How Difficulty Levels Could Work

[gozer]

well, more aliens and more alien attacks would also need some tweaking of the prices of stuff found in missions. I remember that playing on lower difficulties in UFO:EU and TFTD was actually much more difficult money-wise ... kind of unintended consequence of higher difficulties was you didn't have problems with resources

When playing on high difficulties combat was harder but on the other hand I never had to manufacture grenades of ammo for alien weapons (I got everything I needed from missions) and I had tons of elerium/zrbite to manufacture whatever I wanted and to fuel the advanced aircrafts. I also had tons of money from selling alien weapons and corpses ... so even though combat was harder and I had more casualties there was no problem with hiring (and then paying their salaries every month) lots of soldiers to compensate for the losses.

On lower difficulty settings elerium/zrbite was quite a problem (less UFOs to get it from, and if I didn't catch them on ground the elerium/zrbite usualy got blown up when I shot UFO down) so manufacturing stuff and fueling Avengers etc. was quite a problem. Also with less income from selling alien weapons and stuff I had to rely much more on income from monthly funding ... and even if the game was going really good that really wasn't some huge pile of money - with couple bases to pay maintenance for and lots of soldiers/scientists/technicians on payrol monthly payments were barely able to cover month-to-month expenses

[Sathra]

This is a very good point. If you're good at tactical combat, its arguable that the higher difficulties are actually easier than the lower.

Although, you can't use alien weapons directly in Xenonauts. Well, maybe pick them up in missions, but not for equipping on base.