Right, so now its either barbecue with samandrons or run, just run with xeno's, uh I mean chryssalids. Neat to know. I just had a base defense not long ago and it was snakemen. Luckily they had just the barbecue dinosaurs with them. I beat that mission without casualties.
I have now played my veteran game quite far, its half way september. I'm reaching laser & gauss weapons finally, I think I'm missing only one thing to get hyperwave decoder, I already researched the sentinel and so on. Some times the game still feels too easy. But the difference to experienced is randomness. I had one base defense on which I lost nine soldiers in the cleanup. Then I assaulted sectoid base which I won without any casualties... On most small missions I don't loose anyone, but it can all change really quickly... I didn't see much of that on lower difficulties.
I'm thinking of starting another game on genius perhaps.
I will still applaud the balance, every time I get something better, the aliens get harder to deal with. And no bugs, everything seems to work smoothly.
EDIT:
I'm in a bit of dead end with dealing with Mutons at the moment. I'm yet to reach anything more powerful than normal/alien laser rifle and I lack a good method on dealing with the green goblins close quarters... The problem is that I don't want to sacrifice all my experienced crews on dealing with Mutons. I did two tactical withdrawals in a row. There was a Muton base mission and I had to abort assaulting the battleship. I didn't take other casualties than the dog, but my rocket HWP was nearly knocked out. Aaand, they had those hovering rocket spitting lovelies around. I only saw one, but decided to pull out regardless. I gave it quite a hammering but it just kept on going. I wonder how much rockets and grenades will it suck before going down? I was considering a close HE pack assault but decided not to. Oh and it was a night mission too.
Then I aborted the recovery of the other supplyship. Securing the LZ would have been a total pain in the ass as RNG decided that I need to have at least one muton on each side and really close, too close to toss explosives around unless I would go kamikaze on them. I have been "stuck" on other research for a while, I guess I should go for all the neat weaponry ASAP. It seems that greenies are on the menu now all the time. The aliens sure have an stranglehold on me now unless I make drastic progress on research to get heavier weaponry. I think I'm now reaching the point where nearly all conventional weaponry will soon be obsolete.