XCOM Items Analysis part 1: Weapons
Note that for all items, the costs listed are a base cost. Increasing Engineers can reduce the cost by as much as 50% of the base. (The formula is complicated, and involves diminishing returns) Also note that this only applies to $, Elerium, and Alloys. Any other costs are unaffected by engineer count.
Weapons
Damage takes the base number, and then ranges it as -1, no change, or +1. (0 is not a valid number, and gets rounded up to 1) For instance, a Conventional Pistol is 1-2 damage due to having a base of 1, while a Laser Pistol is 1-3 due to having a base of 2, meaning a Laser Pistol is an unusually small step up in damage compared to other Laser-tier weapons.
Crit damage is apparently buggy in Enemy Within. It's supposed to produce three different results, and in actuality produces 2 results, one of them 2/3rds of the time and the other the remaining third of the time. If there's an actual formula to produce crit damage, I don't know what it is -weaker weapons can do as much as doubled damage, but stronger weapons cap out at 60% higher.
Terrain damage varies across weapons, but most weapons have some garbage value for the terrain damage stat at the conventional weapon tier and then jump to 125 terrain damage for Laser and keep it there for Plasma. I'm ignoring it between the standardization across weapon types and the fact that the player can't do much to try to plan around it. Also, I have no idea what the terrain damage numbers even mean, and haven't been able to find a concrete answer.
I'm not separately covering EXALT's weapons. They're only really noteworthy for being sellable. Even the potential to loot Lasers isn't that significant, as EXALT takes so long to show up, and so long to then transition to Elites, that if you aren't already in the middle of transitioning to Plasma by the time they show up, you're probably playing the game horribly wrong. I guess if you did a challenge run in which you refused to manufacture your own weapons, you might appreciate stealing the Laser Sniper Rifle...
A note on Range modifiers: with a Medium range gun, you get +37 Aim when directly adjacent, a Shotgun gets +50 Aim, and Sniper Rifles lose -24 Aim. (A Shotgun's maximum Aim penalty for being far out, conversely, is hard-capped at -40) This provides a framework to compare classes and weapons -a Shotgun is actually only barely more accurate, when it is more accurate, than Medium Range weapons, and so its potential Aim advantage per se can generally be ignored when making comparisons, most obviously to the Rifle family. The real reason an Assault should use a Shotgun over an Assault Rifle is that it does more damage.
Pistols
Pistols can be upgraded with +1 damage, +10 Aim, and +10 crit chance from Foundry Projects. All Pistols have unlimited ammo.
Conventional
Free, unlimited
1 Damage, 2 or 3 crit damage
Laser
10$, 10 Alloys
2 Damage, 3 or 4 crit damage, +10 crit chance
Plasma
100$, 10 Elerium, 20 Alloys
3 Damage, 4 or 6 crit damage
Pistols are the basic backup weapon for everybody except the Heavy (And the Mec in Enemy Within), of course, and are just... bad. They ignore ammunition constraints and, with upgrades, have slightly better Aim than regular weapons, so theoretically you might break them out when you need to make your shot count, but eh. It's semi-notable that the Plasma Pistol is just as strong as the conventional Assault Rifle, but the way the remaquel is set up it's going to take longer to capture a Sectoid and research its Plasma Pistol than it would to research Laser Rifles. So even though you could theoretically have the mildly amusing point of equipping your rookies and Supports with Plasma Pistols to never need to spend ammo while having the same damage as an Assault Rifle, in practice you'll get Laser Rifles first.
Pistols are, of course, supposed to be a backup weapon and so shouldn't be particularly good, but making them an intrinsic weapon on most classes seems a poor design decision. If Pistols represented an item slot of some sort that could be fitted with other things (eg the Arc Thrower), players could choose between playing it safe -take the Pistol so the soldier is never defenseless- vs going "all-in" by taking some other option and risking being left helpless. Say, if the Pistol slot was simply a second item slot.
There's the more complicated point that, by and large, you really don't need a backup weapon. Ammunition is generous even before you get Ammo Conservation, and battles are designed to be short-lived firefights followed by assured calm, while reloading is free other than being a turn-ending action. Naturally, the two classes -Heavy and Mec- that have the worst ammunition pools don't even get the Pistol anyway. (To be fair, Enemy Within pushes the player to be more aggressive via timed Meld canisters, but this becomes less and less relevant the further into the game you get)
Snipers actually appreciate their Pistols, since Snapshot is basically never worth taking over Squadsight and you can't fire Sniper Rifles after a move without Snapshot (Nor, without abuse of a glitch, enter Overwatch), but for Assaults and Supports the Pistol's presence is just kind of strange and not particularly welcome. I really wish the Pistol had done something more unique -maybe been your capture tool?
Laser Pistols are cheap enough that it's probably worth buying 4-6 once you've unlocked them, even though the benefit is fairly small, but with Plasma Pistols you're probably better off capturing all your copies. They just aren't a big enough boon to justify the expense, and you want a minimum of 1 capture of every (capturable) Alien in the game anyway, thanks to the myriad Research Credits interrogations provide and the fact that South America's "We Have Ways" continent bonus means that interrogations won't even compete with other, potentially more important research. 2 Plasma Pistols is enough for most purposes if you're running two Snipers (Okay, this is misleading, because you use up one Plasma Pistol when researching it, so "one capture of each type" will leave you with just one Plasma Pistol...), and if you're running more Snipers than that, you're probably leaning very heavily on Squad Sight and they shouldn't be dealing with targets in their face that often anyway. Also, you can just capture more Sectoids opportunistically -they're pretty easy to capture on any difficulty below Impossible, since their HP is so low the Arc Thrower can work on them without even shooting them first.
And on Impossible, they're still well within the range of the upgraded Arc Thrower.
Rifles
Laser
30$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage
Plasma
250$, 30 Elerium, 30 Alloys (On Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 375$, 60 Elerium, 50 Alloys
9 Damage, 13 or 15 crit damage
It's the Rifle's bigger, meaner cousin, but not by that much. Also, it has one less ammo to use. Before you get Ammo Conservation, this is kind of a big deal, particularly given Bullet Swarm means a Heavy can easily chew through the entire supply in a single skirmish. After you get Ammo Conservation it's only really noticeable if you love using Suppression on your Heavies... which would require Suppression be an actually good effect.
The lack of a crit modifier isn't very noticeable, as covered in the Rifle's section.
The laser tier should be upgraded to ASAP, as Heavies are one of the better damage-dealing classes, and it's not possible to capture Heavy Plasmas until very late in the game. Unlocking Heavy Lasers will also unlock the S.H.I.V. Laser Foundry Project, and in Enemy Within it also unlocks the Mec's second-tier weapon, so there's a greater payoff than unlocking unlocking Laser Sniper Rifles. (Well, that point can be argued, as Squadsight Snipers are insanely good, so anything that improves them is disproportionately good) Unlocking Laser Sniper Rifles doubles as unlocking Scatter Lasers, but Assaults can make do with Laser Rifles, not to mention captured Light Plasma Rifles. Mecs (and S.H.I.V.s) have no equivalent option for tiding them over.
The Heavy Plasma is the only weapon in the game where it's legitimately a difficult decision as to whether you should try to research and manufacture them yourself or focus on captures. Muton Elites take so long to show up it's entirely possible to reach the Heavy Plasma via research first, and it's even worth considering pushing for the Heavy Plasma research as it also unlocks, again, an even better weapon for S.H.I.V.s, and in Enemy Within an even better weapon for Mecs. If you've captured a regular Plasma Rifle and you've got the South America continental bonus (Entirely plausible), you are in a position to instantly get the Research Credit for all Plasma weapons, too, making the research burden more tolerable. (Research credits halve research time of affected researches, with two exceptions) Mutons transition to Plasma Rifles (You need the Plasma Rifle research to unlock the Heavy Plasma research if you're not going to just research a looted Heavy Plasma) two months before Elite Mutons enter the normal rotation, so it's entirely possible to have successfully researched and manufactured Heavy Plasma well before Muton Elites enter the rotation.
