XCOM: 10 Things The Next Game Must Have
3. No Panic System
The panic system is probably the single worst thing about XCOM: Enemy Unknown. While intended to keep the player proactive and dependent on the funding nations, the panic system relied on setting up satellites over funding nations to control their panic over alien activity. Unfortunately, it sucked out the strategy out of the strategic layer.
One of the big problems was that satellites were absurdly expensive at the beginning of the game and took forever to build. With a 20 day build time (longer than the alien/human tech Firestorm interceptors 14 day build time), it meant that building a satellite was job number one if you wanted to save a country before the monthly progress report. While getting more engineers makes the cost go down, nothing short of the Advanced Construction Foundry project or modding will allow you build a satellite faster (and Advanced Constructions means you pay double).
If you failed to intercept UFOs, go on abduction missions in certain countries, lose your entire team, or abort the mission, panic would spike. This forced you to build more satellites and more Satellite Uplinks to increase the number of satellites you can operate at any one time. Because of how the base mechanics were set up (building more facilities next to each other means they perform better), that meant you had to build all your Uplinks in one area for maximum efficiency, taking a good chunk of variety out of the base construction process.
While the game did provide opportunities to reduce panic on a large scale, such as Council missions and assaulting an alien base, it didnt do much for the games pacing. The first few months would be a race to build Uplinks and satellites no matter what you did, with the game getting progressively easier as you covered the planet in satellites and forced the aliens to target fewer nations. Even though this allowed you to essentially play the game forever, it did make the game tedious and even easier in the end.