NotDefault

Floaters and Snakemen, yes, but Sectoids are a bit nastier because they show up at the very beginning before I have any decent technology. Any alien is dangerous when my soldiers are t-shirted rifle-wielding rookies. The psionics are also annoying because it's very difficult to nab the Leader using start technology, so there isn't much of a reward for the slaughter or slog (depending on the tactics used).

It's limited to 110 due to the odd way in which it is stored. The bravery stat seen in the game is equaled to 110 - 10 * the stat stored in the files. That's why it moves in increments of 10, and since it is stored as a byte, it means bravery can't go above 110 (there may be a cap on improvement below that number). A suggestion about armour: you say that the damage to the armour appears to be between 0 and 5 randomly. Perhaps this is some percentage (about 10% ballpark) of the damage the armour absorbed. Now a question about armour: is the damage to the armour carried over from mission to mission, or does it just affect the armour in the mission where it is damaged?

As production values drop, graphics are the most noticable casualty. Xenocide, although the gameplay might end up being just fine, really doesn't look very good. I admit I'm just going by the screenshots, but the 3D is clearly not professional-quality. There's really nothing that can be done about this; even low-budget professional games have this drawback. Some other things that can go are the AI (a good AI can be very complicated), the writing, and the gameplay design. That's why I hold out hope that UFO2000 can become an effective UFO Defense remake; the graphics and writing are there already, the gameplay design is not too hard to reverse engineer convincingly, and the X-Com AI is rather pitiful anyway. The problem is that the best that can come of such a remake is bug fixes and some extra features (multiplayer support being the big one, but extensibility being significant as well). It's still just a remake. That's not to say I wouldn't be happy with a good X-Com inspired fan-made game; I would, I just don't think it's likely to happen. I also would be very happy with a UFO2000-style remake with bug fixes, relatively easy modding, and even possibly some sort of included XCOMUTIL feature. I do wonder if anyone has checked up on the location of the X-Com: UFO Defense source code. I have no idea at all what the legal status of X-Com is, but it would be a great asset to these remakes to have access to the original gameplay mechanics as seen in the source code (it would also be ridiculously easy to fix some bugs; the base-defense misplaced wall bug is probably the result of one misentered number in a for loop somewhere). Considering that the X-Com brand is all but abandoned and that the source code is old enough to not be usable in anything but an X-Com remake, there might be hope.