Not at all! It only requires boosting all weapons damage by something like 250%. Oh, and aliens' HP too. ![Tongue :P](https://openxcom.org/forum/Smileys/default/tongue.gif)
Actually its defeating the purpose of playing a mod which is based upon difficulty.
May be you are right, but I balance that with surprise effect (I don't know what I can expect during an year), without any saves to revert an action and random unlucky situations like 200% damage.
In attachment
1) Two field medics.2) A guy with M79 missed and hit to my skyranger with full of ammunition...
I usually do not have dedicadet Medics, no reason to have too, once you get normal Medikits half of the Squad gets one, the other a Motionscanner and you are set to go.
I actually also do not advise useing the OpenXcom builtin Ironman mode, there might be still bugs in the Mod, which i do not have found so far.
They can be small stuff which is easy to fix and does not break savegames, but you only know what they are once they occur.
It is much better to enforce your own ironman, and still have the possibility to reload another save if such a bug occurs.
Otherwise, the key to actually succeed in the early groundbattles, especially in _January, is useing 1 tank as a scout. A large proportion of aliens will carry Plasma Pistols,
which only do minor damage towards tanks, if at all. Also you get a Tank/Cannon and a Tank/Rocketlauncher for free, its sitting in the Storage.
The Tank/Cannon actually is really good early on, since it fires High Explosive Rounds and has 3 Shot Autofire. All early games enemies will basically fall to its fire, exception are Cyberdiscs. Even vs Chryssalids it does good work.