Hi Ivan! Just caught up with the few last episodes, had been unable to watch for a while. Great job as usual. There was some suspense over the choosing of the potential IronMan. I was thinking "Come on! Scroll down a bit.. here's a Heavy with decent TUs and not much else..!! Pick me!".
If you ever give it another try, I would like to volunteer! My soldier has all you need (TUs & Strength enough for a lot of grenades), and nothing to be wasted (got bad reactions, bad firing accuracy, bad melee accuracy) so he seems to be a good candidate. If you get another small scout, you can shoot them down safely with a cannon, no need to hope that they will land too!
Regarding pistols:
The laser pistol is more like a shotgun. It's really crappy at range (worse aimed shot accuracy at 68% instead of 78%-85%), but you gain an auto-shots. 28% of soldier accuracy looks small, but with 3 shots it can be pretty good up close. That makes it a good breaching weapon since you know you will be at short range any ways. They're great for soldiers with low accuracy (the small FA means they lose less in absolute accuracy than a high FA soldier) and it lets them shoot away with infinite ammo until they manage to hit something.
Comparatively, the plasma pistol is really the "master weapon" better performance up close with the autoshot at 50%, about equal to a service pistol over long range (twice as many TUs to shoot, twice the damage, a bit more accurate).
So scout and snipe should still work: Rookies in the front with lasers, marksmen in the back with plasma. Rookies first when breaching, of course, that's common courtesy! (and makes a lot of sense, weapon/soldier value wise)
Cheers!
