Let me suggest something non-trivial.
If you have a game mechanic becoming a boring process, think about making it interesting, not about letting player skip it.
Original game didnt have autocombat and full remake of only original game shouldnt have it.
If we talk about modding the game though, i'd suggest making the game interesting up till the end, instead of allowing player to skip.
This could include:
- Engineers and leaders with blaster launchers randomly popping up on any ufo later into the game
- High ranked aliens showing up on ufos later into the game
- Etherial leaders showing up on ufos of non-psionic races later into the game, sectoid leaders showing on smaller sectoid ufos instead
- After all aliens switched to heavy plasma, they would develop better armor, first for high ranked officers, then for everybody
- Again after item progression is finished, maybe istead or together with armor upgrade they would get more TU's and health
And:
- As a very crazy but interesting idea, a classificator could be added into the game, remembering which kind of starting layouts made player suffer bigger casualties (including those where player had to reload the game), and make later ufos utilise those layouts (and keep adjusting if player starts to beat them easilly)
On that, read on SVM or linear classificators on wiki. Its pretty simple thing - we try to divide all starting layouts into two classes - HARD and EASY. That is, for given x-com craft, alien craft and alien race and terrain, the layout of the blocks, position of both craft, and possibly position of aliens are evaluated. Each x-com craft, alien craft, alien race and terrain type (and light or dark of course) are separated cases. Block layout, position of x-com craft and alien ufo, and possibly position of aliens on spawn points (but this may be not a good idea) are the factors that make the exact map case HARD or EASY for the player (depending on the casualty level - casualty level over medium is considered HARD and lesser is considered EASY). Then, further into the game, it would istead of randomizing the terrain randomly roll to pick up the hardest possible terrain. This is done by trying to classify randomly generated terrains against the knowledge base (we roll the terrain composition and craft positions and then check if its considered HARD or EASY by the classificator) and finding one that is hardest than the worst ever encountered before by the player, or just using one of the remembered "presets" where player suffered greatest casualties.
This would however require player account analysis since throughout a game pleyer doesnt do that many missions to "feed" a classificator. Maybe even a worldwide gathering of statistics (players agreeing the game to upload its data to some universal sever, from which then every client can download it to feed the classificator so it has enough values to work with. However, this could be very fun as it could really make missions "not that simple" since very hard layouts would be generated.
But its a crazy idea