Is the game's difficulty scaled to be meant for a full lobby?

[Partzle]

I've been progressing through the series with one of my friends, and we've been struggling basically the entire game on normal difficulty. The problem we're finding is that enemies take an absurd amount of damage, and can kill you in less than a second from full health if you're unlucky.

For example, we can not kill any combine/zombies with the physics gun in one hit. At the beginning of the game we sometimes could, but past Prison it takes up to 4 hits. Another example are the combine gunships, which seem to take about 25 rockets to down.

This doesn't seem right, and I haven't been able to scope out any console commands or options that might alter these scenarios. All I managed to find was a command that decreases the damage we take, which isn't any fun.

I should preface that like, we're not idiots. We're veteran gamers with some serious experience, and are undoubtedly both competent players. I would be extremely disappointed to hear that this is just how the game is, because that just seems flawed. It took us literally hours to get through Prison just because of how ridiculously over-powered the defense missions were.

Is there an option I'm missing? Is this just how it is? I played through HL2 with Synergy a couple years back and I remember absolutely no problems of this sort.

[Şіļęŋť™ (Swe)]

Do you play with mp_vintage 0 or 1? Anyway, they need to update Vintage mode and so on.

[Partzle]

I believe so, there's a checkbox for vintage mode in the menu, but we haven't noticed a difference having it on or off. I'll give it a shot in console next time we play.

[Balim]

Try easy mode ("skill 1") and you can try editing each convar manually in a cfg that you could execute every map change. You can also set a majority of these sk_ cvars in your skill_mod.cfg in:
Steam\steamapps\Common\Synergy\synergy\cfg\
You could also try these convars (which are also in the skill_mod.cfg):
sk_dmg_take_scale1
sk_dmg_inflict_scale1
Where the value is to be multiplied like 0.5 would be half, 2.0 would be double, etc.
The number on the end is depending on what difficulty you are set to, like the skill cvar.
1 is easy, 2 is normal, 3 is hard.

[Partzle]

That's very helpful information, thanks man!