Who should I award medals to XCOM:EW?

Question

XCOM Enemy Within adds medals which you can award to your soldiers. Another question covers how you earn medals, but I would like to ask what things I should consider when deciding who to award a medal to?

• Are any medals particularly effective for some classes? Are any of the medals wasted on certain classes?
• Do any of the medals combo well?
• How do medals work when changing a soldier to be a psy op or a MEC?
• Is there an optimum time to award medals? I'm starting to be given the option to award them when my roster is full of squaddies and rookies; should I wait until they are higher ranked? Or do some have less benefit for higher ranked soldiers?

Answer 1

XCOM:EW has great factor for customization and purpose developed team members, so it would be hard to give straight answer what would be the best for your soldier, in synergy with the team. So best advice to give I think is to hand out medals as giving a further edge to an anyway well-trained soldier, so s/he can perform even better in that aspect.

Medals go with the soldier, even if turned into a MEC.

Best timing is contradictious in this manner, because you profit most often if you give out medals early, but you will be able to verify a concept only later (or be a good planner and stick to it (and not playing ironman), so you can hand them out early). As the soldiers level up, the medal will mean smaller difference to their skill.

So give aiming to sniper, dodge for ranger, HP/defense for tank, etc. If you go tinkering a bit, you can come up combinations that can get close to bend the general chances :)