As was observed from the demo, the levels of autism when it comes to managing your squad(s) are off the charts. You can edit pretty much everything regarding your soldiers, you can promote them (promotions cost Squad Points, which are the main currency) which gets them additional skill points and you can buy new gear weapons for them. There are 9 skills to level up, ranging from Endurance to Biochemistry - soldiers dont have classes, you create their "class" through the skills and gear you give them. As you level up individual skills, you can further choose some of them to be primary and secondary skills for the character (works similarly like tagging in Fallout for example) and the primary skills then lead to further specialisation in the given area.
There is a respectable amount of weapons and gear, ranged weapons have multiple ammo types. There are tons of shit you can get, there is apparently even crafting and the gear you have can be upgraded. P. cool tbh fam. For some there might be too much autism - for example you actually have to load the weapons manually in the squad management screen or you will start win empty guns (and reloading will cost APs at the start of the mission).
Right now the EA version offers several single missions and operations (the operations being basically mini campaigns with 2-3 connected missions). The full version should include campaign and some sort of base defence thingy.
Gameplay itself doesnt seem to have changed much since the demo.
Control scheme is complex to say the least (I talked about it ITT in the previous posts) and while there have apparently been some streamlining (you now get to aiming mode simply by pressing space, while previsouly you needed several clicks for example), you still need a bit more hotkeys than one would probably expect in a TB tactics game in 2023. This is not bad in itself of course, but I guess that some people might complain about "bussywork" and such. There are a few new alien types, including a monster that explodes when killed. I found out about this in rather unfortunate circumstances as I sent my shotgun wielding hacker dude to make a point blank kill. He is currently on fire as I type this.
Will post more as I play more, in any case this looks very promising and I hope the devs will manage to update regularly. If you are interested in squad level turn based tactics with deep/autistic management layer, this is definitely something to keep an eye on.
