This question is directly related to my desire for battlescape saves, since being able to fast-forward the battle situation to the desired testing prerequisite for debugging a certain bug is only a workaround for the lack of battlescape saves. For instance, how to debug a bug such as this
http://ufoai.org/bugs/ufoalieninvasion/issues/5543 without needing to play through the map ? What I would want is a save from directly before the end of the mission. However, in lieu of that, are there ways to fast-forward instead, such as killing some units, moving some units a long way in an instant, creating some units ? (Needless to say that that would be cheating in normal play.)
In my work for
wesnoth I even created explicit debug functionality in some cases to jump forward with only one or two clicks. A wesnoth scenario is pretty similar to an UFO:AI tactical mission, there you can do such modifications as mentioned by running scripts on-the-fly.