Been following development for several years now, decided to just dump some of my ideas out here, to be used, discussed, or ignored
I'll try to order them from what seems to me to be the most feasible to least feasible...
1. SAM sites. As soon as I research UFO antimatter/hybrid missles, why in blazes wouldn't I be able to make SAM installations
inside the base that are equipped with a slightly modified version of these? Never mind the ones that are separate from bases - I'll assume the UN will not resupply them if they're using alien material based missiles, so they gotta stick to the old ones... While I'm pretty sure we can modify the antimatter missiles we salvage from aircraft for in-base SAM, or make enough hybrid ones.
2. RADAR sites. Once you've unlocked advanced radar technology, shouldn't we be able to upgrade our out-of-base radars? Or at least build better ones?
3. I want some sort of "call in the cavalry" button. Let's say I downed a UFO and it crash landed, but I don't want to send my dropship there because all my soldiers are wounded from other missions, and I don't really need it. So as commander I pick up the phone and ask the local government to send their army. A bunch of wounded (THEY SHOULD BE WOUNDED! This was implemented in the original xcom I believe, and have been suggested here) aliens with a crashed aircraft can't really pose that much of a problem to average human soldiers equipped with the same stuff PHALANX has available at the beginning. The price: You don't get money or bodies. Upside - the nation in question is still happier as if you've completed the mission yourself (because hey, they got a free UFO!)
4. And as I sell UFOs to various nations as well as excess recovered alien equipment, I expect some of it to start appearing on the world market, available for me to buy. I mean, what are the nations using all those alien materials they get from dismantling broken UFOs for? If they actually ARE arming someone with nanocomposite or plasma-based weapons, wouldn't it have some impact on PHALANX? Maybe nations would feel they need PHALANX less? Or more (since it got them the tech in the first place)?
5. Technically not a feature requests, but aircraft construction costs in alien materials should be toned down a bit! By at least a thousand.
6. I'm utterly convinced that this has been suggested before, but some civilians should definitely be ARMED. At least those in military installations.
7. ...And some civilians will definitely be stupid enough to try and grab the gun of the alien I just shot down next to them.
8. Once a cure for XVI is discovered and it becomes possible to wholly disconnect an alien from the hive mind, there should be a way to train captured live aliens as soldiers. Unfortunately that seems to require a major change to one plot point - the assumption that those under control of XVI do not have a brain which actually records sensory input. If aliens or humans are allowed to remember what they experienced under control of the virus... Still, I think it would be way cool to have a mixed human-alien squad fighting an XVI-controlled hybrid human-alien group.
9. I highly doubt this will be officially implemented before the game is done, but what about a different strand of a hard-type campaign: PHALANX has been formed not by UN, but by one of the nations, to protect it's own interests. That means you can only build installations within your national borders, only one nation pays you, and other nations get
angry when you operate within their borders, leading to an occasional human-piloted Saracen shooting down your stiletto as it chases down a UFO over a border, or three-way battles when attempting to capture a UFO outside your borders - local militia shows up and attacks both PHALANX and the aliens...
This makes for a much harder, very different campaign, which assumes relations between nations are not the best during the alien invasion, but still not different enough from the main branch to require a major overhaul of the code to implement (correct me if I'm wrong)...
10. UFOs that crash in inland seas should be salvageable without underwater combat! I'm tired of losing them to the friggin dried up Aral sea, or even the Caspian! They're not deep enough to render any UFO that fell into them as "lost to sea".
Yeah, I understand most of this wont be implemented! But at least it's out there!
