Strategy
Simulation speed: Degrades when real components replace the functional blocks. The simulation speed depends on simulation engine, the simulation algorithm, the number of gates in the design, and whether the design is primarily synchronous or asynchronous
Low cost cycle based simulation is a good compromise. Since it can not test physical characteristic of a design, event driven simulator may be used in conjunction.
Cycle based simulators and emulators may have long compilation. Hence, not suitable for initial tests that needs many changes.
Event driven and cycle based simulators have fairly equal debugging environments, all signals are available at all times. Emulators on the other hand, require the list of signals to be traced to be declared at compilation time