Tough! But why would you bring a team of only 5 people to a Lair mission? They don’t have time limit so you could bring some more snipers to try and disable one of the Chirons at turn 1.
To be honest seeing 2 artillery Chirons on a Lair mission I would probably just evac =)
I’m not getting dragged into this discussion, but for the record I strongly disagree.
Neither do I, TBH. I didn’t want to do any of these things 20 years ago either, mind you.
Anyway, don’t you agree that it would be helpful to know how difficulty in PP actually works, so that we wouldn’t have to engage in guesswork and endlessly discuss among ourselves our subjective notions of what difficulty is?
The question posed by OP is if it is possible to make a game that would be challenging and fun to play for both old school fans of X-com and new gamers who perhaps prefer more casual experience. What would need to be changed for that?
How “difficulty” is currently made in game is not too relevant to me personally because it clearly doesn’t work. I do agree with you that whatever drives potential change in difficulty should be in some way communicated. Are there are triggers that you have control over? Is it something that just happens on its own overtime? These are nice things to know for new players. Or for everyone if these changes are dynamic in nature.
Sorry for dragging discussion off topic 
Absolutely agree with the OP. Here’s what I posted on a different thread:
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This sums up a lot of my problems with PP, aside rrom lack of variety and actual adaptations.
This doesn’t feel like turn based tactics. It doesn’t feel even remotely like tactics or strategy. This is a game of candy crush. You just realize this track is purples, this track is greens, and if I flip these two to line them all up, everything on the screen explodes. There’s no setting things up for future returns, really, no real out maneuvering to be done. It’s less tactical than a game of tetris.
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As an old school gamer who started on a Vic20 and had a family who adopted PCs very early on, I get what you mean about the differences, but I think Snapshot has betrayed their old school roots. What I expected from the old school designer handling this was something a lot more deep and complex that relied on the PLAYER and the player’s ability to outwit the game. Not giving everyone huge amounts of superhuman abilities that allow them to level half a maps worth of enemies in a single round. I expected to see a lot more passive skills like Bobbo got himself a +5% aim passive and a increased dmg from the high ground… Looks like Bobbo is getting the sniper rifle. Not, oh look, Jim is a sniper who can run 18.6 miles in one round, and then use his super sniper eye to unload a tank Cannon 6 times into every enemy within a half mile radius. It’s like they took all the flashiest and most ridiculous parts of modern games and paired it to a skeleton that cut out all the best parts of old school gaming while keeping the more annoying aspects of it instead.
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Players of ADOM and Unreal World, both Roguelike, are no way typical gamers, woo seriously…
What? Some typical players play those games blindly?
Sigh, but anyway, again I totally disagree, ADOM follows the tradition of totally abstruse logic in classic Roguelikes, even with manual in hand, the total weird logic of rules make it very hard, thanks more modern games gave up on that absurdity. But because of that, no players comment on those games are no way typical because those games are totally atypical, well at least ADOM, didn’t played much Unreal World perhaps it is more based on common sense.
Gee, I’ll check, hard to believe, Xenonauts is just an indie game (with a high prod value for such indie game).
A day you’ll have to learn that only very few people are a genius like you are.
It does - just not in the way we old school gamers would like. The OP skill combos are all created precisely because PLAYERS have figured out how to chain them and outwit the game.
Not had a chance to try them yet, but looking at the latest patch notes, I think Jim may now only be able to run a quarter of that distance and spray bullets all over the place. 
But I get what you mean. I deliberately avoid the exploits, because I find them mind-crushingly boring, and so I can see that under the hood there’s a very good tactical game here, because I don’t abuse the system and therefore I HAVE to play tactically. But the fact that the system can be abused - and in some players’ POV has to be abused to survive (it doesn’t: I’m surviving fine and I don’t abuse the system at all) - has to be a bad thing.
In BB5, I remember arguing against those who said that if I didn’t like the way Dash was so OP I didn’t have to use it, but I should leave it alone for those who liked it. My point was that it shouldn’t be up to ME to limit my play style just to make the game balanced - that’s the job of the devs.
