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Game mechanics lookup?

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Quizer:
I'd like to know how several things in the game work in detail. Is it possible to look this information up somewhere? (Version 2.5dev)

 - How does radar detection work? Is it chance-based or 100% once it enters the detection area? What are the inner and outer circles? Is one radar enough or is it beneficial to have several? Should you have one of each, or only one of the best type available?
   With the basic radar you get at the beginning, whenever I detect a UFO, it is usually at the border of the inner circle. But once I built an advanced radar, I started getting detections only further inside the inner boundary. And then I got a "landed UFO" site within my detection area without ever seeing the corresponding UFO.
   
 - How does reaction fire work? On the whole, it doesn't seem as reliable / effective as I'd like it to be. I've seen a thread about people arguing over how strong reaction fire makes "camping" as a strategy too powerful, but they never actually came out and said how it works. If you reserve TUs for reaction fire, can it trigger once only, or several times?
   Also, does it work the same way for humans and aliens? I've noticed that on a turn after an alien walks very close to you, you can often evade reaction fire by walking around it and shooting it from the side / behind.

Bonzo:
In 2.4, the small radius is the area a UFO will be detected in, the larger radius only picks up UFOs already detected (having passed through the small radius first). I suppose this simulates that it's easier at long distances to show up a stealth aircraft you've already identified than spot them right off.

Regarding effectiveness, reaction fire is a major game balance issue the development team are working on - can't comment on it's 2.5 behaviour.

trillioneyes:
I'm playing 2.5 and the aliens seem to always get reaction fire against me and never trigger my reaction fire (slight exaggeration; there have been exceptions on both sides). I've heard from other places that actions take place in an order dependent on their TU costs, so that using an attack that costs 6 TU should not trigger a reaction fire that costs 8 (or something like that). I don't know the specifics or even if that's how it works at all, though.

DarkRain:
Bonzo is right, and it still applies to 2.5 inner circle is the detection radius, outer one the tracking radius, to complement: detection is chance based, advanced radars have better chances, detection rate of the radars doesn't add together, but each radar will have a chance to detect the ufo in turn, so while you can't have 100% chances by stacking radars together you do get better chances by having more radars.
Additionally ufos can drop from orbit anywhere (seemingly even right on top of bases that they then proceed to attack :( ), aaand some missions are generated without ufos btw.

What trillioneyes describes is the general idea of how the reaction fire system works, other factors like chances to hit also play a role IIRC, note that there was a bug that caused the aliens to reaction fire much more often than normal, which has been recently fixed, you might also be interested in the last pages in this thread

Quizer:
Do we know exact figures for radar mechanics? As in, what the chance of detection per check is for the different radars (I have only seen regular and advanced, so far), and how frequent checks are while a UFO is with in the detection radius.

As for reaction fire, I've tried using less TU intensive shots for reaction fire when trying to ambush aliens, and have had much more success. And yeah, having a firing squad set up somewhere rather than just one guy definitely helps.

Still, I kinda miss the safety of combat I experienced in the old 2.4 release. Most maps in 2.5dev are a lot more close quarters (which I don't really feel is necessarily to the player's advantage), and the weapons aliens fielded at the beginning never outright killed one of your soldiers. Now, starting two months into the game in 2.5dev, I'm facing aliens with plasma blasters and so many TUs that they can do a full turn's walking, then do a full turn's firing, then walk some more, fire again, and still kill your soldier by RF'ing a plasma ball in his face on your turn when he so much as twitches. (Anyway, I don't really mind that Reaction Fire isn't all-powerful in the player's favor, but I'd still like to know exactly how it works so I can take advantage of it as I may.)

I like the wounds system, which is more in line with the old X-COM. Healing HP by the dozens felt kind of overpowered; I'm fine with healing only enough HP to make sure I don't immediately bleed out on the next turn while I stabilize my wounded comrade. I've never had occasion to use the other two medikit 'firing modes', though. How exactly do they work? Is stimulants solely for curing stun damage, or does it do something else as well?

By the way, is there a way to check how many fatal wounds an alien has? I'd like to be able to make sure a partially stunned, partially injured alien I want to capture doesn't bleed out without wasting excess medikit charges.

Are we going to get upgrades to radar towers in the future? The detection radius is so teeny-tiny, and there are other things like ufo yards you want to build, too. Getting two non-base buildings per base built (is that right?) feels a little stingy.

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