It is of course cheaper to just capture Muton Elites to yoink their Heavy Plasmas, but waiting for Muton Elites to show up means your Heavies will lag behind your other troops for a long time. If you don't have too much of your resources tied up in urgent projects, it's genuinely useful to build Heavy Plasmas yourself.
... at least once your Snipers and Assaults have gotten their Plasma-tier toys.
Sniper Rifles
All Sniper Rifles have 5 ammunition base, and are normally unable to be fired after movement. This includes that you cannot enter Overwatch... or it would if there wasn't a glitch that lets you Overwatch anyway. It's not even a difficult glitch.
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage, +25 crit chance
Laser
35$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage, +30 crit chance
Plasma
250$, 25 Elerium, 30 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 375$, 60 Elerium, 50 Alloys)
9 Damage, 13 or 15 crit damage, +35 crit chance
Defined primarily by the inability to move and shoot... unless you have Snap Shot... and also the fact that they work with Squadsight. (You can't fire your Pistol at Squadsight targets... at least, you're not supposed to be able to. The game can be glitchy, particularly when it comes to Overwatch) Also defined by being the only weapon that, instead of gaining Aim as you get closer, actually loses Aim! This is why your Snipers have better Aim than your other classes -because other classes can supplement their base Aim by getting closer to the target, where for the Sniper their Aim is the roof on how accurate they can be, outside of when using the Pistol. So don't be too impressed by the high Aim on your Snipers!
The high crit chance makes the Sniper Rifle on average the most lethal weapon of the regular main weapons. Backed by Headshot, Snipers will get crits fairly routinely without needing to flank anything.
Since critical hits don't do anything except increase damage, this is basically the same thing as increasing the Sniper Rifle's base damage, only without the player being able to count on it or plan around it. This is not a good design decision. This is sad, because I feel the Sniper Rifle is the only genuinely well-designed weapon class.
As with all the Laser-tier weapons, the Laser Sniper Rifle is cheap enough for a big enough payoff that you should probably get it as quickly as you can. The Plasma Sniper Rifles shares with the Alloy Cannon the property of not being possible to capture, so you'll need to set aside resources to construct Plasma Sniper Rifles. In Enemy Within on the higher difficulties, it may well take a long, long time for you to get around to equipping your Snipers with Plasma Sniper Rifles.
S.H.I.V. weaponry
I am unclear exactly how much ammo the S.H.I.V. has on its gun, other than "not unlimited." Strangely, both wikis lack this information. I guess it's not that popular. In any event, their weapon class is generic, at least in terms of universal properties. (Medium range etc)
Conventional
Free
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage, +10 crit chance
Laser
Foundry Project costs: 100$, 30 Alloys, 15 Weapon Fragments
8 Damage, 12 or 13 crit damage, +15 Aim and +15 crit chance
Plasma
Foundry Project costs: 200$, 30 Elerium, 45 Alloys, 30 Weapon Fragments
10 Damage, 15 or 16 crit damage, +25 Aim and +20 crit chance
S.H.I.V. weapons are better than trooper weapons. This compensates for the robot's much more limited access to special skills and lack of actual leveling. This seems a fair trade to me, if a bit boring. My main issue is that Enemy Within introduces Mec's, who fill a rather similar role, and at the highest tier of weapon the S.H.I.V.'s weapons stop having a slight damage advantage over the Mec's. This is unfortunate, as Enemy Within actually does several things to try to make the robots more relevant, but the introduction of Mecs means they still tend to be overshadowed, particularly in the long term.
The Laser upgrade compares somewhat unfavorably to other Laser-tier weapons if you don't expect to field 3-4 of the robots (At once!) in raw $ cost and provides less of a damage increase than you normally get out of progressing to Laser (33% instead of roughly 50% more damage), but compares very favorably in the Alloys cost and provides an increase to Aim and to crit chance. It's a shaky upgrade, but if you intend to use S.H.I.V.s in the early game, you should probably take it.
The Plasma upgrade is much more straightforward: if you're going to use the robots, you should make it. It's actually cheaper than most of the individual Plasma weapons, while providing improvements beyond mere damage, even if it unfortunately only represents a 25% increase in damage over Laser, rather than the usual second 50% increase. On the other hand, it still ends up hitting harder than any other weapon except the Mec's Particle Cannon. Notably, the Plasma upgrade does not require the Laser upgrade. It's entirely possible to reach the mid-late game, decide you want to use the robots, and promptly upgrade them straight to Plasma guns. In that scenario an already strong upgrade becomes amazing. The Plasma Upgrade is indirectly made even more appealing when playing on Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within, as it's unaffected by the price hikes most Plasma-tier weapons undergo.
Mec primary guns
All of them have a base ammo of 2 and +10 to crit chance.
Minigun
Free, unlimited copies
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage
Railgun
70$, 30 Alloys
7 Damage, 10 or 12 crit damage
Particle Cannon
325$, 40 Alloys, 40 Elerium
10 Damage, 15 or 16 crit damage
It's the Mec's gun. Slightly stronger at every tier than the Sniper/Shotgun/LMG trifecta, though actually weaker than the S.H.I.V.'s weapons until you hit Plasma-tier. In trade, their ammo is garbage. This is slightly misleading, as Mecs can get a personal skill to increase ammunition by 50% (Among other benefits), putting them at merely LMG-tier for ammo, but it's fairly noteworthy as a limitation, particularly since Mecs automatically get the ability to shoot twice in one turn at Major, and have the innate ability to burn 2 ammo on Collateral Damage. Mecs are, appropriately enough, powerful but somewhat unwieldy. Works for me.
The Railgun is considerably more expensive than other Laser-tier weapons, and is a smaller improvement in percentage terms than most of those. (Roughly 40% vs 50%) Placing it as a lower priority than getting your other squad members kitted out to Laser tier is an understandable decision.
The Particle Cannon is a bit odd, in that it's the only Plasma-tier weapon aside from the Plasma Pistol (And SHIV Plasma) to not become more expensive on higher difficulties. This makes it noticeably more appealing if playing on Classic or Impossible, as it will be cheaper than pretty much all your other Plasma weapons, and so serious consideration should be given to prioritizing the Mec's weapon over Plasma Snipers and Alloy Cannons when playing on either of those difficulties. (Even though it's, again, a slightly weaker boost in damage in percentage terms, being slightly under 43%)
Rocket Launchers
The Rocket Launcher is a "secondary weapon" for the Heavy, replacing the usual Pistol. Rockets do damage in an area, destroying cover/walls in the area, and instead of a binary hit/miss roll roll for whether they hit, they roll for whether they hit the exact selected location or veer off course randomly and explode elsewhere on the map. Rockets can only be fired by using the Heavy's "Fire Rocket" special ability. By default you get one shot.
Rocket Launcher
Free, unlimited copies
6 damage
Blaster Launcher
275$, 65 Elerium, 50 Alloys, 1 Fusion Core, 2 UFO Flight Computers (If playing on Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 400$, 120 Elerium, 75 Alloys, 1 Fusion Core, 2 UFO Flight Computers)
9 damage
The real difference between the two is the Blaster Launcher's "guided" shots. (And a vastly larger listed range, though to my awareness this only means anything because of its guided shots being able to take roundabout routes) An incidental benefit of the Blaster Launcher is doing away with the chance for the shot to to go off course.
The fact that Rocket Launchers are both an equipped weapon and a skill slot on the Heavy is loathsome. I also dislike that the basic Rocket Launcher has a 10% chance of its shot going off course -a fixed 10%, unrelated to all factors, such as the soldier's Aim. (According to the wiki if the Heavy's Aim is higher than 90%, it will raise this chance to that value, but this can't happen if you aren't running Second Wave options) The fact that Alien Grenades never go off course, hit almost as hard (Exactly as hard in Enemy Within if you have the Grenade specialization skill!), have the same strike zone, and destroy cover just as effectively... ugh. Rockets were not designed well.
