Difficulty (Long War)
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 was 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. This has been fixed in Beta 10.
<spoiler>
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 (in XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XEW\XComGame\Config), finding these lines:
MaxActiveAIUnits=130; Normal
MaxActiveAIUnits=120; Classic
MaxActiveAIUnits=110; Brutal
MaxActiveAIUnits=100; Impossible
and 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. http://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/25rzwz/long_war_psa_a_bug_was_discovered_that_makes/ </spoiler>
OMG, this is hard. I'm having to save and load lots to win all my missions
You are not intended to win every mission, and in fact if you do you'll have a very imbalanced game. You can and will see Supply Ships and Battleships in March or April and you're not intended to beat them. Take heart though, Long War is balanced around winning some and losing some. You can get countries back if you lose them and you can keep fighting as long as even one country supports you. You're expected to have dozens of soldiers on your roster, so losing your highest ranked sniper isn't the end of the world, and there will be a lot of UFOs to assault, so if you don't shoot some down or fail to assault them there will be many more.