A player should have to make choices - whether to fight every mission or just the essential ones, and whether to use Auto-mission and progress at a faster pace, or manually at a slower pace.
You don't have to field a full team of 8, and save game is there if you're really concerned with not taking any losses - which gives players the opportunity to play "hardcore" and never reverse a loss, or "softcore" and just reload the mission if they fail. Or in my case, finally actually lose an auto-played base defense (that had 8 soldiers, well equipped and not injured), reflexively save the game right after hitting "Try Again" (I *think* I hit Try Again - now I'm second-guessing myself if I accidentally pressed "Esc", which I do very often) and then realizing that my base had just gotten destroyed right before I saved.
It should be possible to take losses and build back up and recover. Which it is right now, so kudos to the people who got the game to that point of almost perfect balance.
The major issue for me is that the research feels kinda cool, but then it's a bit haphazard and the "special" missions are kind of random and spread out and without direction - the game tends to stagnate. Or maybe my 2.4 was bugged.
The player really needs to feel that he's working towards a goal, not just building more bases that become more troublesome to remember who has what where. I was at the point last night where I had almost the entire planet's landmass covered by radar, the SAM sites were almost shooting down Harvesters, all research done and ...not much to do since searching for bases had no effect whatsoever.
I would prefer an in-game mechanic that prompts the player to search for a base in that case, or a research thing to uncover it and gradually assault it, just playing in the Geoscape and doing the occasional non-auto-playable random mission month after month gets boring. There needs to be that carrot in addition to the stick of the UFO attacks.