The Blaster Launcher is rather disappointing compared to the original game's version. To be fair, the original game's Blaster Launcher was completely, totally, utterly broken, but the remaquel's Blaster Launcher is underwhelming given the significant requirements that have to be met to be allowed the privilege of building one. 50% more damage and... occasionally you can fire around a corner or something, but honestly most of the time the Blaster Launcher just wastes more of the player's time by virtue of having a slower animation, which is appalling on a number of levels.
Furthermore, unlike your other weapons, the Rocket Launcher doesn't come in three tiers, but has a similar progression in damage -weapons improve their damage by roughly 50% per tier. While the Blaster Launcher is considered to be a tier 3 weapon for certain purposes of the game, its damage gain over the base Rocket Launcher is that of a tier 2 weapon. If it had the damage gain of a tier 3 weapon, its damage would be around 14, not 9. This contributes to it being rather disappointing for the effort involved, and it's worth commentary that in the original X-COM, the Blaster Launcher had nearly triple the base firepower of the Rocket Launcher.
Given how much more constrained the Rocket Launcher/Blaster Launcher are in the remaquel, I find it strange how weak they are, especially since they're considerably more difficult to get a hold of. In the original game you could loot them readily enough, so long as you were hitting a place that had an Alien carrying a Blaster Launcher. In the remaquel, you must successfully hit a Battleship to have a shot at it, and adding insult to injury the Fusion Core requirement puts the Blaster Launcher in direct competition with the Fusion Lance. The payoff for upgrading your interception craft to Fusion Lances is far higher than upgrading your Heavies to Blaster Launchers, making an already dubious choice something you should basically only consider if you've managed to capture a ridiculous amount of Fusion Cores -enough to set you for life as far as maxing out your Interceptors goes, specifically. Realistically, you've probably long been in a position to complete the game by the time you reach that point.
The Blaster Launcher is basically a luxury item for players who are just messing around long after they could've won the game. Worse, they aren't even available in Multiplayer. Realistic play will almost never actually see use for a Blaster Launcher.
The Slingshot DLC makes this slightly less egregious, as it can allow you to get two very early Fusion Cores, earlier than you're liable to be fielding Firestorms, and since Fusion Lances can't be equipped to your basic interceptors, it might be worth considering getting yourself one early Blaster Launcher so you get some actual benefit from the early Fusion Cores and then building a Fusion lance with the other Fusion Core in preparation for the transition. Since Slingshot comes integrated with the Enemy Within expansion, even if you dislike buying DLC you may still be able to take advantage of this.
On the other hand, that involves some out-of-the-way research to acquire a fairly small benefit. So... still a luxury item with almost no practical use. And the Aliens don't use it themselves, unlike the original XCOM, so it's existence in the game begins to border on being a technicality. Ugh.
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A general trend with the remaquel is that it simplifies gameplay and also makes it less opaque, compared against the original XCOM. The original basically demands you read a guide to have any clue what's going on in regards to various mechanics -not even getting into the many, many bugs that negatively impacted the learning curve.
A good example of both simplifying and making more transparent is the core accuracy check on weapons fire. Both the original and the remaquel present to the player a percentage-based "accuracy" number, such as 87%. In the remaquel this is exactly what it appears to be: your chance of hitting the target. In the original game, it's a number representing how large the cone of fire is; 100% (Or more!) means the cone is so focused as to be almost a straight line, while 25% means the cone is so wide the shot can outright go sideways. The original XCOM doesn't clarify this point, ever, and it's easy to be under a very false impression of how the mechanic works, where in the remaquel the conclusion a player is liable to draw based on the information given is, in fact, correct.
In a lot of ways, this is a strength of the remaquel. The original XCOM, while an incredible game, is also obtuse, nigh-incomprehensible without consulting a wiki or the like, and its complexities don't always improve the game. Much of its depth comes from these complexities, but so too do many of its problems.
In other ways, it's a weakness of the remaquel. The weapons are one of the cases where it trends toward weakness. In the original XCOM, weapons are a complex and interesting set of choices with enough depth that the player community has discovered new uses for previously under-rated weapons years and years after the game was released. There's only a handful of reasonably mindless rules of thumb -mostly, that a portion (and only a portion) of the conventional weapons are essentially irrelevant once you have Laser weapons and Alien weaponry. Even then, there's interesting edge cases -some players like to use the humble Rifle when fighting psychic Aliens because if all your guys are in Power Armor and wielding Rifles, it's actually impossible for a mind-controlled soldier to injure your not-mind-controlled soldiers. Being a pathetically bad weapon is actually a strength!
In the remaquel, though, weapons are very straightforward and boring. If you have a Laser version of a weapon, you should use that over the conventional version. If you have the Plasma version, you should use that. The complexities are mostly limited to the question of strategic priority -that the resources going into gaining access to and then producing a given more advanced weapon might be better spent on some other project first. On the level of "Which weapon should I use?" it's not a choice at all. Laser is better than conventional, full stop, while Plasma is better than Laser, full stop.
Worse, even though you have a class-locked approach, with each class having its own primary weapon (Only the point of Supports, Rookies, and Assaults all having access to the Rifle set is an exception) the weapon differentiation is most important for breaking up the process of advancing all your troops to their best state. LMG-class, Rifle-class, and Mec-exclusive weapons are the worst about this, as the only differentiation between the classes if what units can wield them, what their base crit chance is, how much damage they have at a given tier, and how much ammo they have. However, the Shotgun being a "short range" weapon is only a modest exaggeration of the default truth that getting closer to the target is important to maximizing accuracy, placing it as also overly similar to the cluster of "medium range" weapons. Only the Sniper Rifle is fundamentally different from the other weapon categories -specifically that it cannot be fired after moving (Unless you have Snapshot...) and that it reverses the usual rule regarding accuracy, actually suffering penalties to accuracy as you close with the target.
Otherwise, though, weapons are an undifferentiated blob of meaninglessness that function almost exclusively as a way to control the rate at which the player's damage output grows. Critically, the remaquel lacks secondary mechanical concerns to add niches. Early in this post I commented on how "terrain damage" is set to 125 for all the Laser-tier and Plasma-tier weapons (Yes, this includes the Mec's weapons and the S.H.I.V. weapons) and it's an example of that lack of depth. If Heavy Lasers and Heavy Plasmas were better at destroying terrain than other weapon types (And, preferably, it was possible to manually target terrain) then they would have a distinct niche of being a way to punch your way through walls to open alternative routes to targets. Or, if Laser weapons had unlimited ammo, as they do in the original game, a player might consider running them on soldiers they intend to use ammo-intensive abilities on (eg Suppression), in spite of the inferior damage compared to Plasma weapons. That kind of thing.
In practice there's basically only one reason to ever consider running anything less than the most powerful thing available to you -captures. Since Aliens must be reduced to a fairly specific HP range that is, in fact, smaller than the damage of any Plasma-tier weapon except the Plasma Pistol to then be capturable, it's entirely possible to be in a situation where you want to take a shot to weaken a target so you can zap it with an Arc Thrower and all your main guns will kill the target if you take that shot.
Ah, but I specified main weapons for a reason. At most the capture mechanic is an incentive to consider keeping your Pistols weaker than Plasma. There's no reason to avoid running the strongest possible main weapon, unless for some bizarre reason you're running a team of nothing but Heavies. (You might think Mecs being mixed in would retain the problem, but they can just use Collateral Damage to soften up targets for a capture) Furthermore, the Arc Thrower can eventually be upgraded to widen the range of health in which a successful capture can be made, at which point just spamming Plasma shots will probably still work just fine.
So the weapon mechanics is one case where I feel the remaquel falls fairly flat.
Next time we cover armor and items.
