Any interest in a discussion of how various weapons are used, or have I already missed it?
How about various cheating philosophies?
In an attempt to get the ball rolling...
I seldom bother with weapons platforms, except for the hovertank/launcher. The reason is simply that soldiers are cheaper. The hovertank/launcher is the exception for me, because it is a blaster launcher and seven missiles that only occupies one slot in the avenger. It may take up the space of four troopers, but the avenger will still hold another eighteen men and equipping twenty-two men with only 80 items is difficult without skimping on something.
The only cheat that I will use is the money cheat. I feel that humanity should not be defended on a shoestring, but will otherwise let the chips fall as they may. If that means that a terror site goes unanswered because it happened before the replacement skyranger arrived, so be it. It is not that I accept high casualties, but feel that reloading after anything goes wrong is more trouble than it is worth. Besides, how else can you discover what happens if you lose, if you never lose.
A friend of mine played with a certain bloody-mindedness forced upon him by budgetary constraints. In order to make enough money to keep X-Com operational, he sent out squads with only enough weapons to arm a pair of troopers. All of the other troopers were armed by looting the dead. When they got back to base, everything except the ellirium was sold off. Two heavy plasmas can be sold for enough to replace eight soldiers, so he collected quite a pile of money this way. How he kept any troopers alive long enough to determine their psi strength is anybody's guess. He may have abandoned the strategy once his money troubles were over.
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