Recommended Custom Difficulty settings

[GrenadeMagnet6]

What are recommended custom settings to make the game challenging but not too arduous? I'm a new player and watching Youtube videos to get an idea of the initial gameplay on Unfair settings. Prior games like this I usually play on the next-to-hardest settings, but usually customize. Like with the Firaxis X-com game series (not exactly the same type of game, but has isometric combat) I made a custom configuration mod to combine aspects of Classic difficulty (i.e. the game's Hard setting) and Impossible difficulty to apply the particular difficulty aspects I desired (the mod was called Implassic for X-Com).

Basically for RT difficulty settings I don't want to run into combat with the custom settings and have a 50/50 chance of a complete squad-wipe with each encounter, when facing enemies of equivalent strength and abilities.

For RT's custom difficulty settings I was considering making the enemies tougher, but keeping my player/allies damage output unchanged and percentage to hit cover the same percentages for both allies and enemies, if possible.

I understand from another poster's thread that applying custom difficulty settings in RT causes the game to apply the settings immediately in Act 1, and not make the settings incremental as one proceeds, as with the application of the preset difficulties, which is fine.

I also understand the player's team can get extremely overpowered by Acts 3 and 4, from the ranking up of various meta-abilities and random powerful artifacts that may be acquired. I don't see a way around that problem, unless I manually self-nerf from using the overpowered abilities, or wait for Owlcat to apply more balancing changes in future patches.

Thank you for any feedback or links to threads here that may have already discussed the topic.

[Green Knight]

The problem with RT difficulty is that it doesn't scale well with game progression.

Daring is, for example, quite OK early game, but by Act 2 (if not sooner) it will feel rather easy.

Hard is not that much harder than Daring, except for space combat, which will annoy you no end until you get lvl up and some better gear on your ship. But after a while, sometime in Act 2, it'll feel rather easy.

Unfair is quite a bit harder than Hard I would say, but IMO all it does is force your to min-max even more and eventually your're back at the same place: combat gets too easy. Although if you mess up you might occasionally have to load a save and retry. I also find it tedious to be failing quite a few more skill tests than you normally would, unless u use talents to improve ur skills.

TL:DR no matter what you tweak your settings to, combat is going to feel progressively easier.

[Hidetsugu]

My favourite custom difficulty was - I started with Daring presets, maxed out enemy wounds and stats, but lowered damage to normal difficulty level. Maxed skill checks bonus to not be forced to take some party members with me just because of their skill proficiency. Lowered space combat to normal - any higher is pain if you don't know the most optimal ship build.
It makes for long, drawn out fights, with their timing events activating. But without the chance to be 1-shot by a lucky crit, so you have time for reaction and healing in combat. Once it starts getting easy for you - you can start raising the damage modifier. Although if your builds are good, around the middle of act 2 almost nothing is a challenge no matter what your difficulty sliders are.

[Aranador]

I like giving baddies as many health points as possible - they still die fast, but they at least sometimes get to do something, and not because my characters simply fail when they try to do something.

[stax]

I play on unfair modified to make skill checks unfair as well (basically, the original unfair as it was when the game got released, -20% skill checks). Also, a 4-man party only, so you should be fine with six.

It should be possible to play on unfair right from the start. Once you grasp the basics, what will kill you is not knowing the encounter mechanics, not the difficulty. Once you learn them, a squad wipe will be rare, usually to a string of bad luck, and even then its usually just a few downed allies, not a wipe. The game is pretty forgiving, save for a few curve balls (nimble prisoner, aurora).

[Green Knight]

I would add that a few characters "dying" is not a problem*, as in most cases (but not always) you can go back to ship, heal up, then head back in again.

I've also dragged Yrliet around with Toughness 5 quite a bit due to Trauma and it's FINE :D

* Caveat: You have to suffer through some load screens...