Weapons
Damage takes the base number, and then ranges it as -1, no change, or +1. (0 is not a valid number, and gets rounded up to 1) For instance, a Conventional Pistol is 1-2 damage due to having a base of 1, while a Laser Pistol is 1-3 due to having a base of 2, meaning a Laser Pistol is an unusually small step up in damage compared to other Laser-tier weapons.
Crit damage is apparently buggy in Enemy Within. It's supposed to produce three different results, and in actuality produces 2 results, one of them 2/3rds of the time and the other the remaining third of the time. If there's an actual formula to produce crit damage, I don't know what it is -weaker weapons can do as much as doubled damage, but stronger weapons cap out at 60% higher.
Terrain damage varies across weapons, but most weapons have some garbage value for the terrain damage stat at the conventional weapon tier and then jump to 125 terrain damage for Laser and keep it there for Plasma. I'm ignoring it between the standardization across weapon types and the fact that the player can't do much to try to plan around it. Also, I have no idea what the terrain damage numbers even mean, and haven't been able to find a concrete answer.
I'm not separately covering EXALT's weapons. They're only really noteworthy for being sellable. Even the potential to loot Lasers isn't that significant, as EXALT takes so long to show up, and so long to then transition to Elites, that if you aren't already in the middle of transitioning to Plasma by the time they show up, you're probably playing the game horribly wrong. I guess if you did a challenge run in which you refused to manufacture your own weapons, you might appreciate stealing the Laser Sniper Rifle...
A note on Range modifiers: with a Medium range gun, you get +37 Aim when directly adjacent, a Shotgun gets +50 Aim, and Sniper Rifles lose -24 Aim. (A Shotgun's maximum Aim penalty for being far out, conversely, is hard-capped at -40) This provides a framework to compare classes and weapons -a Shotgun is actually only barely more accurate, when it is more accurate, than Medium Range weapons, and so its potential Aim advantage per se can generally be ignored when making comparisons, most obviously to the Rifle family. The real reason an Assault should use a Shotgun over an Assault Rifle is that it does more damage.
Pistols
Pistols can be upgraded with +1 damage, +10 Aim, and +10 crit chance from Foundry Projects. All Pistols have unlimited ammo.
Conventional
Free, unlimited
1 Damage, 2 or 3 crit damage
Laser
10$, 10 Alloys
2 Damage, 3 or 4 crit damage, +10 crit chance
Plasma
100$, 10 Elerium, 20 Alloys
3 Damage, 4 or 6 crit damage
Pistols are the basic backup weapon for everybody except the Heavy (And the Mec in Enemy Within), of course, and are just... bad. They ignore ammunition constraints and, with upgrades, have slightly better Aim than regular weapons, so theoretically you might break them out when you need to make your shot count, but eh. It's semi-notable that the Plasma Pistol is just as strong as the conventional Assault Rifle, but the way the remaquel is set up it's going to take longer to capture a Sectoid and research its Plasma Pistol than it would to research Laser Rifles. So even though you could theoretically have the mildly amusing point of equipping your rookies and Supports with Plasma Pistols to never need to spend ammo while having the same damage as an Assault Rifle, in practice you'll get Laser Rifles first.
Pistols are, of course, supposed to be a backup weapon and so shouldn't be particularly good, but making them an intrinsic weapon on most classes seems a poor design decision. If Pistols represented an item slot of some sort that could be fitted with other things (eg the Arc Thrower), players could choose between playing it safe -take the Pistol so the soldier is never defenseless- vs going "all-in" by taking some other option and risking being left helpless. Say, if the Pistol slot was simply a second item slot.
There's the more complicated point that, by and large, you really don't need a backup weapon. Ammunition is generous even before you get Ammo Conservation, and battles are designed to be short-lived firefights followed by assured calm, while reloading is free other than being a turn-ending action. Naturally, the two classes -Heavy and Mec- that have the worst ammunition pools don't even get the Pistol anyway. (To be fair, Enemy Within pushes the player to be more aggressive via timed Meld canisters, but this becomes less and less relevant the further into the game you get)
Snipers actually appreciate their Pistols, since Snapshot is basically never worth taking over Squadsight and you can't fire Sniper Rifles after a move without Snapshot (Nor, without abuse of a glitch, enter Overwatch), but for Assaults and Supports the Pistol's presence is just kind of strange and not particularly welcome. I really wish the Pistol had done something more unique -maybe been your capture tool?
Laser Pistols are cheap enough that it's probably worth buying 4-6 once you've unlocked them, even though the benefit is fairly small, but with Plasma Pistols you're probably better off capturing all your copies. They just aren't a big enough boon to justify the expense, and you want a minimum of 1 capture of every (capturable) Alien in the game anyway, thanks to the myriad Research Credits interrogations provide and the fact that South America's "We Have Ways" continent bonus means that interrogations won't even compete with other, potentially more important research. 2 Plasma Pistols is enough for most purposes if you're running two Snipers (Okay, this is misleading, because you use up one Plasma Pistol when researching it, so "one capture of each type" will leave you with just one Plasma Pistol...), and if you're running more Snipers than that, you're probably leaning very heavily on Squad Sight and they shouldn't be dealing with targets in their face that often anyway. Also, you can just capture more Sectoids opportunistically -they're pretty easy to capture on any difficulty below Impossible, since their HP is so low the Arc Thrower can work on them without even shooting them first.
And on Impossible, they're still well within the range of the upgraded Arc Thrower.
Rifles
All Rifles have 4 ammo base and have +10 crit chance base.
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
3 Damage, 4 or 6 crit damage
Laser
25$, 15 Alloys
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage
Light Plasma
125$, 15 Elerium, 20 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 180$, 30 Elerium, 30 Alloys)
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage, +10 Aim
Plasma
200$, 20 Elerium, 30 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 300$, 40 Elerium, 50 Alloys)
7 Damage, 10 or 12 crit damage
The "standard" weapon type, used by Rookies and Supports and available to Assaults if they want to ignore the harder-hitting Shotguns for some bizarre reason. Your bread-and-butter weapon with no disadvantages, but no advantages beyond lacking a disadvantage. Also uniformly the weakest main weapon type, behind by either 1, 2, or 3 points of damage at any given tier relative to any given other main weapon. Theoretically contributes to Supports being, well, supporting units, as their weapon is overall the worst of the bunch, but Rifles don't particularly hit any "magic number" marks of suck, particularly when considering normal damage variance. I guess the Conventional Rifle has the flaw that on every difficulty except the highest the other main weapons will always one-shot Sectoids and Rifles sometimes won't?
In practice Rifles... exist, and frankly it feels a bit redundant with the Pistol, as they both fill the role of "overall bad weapon". The Rifle basically serves to make the Support the overall weakest attacker, theoretically emphasizing that they're the Support class and not the "kill everyone" class, but that actually ends up being a bit wonky, since Plasma Rifles are the easiest non-Pistol non-Light Plasma Rifle Plasma-tier weapon to acquire copies of. As such, it's entirely possible to end up with your Assaults and Supports spending a good chunk of the mid-late game as your hardest-hitting troops in terms of base damage, since Plasma Rifles are slightly stronger than Laser Sniper Rifles and Heavy Lasers. (Albeit only by the 1 point, which is somewhat drowned out by damage variance)
The Light Plasma Rifle is kind of interesting, but honestly more for its relevance to the Aliens -specifically, Aliens are allowed to upgrade in a form other than replacing existing Alien types- than in its relevance to the player's choices. Light Plasma Rifles are just what you loot until you can loot Plasma Rifles. In theory the player might use a Light Plasma Rifle over a Plasma Rifle for the Aim bonus, but damage is a lot more important than Aim, overall.
The Light Plasma Rifle's existence also just calls attention to the fact that the remaquel can support having the Aliens progress through weapon types as per the original game, but mostly doesn't for who knows what reason. It's not a technical difficulties issue, as proven by the fact that they did, in fact, do it. So why is the progression on the aliens almost exclusively based on phasing out weaker breeds in favor of stronger ones?
