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Yeah, that disucssion. My main thought after playing around a bit with Xenonauts is what squad sizes are aimed for in game balance. In the OG the great stuff was that you could stuff your skyranger under the roof with soldiers when you got the impression your equipment sucks and you have to take a quantity over quality approach. Usually there was a efficiency curve for your missions since beyond ~12 men you were nearly ensured to have far higher casualty rates due to stray bullets and grenades since your men always bunched up somewhere so it wasn't a desired tactic beyond bringing more firepower to the fight since you lack the pewpew gun that concentrate that firepower and the armor to survive in smaller numbers. However the Charlie only has space for 8 men although the craft clearly has 18 tiles space inside which would mean 12 men if we assume troops are sitting alongside the sides of the vehicle. Since you can load a tank with 6 soldiers on it, it clearly isn't a weight issue but seemingly intentional? Additionally my impression from the starting weapons on normal is that particularly the basic armor and Jackal armor is essentially useless in combat. If your soldier gets hit he will be dead and to top it off his visual range gets restricted meaning more instances where aliens will be able to shoot the soldier beyond his visual range. If that's intended the limited recruitment capability, crew space in the base and squad size in the Charlie seem a bit strange. If the preferred strategy in the early game is to throw bodies at the problem one should be able to throw bodies at the problem. I saw that the game sprites go up to 16, not sure if that's for later transports. However bigger squad sizes and more space to recruit soldiers is more necessary at the start than in the end when fully powerarmored soldiers don't need to be in big teams to bring along tons of firepower. More importantly there should be flexibility for choice to have standard teams of 6-8 for small UFOs and possibly 12-24 for terror missions/big UFOs. In the terror missions I essentially got 3-4 men dead sitting behind cover in jackal armor but getting shot out of nowhere or hit from stray bullets. Since I don't see any ways in terms of tactical choice I'd chalk such things up to accidental deaths, however feel that if I have to cope for some attrition rates I'd rather have more people to bring along. Losing high exp soldiers is usually bad enough and starting over with a squad of rookies kind of makes it necessary to bring two of them for every veteran to stand a chance. I'd say in XCom:EU the main problem is that from midgame on you cannot afford to lose soldiers since your rookies are essentially worthless. This was even worse in the Altar games where you had no recruitment capabilities beyond special events. You can't afford to lose soldiers, which in turn supports save spamming. I have no problem losing men, but the essence of strategy gaming is the capability to establish a strategy to deal with the enemy and this includes on how to organize your manpower so you can afford losses. If the structure of the game makes it necessary to win every battle then you subvert the intention of dealing with losses and use strategy. E.g. in Total War games losing a battle or having half your army ravaged in a bloody clash so it is unusable for years on that front isn't an issue since you can plan your strategy to cope with those losses. Most UFO clones have the problem of making all tactical missions, mission critical to continue the game and so I'm most worried about this game aspect. Somehow I can really say up to now only the OG managed to give you good options to soldier on after your interceptors are shot down, your squad slaughtered and the skyranger blown up. And that's what made it a great strategy title with cool squad based combat!