Some not quite random thoughts on the subjects raised
1. Jon_dArc raised the issue that laser weapons had been too heavily nerfed after the first round of weapon balancing hit early in 2.5's development cycle. On October 7, I introduced some significant (and controversial) changes to address this. In short, handheld laser weapons are no longer available at the start, but come as an early-middle game replacement for plasma weapons, which now perform poorly against armoured aliens. Their damage values have been adjusted accordingly, although they are still not as accurate as they used to be. During that stage of the game, they should be very useful.
It may be just I'm so used to the 'xcom way' but I do prefer having an inferior to alien weaponry but superior to starting tech weapon tech in the research tree. It allows you to develop better weapons relatively quickly without being quite on the sme level as the aliens. My preference would be for highly accurate laser rifles that do less dmage per 'round' than the assault rifle. It should be possible to balance it for a slightly higher avaerage damage output than the assault rifle. Adding a laser sniper rifle would also be a nice feature.
2. I agree that there are some cumbersome elements to the base building that could be revised, and I'm not convinced that the plan for larger bases will help matters. But I don't have any better vision for it.
Just what hardware limit is keeping the base constrained to a 5x5 grid? Is it the size of the base on assaults? Doing away with the surface level would free up quite a bit of memory. The aliens would start in the areas of the base that access the surface (entrance, hangars, radars).
4. ... two days ago I implemented some pretty heavy changes to the rate of employees you will receive each month. I've also increased the number of soldiers you start with in all but the hardest campaign (soldiers are nearly doubled in standard campaign). Each campaign now also has a scriptable parameter to effect how many soldiers are received each month, so it will be easy for you or anyone to increase the number if you find it's too low.
I agree completely that the tiny number of employees on offer created a ceiling to what could be done -- it encouraged excessively conservative battlescape tactics and forced us to keep the number of aliens you'll face pretty low. And for most employees the nation happiness factor was exponential, which means that as the nations got really unhappy -- when you really needed employees -- you could end up getting almost no employees. My sense is that most people will end up with too many employees by mid-game now, but we'll see how the new numbers work out.
Because the number of missions has gone down and the time spent in hospitals has gone up, we'll need to look at the stats increase mechanisms to ensure soldiers can realistically level up through a campaign. But that may or may not make it into 2.5.
Completely agree that the number of employees needs to increase. To make keeping the nations happy a bigger incentive I suggest that happy nations would provide a small number of higher skilled pilots and soldiers each month. getting 2 to 5 soldiers with skills in the high 20's low 30's each month would be precious while having 20 or so raw recruits with skills in the teens would allow for recovery from dissters.
Third, research topics that yield no value. A lot of players really enjoy the lengthy lore behind the game. Personally, I find it tedious. But I suspect it will stay. It fits our niche, which tends to be more detailed, micro-managing, nerdy strategy. What I hope to do -- although it won't happen for 2.5 -- is to better integrate the storyline research with practical items. In an ideal world, a string of "useless" storyline research techs would end in an important item or ability or whatever. They would be the long-term research investment to counter the shorter-term research into weapons, etc. I suspect this won't really be possible until psionics is implemented, though. Looking at the storyline texts we have now, it's very difficult to think of ways to tie them into useable technology.
The storyline techs, for lack of a better term, could result in some game play advantages. Studying the aliens could produce a nerve gas or other weapon effective against the aliens or maybe a 'telepathy scrambler' which would 'stun' aliens in a small area.
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