The basic crit bonus is also less notable than you might expect, as "Hardened" enemies get +60 crit chance resistance compared against the +50 crit chance provided by not being in cover. As such, while Rifles are ahead of, say, LMGs, when it comes to crit chance skills actually providing bonuses against Hardened enemies, the Rifles themselves don't actually have a base crit chance against Hardened enemies, same as an LMG.
Like the Pistol, the Laser tier is dirt cheap, and you might as well take it, while the Plasma tier (Light Plasma included) is extremely expensive and you're probably better off trying to capture all your copies. If you capture one copy of every Alien in the game, you'll end up with 3-4 Light Plasma Rifles and 1-2 Plasma Rifles. (Mutons are one of two sources of Plasma Rifles, and initially they carry Light Plasma Rifles, so depending on when you capture a Muton will dictate what the minimum count of these is. And okay then subtract 1 of each because you use up one on research. But capturing for gear is a good idea regardless) Unlike the Pistol, Enemy Within exaggerates this truth on higher difficulties, making Plasma Rifles (Light version included) roughly 50% more expensive to manufacture, while capturing more copies is no harder than in the original game.
Beam Weapons, the research that unlocks Laser Pistols and Laser Rifles, is a step on the road to Laser-tier Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, and LMG. It might be tempting to leave off buying Laser Rifles with an intention to upgrade straight to Light Plasma Rifles, but in practice you're probably better off buying the Laser Rifles anyway, since you have to unlock them to get at the other, more important Laser-tier weapons, and Laser Rifles are dirt-cheap. Especially on the higher difficulties, wherein XCOM HQ takes longer to get going, and in Enemy Within Plasma research takes longer (40% longer on Classic, 70% on Impossible) it'll probably take so long to capture and research Light Plasma Rifles that the Laser Rifles will actually benefit you for several missions.
Shotguns
All Shotguns have 4 ammo base and have a +20 crit chance base.
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage
Scatter Laser
30$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage
Alloy Cannon
250$, 20 Elerium, 50 Alloys (On Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 300$, 40 Elerium, 75 Alloys)
9 Damage,13 or 15 crit damage
Less critty than the Sniper Rifle, but still the crittiest general usage weapon. Not enough to ensure a critical hit on a flank without yet more crit chance boosting, though.
Shotguns are weird, because they have a bigger Aim bonus than other weapons for getting closer to your target, but not remotely by enough to, say, let you blow up an Alien 95% reliably that's hiding behind Full Cover just through the Shotgun's bonus Aim, while the Aim penalty it gets for being too far away rarely has a visible impact. In practice, Assaults will usually be, at worst, under a slight Aim penalty, even if they behave like their LMG and Rifle-wielding teammates and stick behind Cover and plink at targets from a modest distance. (It's not as if there's any real incentive to hang out at the furthest portion of your firing distance, even if Shotguns had no Aim penalty)
There's the particularly obnoxious point that a Light Plasma Rifle fired from directly adjacent to the target is only 3 Aim behind a Shotgun fired from directly adjacent, thanks to how the Accuracy formula is handled. You might as well use a Light Plasma Rifle over a conventional Shotgun at that point as 1 damage is far more significant than 3 Aim. This is ridiculous given that the Shotgun's entire thing is supposed to be that it's a close-combat weapon! It's a somewhat misleading comparison, with a better comparison being Light Plasma Rifle to Scatter Laser, but it's still painful that the Scatter Laser is only very slightly better than the Light Plasma Rifle at killing things you're directly adjacent to.
It's disappointing how shotguns are supposed to be a close-combat weapon and they're virtually indistinguishable from the "regular" weapons in practice. I'd have liked to see their damage scaled to distance. That would've gone a long way to make the Shotgun distinctive and meaningfully "better up close, worse far away."
As an aside, the Alloy Cannon grates on me conceptually. Real plasma physics lends itself far better to shotgun-like behavior than to lobbing discrete projectiles at carefully chosen targets, and forget a sniper rifle -and yet the only weapon whose third tier isn't plasma is the shotgun! Why wasn't it Alloy Sniper Rifle and Plasma Shotgun?? That would've actually made some sense! There's the additional problem that Alien Alloys are treated as a limited resource by the game, and so a weapon that fires Alien Alloys obeying the game's usual "ammo from nowhere for free" rules is a head-scratcher, but I'm more willing to let that one go. If you assume the game is being faithful to the original, one would assume the Plasma weapons use Elerium in their clips, and so every Plasma-tier weapon would run into the same problem. Ultimately I'm fine with suspending my disbelief on the ammo point, since ammo is so heavily abstracted out anyway.
The Laser tier of Shotguns is sort-of expensive, and if you are managing to capture a lot of Light Plasma Rifles, you might consider simply equipping your Assaults with those to save money for Alloy Cannons, as the Light Plasma Rifle is only 1 point of damage behind the Scatter laser and will usually result in higher Aim, or at worst only slightly lower Aim. Alloy Cannons are one of the main reasons why I recommend being capture-happy on most Plasma-tier weapons -you can't capture Alloy Cannons, so you'll just have to suck up the expense if you want your Assaults as strong as possible. Resources not spent on capturable gear is money available to spend on gear you can't capture. Enemy Within exaggerates this, since most of the Plasma-tier weapons are roughly 50% more expensive on the higher two difficulties, with some prices as much as doubling!
LMGs/Heavy Rifles
All LMG-class weapons have 3 ammo base and no crit modifier.
Conventional
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
3 Damage, 4 or 6 crit damage
Laser
25$, 15 Alloys
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage
Light Plasma
125$, 15 Elerium, 20 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 180$, 30 Elerium, 30 Alloys)
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage, +10 Aim
Plasma
200$, 20 Elerium, 30 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 300$, 40 Elerium, 50 Alloys)
7 Damage, 10 or 12 crit damage
The "standard" weapon type, used by Rookies and Supports and available to Assaults if they want to ignore the harder-hitting Shotguns for some bizarre reason. Your bread-and-butter weapon with no disadvantages, but no advantages beyond lacking a disadvantage. Also uniformly the weakest main weapon type, behind by either 1, 2, or 3 points of damage at any given tier relative to any given other main weapon. Theoretically contributes to Supports being, well, supporting units, as their weapon is overall the worst of the bunch, but Rifles don't particularly hit any "magic number" marks of suck, particularly when considering normal damage variance. I guess the Conventional Rifle has the flaw that on every difficulty except the highest the other main weapons will always one-shot Sectoids and Rifles sometimes won't?
In practice Rifles... exist, and frankly it feels a bit redundant with the Pistol, as they both fill the role of "overall bad weapon". The Rifle basically serves to make the Support the overall weakest attacker, theoretically emphasizing that they're the Support class and not the "kill everyone" class, but that actually ends up being a bit wonky, since Plasma Rifles are the easiest non-Pistol non-Light Plasma Rifle Plasma-tier weapon to acquire copies of. As such, it's entirely possible to end up with your Assaults and Supports spending a good chunk of the mid-late game as your hardest-hitting troops in terms of base damage, since Plasma Rifles are slightly stronger than Laser Sniper Rifles and Heavy Lasers. (Albeit only by the 1 point, which is somewhat drowned out by damage variance)
The Light Plasma Rifle is kind of interesting, but honestly more for its relevance to the Aliens -specifically, Aliens are allowed to upgrade in a form other than replacing existing Alien types- than in its relevance to the player's choices. Light Plasma Rifles are just what you loot until you can loot Plasma Rifles. In theory the player might use a Light Plasma Rifle over a Plasma Rifle for the Aim bonus, but damage is a lot more important than Aim, overall.
The Light Plasma Rifle's existence also just calls attention to the fact that the remaquel can support having the Aliens progress through weapon types as per the original game, but mostly doesn't for who knows what reason. It's not a technical difficulties issue, as proven by the fact that they did, in fact, do it. So why is the progression on the aliens almost exclusively based on phasing out weaker breeds in favor of stronger ones?
