Well that funny overpowered sniper is nice, when they survive long enough to receive squad sight. And then they are immobile, which in current version opens them for stealth attacks. In original, they required field of fire, which was quite hard in some locations. Snipers that can move and fire, were actually able to hit something and most importantly had reaction shots after movement, which helped immensely (with theirs survivability).
I'm currently at phase when I discovered cyberdisk can crit behind light cover and aliens can use grenades, and I lost heavy with cute name and only heavy who could move fast and do suppression. So I'm down to 3 experienced members. I play on ironman with one member who is supposed to be in every mission and is chief of whole XCOM, to make it more interesting and difficult, it creates interesting situations when it's basically half squad member. That's one Assault. Then I have one heavy "doomsday" specialized with shreder rocket and training against mecha, he was also in that mission. And one sniper with squad sight "shadow". And that's all experienced squad members after 3-4 months. On the other hand I didn't lose single country, and finally have enough satellites to have some money, and enough engineers so satellites are cheap.
In original floaters were not a joke, when they went behind and prepared for a crit, and in front were 6 mutons. It's obvious the charge was out of question and they shouldn't be left behind at all. Similarly to thin men. Actually current problems with thin men are because they BOTH increased health by one, AND gave them plasma rifle. They should either increase health (probably better), or give them plasma rifle. Or they could reduce theirs appearance to two, not swarms as always. I don't remember if I was played on classics, but they moved 3 thin men around my two survivors... Obviously one thin man survived to kill one of survivors.
Well EW is more difficult than original, and squad is much longer in only 4. In fact it's bit mistake. A SHIV should be given a free slot (and shown as carried by another plane). Actually SHIV is quite convenient, with enough engineers losing a SHIV is just a price of two recruits, which when gives chance for rookies to improve is far affordable price.
Otherwise EW is quite a mess as it depends on easy missions in the beginning and trying to put up satellite ASAP.
In addition I found it has rather too few downed craft missions. In UFO:ET it was main source of dead bodies, aside of kicking alliens from a country, losing the country, kicking alliens from the same country, losing the same country, kicking aliens from the same country... getting money for finally enought decent fighter aircraft and kicking and keeping aliens out bit more reliably. Base attack missions were always bloody. Base defense mission were always iffy and finished with something like three soldiers standing. Or with "No that absoutelly massacring heavy weapon platform, I saved for it 2 months." Of course few were killed by it, and the killing alien exposed himself, thus was killed without risk. I had also base defense mission with really touch aliens, two days after I manufactured two rifles that could kill them and had only three clips for them. So one rifle to one person with clip n 0, second rifle to another person with clip n 1, and spare clip to better shooter. And I tried to avoid burst fire and hit with every shot.
The lack of inventory really hurt the game. Inability to pick up Medikits and some artificial restrictions screwed up with narrative.
