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As has been discussed, there is currently a bit of an issue with the early game, in that too many of the missions are simple light scout UFO ground assaults which quickly become tedious. In order to alleviate this we plan to introduce a new mission type: Abduction missions. The lore idea is that these missions represent small groups of aliens who are down on the surface (their UFO will not be present in the mission) and are hunting for humans (and probably hapless livestock) to abduct. They will essentially be "mini" terror sites that start appearing right from the beginning of the game, except with fewer aliens and no civilians/friendly AI. They will be spawned occasionally by research mission UFOs when they land. If they are not dealt with in a certain time then, like a terror site, the aliens will escape with some abductees and the nation in which the attack took place will suffer a Xenonaut relations penalty. The size of these missions will probably also escalate as the game progresses. The above is quite straight forward, but we have additional ideas for them: Firstly, we specifically want these missions to be quick, given we are trying to solve the problem of too many Light Scout missions dragging on. As such, we are considering making them "timed", whereby once the mission starts the aliens will escape in X number of turns (once the turn timer is up the aliens will be teleport away to escape). The player would be rated on how many aliens they stopped from escaping - this should differentiate them significantly from normal UFO attack missions. Secondly, the size of these missions will escalate as the game progresses. To start with they will be attacks on simple rural areas using the standard tiles, but we are also considering having later abduction missions possibly be more direct attacks on military bases. Military bases would be represented by re-purposed tiles from the Xenonaut base, and as such these would be indoor missions. In this case we would probably also have military personal defending the sites. Finally, rewards - this is more of an open question: I would like to reward the player with something a bit special for doing these missions, both to differentiate them from UFO missions and to compensate for them not giving the player alenium/alloys/UFO cores. Any thoughts on what interesting rewards might be? Obviously we are limited by content we already have or could easily cobble together, but perhaps something interesting could be done.