The basic crit bonus is also less notable than you might expect, as "Hardened" enemies get +60 crit chance resistance compared against the +50 crit chance provided by not being in cover. As such, while Rifles are ahead of, say, LMGs, when it comes to crit chance skills actually providing bonuses against Hardened enemies, the Rifles themselves don't actually have a base crit chance against Hardened enemies, same as an LMG.
Like the Pistol, the Laser tier is dirt cheap, and you might as well take it, while the Plasma tier (Light Plasma included) is extremely expensive and you're probably better off trying to capture all your copies. If you capture one copy of every Alien in the game, you'll end up with 3-4 Light Plasma Rifles and 1-2 Plasma Rifles. (Mutons are one of two sources of Plasma Rifles, and initially they carry Light Plasma Rifles, so depending on when you capture a Muton will dictate what the minimum count of these is. And okay then subtract 1 of each because you use up one on research. But capturing for gear is a good idea regardless) Unlike the Pistol, Enemy Within exaggerates this truth on higher difficulties, making Plasma Rifles (Light version included) roughly 50% more expensive to manufacture, while capturing more copies is no harder than in the original game.
Beam Weapons, the research that unlocks Laser Pistols and Laser Rifles, is a step on the road to Laser-tier Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, and LMG. It might be tempting to leave off buying Laser Rifles with an intention to upgrade straight to Light Plasma Rifles, but in practice you're probably better off buying the Laser Rifles anyway, since you have to unlock them to get at the other, more important Laser-tier weapons, and Laser Rifles are dirt-cheap. Especially on the higher difficulties, wherein XCOM HQ takes longer to get going, and in Enemy Within Plasma research takes longer (40% longer on Classic, 70% on Impossible) it'll probably take so long to capture and research Light Plasma Rifles that the Laser Rifles will actually benefit you for several missions.
Shotguns
All Shotguns have 4 ammo base and have a +20 crit chance base.
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage
Scatter Laser
30$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage
Alloy Cannon
250$, 20 Elerium, 50 Alloys (On Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 300$, 40 Elerium, 75 Alloys)
9 Damage,13 or 15 crit damage
Less critty than the Sniper Rifle, but still the crittiest general usage weapon. Not enough to ensure a critical hit on a flank without yet more crit chance boosting, though.
Shotguns are weird, because they have a bigger Aim bonus than other weapons for getting closer to your target, but not remotely by enough to, say, let you blow up an Alien 95% reliably that's hiding behind Full Cover just through the Shotgun's bonus Aim, while the Aim penalty it gets for being too far away rarely has a visible impact. In practice, Assaults will usually be, at worst, under a slight Aim penalty, even if they behave like their LMG and Rifle-wielding teammates and stick behind Cover and plink at targets from a modest distance. (It's not as if there's any real incentive to hang out at the furthest portion of your firing distance, even if Shotguns had no Aim penalty)
There's the particularly obnoxious point that a Light Plasma Rifle fired from directly adjacent to the target is only 3 Aim behind a Shotgun fired from directly adjacent, thanks to how the Accuracy formula is handled. You might as well use a Light Plasma Rifle over a conventional Shotgun at that point as 1 damage is far more significant than 3 Aim. This is ridiculous given that the Shotgun's entire thing is supposed to be that it's a close-combat weapon! It's a somewhat misleading comparison, with a better comparison being Light Plasma Rifle to Scatter Laser, but it's still painful that the Scatter Laser is only very slightly better than the Light Plasma Rifle at killing things you're directly adjacent to.
It's disappointing how shotguns are supposed to be a close-combat weapon and they're virtually indistinguishable from the "regular" weapons in practice. I'd have liked to see their damage scaled to distance. That would've gone a long way to make the Shotgun distinctive and meaningfully "better up close, worse far away."
As an aside, the Alloy Cannon grates on me conceptually. Real plasma physics lends itself far better to shotgun-like behavior than to lobbing discrete projectiles at carefully chosen targets, and forget a sniper rifle -and yet the only weapon whose third tier isn't plasma is the shotgun! Why wasn't it Alloy Sniper Rifle and Plasma Shotgun?? That would've actually made some sense! There's the additional problem that Alien Alloys are treated as a limited resource by the game, and so a weapon that fires Alien Alloys obeying the game's usual "ammo from nowhere for free" rules is a head-scratcher, but I'm more willing to let that one go. If you assume the game is being faithful to the original, one would assume the Plasma weapons use Elerium in their clips, and so every Plasma-tier weapon would run into the same problem. Ultimately I'm fine with suspending my disbelief on the ammo point, since ammo is so heavily abstracted out anyway.
The Laser tier of Shotguns is sort-of expensive, and if you are managing to capture a lot of Light Plasma Rifles, you might consider simply equipping your Assaults with those to save money for Alloy Cannons, as the Light Plasma Rifle is only 1 point of damage behind the Scatter laser and will usually result in higher Aim, or at worst only slightly lower Aim. Alloy Cannons are one of the main reasons why I recommend being capture-happy on most Plasma-tier weapons -you can't capture Alloy Cannons, so you'll just have to suck up the expense if you want your Assaults as strong as possible. Resources not spent on capturable gear is money available to spend on gear you can't capture. Enemy Within exaggerates this, since most of the Plasma-tier weapons are roughly 50% more expensive on the higher two difficulties, with some prices as much as doubling!
LMGs/Heavy Rifles
All LMG-class weapons have 3 ammo base and no crit modifier.
Conventional
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage
Laser
30$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage
Plasma
250$, 30 Elerium, 30 Alloys (On Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 375$, 60 Elerium, 50 Alloys
9 Damage, 13 or 15 crit damage
It's the Rifle's bigger, meaner cousin, but not by that much. Also, it has one less ammo to use. Before you get Ammo Conservation, this is kind of a big deal, particularly given Bullet Swarm means a Heavy can easily chew through the entire supply in a single skirmish. After you get Ammo Conservation it's only really noticeable if you love using Suppression on your Heavies... which would require Suppression be an actually good effect.
The lack of a crit modifier isn't very noticeable, as covered in the Rifle's section.
The laser tier should be upgraded to ASAP, as Heavies are one of the better damage-dealing classes, and it's not possible to capture Heavy Plasmas until very late in the game. Unlocking Heavy Lasers will also unlock the S.H.I.V. Laser Foundry Project, and in Enemy Within it also unlocks the Mec's second-tier weapon, so there's a greater payoff than unlocking unlocking Laser Sniper Rifles. (Well, that point can be argued, as Squadsight Snipers are insanely good, so anything that improves them is disproportionately good) Unlocking Laser Sniper Rifles doubles as unlocking Scatter Lasers, but Assaults can make do with Laser Rifles, not to mention captured Light Plasma Rifles. Mecs (and S.H.I.V.s) have no equivalent option for tiding them over.
The Heavy Plasma is the only weapon in the game where it's legitimately a difficult decision as to whether you should try to research and manufacture them yourself or focus on captures. Muton Elites take so long to show up it's entirely possible to reach the Heavy Plasma via research first, and it's even worth considering pushing for the Heavy Plasma research as it also unlocks, again, an even better weapon for S.H.I.V.s, and in Enemy Within an even better weapon for Mecs. If you've captured a regular Plasma Rifle and you've got the South America continental bonus (Entirely plausible), you are in a position to instantly get the Research Credit for all Plasma weapons, too, making the research burden more tolerable. (Research credits halve research time of affected researches, with two exceptions) Mutons transition to Plasma Rifles (You need the Plasma Rifle research to unlock the Heavy Plasma research if you're not going to just research a looted Heavy Plasma) two months before Elite Mutons enter the normal rotation, so it's entirely possible to have successfully researched and manufactured Heavy Plasma well before Muton Elites enter the rotation.
