My playthrough experience.

[Kaorimoch]

I never played the original xcom, I must have missed it in my teens, but I played the UFO After series to death. Anyway, here was my experience in point form as feedback for the devs.

I have played the steam build up to March 1980 with 4 bases up and running getting 3 million each month in funding.

Things I like

1 Those battleships filled with autons that come out at you in waves, Love it. I kill 30-35 so its a great stand up and hit em fight that ends with victory so I dont have to clear out the ufo. Keeps things varied so each map has differences.

2 The balance at the start of game really gives a great challenge upgrading from M16s to lasers.

Annoying things.

1 I once spent real time 30 minutes chasing a wraith around the map that teleported every move. It was farm map so there were many LOS obstacles. Very frustrating.

2 Air is very unbalanced since the big ufos come in 3 months and the better interceptors require a lot of build time and money. The build time is more of a problem.

3 It takes about 2 months to set up a new base properly.

4 The UFOs come in waves of like 12 at a time. Great revenue opportunity, but it means each base needs a lot of interceptors to take advantage of it all. I found it balanced for me well when I had 5 marauders at each base.

Modifications I made to make the game more fun for me.

1 Increased the damage for magstorm and plasma blaster fivefold.

2 Reduced the build time for the interceptors to 100 for corsairs and 150 for marauders.

3 Reduced cost to 320 for corsairs and 400 for marauders.

4 Increased base sight range for soldiers to 22.

5 Reduced build time on the armor to 30 days for wolf, 90 days for sentinel.

Xenonaut bugs I have noticed

1 When the last enemy on a map was a zombie, I killed it, out came the reaper.. and then it showed mission complete. And I lost points for letting an enemy get away.

2 When selecting a plane to build without an engineer on the project, I went to the geoscope, the money was taken off me, went back to the manufacturing plant, removed the project and no money was refunded. It was gone.

3. When putting on the sentinel armor while having a weapon equipped in the squad screen, the weapon disappears. Usually the weapon might go back to inventory, but in this case it actually disappears and I have to reload and unequip the weapon to equip it.

4 Using the shrike to visit some areas such as terror sites leads to a crash to desktop. I used the maps someone had altered to allow a shrike to land since some maps didn't have proper shrike deploy slots. Later on in the game, I was unable to add more soldiers to the shrike and trying to click on the grayed out shrike button to assign a soldier to it led to a crash to desktop. I had to spend time getting the valkyrie going or rely on the chinook. (I was secretly hoping for a Macross Valkyrie for a cool mech battle but ... yeah)

5 The game would crash to desktop if I tried to transfer a soldier to another base. This led to me having to level up soldiers from scratch at each base, so getting soldiers with 55 TUs to take on a downed battleship - not fun.

Weird less important bugs

1 When attacking a downed ufo that severe damage was inflicted on, after the first turn, I win the map! There were no aliens.

2 Healing someone with a medkit counted as an action that aliens could react to with a shot.

3 When deploying with the valkyrie, the deployment phase seems mixed up with the first phase. That led to a nice terror mission opening where the aliens took out 3 of my team members. To get around this, I saved the game after deploying my troops, then I reloaded that game and I was able to take the first move.

Recommendations

1 I cannot see the aliens when they are just on the edge of the viewable space during a night mission. I have to wiggle the cursor around the area the alien should be to find it and on that note, when you enter a ufo during night, the ufo interiors go dark when you cant see them (eg when moving soldiers) which does not occur during the day.

Pie in the sky recommendations

1 More in game indications of where the story is going.

2 Perhaps you could “retire” soldiers when they reach a certain point and put them into some sort of training academy to give rookies a boost when they hit the field. This would give players a way to get rid of super soldiers and make rookies more effective, keeping players interested in leveling up soldiers in the field. It makes the ground missions more rewarding.

3 Upgrading radar stations to improve detection?

[Sathra]

Radar is meant to get upgraded, but the item to do so isn't capturable for some reason.

[thothkins]

2 Perhaps you could “retire” soldiers when they reach a certain point and put them into some sort of training academy to give rookies a boost when they hit the field. This would give players a way to get rid of super soldiers and make rookies more effective, keeping players interested in leveling up soldiers in the field. It makes the ground missions more rewarding.

I recall this coming up in one of the threads involving bringing in new recruits at a higher experience level. Basically, that they were now being taught by veterans with combat experience against the aliens.