If you shoot down a UFO, does it matter at all how long you take to send your strike team there?
Will the Aliens kill more Civilians or spread around on the map more if you take your time?
I get the impression that sometimes the enemies on a map were all still close to the space ship and other times they are really dug in already (i.e. hiding on rooftops), and I was wondering if that is entirely luck-based or if it's a matter of how fast you get to the crash site.
First, unintercepted sites vanish after a time. So that's one big change. The other change is day/night. But other than that, no, each landing starts "fresh", a terror site will be as fresh after 20 hours of waiting for your team as when the aliens landed.
Note as you load your game and intercept the same site again, the map might have changed, but that's not time dependent really, it's just the random choice of a map.
There is no change the only change if you wait is the Day/Night cycle in game so for example you could wait 4 years and the enemy's wouldn't change, move, etc.