It is of course cheaper to just capture Muton Elites to yoink their Heavy Plasmas, but waiting for Muton Elites to show up means your Heavies will lag behind your other troops for a long time. If you don't have too much of your resources tied up in urgent projects, it's genuinely useful to build Heavy Plasmas yourself.
... at least once your Snipers and Assaults have gotten their Plasma-tier toys.
Sniper Rifles
All Sniper Rifles have 5 ammunition base, and are normally unable to be fired after movement. This includes that you cannot enter Overwatch... or it would if there wasn't a glitch that lets you Overwatch anyway. It's not even a difficult glitch.
Conventional
Free, unlimited copies
4 Damage, 6 or 7 crit damage, +25 crit chance
Laser
35$, 25 Alloys
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage, +30 crit chance
Plasma
250$, 25 Elerium, 30 Alloys (If playing Classic or Impossible Difficulty in Enemy Within: 375$, 60 Elerium, 50 Alloys)
9 Damage, 13 or 15 crit damage, +35 crit chance
Defined primarily by the inability to move and shoot... unless you have Snap Shot... and also the fact that they work with Squadsight. (You can't fire your Pistol at Squadsight targets... at least, you're not supposed to be able to. The game can be glitchy, particularly when it comes to Overwatch) Also defined by being the only weapon that, instead of gaining Aim as you get closer, actually loses Aim! This is why your Snipers have better Aim than your other classes -because other classes can supplement their base Aim by getting closer to the target, where for the Sniper their Aim is the roof on how accurate they can be, outside of when using the Pistol. So don't be too impressed by the high Aim on your Snipers!
The high crit chance makes the Sniper Rifle on average the most lethal weapon of the regular main weapons. Backed by Headshot, Snipers will get crits fairly routinely without needing to flank anything.
Since critical hits don't do anything except increase damage, this is basically the same thing as increasing the Sniper Rifle's base damage, only without the player being able to count on it or plan around it. This is not a good design decision. This is sad, because I feel the Sniper Rifle is the only genuinely well-designed weapon class.
As with all the Laser-tier weapons, the Laser Sniper Rifle is cheap enough for a big enough payoff that you should probably get it as quickly as you can. The Plasma Sniper Rifles shares with the Alloy Cannon the property of not being possible to capture, so you'll need to set aside resources to construct Plasma Sniper Rifles. In Enemy Within on the higher difficulties, it may well take a long, long time for you to get around to equipping your Snipers with Plasma Sniper Rifles.
S.H.I.V. weaponry
I am unclear exactly how much ammo the S.H.I.V. has on its gun, other than "not unlimited." Strangely, both wikis lack this information. I guess it's not that popular. In any event, their weapon class is generic, at least in terms of universal properties. (Medium range etc)
Conventional
Free
6 Damage, 9 or 10 crit damage, +10 crit chance
Laser
Foundry Project costs: 100$, 30 Alloys, 15 Weapon Fragments
8 Damage, 12 or 13 crit damage, +15 Aim and +15 crit chance
Plasma
Foundry Project costs: 200$, 30 Elerium, 45 Alloys, 30 Weapon Fragments
10 Damage, 15 or 16 crit damage, +25 Aim and +20 crit chance
S.H.I.V. weapons are better than trooper weapons. This compensates for the robot's much more limited access to special skills and lack of actual leveling. This seems a fair trade to me, if a bit boring. My main issue is that Enemy Within introduces Mec's, who fill a rather similar role, and at the highest tier of weapon the S.H.I.V.'s weapons stop having a slight damage advantage over the Mec's. This is unfortunate, as Enemy Within actually does several things to try to make the robots more relevant, but the introduction of Mecs means they still tend to be overshadowed, particularly in the long term.
The Laser upgrade compares somewhat unfavorably to other Laser-tier weapons if you don't expect to field 3-4 of the robots (At once!) in raw $ cost and provides less of a damage increase than you normally get out of progressing to Laser (33% instead of roughly 50% more damage), but compares very favorably in the Alloys cost and provides an increase to Aim and to crit chance. It's a shaky upgrade, but if you intend to use S.H.I.V.s in the early game, you should probably take it.
The Plasma upgrade is much more straightforward: if you're going to use the robots, you should make it. It's actually cheaper than most of the individual Plasma weapons, while providing improvements beyond mere damage, even if it unfortunately only represents a 25% increase in damage over Laser, rather than the usual second 50% increase. On the other hand, it still ends up hitting harder than any other weapon except the Mec's Particle Cannon. Notably, the Plasma upgrade does not require the Laser upgrade. It's entirely possible to reach the mid-late game, decide you want to use the robots, and promptly upgrade them straight to Plasma guns. In that scenario an already strong upgrade becomes amazing. The Plasma Upgrade is indirectly made even more appealing when playing on Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within, as it's unaffected by the price hikes most Plasma-tier weapons undergo.
Mec primary guns
All of them have a base ammo of 2 and +10 to crit chance.
Minigun
Free, unlimited copies
5 Damage, 7 or 9 crit damage
Railgun
70$, 30 Alloys
7 Damage, 10 or 12 crit damage
Particle Cannon
325$, 40 Alloys, 40 Elerium
10 Damage, 15 or 16 crit damage
It's the Mec's gun. Slightly stronger at every tier than the Sniper/Shotgun/LMG trifecta, though actually weaker than the S.H.I.V.'s weapons until you hit Plasma-tier. In trade, their ammo is garbage. This is slightly misleading, as Mecs can get a personal skill to increase ammunition by 50% (Among other benefits), putting them at merely LMG-tier for ammo, but it's fairly noteworthy as a limitation, particularly since Mecs automatically get the ability to shoot twice in one turn at Major, and have the innate ability to burn 2 ammo on Collateral Damage. Mecs are, appropriately enough, powerful but somewhat unwieldy. Works for me.
The Railgun is considerably more expensive than other Laser-tier weapons, and is a smaller improvement in percentage terms than most of those. (Roughly 40% vs 50%) Placing it as a lower priority than getting your other squad members kitted out to Laser tier is an understandable decision.
The Particle Cannon is a bit odd, in that it's the only Plasma-tier weapon aside from the Plasma Pistol (And SHIV Plasma) to not become more expensive on higher difficulties. This makes it noticeably more appealing if playing on Classic or Impossible, as it will be cheaper than pretty much all your other Plasma weapons, and so serious consideration should be given to prioritizing the Mec's weapon over Plasma Snipers and Alloy Cannons when playing on either of those difficulties. (Even though it's, again, a slightly weaker boost in damage in percentage terms, being slightly under 43%)
Rocket Launchers
The Rocket Launcher is a "secondary weapon" for the Heavy, replacing the usual Pistol. Rockets do damage in an area, destroying cover/walls in the area, and instead of a binary hit/miss roll roll for whether they hit, they roll for whether they hit the exact selected location or veer off course randomly and explode elsewhere on the map. Rockets can only be fired by using the Heavy's "Fire Rocket" special ability. By default you get one shot.
Rocket Launcher
Free, unlimited copies
6 damage
Blaster Launcher
275$, 65 Elerium, 50 Alloys, 1 Fusion Core, 2 UFO Flight Computers (If playing on Classic or Impossible in Enemy Within: 400$, 120 Elerium, 75 Alloys, 1 Fusion Core, 2 UFO Flight Computers)
9 damage
The real difference between the two is the Blaster Launcher's "guided" shots. (And a vastly larger listed range, though to my awareness this only means anything because of its guided shots being able to take roundabout routes) An incidental benefit of the Blaster Launcher is doing away with the chance for the shot to to go off course.
The fact that Rocket Launchers are both an equipped weapon and a skill slot on the Heavy is loathsome. I also dislike that the basic Rocket Launcher has a 10% chance of its shot going off course -a fixed 10%, unrelated to all factors, such as the soldier's Aim. (According to the wiki if the Heavy's Aim is higher than 90%, it will raise this chance to that value, but this can't happen if you aren't running Second Wave options) The fact that Alien Grenades never go off course, hit almost as hard (Exactly as hard in Enemy Within if you have the Grenade specialization skill!), have the same strike zone, and destroy cover just as effectively... ugh. Rockets were not designed well.
