Is there a story section in the forums?
Any tips on good mid game weapons? (I like the super shooty gun in particular)
What armor scheme does everyone use for general missions? (My answer is tactical armor and vests for Gals and weaklings, with the heavier armor types for my best gals, wiht two tactical hover suits for the nooks and crannies)
Any tips for starting mage equipment?
Story-section:
Dunno, the plot is pretty much explained in the in-game bootypedia.
Guns:
It's the question of what do you want to hunt down.
Grenade launchers and spare panzerfausts are great to have in the craft at any given time. Super-shooty gun ain't my taste since it can't do snapshots and requires a brave and strong user. The custom shooty gun feels better to have in comparision for almost every situation that doesn't involve shooting one target 18 times.
'Smart-weapons' research gives you the 'smart-rifle' if you like a rifle-weapon with 50 clip and 44 piercing damage to wreck havoc.
The death-blossom smg is a heavy sidearm and have API-rounds. While doing 42 piercing damage it is able to set the ground and units
on fire . Also has 2 additional ammo-types (chem rounds doing 23x6 chem damage to eat armor away while doing so with a x4 autoshot! With 'hellerium-munitions' in tier 3 you get HVAP ammo for 60 piercing damage ammunition. Only 10dmg short of a gauss pistol while having more utility. Get those!
Shotguns are lots to have, bring mammuth-chain shotguns. Does the dirty work against most opponents. Great for hunting dark ones and zombies.
You don't need too many sniper-rifles but they do work wonder in shooting 'blind' into smoked areas (either due to your own smoke-screen of fallout of explosives).
Bring your best grenades! Have plenty of healing items (either healing gel or a field surgery kit) and items to remove 'stun'-damage like a canteen or stimms.
Give everyone a
handle and give the 'good' ones heavy batons or anything else that does good 'daze' damage.
For lasers, bring the lasguns you can find and heavy lasguns to pierce super-armors. Optional you can buy some 'Super Self-chargers' from the bounty-prices as an 'alternative' since the damage ain't great, it can only snap twice and aimed once so you could use it for the
plasma bayonet in melee combat.
For plasma the early guns are quite 'poor' for the aim and scarce. All 'good' ones are locked and need the research 'unlock stellar empire weapons' to use and 'improve'.
Armor:
Heavy suits are just awesome and can withstand most sources of piercing damage while reducing choke-damage to 101% thanks to air-filters. It's tricky to use during night missions so you better bring 'sniper-armor' for the night-vision spotting. The heavy suit can later be build into the even better 'guardian-suit' so stack those heavy green armors.
Bring 'radiator-shirts' and 'fans' (the item purchable for virtually nothing and is great for training melee) to reduce heat-damage taken in hot-environments. Same for guardian-suit later too.
Mages:
As soon as you have some voodoo-skills trained bring rod of airlessness to 'choke' your victims for captures. Give a 'Master's Cane' only to hands of the rank 'baroness' or 'duchess'.
The casual stuff you can buy via black-market isn't that great to begin with and VooDoo is 'optional' to use. A good bullet to the face can get rid of the foe faster and saver than mental tricks.