Still wondering about the right balance of prerequisites wrt. shard guns, gauss tech and sonic weapons. Shard guns require a commander (incl. naga lord) so you essentially need to do a very large ship to get it. Gauss requires a navigator, which you might get from a large or very large ufo. Sonic requires alien implants (and some delay because you need the bionic lab), which you get from a very large ufo. It seems you get these very close together; now researching sonic in October and I just obtained gauss and shard a month or so ago. While these are not mutually exclusive (I especially like gauss sniper rifles), would it make sense to space them out a bit more. For example, make the relatively weak shard weapons available upon researching a squad leader or a paladin? It would make sense that upon interrogating someone using the weapons you would learn how to use them because shard guns don't require a biological connection.
Another balancing thing I noticed that I have only obtained one (1) M.C. reader in the game so far in October. Or maybe some of them were destroyed in gas cannon HE/ZR explosions. I think these should come up more frequently, to make it easier to identify which aliens you need to capture.
After watching EvilBL's SH/Ironman videos (success in the 12th attempt!), I retried my campaign (with saves).
This time I have focused on getting prerequisites right. I got Gauss weapons in June, because I got lucky with aquatoid medium ship (aquatoids also attacked a military base that month and I got an extra navigator there); earlier there also was an aquatoid ship terror mission, but I had to abort that as being way too difficult. So I suppose, based on typical RNG, you get gauss first and rather early (except if RNG screws you and you get gillmen and nagas only).
I got an aquatoid base attack and from there a commander in September. There was also a naga very large ship in September. This allowed access to the very underwhelming shart weapons (unless you want to use them to punch the armor).
Access to sonic tech had been delayed by the lack of examination room -> advanced bionics -> BIOLAB facility. I just got examination room (from the very large UFO?); I don't think I got this earlier from two alien artifact sites or other medium/large ships I had done. So, after BIOLAB is built, getting sonic in October.
So, with luck and focus on obtaining a navigator early, you can get gauss way earlier than sonic. My earlier comment about shard weapons still holds; they're essentially useless by the time you get them (they would be far more interesting if you got them about the same time as gauss, or even earlier). I wonder if the prerequisites of that could be toned down a bit (researching a medic and a squad leader, rather than a commander, perhaps?).
This time around there was a relatively early charcharodon + bio-drone assualt on military base, so plenty of access to bio-drones. This time I also had obtained a couple of M.C. readers elsewhere and I think I got a couple of more from the aliens assaulting my base.
Military base assaults and city terror missions are really nice and progress the early game research considerably, because you can use stun grenades to capture live aliens. At that point in the early game, your only real underwater option are harpoons with stun clips (fine with aquatoids but tricky or very challenging otherwise). You usually will be able to get stun rods a bit later and melee is always a bit of gamble on whether you get the alien you want inside the ship or not.
