Your scientists want to use this stuff to genetically modify your soldiers, giving them magic eyes and brains and legs and noses (except not the last one). Meld gives you access to two different types of upgrade trees, one recommended by your engineers and one recommended by your scientists. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a bounty. You’ll have to scour some maps in small groups rather than sticking together and carefully covering each other. You’ll have to make mad dashes over to it, exposing your soldiers and leaving them in vulnerable situations. What this means is that the usual XCOM pace of “move very slowly from cover to cover, inching forward, making sure to reload all weapons after every shootout” doesn’t work if you ever want to get Meld. Secondly, these canisters are (for an equally inadequately explained reason) rigged to self-destruct after a certain number of turns, and you don’t know how long you have until you’ve seen the canisters. The problems surrounding this are twofold: firstly, you don’t know where on the map the Meld canisters are. One of these makes more sense than the other. Genetically modified soldiers have no sleeves. MECs are huge, and talk in robotic monotones.
