Hello!
Very soon I'm finishing UFO: AI 2.6 june version on standard difficulty, and this is my feedback from it.
First 2.6 seemed easier than 2.5, but I'm quite sure that's just because I didn't know how to play when I started 2.5. It "hard" for me from now on, looks like.
Second - despite not being labeled as a stable release the game has not crashed even once.
I've collected a few thoughts for Geoscape and Battlescape. Perhaps such input is wanted, perhaps not. All in all I've been very happy for what's been done to Ufo: AI - barring some glitches in the UI there has been absolutely zero changes to worse.
Geoscape:
1) + Buy/Sell: At last market is not an instant teleport system with no drawback whatsoever. The cost isn't very big, though. Selling price could probably be even less, though again I'm not sure if harder difficulties would suffer from less cash.
2) - Alien bases: I've found exactly one alien base during whole game. I'm not sure what has happened here or if I've just been unlucky in finding them, but the only time I found one was when the aliens had constructed it less than 1000 kilometres from Phalanx base. It wasn't this hard in 2.5, and if I'm not imagining whole thing, this may very well make a nasty bottleneck in game progress.
3) - Alien fighters/gunboats: It's way too easy to lure a gunboat to certain death by launching aircraft/going back to base. At first I was afraid if it gave away my base position to aliens, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I'd hope there was some kind of limit in how many times you can pull the alien craft back to your base defenses before they give up, or at least that they'd retaliate.
Battlescape:
1) + Smoke grenades: I love the stun damage. In fact I would hope that nanocomposite and power armor didn't ignore the smoke stun damage completely. The stun damage makes it a bit riskier to abuse the hell out of smoke grenades, and long shots have a good chance of stunning your soldiers even if they don't deal too much damage.
I would suggest that nanocomposite armor would receive less stun damage from smoke, and power armor would receive the minimum amount of stun damage from smoke.
Heck, you might even make a gas mask item that goes into the same slot with IR goggles. That way you could either have IR spotter or a soldier who doesn't get knocked unconscious too easily, but not both. It'd be a meaningful tactical decision.
2) - Morale: I would like to see morale playing a bigger role. Soldiers got some morale effects only when they get near-lethal damage. Civilians who die close by could lower morale, and maybe all near-miss shots against a soldier too? Of course I don't know if morale functions better on harder difficulties, but right now it might just as well not be in the game.
3) - Weapon balance: Something is wrong when enemy survives 3x 3-round blasts from Plasma Blaster, and it's the most advanced COB weapon. But there seems to be quite a few topics already about this, so I just say that I'd like to see more viable builds for soldiers.
4) - Repetition: I'm aware that 2.6 is mostly an UI update, so I guess it's quite unlikely that new aliens will be added to the game. However, a few more alien types would be welcome, since you pretty much know what to expect. Different mission types might help, but even vanilla missions would become more interesting with more variation in aliens you're going to face.
A few times I had a mission where was a ton of hovernets all over the place and not much else, and those did feel a bit more entertaining and different. But there's only so much you can do with 5+2 different aliens.
