Everything is better in RT in Apocalypse. They added the turn by turn play only to satisfy the majority of the fans...

Oh, is it ok if I raid Cult of Sirus because they seem to be helping the aliens and it's getting on my nerves and they don't supply anything so I was thinking it would be alright ?

Raiding CoS is absolutely justified. These punks worship aliens as gods and deserve to die. Besides, they will always be hostile to X-Com so a raid or two won't change anything for worse.

i always raid the 2nd strongest gang (psyke i think) from the get go... they can be a great cash giver... you can sell those drug thingies that they have laying around thier bases for 4500 a pop. they WILL attack your bases though so be prepared... you can also get weapons from them that arnt being sold yet

mini rocket launchers
plasma pistols
mines

pretty cool. just have to be ready to fight them

I wonder if it's possible to use those effectively in CoS raids...

...Do they affect androids? I never bothered to figure that out.

AFAIK, not. Droids have awesome PSI-defence, BTW.

Huzzah! Robots! Very, very useful due to their enormous strength and better shooting accuracy (to begin with, anyway).

Yes. As stated somewhere in this thread way back, robots are extremely usefull at the beginning of the game. They are extremely sturdy and less prone to have fatal wounds. More importantly, they are also very likely to survive a walking bomb explosion from point zero, which make them extremely usefull to save the hide of the other human members around.

Usually I always take 3 squads of 4 in a mission. On each squad I always try to keep one robot for a minimum.

When you then manage to keep casualties low, robots slowly become obsolete because a human develop way further than any robots are built to be.

If they raid my base, do I fight a base defense mission?

If so, should I set up Security Stations all around my access lift?

Yes.

It's hard to describe a good base defense without pictures but let me tell it like this: enemies often start in your hangars or at your access lift so you'd probably want to build a few of those around there.