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Hear me out. Games too often have a tech tree where... all the advances are just incremental improvements to existing tech and items. The opponents do the same. Everything just feels the same and balanced out for the entire game with nothing really feeling different. Just bigger numbers. Stellaris at launch (stopped playing a month later) was a big victim of this design. That and the perfect Rock/Paper/Scissors combat. Sword of the Stars is an example of excellence. Yes, the numbers got bigger but the tactics and feel of the weapons became very different. God, I love the mass driver hulls... X2, suffers greatly from the incremental tech. It's boring and changes nothing in squad tactics or abilities or outcome assuming parity with the aliens. It all washes out and all your tech upgrades are meaningless. Might as well be the very first battle same as the final. It may be too late in the development cycle for X2. Still, I would strongly suggest that the team try to innovate and have each teach level ballistic/accelerated/laser/plasma all feel and act much more differently than the +125% that the info card literally says in the game! OG floppy disk X-COM even had more drastic differences in the gear-enabling tactics. Nuclear Football anyone?

One feature I am really disappointed about is the fact that there is no "prone position" which, IRL, gives you a) a lot more protection from direct fire as you are a presenting a smaller target, b) makes you more difficult to spot, c) gives you much greater accuracy with rifles and machine guns and d) gives better conditions for giving covering fire. Not acknowledging this in the gameplay really spoils the tactics side of things; having your team crawling on their belt-buckles means they'll move much slower but will be able to move into fire positions without being seen and/or much less likely to get hit. It was one of the good things about XCom Apocalypse (which was an ugly looking game, but had great combat mechanics). I really hope the devs rethink their design here, as I think the "dumbing down" of the combat mechanics will really negatively affect the game.

Basically the title, but especially against Androns, which can't be suppressed. I recently had to raid an Andron base and lost two of my best troops to reaction fire. I was using two shield Troops, but their shields got shot up very early on(to reaction fire). I then used my tank to bait out reaction fire, but it eventually went down. I was able to kill the aliens at a steady clip, but there were just too many of them. And when I lost my shields and tank, I had to make the tough choice of finishing the mission, or aborting. I pressed on and won, but a couple high ranking Androns got two of my men with reaction fire after throwing nades at them. These were tight spaces so I couldn't use the tactic of shooting from beyond range with a spotter. A few more questions: 1) Can Androns see through smoke like drones? 2) If not, can Drones spot for Androns through smoke? 3) Can Alenium grenades hurt Androns? I didn't see damage numbers. How about regular grenades? Thanks!

So I've been playing a lot of Xenonauts recently and one thing that I'm consistently noticing is that it doesn't really feel as though I'm fighting intelligent opponents. Part of that is an issue I have with the enemy AI, and part of that is an issue that I have with how enemy defenses are set up and the weaponry available to them. The first and most glaringly obvious thing to me is the lack of stationary weapons emplacements whenever we're boarding UFOs. My reasoning is thus: the aliens are a reasonably tactically versed enemy. They also know that humans with some pressing questions and heavy weaponry and explosives will be showing up within 24 hours to speak with them; any longer and (since the UFOs disappear without any cash payment or any mention of any action by local governments) they will be rescued and the craft salvaged. Their larger UFOs are also laid out so that there are several chokepoints with relatively long lines of sight. They are also capable of building burst-fire weaponry. So why is it that we don't see an equivalent of, say, an M2 Browning, a heavy weapon capable of sustained fire that you can set up in one position to cover a certain position? The very first thing I would do if I knew that I only had to hold the ship against enemy attack for a certain amount of time would be to set up a machine gun or equivalent to cover the chokepoints within the ship. The sheer volume of fire that it would be able to deliver and its relatively high ammunition capacity means that you would be able to tear any nosy humans to literal shreds if they tried to get in for quite some time, and since they don't have weaponry capable of going through the walls, it instantly makes the ship much, much more defensible. On the human side, this also increases the tactical usefulness of snipers and rocket launchers, because those let you kill the aliens manning those weapons with relatively little risk to the soldiers in question, as well as explosives (provided we get destructible walls in future), which would let you flank them. I also have a bit of an issue with the enemy AI after you've slaughtered all the aliens in the UFO and are on the way to capturing it. Why is it that the aliens don't immediately converge on the UFO once you've initiated that victory condition? It makes the "five turns after you've occupied it" victory condition a little unnecessary to my thinking, if you're already guaranteed victory after you've captured it, and it'd make it more interesting if you're four turns in with three Xenonauts on the verge of death by bleed-out and then that one bastard of an Sebillian you missed blunders in, resetting the timer. All in all, I think that it's a very fun game with a lot of replay value; I just think that those little additions would make the experience feel that much more real (as real as a game about shooting space aliens can be).