Maybe he could point out to you where in the rules it says the Central Officer doesn't have veto power? Purely as a practical matter, Central can stop a player from placing (more) units (legally) by tapping "Done" on the placement step...
It's not an official response, but it should at least encourage him to re-evaluate his arguments.
 
And it is clear from the rules that it's not up to the Commander to decide when the game can continue - it's the Central Officer who controls the app, and thereby controls the flow of the game, so his refusing to allow the game to continue is not in line with the rules.
 
If you want an official source, check out this official game preview from FFG: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/12/8/something-has-to-give/ specifically the section titled "build toward victory":
 
That makes it entirely explicit that the intention is for control of the budget to be a purely advisory role so far as other players are concerned.

Maybe he could point out to you where in the rules it says the Central Officer doesn't have veto power? Purely as a practical matter, Central can stop a player from placing (more) units (legally) by tapping "Done" on the placement step...
It's not an official response, but it should at least encourage him to re-evaluate his arguments.
 
And it is clear from the rules that it's not up to the Commander to decide when the game can continue - it's the Central Officer who controls the app, and thereby controls the flow of the game, so his refusing to allow the game to continue is not in line with the rules.
 
If you want an official source, check out this official game preview from FFG: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2014/12/8/something-has-to-give/ specifically the section titled "build toward victory":
 
That makes it entirely explicit that the intention is for control of the budget to be a purely advisory role so far as other players are concerned.

6 months is a fairly standard turn-around for Kickstarter board-game projects where the game is fully designed and the KS is just being used to fund production.
 
It takes a long time to manufacture tens or hundreds of thousands of games, and it takes a long time to ship bulk freight around the planet. As I say, I'm just making an educated guess at when the game will arrive, but it is an educated one.

FFG announcement article: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/xcom-the-board-game/products/evolution/
 
Things that can be gleaned from the article:
 
 - Exalt are represented by tokens that can be added to and removed from the board, and make tasks Dangerous while they're on the board.
 - There are at least 3 plastic figures.
 - There's a 6-sided Threat die.
 - There are at least 2 new Missions with Meld - and one of them has an additional text condition associated with its first task.
 - There are new alien cards - though they might just be replacements for existing aliens.
 - There's an entirely new small card type.
 - There are "destruction cards" associated with the Annihilation invasion plan.
 - There are new Tech cards - including one that adds yet more competition for the Central Officer's Satellites, and one that can deal with EXALT tokens.
 - There's a Meld Token that shows which Missions are eligible for an extra reward for speedy progress (the example has the Meld reward for the second Task).
 - The Chief Scientist has a Cybernetics Lab that has something to do with MEC Troopers.

My machine's not exactly cutting edge (motherboard and CPU are 8 years old; graphics card 6 years old; RAM upgraded a couple of times) and runs it without a hitch. It's a Unity-based app, so the min spec for the Windows version should be pretty close to the min spec for the Android/iPhone/Kindle versions.
 
So long as your PC is more powerful than a typical smart phone, it shouldn't be a problem.

1) You're half right - In the Refresh step of the Resolution Phase, the app should tell you to put all discarded cards on the bottom of their decks - you should only ever shuffle a deck before play begins, or when a Crisis tells you to shuffle the Crisis deck. The basic idea is that discards go to the bottom of their deck, but, rather than slowing things down during the Timed Phase, you just put them in a discard pile until the end of the round. Personally, I don't bother recycling discarded Missions since even if you don't unlock the Final Mission early, you'll still only draw the 12 Missions once each. Other decks either have a chance to loop round, or a way to interact with the discards, so I follow the rules on them.
 
2) Compare the wording of Satellite Uplink with the wording of Carapace Armor - or Satellite Targeting with Holo-Targeting - in both cases, the Central Officer gets a version of the effect that can affect any player, while the Squad Leader's version only works on his own Tasks. In general, the cards mean exactly what they say - ones that only work on specific Tasks will say so.

1) If you roll a Loss on any Task, you lose (or Exhaust) the Unit(s) involved. The only way the Soldier wouldn't die is if you had UFO Flight or Revive and an appropriate Unit on hand to use them with
2) After rolling a Loss, you may continue with the same Task so long as you still have eligible Units available - either due to saving an Interceptor with Defense Matrix or because you're in ground combat and still have some assigned Soldiers left (either due to Revive or because you didn't commit all the assigned Soldiers to that roll).

1) You're half right - In the Refresh step of the Resolution Phase, the app should tell you to put all discarded cards on the bottom of their decks - you should only ever shuffle a deck before play begins, or when a Crisis tells you to shuffle the Crisis deck. The basic idea is that discards go to the bottom of their deck, but, rather than slowing things down during the Timed Phase, you just put them in a discard pile until the end of the round. Personally, I don't bother recycling discarded Missions since even if you don't unlock the Final Mission early, you'll still only draw the 12 Missions once each. Other decks either have a chance to loop round, or a way to interact with the discards, so I follow the rules on them.
 
2) Compare the wording of Satellite Uplink with the wording of Carapace Armor - or Satellite Targeting with Holo-Targeting - in both cases, the Central Officer gets a version of the effect that can affect any player, while the Squad Leader's version only works on his own Tasks. In general, the cards mean exactly what they say - ones that only work on specific Tasks will say so.

No, this is definitely not allowed - I can't find it in the rules/FAQ, but, as you observed, it makes the game massively easier, effectively makes the option to spend credits on recruitment obsolete, and removes almost all the cost of losing recruitable units - it actually makes moderate losses there less painful than losing Scientists/Satellites.
 
