I'm about 2/3 of the way through the game and the difficulty level just went through the roof. Almost every mission I pick has six reti's with Rocket Launchers to blow the team I spent 40 missions building up straight to hell.

When the Reticulan peace offer came, I accepted it. I'm tired of this.

I sure hope Aftershock has better balance than this. I'm sick to death of games that see an exponential rise in the difficulty level as the game goes along....

-MB
Lapdog for the Reticulan Council

Yeah, this is a problem. It was improved somewhat in the patches, but not enough. I am fairly confident this will be better in Aftershock.

One thing in its favour is that you don't get to a point where you cannot lose. There is no challenge to fighting battles that you cannot lose and I would soon get bored.

mbnx01, at your stage in the game I would advise making heavy use of bio-armour, enhanced plasma rifles and psi-projectors for missions against the Reticulans. Have one or two soldiers with collapsible machine guns, but in open terrain make sure that they are behind the soldiers wearing bio-armour so the aliens with rocket launchers won't target them.

I've started the game from the beginning a couple of times now and I've noticed that the game's difficulty level doesn't always suddently skyrocket, depending on your advancements in research & development. On the first time around I kept forgetting about R&D completely, wasting days without doing any research. I obviously don't do that anymore and the game has been easier. So I think that researching things in the correct order and efficiently saves a heap of trouble.

I've been waiting for someone to make a post like this (because I'm too lazy to make one myself)

SPOILER

I've got to the whole 'capture an alien ship thing' level and that's where my problems are. I try and try and try, then give up for a few months. Then I repeat this process...

No matter what armour I wear or what weapons I take nothing works, my whole troupe gets gunned down instantly. How did you guys get past this level???

you mean the russian mission? Yeah, a lot of it is luck
sometimes you will get very unlucky with 8 aliens or more spawning on the starting area. This is the unlucky, and unfortunately, one of the more common ways the mission goes. However, if you get lucky(like i did on my 10 try or so) you will only get 2-3 aliens in the starting area with 1 or 2 directly outside. These are easily gunned down, as 1 rockets is much easier to dodge than 4. Also, psionics are invaluable on this mission, what you have to do is find the reticulan with the microslug accelerator or a rocket launcher and then mind control them. The microslug accelerator kills a reticulan in about 1-3 seconds
I am thinking that it is completely possible to pick up the microslug accelerator, get the ammo, and then retreat, research the microslug accelerator, get rail guns, and bring both the accelerator and the rail guns along
___________________________________________________
bottom line is, psi is invaluable, and getting a reticulan with a rocket launcher or microslug accelerator or taking one and developing the technology to do with it is the only way to succeed

Unless you are very good, that is

Yuck, the Russian mission was impossible, took me a lot of tries and luck.

Ah, the capture alien spaceship mission. Difficult, but not impossible. If you wait until your engineers have made the best possible equipment, this mission is a bit easier. It's a plot-line mission, so it won't go away if you wait.

Equip all seven soldiers with bio-armour, so they can scatter quickly and an alien with an advanced plasma launcher doesn't wipe out your entire squad in one go.

You will need two soldiers equipped with several psi-projectors each, both for the first stage and the second stage of the mission. Mind controlling some of the Reticulans is the only way to win the first stage of the mission.

Load one soldier up with warp medikits. You will need a specialist medic in the first stage if the Reticulans launch a 'human' wave attack on your squad.

Equip two soldiers with sniper rifles that do hard damage. The Barrett is my first choice because it has a greater magazine capacity than the Falcon. Put enhanced hybrid plasma rifles in their backpacks, along with the enhanced hybrid power cells.

One of the other soldiers should have a weapon that inflicts area burn damage. Either a hybrid rocket spitter with incendiary rockets, or simple acid grenades. His first action in the first stage of the mission should probably be to target the area behind the starting position of the squad, where several Reticulans like to lurk and ambush you. Put an enhanced hybrid plasma rifle in his backpack.

The other soldier should have an enhanced hybrid plasma rifle as his only weapon.

Armour piercing rounds are not all that effective against bio-armour, although they are better than soft and universal rounds. Although all alien armour systems are optimised against plasma and laser weapons, the massive damage potential of the enhanced hybrid plasma rifle makes up for this. Remember that the basic hybrid power cell only gives you five shots before depletion, and the enhanced power cell still only gives you ten shots. As it takes ten seconds to reload, you should think carefully about when to reload. Don't wait until the power cell is depleted.

In the first stage, you should scatter and wait for the aliens to come to you. Hit their suspected hiding places with area effect weapons (grenades or rocket spitter). Mind control any alien that comes in range as he will draw the fire of his comrades.

In the second stage, keep your two psi specialists safe, and move the other soldiers to the nearby junctions in the corridoors. They will act as your scouts. Then wait for the aliens and mind-control them when they appear.

Once the alien ranks have thinned out, you can easily retrive the alien artefact in the target area and make your escape.

The difficulty increases are tied in with the progress you make in the game. They do not occur at a fixed in-game date. If your research is progressing slowly and you keep losing missions, then it can take a long time for the next difficulty increase to occur.

