I feel like MECs are more important as you come out of summer 2015, because you start running into more strong enemies or packs of things you want dead or under control in the coming turn and the easiest way about it is walking a MEC up and flaming them and forcing some of them into a panic (e.g muton elites, 6+ chryssalid packs). You can MAYBE skimp and keep a few lasers elsewhere but you'll be doing very little damage soon unless pulse comes up or you play smart.Ĭlick to expand.Alien Mechanized units also drop alloys as long as you can recover the corpse (no killing blows w/ explosives) heavy and regular floaters give a few but the real and big mechanized units can give ~12 or so. If you plan on doing an earlier alien base you want gauss/carapace though. I'm at April 2016 now and I'm still only transitioning into pulse (this is what happens when you don't have captures to interrogate) and aegis. the gauss long rifle) or has a purpose to it. gauss tier is still good until the end of the game (esp. Railgun and recoiless rifle eventually get supplanted by better weapons (railgun and pulse lance have same min damage) but really only in the plasma tier, which is hard to start on if you've seen how the plasma tier works. You can skip gauss in the sense that you can try to skip the standard rifle/SAW/LMG stuff if you think you're okay in the tactical end but advanced gauss unlocks the GLR (sniper rifle w/ HEAT ammo perk), grenade launcher, railgun (for MECs) and the proxy mine launcher and recoilless rifle (rocket launcher), which are all great. Literally my first capture was a Muton Elite, then an Ethereal. Don't be like me and only start capturing in Dec 2015 when Elites and Ethereals showed up.

Xcom long war gene mods