longbrodie

Yes! One of my favorite things about the original two X-Com games was eventually being able to identify the race on board each enemy ship and equip your soldiers appropriately. Lasers were soooo much different from plasma and even gauss rifles had great uses that beat out sonic weapons versus certain enemies in TFTD. Availability of ammunition was also a big consideration in those games, so you didn't always want to use your most powerful weapons when it was straight up overkill.

Don't have time to read through all the posts here as I'm about to go to work, but has anyone discussed the possibility of giving more differences to the various weapon technology tiers? I remember hanging onto my laser/gauss weapons in the original X-Com games because they remained useful against various enemy types. For example, the Gauss Rifle was excellent for fighting aquatoids/gillmen because of accuracy and availability of ammo and low TU cost, and with the Hyperwave Decoder you would know what kind of resistance to expect when you shot down an enemy ship and could plan your squad load-out appropriately. As another example, Heavy Lasers remained useful throughout the original because of their bonus damage vs. sectopods and the fact that they never ran out of ammo. Right now I feel like there is no reason to keep your old weaponry once you advance to the next tier - more frequent reloads and a slight accuracy drop are not sufficient drawbacks to the huge damage boost. Hell, the basic cannons that were available from the start remained useful with HE ammo as grenade launchers vs. the lesser enemies... And you reliably ran into those lesser enemies, not just the elites, throughout most of the game.