weird suggestion: add more islands to the atlanic ocean specifically the southern atlanic ocean, OR between africa and antartica. why? the south america start is horrendous.
I cleared all of south america and north america and that left me with two bases in south america and 0 in north america and it takes me several days to fly to africia or asia to try to defend a haven light years away from my bases. I have a tip that a phoenix base exists in western africia, but it’s not much use to me having had to travel MORE than halfway across the world in order to jump the atlantic ocean.
By comparison travel between other continents is much easier, there’s really no worse combination of base spawns than starting base southern america, then non-random 100% chance 2nd base on same continent, then no bases in north america, then next base tip western africia, except of course maybe something like a tip for australia/middleeast… any way you slice it though southern america is the worst start and really it should either be impossible to start there, or there needs to be slightly easier travel from southern american to africa, either directly or via antartica (which I wasted time clearing in the hopes it might help.
This doesn’t come up in other xcom genre style games because the planes can fly further than “3000 units” per hop, and my guess is that 3000 units is for some reason around 500-700 miles which is well… it’s a fine thing to balance the game around, but yeah, just disable the south american start, or add a few bonus island exploration nodes to help.