with your experience, would playing on targeting behavior 2 with advanced cover/accuracy mod be too easy?
No. I'm not a pro at this game by any means but I could easily beat vanilla Super-Human while I struggle really hard with BAI enabled.
It really is a lot harder than what you'll be used to!
There is certain things that make it easier. Most people who use advanced cover/accuracy mod also enable extender-accuracy. And extender accuracy makes the game easier due to shifting a lot of power towards explosives. In vanilla the aliens rarely have grenades, especially early on. So you are nerfing their shooting-weapons with these settings while you can compensate by using grenades.
Since you mentioned something about TFTD, however, that's not so much the case because the AI also gets a lot of grenades early on that they can use.
Using Cover-mod without also using extender-accuracy, however does not make it significantly easier. Maybe a little bit.
Im looking for a challenge harder than superhuman (I do not use PSI) but allow them to use it normally.
This is actually available as mod in BOXCE. It's the mod called Brutal-AI: It disables the research-option for the PSI-weapons but you can still use labs to filter your units for who is good defensively against PSI. I made this both for Vanilla and TFTD. In TFTD it changes the score-threshold from -300 to -500 to make the first 2 months a little easier even because I could otherwise never make it past them. Terror-missions in TFTD against Brutal-AI really are very hard.
otherwise its just like in his demo video. 4 soldiers in cover turkey shooting mutons in a field
so what do you think? is it just too advantageous to be able to camp behind walls and skyranger legs and makes it too easy?
The situation you saw in the demo-video will not happen when you play on Aggression 0 or 1. Aliens will not be "in a field" if they can help it. They will always seek out cover and either end their turn after dealing a lot of damage to you or in cover. They will usually stay in buildings or their UFO and wait for you to be out in the field or leave your cover.
whats the difference between 1 and 0? i planned on using 0 initially with no knowledge
Brutal AI usually has 3 phases in their actions. A seeking-phase, an attacking phase and a repositioning/hiding phase.
The attacking-phase works the same regardless of aggressiveness: If they know about something they can attack, they will do so.
The seeking- and repositioning-phases differ between all aggressivenesses:
3 has no repositining-phase. They will spend all of their TUs for seeking and attacking. And if they don't find you, they will just seek.
0, 1 and 2 have a concept of cover. However, "2s" concept of cover is highly flawed and doesn't have any foresight. Just currently not being seen is good enough for them.
They will reserve TUs of their seeking-phase to go back to what they consider cover and spend at the very most half of their TUs for seeking.
The difference between 0 and 1 is what they do in their hiding/repositioning-phase:
0 will try to preserve as many TUs as possible to go back to cover. So if they think they are already in cover, they will remain where they are after the seeking-phase.
1 will try to get closer to the enemy while remaining in cover.
The difference in practice is, that on 0, aliens will remain mostly where they are spawned, as long as they seem the location save. They look around some corners and then end their turn. On 1, they will move towards "where the enemy is". So they will mostly go near the UFO-doors so they are better positioned to attack you on the next turn.
0 is a more vanilla-esque-feeling. You must search the enemies more because they will be more hidden. Chances are higher you'll walk in to reaction fire but you are more likely to have the numerical advantage in fire-fights.
1 is imho the overall strongest setting/best compromise when it comes to playing-strength. They still want to be in good cover but they want to position in places that allow them to attack you on their next turn. It is not uncommon that a soldier they spotted will be attacked by 5 or more aliens that are all in positions from where they can peek out, shoot and hide again. The disadvantage for them would be that they also give away a lot of their own positions that way.
So it's hard to say if 0 or 1 is really harder. I'd say it depends.
Oh, and if it isn't difficult enough for you, you can enable "Bug hunt mode for AI".
The AI's ability to find your units on their turn and find good cover is much better when they actually know (via cheating) where your units are on the minimap as opposed of having to make educated guesses.
