Wow, being able to pre-prime grenades on 1.0 is OP as hell. I've never used as many smoke grenades in my all the years I've played xcom as I did today.
There's not even such thing as a rookie any more. Everyone gets a rocket launcher, a laser pistol, personal armour and as many pre-primed smokes grenades as they can carry. They're about to upgrade to plasma. It's like everyone is uber useful from day 1, even the incredibly hopeless. I almost feel like I need to nominate some soldiers to be rookies, because everyone regularly lives through their first few missions. Too many items, too much firepower, way too many rockets.
I keep a few dedicated pistol/stunners around, but that just means they can carry even more smoke than the rocket crew (all 10 of them). As the heavy rocket smoke-jumpers get more strength and TUs, then they can do it all. More smoke, more rockets, more stunning and easier weapon changing. Hell, I'll even bother to give them medikits one day.
A standard mission:
Turn 1, smoke around the skyranger, smoke in the skyranger, pass turn. I'm perfectly safe. Plus I can nuke anything that I can see down the ramp anyway.
Turn 2, run out (I'm still perfectly safe), chuck smoke wherever else I feel I should, or start scout/snipering. Ie: Send a barrage of rockets at anything in the least bit scary. Use the pistols when I run out or need to go inside the ufo or get bored of reloading.
Turn 3-x, Finish mission, stun a few aliens along the way that managed to blunder through some smoke right next to me.
It's weird when quality of life features and corrected gameplay "flaws" make a game 10x easier than the original. Pre-primed smoke grenades, unlimited amounts of smoke on the battlefield (used to be about 400 squares), virtually unlimited skyranger capacity (it's now done off base store limits instead of the 80 item limit) and knowing your exact maximum pack weight makes the game too easy.
This is on Superhuman.
Sure I've lost about 20 guys in the first two months, but that was mostly just me dicking around, going for unnecessary captures, or just trying stuff out. It'll get harder, and psi is always a problem, but I don't think I've had an easier xcom playthrough, and I've researched diddly so far.
I've already got so many damned plasma pistols and magazines laying around that I'm actually tempted to research them for once. It'll just make my rocket smokers even scarier. I'm not sure I even need heavy plasma or blaster bombs to win this run.