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So one thing that bugs me currently is that there is no choice of where to put your starting base. Strategically, there's one location far superior to anything else, and that is somewhere around Cairo, Egypt. Nation relations come from protecting their airspace, and even if changed back to ground missions, this would remain the same. A Cairo base gives you coverage over more regions than anything else. Specifically, you get: Middle East - 100% coverage. Northern Africa - about 80% coverage, only losing the Western part like Mali, Mauritania, Algeria. Southern Africa - some coverage of about 30% Europe - looks like more than 60% coverage. Misses UK and Norway most notably Soviet Union - about 20% coverage, which is good for this massive region. Encompasses most major cities that can be bombed, too. Indochina - a sliver of coverage here, encompassing Afghanistan. Nothing else comes close to this positioning. Further, the funding region situation makes some other locations clearly worse than certain others for a secondary base. For example, consider a second base in the Americas. A base in mainland US is clearly inferior to a base in Mexico, not far from the Guatemalan border. Such a Mexican base can provide complete coverage of the Central American region with decent coverage of North America and some coverage of the South. A base around Beijing for instance is plain bad. I think there may be an easy solution to this. Currently, UFOs are spawned and assigned to a funding region. This means that it's far more important to cover more regions that land area. My proposal would be to assign UFOs to a random point of land when spawned. This would mean that putting your base somewhere where it can cover a lot of landmass but few regions (like a Beijing base that covers a lot of landmass but only Indochina/Soviet regions) would have a high probability of catching UFOs.

This minor one was on previous builds, but since my search didn't find it I thought I'd bump it up. On selecting your starting base, going to close to a city (in my case Cairo) brings up an allocate aircraft screen, rather than an option to build a base there. Now it's possibly due to the use of cities for terror missions, but a mention of it could be made in any manual or FAQ as it's still a bit disconcerting when trying to place your first base.