Still not buying it but you know what I've never used psi on this game... Not sure if I even knew it existed I'll have to check up on that as it may well be the way forward. Cheers

Its possible to not use psi at all but it sure loads up the difficulty a ton

blehm, that's true. I won't even attempt a late game mission against the Reticulans without a psi projector or two.

The Veteran, have a look in the handguns section of your armory. There will probably be a few alien psi stingers and psi-projectors there.

The psi-projectors are less powerful than the psi-amps in X-Com 1. Range is limited, and a psi-projector only has enough power for ten tries before it needs recharging at your base, so you need a few spares. A human or Reticulan soldier who is using mind-control against an enemy soldier is using his full concentration, so he won't even notice if another enemy attacks him.

Psi stingers are often useful in a tight spot. They will paralyze a soldier for a few seconds (just like a cryssalid), giving you a breathing space. Unlike psi projectors, a soldier with a psi stinger does not have to continue to concentrate on the target.

hmmm, psi stingers, reminds me of a mission i had
i was attacking the aliens, and did alright, i got into the UFO, and i found 2 aliens
One soldier was quickly gunned down, but i killed the rest of the nearby aliens. I had one scout move a little bit and got my superstriker to shoot into a nearby room. Then my scout(Malcom, as always, with his shotgun)is stunned. As the mission progresses, all of my men except for Malcom and the guy with the superstriker are gunned down, but only one soldier is killed. So i have two guys, both stunned, as a reticulan just stuns them. I am worried, as this has been going on for 5 minutes
then suddenly, my guy with the superstriker stop being stunned. I pop off a few grenades, kill a few reticulans(see below), and get restunned
then malcom gets out, kills the stunner, and i win

Now, the oddest thing was, the reticulans didn't shoot my stunned soldiers... well, the stunned guys got hit by a few laser pistols, but that was it. Pretty odd huh?

I once used this as a quick fix on a TFTD artifact mission. I hate losing soldiers, to the extent that I never do But once you get to the harder missions (TFTD already being way harder than UFO) it gets very hard to maintain 100% win missions! On this particular venture I had two or three guys all with fatal wounds, they weren't going to make it out in time unless I aborted and even then I couldn't make it back with all soldiers... Cunning plan. Stunned soldiers with fatal wounds will still die but it seems to slow it down something rather dramatic so I managed to cheat death long enough to make it back to sickbay!

Hi everybody!
I know it's probably a little late to write in this forum, but I've been reading your posts and liked them.
I have finished Aftershock and now I`m playing Aftermath (Yes, the other way around...)
I'm stuck in the alien retibution mission. As soon as I spawn, there are 8 aliens with psi projectors and rocket launchers. I have my soldiers with bio-armour, two of them are snipers, two have psi projectors, one with plasma shotgun, and two with plasma rifles and tons of acid and incendiary grenades. Also they are all loaded with warp medikits. But I just can't give one single step. How can I do to finish this hellish mission?
Tnx in advance!

Don't you have any heavy machine guns or turrets? Also, the plasma shotgun isn't much of an effective weapon while unmodded due to a full hit or a full miss given to it unlike the normal shotguns which have a 15 pellet damage system.

For the 1st half of the mission, it's just like any other really large UFO mission. Most of the time some retties will appear behind you, if you order at least 2 of your men to fire AOE weapons (grenades, rockets, etc) you should weaken and even kill about 3 or 4 of them before they even make it around the corner. The rest of the guys should have long range weapons (snipers or heavy machine guns) or advanced plasma rifles. Keep at least 2 idling ready with projectors to have them "break" the mindcontrol rather than have them try and mindcontrol far away retties. If you have a guy with a turret, order him to deploy at the start of the mission as your starting point tends to have a rather large line of fire. After it's deployed it will mow down any reticulan that crosses it's path. If you think you're being overwelmed try to delay the attack of some retties by trowing smoke grenades in their general direction. This cuts of all lines of fire that go through the cloud, generally makes the retties move closer and gives your turret men time to deploy.

As for the second half, make sure that troops with sniper rifles come with a close range secondary weapon like a SMG or shotgun (not the plasma one), MSAs and plasma rifles work well too but a bit slow for close combat. Turrets and heavy machine guns will also work and they are a lot more devastating in close quarters than at long range, with the only problem being deployment for turrets or slow aiming for HMG. Projectors also work wonders in these tight situations, just make sure you have people guarding the controler as they "lose" their awareness. You might get lucky tho and not have to fight your way to the key as it is close enough and you could "smoke" your way to the room with smoke grenades

Oh, and bring at least a couple of medikits per soldier

Thank you Kret! I'll try that today after work. That mission is driving me crazy!

If it makes you feel any better, I still haven't beaten it either

My current game had a very dramatic difficulty-bump, much more drastic than the last two times around: I was just at the stage when I've manufactured my first Sun Armor and the Rets started totting Advanced Plasmas and killing half of my team on most occasions. The game then became very tedious with multiple reloads per Ret (made even more annoting with my virtual memory getting filled up after a few attempts, which slows my loading times to a crawl; damn 256MB RAM that I don't have the cash to expand ).

I was thinking about creating a difficulty-bump-mitigation mod, but the question is how to do so: weaken the latter-game alien weapons or improve the mid-game Human armor? Or just remove the alien rockets from the game?