on it right now, to the detriment of the core of what made X-Com (at least for me) a great game with so much to offer in the way of replays. If balance is so tight that you have to stack air just to have a viable economy, you take away many other ways to play. Those other ways to try to win are what keep people (or at least me) playing the game again and again. Is the single base tech rush strategy going to be viable in Xenonauts? There is a page on the ufopaedia about ways to handicap X-Com to make it interesting once you've mastered it. http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Making_the_Game_Harder How many of those scenarios will be impossible in Xenonauts simply because the economy is based 100% around shooting down wave after wave of UFOs? I want to love this game, because I've played the Ufo games, and I've played XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and this game could be way better than any of them for an X-Com lover. But right now the emphasis of game-play is far too weighted toward air combat and interception. And (at least to me) that's not what X-Com was about. Turning a corner and seeing 3 little red squares pop up in the top right corner, or listening to metallic footsteps in an alien base, or hearing the high pitched whine of mind control is what made X-Com special. And the fact that you could play it several different ways is what gave it such great replay value.