the rules are useless without the code
which i'm sure i left around here somewhere
I meant a description of the game mechanics. How soldiers gain training experience, how it differs from field experience, how long it takes, etc.
For example, I liked how UNIMOD did this. In UFO:ET, for a soldier to advance a stat - say, Firing Accuracy - from 40 to 41, they need to collect a number of "learning points" in this particular skill; I don't know how many, but let's assume 10. Now, UNIMOD introduced a training facility, where you could send troops to increase either their combat abilities (shooting, throwing, etc.) or general physical shape (health, TUs etc.). Now, if you send a soldier to combat training, over time they will gain "learning points" in combat skills, but
only up to 50% of the next threshold. This means that our guy - or girl, which I always seem to secretly think - will gain up to 5 points of the 10 needed, and only if he or she has 0 points at the beginning. Someone who has Firing Accuracy 40 and 3 learning points, can only gain 2 learning points from the facility, and after that needs to go back to the battlefield to get the remaining 5 to reach Firing Accuracy 41 (after which they can train again, up to 50% the threshold to reach 42).
Now, X-Com works differently as there are no learning points etc., so this mechanics is obviously irrelevant. I only explained this to show what I would like to know.
well... i always thought XCOM uses the most elite soldiers from the worlds most elite forces (delta, seal, foreign legion etc). The founding nations will always let their most toughest, meanest, roughest soldiers to join this secret international operation. Then why do they have crappy skills? cause it takes not too much to kill other human soldiers... But when it comes to sectoids or mutons, those skills turns out to be quiet crappy.
I tried to think like this for years, but never managed to really buy it. A Sectoid is similar enough to a human to use the same tactics (like headshots 
. I think the "non-military operative" makes more sense in the end, and I personally feel it is also way cooler story-wise, since soldiers are boring once you think about it.
More over I think the brains behind XCOM (those tacticians sitting in dark rooms) would develop some training and strategy, to be able to fight off the menace. They are not human, so mostly the tactics which are developed against human enemy wont work that glamorous.
Oh, that is perfectly true.
Basicly this whole concept of training soldiers left at base, was an idea taken from xcom:apoc. I always looked at this like a good idea, since i cannot imagine what does my other 10-20-30 soldiers at base do. Do they arrange a pyjamaparty? Or all of them is in the kitchen pealing potatoes?
Vodka.