The obvious purpose of Mission Control is as a safety valve - letting you pull back units to avoid a budget overrun, or adjust unit assignments to react to a late threat. It also lets you pull soldiers off the Mission if it wasn't completed last round. It's not there to let you resurrect all your dead units every round.

It's always possible to roll nothing but 1s on the alien die, in which case you're going to lose in dramatic fashion.
 
General advice is not to assign more than 2 units to anything (to limit your losses), and try to get some automatic success techs researched ASAP.

There is no separate install step - just unzip the archive and you should be good to go - just run the .exe and it should work

There is no separate install step - just unzip the archive and you should be good to go - just run the .exe and it should work

I like the first paragraph. For the second, I might go for something more like:
 
"If you still have units assigned to the task, you can keep rolling. That only happens if you have a tech card that lets you save a unit from destruction, or if you're the squad leader and have some soldiers paid for who weren't rolling that time."
 
Your wording makes it sound like extra dice (eg from spending Salvage at the Laboratory) can let you roll even when you no longer have any regular dice to roll - you can only roll extra dice when you're rolling dice anyway.
 
Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not keen on the word "resources" in the first paragraph - I'd say "units" instead - since any tech cards etc you commit aren't destroyed.

I still want to quibble over that last bit - it's true that, usually, rolling a Loss means that you can't continue rolling against that task (that round), but that's not actually a rule - and there are times when you can roll again - for example, during the Timed Phase, the Squad Leader assigns two Snipers to Base Defense (not to specific enemy tasks). Only one enemy spawns, and they only have one symbol that matches a Sniper, so only one Sniper can be assigned at a time. The first Sniper misses and rolls a 1 on their first shot, so gets killed. The Squad Leader can then assign the other Sniper to the same enemy, and continue rolling from Threat 2. The same applies to Missions - during the Timed Phase, a pool of Soldiers is assigned to the Mission, and during Resolution, the Squad Leader can assign them to Tasks and reassign them freely between rolls.
 
The other scenario where you can continue after rolling a Loss is when you have a Tech that saves one (or more) of the assigned Units from destruction - Defense Matrix for Interceptors; Revive for Soldiers - in which case those Units can continue to roll against the Task. Note that UFO Flight doesn't let you keep rolling with the same Units because it returns the rescued Soldiers to their Reserves rather than leaving them in position.
 
The trouble with saying you can't keep rolling after a Loss is that people who learn it that way then miss the situations where you can keep rolling after all.

One solid piece of advice: try to avoid going above two units per task.
 
I like to use up the Emergency Funding in the first two rounds - particularly if you have a card that lets you refill it..
 
Unless you have a salvage engine going (Archangel Armor or similar), I'd use salvage to add a second die to research tasks from round 2 onward (so assigning one scientist and using one salvage).

The app has 8 languages - English, Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Czech, Brazilian Portuguese and German.
 
You would need to modify/replace the cards if you wanted to play the game completely in one of those languages.
 
I have no idea whether FFG has any plans along those lines.

English wording:
 
"Tough: Soldiers cannot be assigned to attack this enemy unless their matching icon is specialized."
 
In other words, the soldier you assign must be specialised, though the icon to which you assing it need not be. The specialised soldiers assigned to specilaist icons get an extra die; those assigned to non-specialist icons don't. If you assign soldiers to all three icons of a Sectopod, you'll roll 5 dice against it.

English wording:
 
"Tough: Soldiers cannot be assigned to attack this enemy unless their matching icon is specialized."
 
In other words, the soldier you assign must be specialised, though the icon to which you assing it need not be. The specialised soldiers assigned to specilaist icons get an extra die; those assigned to non-specialist icons don't. If you assign soldiers to all three icons of a Sectopod, you'll roll 5 dice against it.

Yes.
 
There's a timing window between rolling the dice and applying the effects (among other things, to allow Satellite Uplink to be used) and you can use any relevant tech or assets then - the only thing you can't do between rolling the dice and applying their effect is roll additional dice - you can reroll the alien die, or you can add dice to the pool to be rolled when you push your luck, but you can't add additional dice to the roll you've already made.
 
So, yeah, in particular, you can use a Firestorm (or any other success-generating Tech) between rolling a loss and applying it so that you still have a unit assigned to the task.
 
With Alien Construction, because the Scientists are exhausted but remain assigned, you can wait until you've rolled for all three Techs before deciding where to spend your free success. Technically, the same applies to Stealth Satellite, but there's no reason not to use that immediately...

Yep - any time you put a unit somewhere, it has to come from its reserve, so it can't be put anywhere else that round. Exception: a unit saved by UFO Flight returns to its reserve, so could be used on a tech card later on the same Mission on the same round.

Just because it's confusing:
 
The Commander is the guy who chooses Crises, decides how much Emergency Funding to take, and plays with the Interceptors.
The app is controlled by the Central Officer who also places UFOs and controls the Satellites.
 
The other thing that's missing from the Chief Scientist is that he never does any of the alien actions - Squad Leader gets to turn over the top card of the Enemy deck, Commander has Crises, Central has UFOs and Threat.

Ewww. The game has required dice?
 
Ewww. The game requires you to provide your own scoring device?
 
Ewww. The game needs a CD player?
 
Ewww. The game needs batteries?
 
Ewww. The game has a required app?
 
All reasons people may not choose to play a given game, and all reasons that have nothing to do with whether the game is any good or not (okay, some of them have a degree of correlation with game quality, but that doesn't tell you about specific games)