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[MarcAFK]

Autocanons with HE are not the best choices.

Heresy!

Collateral all of the things!

[ChairmanPoo]

As of late I tend to use high explosives a lot. Early on I yse HE atc in sniping duty + cannon fodder scouts + grenadier carrying a lot of HE. Later on I switch to laser snipers + cattle prod smoke scouts + laser/HE grenadiers behind them

The idea was originally to blow up cover in order to make things easier for snipers. But I discovered that more often than not I killed around half the aliens by doing that.
The biggest problem are UFOs tbh. That and buildings which are hard to blow up

[Kruniac]

1 LMG, 1 Autocannon with AP/HE rounds, 6 rifles, 2 shotguns (Kept in backpack until needed for UFO assaults).

By the time I research lasers (Which takes forever as I use Open X-Com Extended), my men are hardened thugs.

[Dorsidwarf]

I've never had a problem with cyberdisks - from what I've found, they die from 3-4 good hits with a laser pistol. The biggest problem is sectoid mind control and spamrepeating panicking

[Sean Mirrsen]

If you have accuracy degrading with range, those 3-4 good hits with a laser pistol may be hard to achieve, at least from outside the inevitable explosion distance. It is, however, the best tool for engaging the things early on. If there is a cyberdisk parked in your view, and you have the laspistol, you can unload twelve shots into it on autofire. Not even the autocannon has such firing rates.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think I could do well without early lasers/more expensive lasers. It's mostly a comfort thing. It's convenient not to lug ammo around. If I hadn't them I'd probably use cannons/ATC a lot more and for longer.

I'm tempted to enable a laser-nerfing mod just to prove myself that I can.

[Gunner-Chan]

Why don't you use the final modpack then? That pushes lasers up the tech tree a bit. It ALSO pushes the heavy cannon and autocannon up into researchables while giving you more conventional weapons to play with.

[Sonlirain]

The laser pistol is more of a SMG. it's pretty nifty for tight quarters inside UFOs thanks to its low LOW autofire costs.
And of course its the perfect sidearm through the entire game due to not needing ammo... but really why bother with a sidearm unless you are using a blaster/rocket launcher?
Most troops use heavy plasma and have nearly infinite ammo.

[ChairmanPoo]

I went for VanillaRebalanced. Which makes laser production use elerium.

http://www.openxcom.com/mod/vanilla-rebalanced



I have my doubts as to what extent does this actually make the game harder, as it's revamped heavy cannons (which now work as mortars (AKA, now you can do indirect artillery barrage) erradicating aliens is easier than ever.

Of course, I *could* do the same before using grenades/heavy explosives... and in fact I did (strong agents can toss HE  far away... and grenades *REALLY* far away. ) so this is more a comfort matter than anything else. Still...

[sambojin]

Laser pistols are great in vanilla. Mostly just due to the "fits on belt" property. With a pistol on one side and a medikit on the other, any soldier is an all purpose tool of multi-missing hilarity. Once you've got armour on everyone, all the accidental friendly shots don't do enough to worry about either (and gives those medikits a workout when they do). No ammo is nice, but it's not really that big of a deal. You'll probably only go through a max of 40 shots for any particular soldier anyway (so two regular pistol clips or 1 1/2 plasma clips).

With UFORangeExtender they can still be quite useful when using a fair bit of smoke, because most things end up being pretty close to you anyway.

If you've got time, research plasma pistols. You'll have enough after the first month or two to equip every soldier anyway, along with enough ammo. The accuracy boost is worth it for any soldier (it's pretty much a laser rifle that's belt sized and a bit lighter). Also slightly better at putting holes in walls than the laser pistol. The 50% accuracy on auto fire more than makes up for the 30% TU cost (compared to 28%/25% of a laser pistol. So one less auto shot, but heaps more accurate. Auto odds stacking works very well TU wise with that level of accuracy, whereas it's not actually that great with a laser pistol's 28%).

You don't really need the extra money that much. Sending 4-6 of them to a every base still gives you a pretty large selling supply. Just keep every clip so you'll never have to make more. Although, 80 man hours and 1 elerium is pretty cheap for such a handy tool. You can literally stamp enough out for an entire squad 6 hours before a mission begins with a basic manufacturing base.

