MrToad

Poor Elliot. Even when they recapture a town, he still gets whacked. "Elliot, you idiot!" is still a family catchphrase, and his final appearances almost made me feel sorry for him. As for Ira, she can get to be reasonably competent without too much effort. My favorite was training Flo up to the point where she could start taking out redshirts. It was worth the time. And Biff was always great in a firefight. I really enjoyed the MERC choices, for the most part, although the cost becomes a bit steep at the end of the list; very worth it, though.

In the early going in JA2, when money is tight, I like Barry, Grizzly, Fox, Leech and either Igor or Grunty plus the IMP guy. Way back with JA, I would often start with Ivan (affordable then!), Larry (since Fox wouldn't join Day1), Grunty, Vinny and usually Ears for his magic ear. Kaboom was always my favorite explosives guy (other than Smoke), but he does have his drawbacks. Management for JA2 was different from JA, since you had more money up front and you didn't have mercs who would hold off until you had proved yourself. Also, helicopter delivery costs (in and out) in JA were antihistamine money. Not a problem in JA2. I don't know how it's going to work in this one. In this one, I don't know what I can afford, but Grizzly, Fox and Wolf make a great trio (or so Fox says, anyway), Ice and Hitman are easygoing, and Leech (if available) is amazingly cheap for his skill. Snake and Mouse never looked good for their cost, but I did use Igor for the same sort of approach, so who knows. I have to say that I've never used Meltdown or Red but maybe this time..

Not that it matters, but I started with JA back when it was the hot new game, and have vastly enjoyed the successors (some more than others, of course). I've also played the hell out of XCom starting with the first one, as well as the majority of the other games mentioned here, So I have a bit of experience with the topic. Personally, I am looking forward to the "no visible CTH" implementation. Every new version has given me something new to sink my teeth into and although some of them (looking at the "back in action" ones especially, but also Wildfire) haven't proved to hold my interest for long, they were interesting and enjoyable efforts to get to know. I'm expecting at least as much from this, and hopefully more. It may prove to cut into my JA2 1.13 playing time, but if it does, I've gained a lot. I'm not going to comment on the silliness going on here other than to say that I am sometimes embarrassed by the stupidity I showed in some of my early postings on Usenet, and I learned the hard way to restrain some of my more intemperate urges. I guess I'm not alone in having to learn that. We were all kids once, though. To get back to the topic, though, I find the burst fire comments interesting, and perhaps I've missed it, but I didn't notice one of my main reasons for bursting - when hitting may be hard, a burst, even if each bullet has a lowered chance, may be the best way to go. As with a shotgun shell, if you put enough bullets out there, something is likely to get hit. As for the "miss the body part. hit another body part" idea, I'm interested, but I wonder if that might add more complexity at the cost of fun. I have no idea, myself, but I'd be willing to see how it works. I wasn't a big fan of the LBE madness in v1.13, but now I spend hours fine-tuning each merc's gear. You never know until you try it. And every single game I've played has had its various pos's and neg's. I'm just standing here waving my money, waiting for the release date, and it honestly doesn't really matter what Devstream comes out between now and then. I just hope that it's as good as the 1.13 implementation, but if it isn't - if it's only as good as JA - that's good enough for me. I still remember with great pleasure "This is highly irregular - oh, well." And while I don't expect to hear Smoke taunt the opposition with "I like what you done with your hair, eh?", I'm, sure what I do hear will still make me laugh. "That was close!" "Wasn't all that close" "That was close; I don't plan on missing"