Difficulty (Long War)
From the Long War FAQ:
I'm fairly new to XCOM. What difficulty should I start with?
Normal.
I'm an XCOM veteran. What difficulty should I start with?
Normal.
But I'm really awesome at --
Sorry to interrupt, but just start with Normal. We don't have easy difficulties in this mod that hold your hand while you learn the ropes and we've removed every bit of code we can find that cheats for the player on the lower difficulties. It's going to be hard. The other difficulties are just harder versions of Normal; feel free to move up when you get a handle on all the new mechanics.
There is a bug in LW Beta 9a where the alien and EXALT technology advancement rate is inverted, so that the easier the difficulty, the faster the enemy techs up.
If you have been complaining about aliens upgrading impossibly quickly in Long War, and being told to go play on lower difficulty only to become even more frustrated... well, you've been right. I'll skip the technical details, but it's just been discovered that some math stuff is backwards and aliens actually upgrade faster on lower difficulties.
It will be fixed in Beta 10, but if you want to apply the fix to your Beta 9 you can do it by opening up your DefaultGameCore.ini file, finding these lines:
MaxActiveAIUnits=130; Normal
MaxActiveAIUnits=120; Classic
MaxActiveAIUnits=110; Brutal
MaxActiveAIUnits=100; Impossibleand changing the numbers to, respectively, 70, 80, 90 and 100.
You don't need to start a new campaign for this to take effect, although I'm not sure whether aliens will keep any upgrades they have already erroneously been granted. (ref)