This is something I've been thinking about with my view of the game that I wanted to post here as well.



I think the root of the tactical combat layer problems is that with only 4-6 troops the design would be unfair if aliens could kill you sight unseen like was the threat in the original. The solution was to remove aliens being able to attack until at least the turn after you first spot them. This is true even if the aliens stumble across you on their own on their turn - they don't get to launch an attack, they can merely take a free move action. However, this lends itself to a strategy to take advantage of this behavior by being extremely careful not to engage too many enemies at once during your own turn. Even on Classic I basically feel no danger of actually losing any of my experienced soldiers at this point - my last loss was months ago and due to some incredibly bad luck ON TOP OF me trying to rush through the alien base faster than was tactically sound (an alien grenade destroyed my full cover and granted LoS to my troop, allowing a follow-up of two heavy plasma shots that still only critically wounded... my support and only medpack carrier. Thank goodness soldiers can't pick up and use equipment from their fallen comrades like in the original!)



If the aliens had their own equivalent of Squad Sight you'd see a very different tactical game emerge, but it'd be one where the attrition of there being 20 aliens to your 6 troops would not work out in your favor.



Also, the math behind Cover is weird. Early game full cover is 40 defense and partial is 20 and they take an alien that had an 80% chance of hitting you in the open down to a 40% or 60% chance - a significant defensive bonus. However, later full cover is taking aliens that may have had a 110% chance of hitting you down to 70% and partial is taking them down to 90%. Which leaves partial cover almost meaningless and leaves full cover still getting you hit more often than not. This really impacts how many aliens you can potentially engage at once regardless of how "good" of a defensive position you're in. And again, to keep this feeling fair, the design skews towards not forcing the issue - it always wants to let you react.



They put the special abilities on timers, but then give you all the time in the world. It's the equivalent of a D&D campaign where the DM lets the party rest and heal everything back to full after every single encounter, regardless of how trivial. There's zero urgency, even past the point of reason. We have a vast intersteller alien threat with FTL communication and telepathy, but they cannot coordinate against assaults unless they happen to be standing right next to each other in the same room? The bomb missions and terror missions are the only missions I've seen in the entire game that break this mold, and they sadly represent less than 10% of the combat you end up going through. Even then, the terror missions allow for the option to just ignore civilian safety and play them like they were abduction missions, and still basically come out ahead for "winning." The game needs more missions like the bomb missions - if you're going to do monster closets, you need to make the objective force the player to kick the doors down one after another whether they really want to or not.



The result is that the best strategy is to peel the aliens off slowly and murder them before they get a chance to ever shoot. This would be resolved if the aliens did get first strike capabilities and were generally more active, but the design would need to allow for a lot more troops. To me this is the fundamental difference between the combat in XCOM and X-Com - moreso than the cover system, skill system, or action/TU differences.