Milestone 2 Air War Thoughts and Suggestions

[Beltorn]

I've finished playing 2.21 experimental on Normal Difficulty yesterday and before that I played on version 1.24 and would like to give some feedback

Overall I liked my experience, it felt better compared to the previous 1.24 game

I am not sure what to think of the current air combat balance, though so wanted to outline it further:

From previous experience n Xenonauts 1 and Xenonauts 2 - 1.24 , Xenonauts are won on the airspace level first and foremost as UFO fly-bys can induce a lot of panic, so I was planning to build up secondary air-defense bases really quickly and expected to need many fighter jets to fight off the UFOs

I went into the game without checking balance changes and turns out current planes are really costly - 500k for Angel and 800k for Phantoms. I barely managed to have 4 Angels and Eventually 7 Phantoms by the end. All Angels were eventually retired, while Phantoms were distributed to one for each base except of two for my main base
Later I discovered that Phantoms actually have enough fuel to fly around the world and engage the UFO there. Frankly, this feels like an amazing way to counter far away UFOs if only we could spot them.
Could you please consider adding a Radar payload and upgraded variant for it for planes so that we could send out long-range Interceptor parties to spot for UFOs in far away regions to compensate for lack of radar coverage there. I know there was an AWACS mod for Xenonauts 1 with same idea. 

On combat level - One fighter planes easily wins against current UFOs if they are equipped with latest armor and two cannons
I'm not too worried about fine balancing, but I'd like to point out that, right now, the feel of the air game is very much reversed - a heroic lone fighter plane shoots down Alien's air superiority squadrons and escorted UFOs easily. Especially if armed with two cannons and some armor. It doesn't show humanity outmatched or on the defensive at all and I hope there will be further changes and considerations to this. 

I have one request - please consider expanding air groups to more than 3 by 3 participants.
A proper fighter squadron is after all two by two planes. I would imagine, Aliens would be sending multiple UFOs groups to attack if we are winning the air combat hard. 
In connection to this, in XCOM 1994, we could send one fighter, have it tail the UFO without engaging and then engage with another 1+ fighters. Allowing simultaneous combat of up to 4 XCOM fighters against one UFO. I remember managing to bring down a larger UFO with 4 Interceptors armed with heavy missiles.
In Xenonauts 2, only the engaging fighter can attack despite the number of tailing Fighter planes.

To me. the feel of UFOs in combat is really wooden - they turn slowly, and actually don't show that high speed in tactical combat that they are showing in strategic layer. 
Alien fighters are relatively easy to bring down, but Alien Interceptors feel actually powerful if one doesn't switch to gauss blasters to win against them, 

My last is concern is how quickly Angel fighters phase out as they are not able to even catch the Medium sized UFOs. 
Would you please consider adding an engine upgrade increasing their max speed, range and maybe Payload by 1? I imagine similar upgrade would make sense for Phantoms when Ultimate Fighters (Marauder? Fury? or maybe a new name) will become available.

On balancing side, I wanted to suggest a radical idea- in XCOM 1994, upgraded fighters used elerium as fuel. 
And right now, we are getting more Alenium than alloys, so why not make Alenium a balancing item instead of straight cash for planes? Something like 5 Alenium for 100% fuel for Phantom and maybe 2 for alenium upgraded Angel?
and respectively fuel tanks would add 1 alenium fuel, increasing the range by respective amount? If Alenium is in short supply, we already can make some after Nanofabrication research. And the cost is appropriately high - 20k per one unit. 

One last request, could we please have Pilots be actual people and not tied to their planes? It feels a little wrong to lose a pilot just because we have to replace the plane.

 

[Marian]

hi I did wrote about plane upgrades (see all if you want) in

16) please add two or even three slots for planes, the first for the engines, the second for the plane's fuselage, the third for the radar and on-board computer (radar could be useful when the plane flies out of the base's radar range and then its own radar still allows for targeting the target)