The Blaster Launcher is rather disappointing compared to the original game's version. To be fair, the original game's Blaster Launcher was completely, totally, utterly broken, but the remaquel's Blaster Launcher is underwhelming given the significant requirements that have to be met to be allowed the privilege of building one. 50% more damage and... occasionally you can fire around a corner or something, but honestly most of the time the Blaster Launcher just wastes more of the player's time by virtue of having a slower animation, which is appalling on a number of levels.
Furthermore, unlike your other weapons, the Rocket Launcher doesn't come in three tiers, but has a similar progression in damage -weapons improve their damage by roughly 50% per tier. While the Blaster Launcher is considered to be a tier 3 weapon for certain purposes of the game, its damage gain over the base Rocket Launcher is that of a tier 2 weapon. If it had the damage gain of a tier 3 weapon, its damage would be around 14, not 9. This contributes to it being rather disappointing for the effort involved, and it's worth commentary that in the original X-COM, the Blaster Launcher had nearly triple the base firepower of the Rocket Launcher.
Given how much more constrained the Rocket Launcher/Blaster Launcher are in the remaquel, I find it strange how weak they are, especially since they're considerably more difficult to get a hold of. In the original game you could loot them readily enough, so long as you were hitting a place that had an Alien carrying a Blaster Launcher. In the remaquel, you must successfully hit a Battleship to have a shot at it, and adding insult to injury the Fusion Core requirement puts the Blaster Launcher in direct competition with the Fusion Lance. The payoff for upgrading your interception craft to Fusion Lances is far higher than upgrading your Heavies to Blaster Launchers, making an already dubious choice something you should basically only consider if you've managed to capture a ridiculous amount of Fusion Cores -enough to set you for life as far as maxing out your Interceptors goes, specifically. Realistically, you've probably long been in a position to complete the game by the time you reach that point.
The Blaster Launcher is basically a luxury item for players who are just messing around long after they could've won the game. Worse, they aren't even available in Multiplayer. Realistic play will almost never actually see use for a Blaster Launcher.
The Slingshot DLC makes this slightly less egregious, as it can allow you to get two very early Fusion Cores, earlier than you're liable to be fielding Firestorms, and since Fusion Lances can't be equipped to your basic interceptors, it might be worth considering getting yourself one early Blaster Launcher so you get some actual benefit from the early Fusion Cores and then building a Fusion lance with the other Fusion Core in preparation for the transition. Since Slingshot comes integrated with the Enemy Within expansion, even if you dislike buying DLC you may still be able to take advantage of this.
On the other hand, that involves some out-of-the-way research to acquire a fairly small benefit. So... still a luxury item with almost no practical use. And the Aliens don't use it themselves, unlike the original XCOM, so it's existence in the game begins to border on being a technicality. Ugh.
------------------------
A general trend with the remaquel is that it simplifies gameplay and also makes it less opaque, compared against the original XCOM. The original basically demands you read a guide to have any clue what's going on in regards to various mechanics -not even getting into the many, many bugs that negatively impacted the learning curve.
A good example of both simplifying and making more transparent is the core accuracy check on weapons fire. Both the original and the remaquel present to the player a percentage-based "accuracy" number, such as 87%. In the remaquel this is exactly what it appears to be: your chance of hitting the target. In the original game, it's a number representing how large the cone of fire is; 100% (Or more!) means the cone is so focused as to be almost a straight line, while 25% means the cone is so wide the shot can outright go sideways. The original XCOM doesn't clarify this point, ever, and it's easy to be under a very false impression of how the mechanic works, where in the remaquel the conclusion a player is liable to draw based on the information given is, in fact, correct.
In a lot of ways, this is a strength of the remaquel. The original XCOM, while an incredible game, is also obtuse, nigh-incomprehensible without consulting a wiki or the like, and its complexities don't always improve the game. Much of its depth comes from these complexities, but so too do many of its problems.
In other ways, it's a weakness of the remaquel. The weapons are one of the cases where it trends toward weakness. In the original XCOM, weapons are a complex and interesting set of choices with enough depth that the player community has discovered new uses for previously under-rated weapons years and years after the game was released. There's only a handful of reasonably mindless rules of thumb -mostly, that a portion (and only a portion) of the conventional weapons are essentially irrelevant once you have Laser weapons and Alien weaponry. Even then, there's interesting edge cases -some players like to use the humble Rifle when fighting psychic Aliens because if all your guys are in Power Armor and wielding Rifles, it's actually impossible for a mind-controlled soldier to injure your not-mind-controlled soldiers. Being a pathetically bad weapon is actually a strength!
In the remaquel, though, weapons are very straightforward and boring. If you have a Laser version of a weapon, you should use that over the conventional version. If you have the Plasma version, you should use that. The complexities are mostly limited to the question of strategic priority -that the resources going into gaining access to and then producing a given more advanced weapon might be better spent on some other project first. On the level of "Which weapon should I use?" it's not a choice at all. Laser is better than conventional, full stop, while Plasma is better than Laser, full stop.
Worse, even though you have a class-locked approach, with each class having its own primary weapon (Only the point of Supports, Rookies, and Assaults all having access to the Rifle set is an exception) the weapon differentiation is most important for breaking up the process of advancing all your troops to their best state. LMG-class, Rifle-class, and Mec-exclusive weapons are the worst about this, as the only differentiation between the classes if what units can wield them, what their base crit chance is, how much damage they have at a given tier, and how much ammo they have. However, the Shotgun being a "short range" weapon is only a modest exaggeration of the default truth that getting closer to the target is important to maximizing accuracy, placing it as also overly similar to the cluster of "medium range" weapons. Only the Sniper Rifle is fundamentally different from the other weapon categories -specifically that it cannot be fired after moving (Unless you have Snapshot...) and that it reverses the usual rule regarding accuracy, actually suffering penalties to accuracy as you close with the target.
Otherwise, though, weapons are an undifferentiated blob of meaninglessness that function almost exclusively as a way to control the rate at which the player's damage output grows. Critically, the remaquel lacks secondary mechanical concerns to add niches. Early in this post I commented on how "terrain damage" is set to 125 for all the Laser-tier and Plasma-tier weapons (Yes, this includes the Mec's weapons and the S.H.I.V. weapons) and it's an example of that lack of depth. If Heavy Lasers and Heavy Plasmas were better at destroying terrain than other weapon types (And, preferably, it was possible to manually target terrain) then they would have a distinct niche of being a way to punch your way through walls to open alternative routes to targets. Or, if Laser weapons had unlimited ammo, as they do in the original game, a player might consider running them on soldiers they intend to use ammo-intensive abilities on (eg Suppression), in spite of the inferior damage compared to Plasma weapons. That kind of thing.
In practice there's basically only one reason to ever consider running anything less than the most powerful thing available to you -captures. Since Aliens must be reduced to a fairly specific HP range that is, in fact, smaller than the damage of any Plasma-tier weapon except the Plasma Pistol to then be capturable, it's entirely possible to be in a situation where you want to take a shot to weaken a target so you can zap it with an Arc Thrower and all your main guns will kill the target if you take that shot.
Ah, but I specified main weapons for a reason. At most the capture mechanic is an incentive to consider keeping your Pistols weaker than Plasma. There's no reason to avoid running the strongest possible main weapon, unless for some bizarre reason you're running a team of nothing but Heavies. (You might think Mecs being mixed in would retain the problem, but they can just use Collateral Damage to soften up targets for a capture) Furthermore, the Arc Thrower can eventually be upgraded to widen the range of health in which a successful capture can be made, at which point just spamming Plasma shots will probably still work just fine.
So the weapon mechanics is one case where I feel the remaquel falls fairly flat.
Next time we cover armor and items.
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