After your first few normal missions and the first terror mission, you'll have enough for the rest of the game anyway.

[Sean Mirrsen]

That's all assuming you don't use the OpenXCOM option to destroy loot unless it was dropped by a live alien. I rarely have an excess of alien weapons on my bases nowadays. Getting my hands on a small launcher is cause for celebration.

[sambojin]

It is even with vanilla options. Sort of joy mixed with dread.

On one hand, my armour costs go way down and people live far longer due to not having to melee stun everything.

On the other, I now have to pay for an extra 100 scientists to make sure I can get through all the live alien research quickly enough.

If you've got "Aliens pick up weapons" turned on, make sure you pick up and unload any weapon, and grab the grenades, or you occasionally get a nasty surprise when they wake up. Just keeping the area stun/smoked works too. They get up, they fall back down. They won't see squat if they're not a flyer for a turn or two in proper smoke either.

Nailing tougher enemies with some laser/plasma pistol fire before you stun launch them makes it a hell of a lot easier to knock them out as well.

Incidentally, having a bit of stun damage on your own troops can be quite handy sometimes. If they do get hit they'll often become unconscious rather than taking the next shot and dying. It's a toss-up. An unconscious soldier who might bleed out and takes more medical work to get fighting again, but is immune to everything other than explosions until you do help him, compared to a dead (or possibly wounded) soldier. They may not have died from the next shot though, so they might have been able to just kill the thing that shot them. You're probably best to just smoke any area that has a wounded soldier in it anyway so your medics can work in peace. Which until you get plenty of power/flying armour, has been known to knock out wounded troopers on occasion anyway.

[sambojin]

The laser pistol is more of a SMG. it's pretty nifty for tight quarters inside UFOs thanks to its low LOW autofire costs.
And of course its the perfect sidearm through the entire game due to not needing ammo... but really why bother with a sidearm unless you are using a blaster/rocket launcher?
Most troops use heavy plasma and have nearly infinite ammo.

Mostly because I do use rockets up until near endgame. Then I use blasters a bit more. There's usually a couple of rocket/pistol soldiers though, even on the final mission. Heavy plasma is the standard assault rifle, but big kabooms never go out of style.

It's the rookie weapon of choice. Nothing gets that initial kill or two like a large rocket for such little cost. So I end up getting caught into the mindset that RLs/pistols=good. Even if it's not actually true when compared to other combos. But it's never actually bad. AoE never runs out of utility, and I'm too damn cheap to knock down buildings with blaster bombs or alien grenades, no matter how many of them I have. But a loaded launcher, a spare rocket, a pistol and a smoke grenade makes for the perfect soldier. Cheap, does stuff, not too heavy. Although I do tend to screen my troops for strength early on, rather than bravery (which is what I should be doing).

It's way quicker to waste one soldier's TUs knocking out an entire wall and giving everyone a sight lane than selectively autofiring through a wall with plasma. The amount of times this causes me to actually have to move half the squad because the wrong square or two got destroyed is annoying. Ssshhhmmm KaBOOM! Sight lane is open, begin firing. BTW, you're now you're a pistol man rookie. Have fun, you're going in first when we get to the UFO.

edit from posts below: Yep. This is why rockets still get used into late game. They might not be able to blow into UFO hulls, but they probably won't nuke half a squad in other situations either. With good armour you can even fire one at anything 5-6 squares away and not care (much) about the explosion. Which makes them awesome, and makes pistols awesome too.

[ChairmanPoo]

Further impressions about this vanilla rebalanced.

- Like I said, nothing I could not achieve via heavy explosive usage, regarding cannons and autocannons. I do require less repositioning for my long range teams though

- Economics are way harder with the removal of engineer profits. You're running a strictly low-cost operation. It CAN be done, however.

[Robsoie]

Blaster launchers are the most fun weapon of the game.
Especially when both you and the aliens start to overuse it.

The poor buildings and the collateral damage is gigantic.
I remember when playing the game on dosbox , from a time before Open Xcom when i decided to blaster launcher an UFO door, and thought i had left enough distance between my team and the ufo door.

How wrong i was (in red , what was my team)
At least i got the door.