Of course they'll not stay around for long if you throw a grenade at their feet. You can arm a grenade before you throw it; cooking it before throwing it. You can also throw RGO grenades which detonate on impact; even less chance of survival.

You can quickly throw grenades from the pockets. Mind you, you get no experience to agility and the throwing skill if you don't throw it from the weapon slot.

Grenades can be thrown pretty far, but I use it to dislodge enemies from a position. If they're hiding behind cover I throw a grenade over. Even if it doesn't kill them, they're injured or shocked. Then I move in and shoot them in the nads. If they're in a building, I throw a grenade through the window. Grenades make your 7.62 life a lot easier, especially smoke grenades. The flash bangs just don't seem that effective, though.

If it wasn't for well placed grenades, some missions would be a pain in the ass :) Like the "get mah gold" series from BSM, where you spawn against a bunch of banditos and then have to kill them. Problem is - if the enemy squad get a chance to fire at you before you get to cover - it gets messy... SOOoooo... use a grenade or grenade launcher, enemy get shocked, you get your 3-4 seconds to retreat to cover :)

Also - I'm quite dissapointed about the no gain to skill via such throwing, but I guess game has no way to distinguish between item dropped on ground and grenade thrown somewhere. Pitty. Good news is - BSM allows for some point spending via level system :)

I just had a government soldier, who was holding a drago and bipod standing up and at ease, out-draw my guy holding a pistol straight out. My guy did a fast turn and before I even gave a fire order this guy put the drago to the hip and fired instantly. I was expecting the clock to stop and I would at least get to issue the order.

So I completely understand the OP's frustration. There are some strange uber enemies.

No mod involved.

The described situation is no cheat, bug or uber-KI. It´s the same thing your men doing when aiming at an enemy but cancel the shooting so the shooter stays at the "ready to shoot" state. It´s the same state as if you aim to a specific point. If one of your merc pops out of the cover directly into the sight of the enemy it costs him only 0.05 seconds to shoot.

OK I've done that before. Credit to the AI being more sophisticated than I thought. If he would have been holding a smaller weapon I would not have thought this unusual. I see now, makes me like this game even more.

That is when they actually aim at a point and totally acceptable. However, I've seen the AI do some really weird stuff with Fast Corners, where they're walking around, take a fast corner and immediately fire an accurate shot. It's really odd and frustrating.

I've noticed this too. A lot of the time they do the whole stupid peakaboo thing, where they just fast-corner towards you, then fast-corner back behind the wall. When the do just fast-corner then shoot it seems like they fire way quicker than they otherwise could.

After fast corner Ai/your mercs are already prepared and aiming, I've been able to land shots from hip in 0.05 secs after doing the fast corner multiple times, so this is "working as intended" IIRC.