And that’s where we are at the moment. Pre-patch, this game was frankly broken - any game which gives a player the ability to end a mission in 1 turn with 1 or 2 men is broken in my book, I mean come on: where’s the challenge and what’s the point? But like Gauthel I’m hoping that if we keep plugging away with feedback, we’ll eventually get something that is better balanced.
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As I said before, the problem with PPs difficulty is not really so much about Old gamers VS New gamers. There are old gamers and new gamers of different kinds and various degrees of causalness and seriousness. Maybe it’s more a question of tolerance level? I don’t like bugs, or obscure mechanics, but I’m more willing to put up with them.
The real problems with PPs difficulty in my opinion are that 1) It’s unpredictable, and 2) easy is not actually really that easy, apparently. I can’t say much about 2 because I always play on normal.
As to 1), here is the problem:
In the original XCom and FXcoms, and many other TTBSGs with a strategic overlay, the difficulty curve is easy to perceive - as game time goes by, the enemies get tougher. You don’t have the 2nd tier weapons by the time you need them? Tough luck. But at least as a player you know exactly what is going on and what you are doing wrong.
In PP I still have no idea what it is going on. Is it because I’m completing story missions? Is it because I’m over performing according to some hidden standard? If so, am I supposed not to pursue story missions and not do tactical missions so as to avoid getting graded? What does any of this has to do with the promised Panda evolution?
So the first thing and which I believe would address many of the complaints would be communicate to the players somehow what makes the enemies stronger.
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For tactical games, that there’s some ultra powerful tool is certainly rare or build along a very long time of play (not learning). For RPG all have op holes, all no exception, it’s just too complex party building with too many choices and possibilities.
For some RPG players if combats are boredom and repetitive because they rule them, it’s fine, the reward is the efficiency of their amazing build.
I’m not in that mood, it means that avoid OP holes in RPG is a reflex, it’s instinctive and automatic. If I ever use one, I just stop and experiment something else after some fun with abusing the system.
If unlike you I didn’t banish old RB it’s because for me it never been an OP tool. But yes, OP tool, skip them instead of abusing them, that’s how get the fun, smart way.
But it’s not that simple:
- Some players are about performance and do a challenge, it’s the dev that need setup the challenge, tune it yourself is like making the game yourself, it’s not gaming anymore.
- Another problem is some players are obsessed by optimization, max efficiency, and they just can’t resist to OP holes, even if after they are bored by resulting combats.
OP holes can be ignored, OP hole can’t be avoided in RPG, but humans aren’t clones, and for some players OP holes achieved easily will break their fun, and they don’t expect it from a tactical game. Yeah that’s life, I have more chance on that, but it’s just me, and you.
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My personal view is that the majority of the issues in this game stem from the attempt to introduce dynamic difficulty, a bizarre concept that actually punishes the player for playing well and leads to a totally unpredictable difficulty ramp. The more traditional way of upping difficulty at set trigger points, whether that be time or at set points in the story missions, is predictable and easy to balance. Firaxcom did this perfectly, you knew that if you didn’t do the appropriate research and kit your team out with appropriate equipment by the time you reached a certain point, you were going to have a really tough time.
Dynamic difficulty algorithms are the sort of thing that sound good in theory, but in practice they are not fun and make balancing the game to account for possible extreme outcomes a total mess. I hope that this is the first and last game I play that implements this type of system.
That seems be a side effect currently, but is it really targeted, or is it impossible to do avoid it, that’s another problem.
If you let it go wild, then auto scaling, you play well it gets harder, you play bad it gets easier. But I don’t see why it must scale down. No scale down, you can’t beat it, play a lower difficulty level.
The problem is this involves to tune and define a difficulty scaling along the campaign, then despite having an automatic system you can’t use the system to correct errors of difficulty scaling of the campaign.
If auto scaling based on players results is rare, at reverse, difficulty scaling of a campaign is no way rare. It’s the infamous RPG enemies scaling, based on level. Except that with thought at a lot of design and tuning effort bad aspect can be controlled. For example met a Dragon at level 1 and it’s like combat a rat, easy fix is use min scaling down.
So the problem of auto scaling is complicated, is it unsolvable, hardly.