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Had an idea for a new type of mission for the game... I lost an interceptor over land and thought what a cool mission it would be for me to have to go in and rescue the downed pilot from being captured by the aliens (the aliens landed and tried to capture him)... That would make for a neat scenario. Would it be hard to code an allied AI to follow your trooper once you got one of your guys close to him? The object would be to get the pilot back to the ship or destroy the aliens (or both). It could be a random rare event spawned by a aircraft shoot down over land.

I've thought of a scenario that seems quite fun to me. With the possibility of your carrier being shot down, wouldn't it be awesome if you could play a rescue mission instead of just getting the message of local forces recovering your troops? I would imagine the mission starting with a crashed carrier and mangled, with your troops in it and maybe a few scattered outside. RNG would determine how wounded/dead they are. Your first order of business would be trying to heal your troops and setting up a defense position. Aliens will have spawned on the far side of the map and are moving towards you. You would need to hold up against the aliens and then after a few turns a good number of friendly NPC soldiers would turn up to try and save you. There's no enemy UFO on the map and the only thing you can gain from the mission is the survival, and experience gain of the crew.

In the description of the Chinook it says that if it is shot down all aboard are lost. Why? When I shoot down a UFO that's not the case. There's wreckage and survivors and gear leftover. What if the same happened when MY transport got shot down? Okay, so I send out my Chinook full of my best commandos and gear. Blam. It goes down. Now I have the option of sending a second team in. When I make my landing I get a message telling me how bad the crash is and the likelihood of there being survivors. Somewhere on the map is the shattered remains of my Chinook, along with scattered corpses, gear, incapacitated xenonauts, and perhaps even a few particularly resilient, albeit injured and outnumbered, xenonauts. The alien craft that shot them down or perhaps a separate transport is there to finish off my xenonauts. I have to fight my way to them. I win if I retrieve all survivors, including unconscious xenonauts, and return them to my Chinook, or if I defeat all aliens. Alternatively the Chinook is shot down and gone. There is a random chance that within the next few days a garbled message will be received from survivors of the lost team. This opens a rescue mission somewhere near the crash site. Wounded survivors are holed up somewhere and dangerously low on ammo, desperately fighting to hold off the alien onslaught. I think it would be an interesting change up and I might be less inclined to immediately reload a saved game upon losing my Chinook. A mission like that would be too damn fun to miss out on.