Excellent summary, and I am going to pursue your schedule in my latest non-DW run (I usually go with DW, and I want to review the differences again). I only take slight issue with the Plasma vs EMP - for the latter, you "only" need dead Sectopods, while the former requires captured Mutons or Heavy Floaters, and competes with Reflex Rifle/Cannon and Plasma Rifle manufacturing. I find the former easier and incidental to missions, while the latter requires (at least for me) a dedicated smoke / acid repair engineer slot on the team, which I would only take on small / medium crashes where you're much more likely to be able to isolate a pod and control it.
Thanks. Hadn’t even considered artifact costs. Probably because I always bring a capture engineer, so I can sell guns. I follow the ABC rule - “always be capturing”.
Followup to your followup, I started to adopt your ABC rule. I hadn't remembered just how many more missions you get in regular vs. DW. In DW, your alien materials / equipment cost is halved for projects, but you still only get one weapon per capture, and so, alien rifles are twice as scarce (and, in my DW experience, tend to happen reliably only by the time that the aliens themselves are fielding more dangerous muton pods e.g. Muton Centurion pod leader). Definitely I have more captured in the current regular campaign. One day I hope you may consider doing a comparison summary of DW.
Excellent summary, and I am going to pursue your schedule in my latest non-DW run (I usually go with DW, and I want to review the differences again). I only take slight issue with the Plasma vs EMP - for the latter, you "only" need dead Sectopods, while the former requires captured Mutons or Heavy Floaters, and competes with Reflex Rifle/Cannon and Plasma Rifle manufacturing. I find the former easier and incidental to missions, while the latter requires (at least for me) a dedicated smoke / acid repair engineer slot on the team, which I would only take on small / medium crashes where you're much more likely to be able to isolate a pod and control it.
Thanks. Hadn’t even considered artifact costs. Probably because I always bring a capture engineer, so I can sell guns. I follow the ABC rule - “always be capturing”.
Followup to your followup, I started to adopt your ABC rule. I hadn't remembered just how many more missions you get in regular vs. DW. In DW, your alien materials / equipment cost is halved for projects, but you still only get one weapon per capture, and so, alien rifles are twice as scarce (and, in my DW experience, tend to happen reliably only by the time that the aliens themselves are fielding more dangerous muton pods e.g. Muton Centurion pod leader). Definitely I have more captured in the current regular campaign. One day I hope you may consider doing a comparison summary of DW.