B15c into B15d2, Impossible with mission restarts, Gaussian Red Fog, Aiming Angles, Commander's Choice, Hidden Potential.



I played into the end of 1st year and almost to tier 3 of MECs. So I'll write about problems and issues I've met with tier 1 and 2 of MECs and their classes.



General MEC-1 notes:

The opportunity window to run MEC-1s seems to be extremely more narrow than in B14. Firstly, meld costs prevent you from any kind of a "MEC rush", and at best you can have MECs half a month earlier or later depending on smaller factors. Here and below I use meld costs as a baseline because other resources costs can be adjusted via rebates, but meld costs are much less adjustable and meld acquisition rates are more steady.



Acquiring MECs in mid-August, I immediately noticed that I have no hopes of housing 2 MECs per mission (as I usually did in B14). The upfront meld costs are quite humongous: 2.5 MEC troopers per MEC suit (i.e. 5 troopers for 2 suits) is an absolutely minimal baseline to getting MECs to most missions. To actually have them for all missions would take 3.5-4 MEC troopers per suit. In meld, that equals to 80+80+(80/2)+30 = 230 meld for 1 suit, baseline scenario with all country bonuses applied, and not counting the cost of secondary systems and guns. By mid-August, I had ~350 meld collected, and ~100 spent on research/foundry projects, leaving me with 250. Which were completely spent building just one MEC suit and 2 MEC troopers.



Given that the aliens increased meld per can to 12 then 15 then 20 through September and October, and given that I aggressively hunted meld on all missions, I was able to get more MEC-related foundry projects done and 2nd suit ready for missions with 5 MEC troopers only by mid-October, 2 months after the first.



During all this time, instead of getting new tactical options, I found out that I just received a giant metal toddler in my squad, and had to literally babysit him. MEC-1 capacity for survival is absolutely horrible with only 8 armor HP+1DR, and their offensive power is terrible due to the rank loss and severe flamethrower nerf. One of my MECTs was sent to medbay via 3 drone hits (3+3+3 damage -> 10 days sick leave) the other one were shot for 11 damage by an outsider and got 18 days wound time. And only due to RNG luck no items were damaged in both cases, because paying repair meld bills would be additionally disastrous. There were several cases of mutons hitting MECs exactly for 8 damage (thankfully not more), and a berserker leader just eaten 19HP MEC alive in one case (mission restart saved him).



Getting Shaped Armor greatly helped survivability, because with 11 armor HP only cyberdiscs and mectiods had potential to 1-shot a MEC into sickbay. Getting MECTs to at least TSGT and finishing Jellied Elerium project helped on the offensive. However, even with all this MEC-1s felt like a liability and not an asset. In B14, *the* project to make MEC-1s quite useful was the Advanced Servomotors project, but in B15 -- not sure if it's all RNG luck or something else -- I was able to start it ONLY by November 30th, 2016. It took exactly that much time to obtain 3+8 mectoid cores and 4 of them came from Deluge mission. I'm not quite sure if I would be able to get it going in a campaign without Furies DLC.



I switched to tier 2 MECs by mid-December, only about half a month before I encountered Heavy Floaters and Muton Elites, which were quite deadly to MECs, and would've absolutely wrecked MEC-1s, should I still had them.



So,

The opportunity window to run MEC-1s is very small -- from late summer, which is the earliest realistic moment to get to MECs to the beginning of 2nd campaign year, where it would be safer to completely avoid MEC-1s and get straight to MEC-2s.

MEC-1s without extra foundry projects are plainly not worth their cost and will NOT give you more tactical options compared to regular soldiers.

MEC-1s baseline worthiness comes with Shaped Armor project, Advanced Servomotors project, and Jellied Elerium project (all together). Which are all gated by various extra means and will take additional time and even more upfront costs.

Compared to that, I have no outstanding issues with MEC-2s. They *do* give you more tactical options and are generally worth their (huge) upfront costs.



MEC Classes notes:

I can't help but notice that out of 8 MEC classes, 3 always fall below the usefulness line. It's a tendency which goes with all LW betas, although affected classes are different each time. In B15, there are 3 "I would not have a squad slot for them even if I had limitless resources" classes: