I skimmed the manual after the fact but it doesn't really answer the question as to why my guy had zero TU. Maybe he got psy'ed up, maybe not. There's zero about psy attacks in the manual except that it reduces morale and I don't recall anything about the guy panicking. Suppression says it reduces TUs to half for next turn yet I had zero. I'm not really a fan of games giving the player all this information to begin with. I don't want to know how much damage I'm doing or what effects I've had on the enemy, it breaks immersion and turns it into a board game. That sort of information would have ruined some of my most memorable moments from the previous xcom games. In this case giving information like suppressed gives an expectation, and then when the enemy behaves as normal (if not better than normal) it ticks me off. I'd rather I simply didn't kill the guy, then he killed me back. Makes sense. Rather than "suppressed" and having no apparent ill-effect on his accuracy or ability to fire.
Not only that but in the first month and a half of play I saw literally one UFO. Maybe you're supposed to immediately build a second base or something but it seemed that 90% of the UFO activity hit parts of the world where my base wasn't located which is a bit bizarre since I put it smack into the centre of North America. Russia cut their funding by 50% because all the ships were hitting europe/asia not the americas. By the time I saw a second UFO it had taken so long that I had exhausted all of my research options and the UFO was of a design that my two starting fighters could not take down.
Few other little things are sort of annoying. Don't like the way research and base management has been simplified, some of the writing is bad, some of the animations take way too long to play (like transitioning from kneeling to standing and vice versa). And speaking of the manual I don't know why they couldn't have thrown a little bit of artwork in there like some screen grabs or anything, they have screen grabs in the quickstart guide but nothing in the manual.
I may give it another go and restart but on the whole as a fan of the original games I feel like xenonauts was made by fans with dissimilar tastes. On first impression it seems to be a game made by number crunchers not people like myself who want to be immersed in the atmosphere of the world.