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There is a kind of uncertainty principle in balancing the game. If battles are too easy, it can become boring, but if it is too hard, one can fall behind the curve and spiral into disaster. Let me illustrate with simple statistics. Let us say for illustrative purposes that in each mission, one soldier is wounded; typically it takes about 10 days for the soldier to heal (or let us suppose that). This means that after 10 missions, one would have 10 inactive soldiers and unless one has a huge reserve, one would have no soldiers to carry out missions. Actually one would already be in trouble after 3 or 4 missions, when half of the soldiers would be out of action and one would have to carry out missions with 3 or 4 soldiers. This actually happened to me today when I found myself with only 4 active soldiers after 3 or 4 "successful" missions. This means that one of 3 things should happen: 1) One should have a reserve of about 10 soldiers; or 2) most missions should not have any wounded soldiers at all; or 3) the game should allow one to refuse 9 out of 10 missions without any serious drawbacks. None of these seems perfectly suitable, but an approximate solution might be to slow down the pace of alien growth, thus giving the player more time to recover, or equivalently to make soldiers heal faster. Here is another balancing problem: if by balance one means that the alien soldier should be equal to one's soldiers in combat ability, the by the well-know military fact that to win an assault against a defensive position, one should have a 3:1 advantage in numbers assuming equal strength. In this game, the aliens are always on the defensive, but are fortunately not equal in fighting ability, since one can fairly easily win a battle with equal numbers with light or no casualties. Note that "winning" in real life does not mean taking no casualties, but it often does in this game. From the above considerations one can conclude that 1) most missions must be won with no casualties at all, or that 2) replacements should be much easier to get. My guess is that (2) is a better solution, since it would make combat more interesting. It is my impression that in Beta 19.5, the solution has gone in the wrong direction, that is the battles have been made more difficult, aliens have been strengthened in various ways and the player weapons have been weakened. So I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the balancing problem for this game is between keeping battles interesting and challenging, without crippling the player over the long run by the resulting casualties.