I play pinballs at high difficulties. It doesn't really say much about X-Com Files.
The FMP is just expanded vanilla with very little changes to how it plays. You can't really make it much harder than vanilla, unless you make the enemies stupidly overpowered, which is neither good nor creative design. The XCF is a completely different game, with lots of new facets and mechanics, so it canmot be compared at all to vanilla.
What's hard to get?
Anyway, it was THE PLAYERS who convinced me to change the alien retaliation from X-Com base assault to air domination. They didn't like defending their base twice a month, and I agree.
About difficulty it was answer mostly to JustTheDude, who was kinda suggesting we are noobs etc... without getting what are we complaining about.
I have no problem with player base air blockade, i even like the idea. Problem is that at superhuman difficulty it turns into player SCREEN blockade, at thats just wrong.
Is it possible to adjust it somehow? Ok, if you send less UFOs, it decrease difficulty... so what about instead of sending 150 small harmless fighters send like 50 medium fighters? Medium fighters damaged my Storms in like 50% of fights, caused many hours or even day of repairs. Or few more battleships, in general send less but stronger UFOs? That small harmless fighters is also kinda pointless, its just req huge missiles managment, becouse it requires too much storage, so you have to keep rebuying like crazy (if you use those when swarms starts ofc, but with missles your craft is invincible to small fighters, so only refuelling/reloading time limits you.).
I just pointed out that superhuman difficulty is broken to almost unplayable state, so i was quite surprised by angry reactions i received...