I found this mod a couple of days ago and when 5.3 got released I installed it.
While I like a lot about all of it I have some complaint, it's to bloody hard.
I get that a lot of people may like that but there is 'difficult' and beyond for those.
I played through the vanilla game twice, once on easy and once on normal which was nice.
I also played the original ufo and terror from the deep way back when, and the new x-com from 2 years.
'Normal' was challenging for me but easy was ... well easy, your dudes hardly ever die once you have armor and most enemies die after 2 or 3 hits and you have plenty of time for research between alien escalations.
Now with Into Darkness 'Normal' is nearly impossible and I abandoned that game after like 3 or 4 hours.
So I'm a few more hours into an easy game and it is still way harder than I feel it should be on that difficulty
I can't keep up with the research, I build 2 additional labs on day 1 which previously was more than enough, now I dont even bother interrogating an officer or research vehicles or disassemblies for lack of time.
By now I have 2 bases each with 4 planes and 8 man teams and 2 dudes in reserve, I just finished building 16 of the first armor and 4 laser rifles. Now with the armor my guys take significantly less damage which is nice but I feel it makes too much of a difference after being slaughtered so long. Maybe a more basic armor earlier would have helped mitigate some frustration.
I haven't used much of the laser weaponry yet but the ballistic weapons are a joke against the new aliens. I dare not send my guys in groups of less than 4 around because thats how many I need to kill just one of them if I'm lucky with reaction shoots in close fights or over time on long range, while vanilla aliens can be overpowered by two guys or one with a shotgun from point blank.
Also they are two aggressive, I just position my guys the first 2-4 turns around the chopper while the civs die, then I get stormed, then the map is nearly clear except for aliens in the ship and eggs.
My point is the vanilla game felt like It was getting easier as time went, this on the other hand beats you hard in the beginning and when you think you start to control it, it gets even harder. I should not have to reload 30+ times in a single mission playing carefully on 'easy' difficulty to not lose soldiers, nor should I need 10 turns to kill a single remaining alien with my entire party if I want to keep them alive.
sorry for the rant, please reconsider your balancing
tl;dr: its to hard on 'easy' difficulty
