Honestly, I was saying it from near the start, what nuCOM 2 needs boils down to this: A much longer effective Doom timer, either by modding alien progress and objectives to move more slowly/toward a much more difficult goal, or else by brute-forcing it with a very large countdown bar; and a much larger, deeper, more slowly acquired tech tree (with more random + customization options, natch) paired with a similarly larger, slower-moving progression of difficulty.
I agree, and I was just thinking about this earlier today. I think it would be really nice to have a longer doom counter, because it could allow a campaign to have more ups and downs then it does currently; simultaneously the pacing could be worked out so as to be a lot neater, so even if the early game is still a little disproportionately punishing, it would be ok because it's not the end of the world (I hear that in general, XCOM 2 is better at this then XCOM EU). The tech-tree needs to be worked out further. Fortunately this is something Firaxis can and does fix in expansions, but until then we at least have modding.
Overall, it does need to be smoothed out, and I'm confident it will be.
I have a rather game-breaking bug going on, but a rather, unusual one.
The aliens don't move anymore. At all. Under any circumstance. Not on their turn, not when their pod is revealed, not even when I break concealment for the first time. I tried an overwatch ambush, only for it to be useless because "standing perfectly still, minding their own business" isn't enough to set it off. It started on the previous mission (a downed UFO), but I hoped that it would only last for a single mission. Nope. I feel like I'm beating up children now. Even attacking the Sectopod feels like a violation. (Although I did skulljack a codex, and the thing that popped out had so much dodge it managed to survive for a while despite me apparently turning off the aliens.
It started when I ran a Heavy MEC full force at the enemy and micro-missiled itself. I think that's it. I get VERY weird bugs whenever I do that. Once all the animations stopped and the game wouldn't continue, and this time, well, this happened.
Fortunately it wasn't Ironman, so I can still deal with this in any case.
I had the same problem, but it started when I gas-grenaded a pack of mutons led by a berserker. The only person who could see them was in concealment, so everything just froze... I had to reboot XCom 2 in order to fix it.
The aliens would just stand around until their turn timed out. I got a flawless 13/13 civilians rescued terror mission out of it though, so that was nice?
Ha. I got to smack around the spoiler that popped out the codex a bit, and then play a game of "taunt the sectopod". I kept expecting them to like, do something though, so that threw me off my taunting game. I kept thinking "it would really suck for the Sectopod to stop its inner meditation right when I'm being an idiot".
Even the little "ALIEN RELAY YOU NEED TO DESTROY" wouldn't explode after killing it, and just continued to spin around minding its own business.