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As I somehow find vanilla sight distances too short for my taste I messed around and made a mod for myself. Expecting total nonsense it actually turned out quite good so I want to share my findings in hopes it may help improve the current game. before boring you all with long explanations I directly present you the changes and conclusions: Sight is changed to a base of 27, wich is 150% of a rifle effective range. Different ranges of armors/aliens is maintained with sebilians getting 25, Harrigans 35 and all others 30. What does this screw up? - It mostly removes the explore & surprise/tensión from the game, as was expected from such a massive change, making this surely a "No Go" change for retail game. What does it actually improves? -It creates a very different Xenonauts. It removes the problem with reaction fire & insta-death because it takes place outside most weapons effective range making incoming fire non accurate and hit for less damage, while still being dangerous. Hunter still proves too big and get pounded easily. So how this Hax/blasphemy can help? -The key is to have longer sight range than weapon effective range so reaction fire and crap takes place in the less lethal área of weapons performance. You may try to increase sight 2 or 3 tiles beyond rifles 18 max range and things improve. The more you increase it the less deadly reaction fire is. This together with other balances may help the game be more enjoyable. So how the nonsense 27 sight range fared? - I love it really. instead of exploring and getting shot from FOW you get a clear picture of the battlefield and things turn into tactical firefight/ battle. You spot aliens from afar and try to pin them down with machine guns while rifles manouver to get inside effective range, moving from cover to cover under long range fire wich is not so lethal but still hurts like hell. Fireteams fires at long range trying to get the lucky shot while advancing wich results in higher ammo use. Its not unusual to use up 2 or 3 mags in the battle. Instead of hunting aliens 1 by 1 you get engaged by multiple aliens shooting from different parts of the map. While this is only a pew pew gallore in early game, when you get to androns and plasma cannons and rifles things turn deadly and interesting. Aliens seem to like long range too. I get the feeling that they work better as a team globally as they charge you and retreat when taking losses. It may be the increased sight revealing them more info about you and giving them time to get to cover/ manouver, even if this part of AI is not really here yet, but I cant really assure this to be true. In CQC maps it does play like in vanilla game with house searching, corner peaking etc. but used to long range firefights it really feels deadly when exchanging fire inside effective range, giving more flavour to combat IMHO since you get to experience both long range and close range firefights. The most epic single firefight I remember with this mod: -In a farm map 3 xenonauts with 1 laser rifle+1 sniper laser+ 1 scatter laser engages 2 caesians with rifles + 1 drone . Aliens were trenched behind a low wall with an open field infront. Xenonauts took cover behind some hay blocks. Range was like 22 tiles with chances to hit aliens behind cover quite null, and flanking not posible due to map layout. After 5 turns exchanging fire the aliens got the upper hand as their burst blow some of the hay blocks. Xenonauts were hit again and again and although Wolf armor and long range damage decrease doesnt let them die in 1 shot, they struggle to use medkits to survive the next hit. Combat ends when the drone and 1 caesian finally die and the last one retreats to the ufo. Xenonauts lost the rifle guy with the other 2 having less than 25% health and all medkits depleted.The team was send back to the Charlie while the rest of the troops assaulted the ufo losing a Hunter and another soldier in the process. Note that the team was elite with stats on the 70s and the ufo was either a corvette or a landing ship, I cant remember. Also note that I played a game with this sight mod from start to human plasma rifles and wraiths & harrigans, and as the game progressed and more firepower and upgraded aliens were trhow into battle, the more interesting and more natural the combat felt. Now for the future of this mess im tweaking supression values so long range fire may not kill easy but at least helps suppress while rifles get into range. Same for the aliens. Also since a way bigger part of the map is used in the firefights im testing using increased blast radius for rockets so it becomes more a médium range weapon and not a choice for CQC ( no more nuking a reaper 4 tiles away of your own soldiers). I may try to change damage of the weapons to increase lethality on extreme ranges, or try to reduce base sight to 22 to get back a bit of exploration/surprise feeling. But Im sure this will slowly become a full mod with probably bringing back the old xcom cannon that fired HE rounds, to increase the long range fun.