The game gets after a while unplayable. All of a sudden we have primitive weapons and extreme only difficulty level action everywhere. This is not what the guys in the blog are showing. All thgis for difficult y1 level? Please. That´s crap.
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So the trick I suggested you didn’t work?
EDIT: Ooops it was another player.
I assume level 1 is the easiest.
I did start with this level and indeed you get a sudden difficulty spike once you get your first lair.
At the same time you get Sirens and Chirons. And if you are unlucky, you get the “explosive” Chirons (with wings on their back).
Also, Arthrons and Tritons start getting more HP and armor.
Something that can help, is replacing all “assault rifles” (Ceres) by “shotguns” (Mercy). For this you first need to do the “Triton autopsy” research.
To deal with Siren, blow their head off. It removes all their willpower so they only have melee attacks left. They have a sense of self preservation so as long as you don’t come too close they will stay hidden behind some cover and not bother you much more.
Chirons that send worms are not a problem, they will fire 3 worms 5 times then do nothing. It’s a bit annoying but you can bash the worms easily with one guy.
Chirons that send goo are more annoying, you should take cover inside a building to avoid being locked into place.
“explosive” Chirons … shouldn’t happen on rookie (but they do), it’s an abomination. Find cover or they will tear your body apart if not kill you.
For your first play-through you may want to use cheesy tactics by using some clearly broken builds. Like 100% stealth infiltrator, sniper/heavy using rage burst, berserker using grenade launcher with armor break…
So at least you go to the end and see the story once. Then you can try again and swear not to use those builds and beat the game.
It’s not just that, it’s:
- Chiron / Siren(s?) before day 20
- Or Chiron at 1 month and 20 day.
Same difficulty level.
There are explosive Chiron at Easy, I have seen first month of Legendary not as Hard than Easy for enemies aspect.
Easy add a ton of elements to make the life easier but not all are making it easier, I noticed:
- Starting rookies with better stats.
- Recruits have great equipment, you have to buy them all that’s the problem but the price of it is perhaps lower. It means that death at Easy are still a burden to manage because of hire price much higher than at Legendary.
- I suspect some missions rewards are partially scaled for difficulty, but not scavenging missions.
- Many missions (all?) add few positions where move through it restore a bit of Will for all team.
- There’s more but right now I forgot.
Still the point is reach level 7 with some soldier, or 6 for some builds to manage the first big difficulty spike, as explain pantolomin.
And don’t feel ashamed to believe you’ll use exploit, it’s only his opinion, my opinion is Easy difficulty can go wild too, and even with those solutions the game is almost as hard than XCOM Veteran.
One thing which helped me Very much: Spend much of your ressources in Training Camps at your second Base. So find a second Base, buy soldier and give them a good Training. Build 3 Training Camps at First and then up to 5 or 6. Your soldiers will geht more exp than During a fight. And dont fight the fights which are just for ressources they are not worth it and the enemy gets very fast very good. Better train your soldiers in your second Base.
Furthermore dont spend your ressources on a second manticor. Better: Steal one right to the beginning of the game. And After some hours of Real time steal a second one. Those Missions are not really difficult… and dont forget to Recruit new soldiers from time to time and bring them to your Trainings Base. On easy all soldiers are well equipped. After some hours you have to produce your weapons for them as you cant produce the special ammo in the beginning…
I startet with this strategy and After 15 hours of gameplay the game is not easy but iam not afraid of chiron or scylla. Only the bomb chiron is hard stuff when there is no building to hide.
Hope this helps a little bit.
@pantolomin
The explosive chiron were the First which appears in my game on easy. That was hard. After them came the Worms and currently the goo chiron. (On easy difficulty). Now they have 860HP. Hope this is max.
Yes, unfortunately the difficulty does spike nasty early on, one of my main complaints has been that ‘easy’ is not easy at all. You can use ‘broken’ builds to get by if you want - the two main ones are a rage burst sniper and a infiltrator, google them for more info.
Unless you’re desperate to play, I’d wait for a balance patch which I honestly don’t think will be to long coming.
Haven’t seen more HP for them, but in my “Easy” play-through they were also the first ones I got.
It’s not because I find them cheesy that I don’t think he should use them.
Using them makes the first campaign easier and you get to see the end, understand more end game stuff and how enemies work.
Then during your second play-through you can decide as I did to not use some builds. But if you have fun with those builds, don’t let me get in your way.
(well except for the fact that I’m advocating for limiting them, and the Pandas at the same time - a balance)
Wish: Explosive Chiron should be the last one you face, preceded by goo Chiron. You should only get worm Chirons in the beginning.
Wish: you shouldn’t have to face multiple Sirens (5 on Rookie) on the first meeting.
Ok perhaps I didn’t noticed well, then I mean recruits attributes start lower. But I think your start team too.
Another significant difference, you start with 6 not 4.
EDIT: But the auto scaling becoming wild can make it all a bit insignificant.
They do, I meant Chirons, I was replying to @Leanproduction
Oops. 
This might sound silly but I found the level up from the easiest level to be easier than the easiest.
Maybe because you have a better grasp on the mechanic of the game and how to bend it.
I did too (even-though I got more explosive Chirons than in my whole rookie campaign) and attribute it to the fact that I changed my tactics a bit.
More than like, but I am positive my soldiers shoot straighter. 
Well let´s see if the software is “normal”. I´ve got on level 1 and relative early syreens with 850HP or chirons with 1200? well later came the scyla with 8500 HP. this must be a bug. well however I´m playing now as hero and the numbers seem “normal” there
Lol, in fact even if difficulty can go wild, there’s still multiples differences at Easy and Normal compared to Legendary, so probably Hero too.
For me it’s not clear, but some players argue players death influence the auto scaling and even manipulate it by doing regular level 1 recruits sacrifices to the gods. So if you sustain more death at Hero, this could lower the scaling more than if you perform too well at a lower difficulty.
It’s something they need fix, adapt the auto scaling to each difficulty level.
That said there’s still plenty differences, like less xp to level up, more rewards, better starting attributes for first soldiers and haven recruits, start with 6 soldiers, no driver for vehicles, slower corruption level progression, better factions self defense against aliens, more, and the list is even quite impressive for Easy, even if Easy can still go wild and become very hard.
One small positive of the system is when you go wrong and chain problems, the difficulty low down this is giving you a little break to recover.
EDIT: At least I know already the plan to prepare the final, sacrifice 10 young soldiers and 5 Mutogs, burn a few vehicles, fake save a few Havens and let them burn into ashes, attempt do some Lairs and flee like a coward. After all that careful preparation I’ll kick ass to final boss, easy peasy.
I have put the game down for now and will be waiting on a patch. Two things caused me to stop playing. 1 The difficulty spike and 2 the constant freezing that has started up again on the aliens movement stage.
I’m looking forward to starting up again when these things are fixed.
Yep I am with you. The enemies are ridiculous. There is no strategy in just running around with a 1000 armor and hitpoints and face tanking entire squads of enemy fire. Yet this is what the enemies do. You lay up effective overwatch and pick your shots and it doesn’t matter, they tank the hits and return fire killing off your squadmates.
Flanking a enemy 3 or 4 times should result in their deaths…because flanking leaves you exposed. The enemy doesn’t have to worry about being exposed because they don’t die.
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