I completely agree with you … there doesn’t seem to be a responsive ‘director’ in the game (thinking of Left 4 Dead / Alien Isolation). Ideally if you manage to keep your entire team alive and keep them equipped with the best stuff, you should be able to stay ahead of their ever increasing curve … while if if suffer expected losses you should be equal to the curve … and if you constantly have bad luck, you’ll be behind the curve.
Instead I think what we get is that you have to be at the top of your game at all times, there is no margin for error, and if you slip even a bit, you’re done for.
I think part of it comes down to a difference in strict simulation vs. responsiveness. In a strict simulation, the game (whatever it is, my thinking comes from mainly a tabletop RPG context) goes on without any response to the player … at month X it deploys alien Y, regardless of whether the player is ready for it. This is, arguably, realistic, as you can’t control the pace of what your enemy is doing … in a grand strategy game, just because you don’t defend the front doesn’t mean your enemy isn’t going to attack there. But much of this game is predicated on being responsive … if you employ certain tactics, it’ll develop units to counter that tactic … but then to stack that on top of a mechanistic, strict simulation seems to be overkill.
I’m not arguing that the game shouldn’t be smart or that it should play to the player’s weaknesses, but that having a system where it both counters your best strategies while blindly increasing difficulty at a regular pace, seems to be disjointed. If the difficulty increase tended to lag a bit, so that if you didn’t progress, it still would, so you wouldn’t ‘rest on your laurels’ … combined with an active response to your tactics, would make for a better balance.