How do you/should you adjust your multi-table tournament strategy in the middle-to-late portions of the tournament when remaining players are required to ante vs. tournaments that simply continue to escalate the blinds?

Maybe this is a regional sort of thing, but many of the live tournaments in these parts don't use an ante by the players. The blinds simply continue to double (roughly) every 'x' number of minutes and that's all there is to it. By comparison, most online tournaments feature an ante which kicks in at some point and "forces" the action a bit more. Rather than taking a hit from your stack twice out of every 10 hands or so, the ante takes chips from your stack every hand and makes sitting back and waiting prohibitive.

I always feel like you can afford to play tighter when there's no ante, but then comes the trouble that when you do enter pots, there's less money in them. (although I guess on a per-lap basis playing with or without an ante is irrelevant; the money in the pot before anyone bets equals the cost to go once around the table in both instances).

I'm just curious what changes that small detail has on others' play. I'm particularly interested in a discussion of how the difference ought to impact play in short-handed situations that occur in the final 3 tables or so as I think this is where the differential in structures is most pronounced in its effect on play.