UFO rescue mission

[Xeinar]

I was thinking that it is unlikely that when a UFO is shotdown, the other aliens would let their comrades die and allow humans to recover their technology. Theoretically after some hours they would send a rescue mission to recover their mates, alive, wounded and dead, and to blow up the wrecked ship. Usually in war this is done by specialized teams with very fast veichles to avoid interceptation, and firefights are reduced to a mininmum.
At the moment, instead, you can wait for days before sending soldiers to recover the crash site.

What about reducing the time allowed to recover a crash site and including the possibility to meet a stronger alien force if human action is taken just before the limit of time?

[H-Hour]

One of the things I want to improve in the future is to create more of a penalty for not responding quickly to missions. Terror missions shouldn't go on for days, the crew of crashed UFOs can disappear, etc. When a mission disappears, you'll take a hit to nation happiness.

This will provide more of an incentive for maintaining multiple squads positioned around the globe -- something which is almost entirely unnecessary in 2.5-dev. But for this we'll first need to have better feedback to players on what is happening to nation happiness.

However, I think sending secondary aircraft or increasing alien force has the potential to lead to exp farming. Perhaps the first could be avoided if the secondary aircraft was so fast you couldn't catch it, but that would open plot holes (why don't they use such craft normally?) and frustration (players will try lots of things to catch them, assuming it's possible).

[Visitor]

I'd rather combine game-balancing aspect of missions not lasting too long with fluff explanation of nations being forced to deal with the threat on their own. I assume, as much as questionable from the tactical point of view, aliens having near limitless resource sin comparison with Earth, expendable troops of generally stable morale (because of their role as a part of a hivemind) - they can afford loss of a single ship here and there, unless it's a target of great strategic importance.

At the same time nation getting squad of them on their backyard would be probably reasonably disturbed, with military on ready and going in as quickly as it's confirmed Phalanx isn't going in anytime soon. They'd probably want to act quickly - risk of infiltrators, horrible PR if aliens will be allowed to start a carnage in some major population center and access to the technology for themselves would be quite an incentive.

It would need to be balanced, though as it's nearly surely would lead to situations where having several downed aien ships, unless going back and forth without rest, player has to ignore some of them. Getting noticeable happiness hit for each such vessel ignored could be a problem, but also a good reason to at last add not only damage to crashed aliens but a chance to take some of them outright (granted, I hope for such mostly because of fluff - I always wondered how come, if the ship itself got broken into pieces, there are absolutely no alien casualties, no corpses near the wreck etc).

[kurja]

I'd rather combine game-balancing aspect of missions not lasting too long with fluff explanation of nations being forced to deal with the threat on their own.

This has been suggested before and was immediately shot down by devs