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I've accumulated some thoughts on replayability so far. We all know it was one of the amazing parts of X-COM, so here's a few points on it, and the variety of gameplay. 1. Map variety. In a game like this, I believe the quantity is significant. I'll hopefully be playing this for hundreds of missions, hence the need for map variety. Xenonauts does pretty well in this, except that maps are very unevenly spread, and that more maps are still needed. By an uneven spread I mean, in my current game I've maybe had 1 or 2 Arctic missions, 1 Soviet Town mission and no Mid-East town missions, with loads of the familiar Farm/Industrial. I do think that ultimately making heavier use of randomization for some maps would improve replayability by a lot, and the support is there due to the submap system. I know it is already supposed to work that way with randomization but it does not always feel like it does. At least the two terror maps that I get most of the time seem to have no random elements, I am well familiar with their buildings by now. On the upside, the underlying system is very good, and it seems relatively easy to create maps (and there's a healthy mapping community), so I am confident that this point will be very strong. 2. UFO variety. Something I mentioned briefly in another thread yesterday, I find it problematic that there is almost no overlap at any given time in the types of UFOs appearing. If it's Corvettes, then it is Corvettes until landing ships appear, which then cause Corvettes to disappear, and so on. It actually takes a lot of the fun out of air combat because it becomes too repetitive. My current game has Cruisers currently, so I know every contact is a Cruiser, so I also know I don't need any light missiles or such, that I just need to scramble jets with a full torpedo loadout. Every time. Plus of course it leads to what feels like worse map variety because you get them in clusters. Early on, you'll get the maps that are for small UFOs, then these maps disappear and you get maps of other sizes. There is no mix as the game proceeds. This is something fairly easy to fix, just by tweaking the timelines and probabilities of the different UFO types. Let me still get the occasional scout when it's cruisers flying around. 3. Aliens. Ideally, I'd like to see one more alien race. There's Caesans that correspond to Sectoids, Sebillians are Snakemen, Androns are Mutons and Preators are Ethereals. Plus some companion races. I do feel that there is one more lacking to hit the sweet spot, preferrably a race with some very scary companion, like Sectopods were. Man I miss those guys. But I realize that adding alien races is an effort due to the graphics. That said, aliens seem to suffer from a problem slightly similar to my UFO point above, though not as bad. In my current game for instance, Caesans have essentially disappeared quite quickly, almost every missions is Sebs with the occasional Andron mission. By the way, why are they called Preators and not Praetors? The latter is probably what they are intended to convey. 4. Needs more curveballs. In the long term, I think it'd be best to have occasional unpredictable events, emergent or not. Again, like the original X-COM. In it, sometimes you'd get lucky to capture an alien Navigator very early, giving you early hyperwave decoders. Or sometimes the first terror mission would come up really early requiring you to respond to it with mostly green troops. Some unpredictable elements like that would really improve replayability further. For contrast, that's poorly done in the Firaxis remake, where I know the first terror mission hits around 15th of April, that Mutons appear in the last days of April, and that my encounters before the terror mission will include a shot down small scout and a large one, and one landed scout.