Hey everyone!
I would like to take part in the discussion!).
Xilmi, this particular message is written for you, as I somehow believe you haven't played the XCF mod.
That far I can explain my experience in XCF as 3 months in total split within last 8 years, 6 playthroughs I guess. XCF is my favorite game ever, and I am a bit nerdy about it.
4 of them were made on superhuman and they were, at my perspective, easier than the same playthoughs on lower levels of difficulties. I will explain why below.
I would say that playing superhuman is often gets you to better results progress-wise.
1. More enemies = huge stat boost to crew at the end of the mission. Thus, doing next mission is easier.
2. More enemies = more score!! I have always gotten better score results on difficulty 5, even with worse outcomes. Like, more civilians dead etc. And more score = faster progress (more funding, more good random events).
3. More enemies = more arms on the battlefield. When it comes to the middle-game - more enemies = more loot. Like, you always have a chance that MiB powersuit guy gets unconscious, you save him and rip the powersuit off at the end.
4. More enemies = you have a better chance to capture the specific pawn alive you are doing this mission for. Early game, each cult mission is about capturing someone alive.
5. More enemies = stronger feel of tension and fun, but as we already had it discussed with Xilmi, quite subjective experience.
Also, I am the one who abused the mechanics like: camping, flashlight on/off, getting all possible stuff from MiB, getting all possible from promotions, getting alien alloys from UFO as early as possible etc.
Mechanics of the mod are quite simple, yet brilliantly polished for player to play on superhuman vs vanilla AI.
Mission-wise it is polished the way you should do next tier mission each month.
Eg. Apprehension in month one (get the cultist), safehouse month two (get lvl 2 cultist), .... base month 4-6 (get one more cultist, hahaha), HQ month 6-9 (kill them all). Otherwise, you are already beneath the progress and will likely fail getting control over the invasion.
There are three (or four, depends on how you count) layers of global enemies:
1. Four cults - earlygame (Church, Exalt, Red Dawn, Ninjas) to deal at month 8-9, at least, with one. Each having 5 steps, mean you not only have to do the mission correct, but also do the research of the cultist prior of the month, otherwise next mission will not spawn in the next month.
2. Advanced organizations with little different mechanics (Syndicate, MiB, Hybrids, Cyberguys), that give you bonuses (Syndicate = alien alloy munitions unlock, Cyborgs = advanced protection etc.) to deal with, at least by some middle point in year 2. While some tier 2 organizations are straight-forward in the progress of the story, others are random-based and need a lot of research.
3. Tier 3 - like lunar Nazis or terror from the deep aliens are sometimes quite stronger than aliens themselves.
4. Aliens with random race.
When it comes to mid game (after alien invasion), strict timing gets less punishing and the game fits to your research progress (most missions are bound to researches you make, except terror, random and storyline missions)
About soldiers cap: With Ironman/superhuman playthroughs I had most like 100-150 soldiers trained by the mid year 2, with like 100-150-200 dead. This is, somehow, the soft-hard cap, because human resources cost funds, not just for buying, but also for keeping them.
Not to tell, that each replacement for experienced unit costs a lot of the time (20-40 missions + at least half a year of training at base).
When getting to alien invasion, my troops usually getting vanished in increased manner because there is the gap between alien firepower and player's troops armor. Usually, hit from plasma weapon = death of the soldier. It is the game rules. You always get incremental.
Now, when you buy newbie soldiers and equip them same as veterans, they are on 10% of effectiveness of veterans with the same armor and equipment (shooting accuracy + moving speed + whatever). Dealing with 10000-15000 enemies by year 3 with 200-300 soldiers is what XCF is about. Please keep this in mind. Also, please keep in mind the craft design: it is almost always open-back until mid game, while even low-tier enemies possess incendiary grenades/dynamite/whatever.
With Lack of the resources forever until year 4-5, losing 50 veterans is gameover. And it is quite punishing experience for the player who spent real-time hours, because player loses it's investments (many many psychology here). Also, losing the craft is sometimes gameover too.
The missions are 95% times incremental over your current progress. Like I mentioned it previously, you will almost never get the mission where enemies are weaker than your crew.. And if you do get that type of mission - you are either on agent training (stat boost, or just score-loss prevention) of you are done and failed (close to score loss and restart).
Of course, there are certain types of missions, where your agents going in while being absolutely naked, like Syndicate HQ, facing 250 TU minotaurs and super-soldiers each of which worth 3 of your agents, Minigun-robots and a couple of bosses, of course. So, you have no armor at all and there's no chances to beat such mission with AI anyhow more advanced than vanilla AI.
That is why I believe that giving to AI some fun tweaks is not "arbitrary", it just matter of integration of the AI into major mods. The total experience with your AI over global mods should be even more entertaining (fun, strong, tense, non-ordinary, difficult but beatable), and I strongly believe it is achievable. The game is made for entertaining and joy, not versa!
