What's with the difficulty levels?

[MacKaris]

At first I started a new game on 'Very Hard', since that was the 'the intended experience', only to find out it was completely impossible. The enemies outnumber you many times over in every combat, and it only takes one or in the best case scenario two hits to kill any one of my dudes.

Then I started a new game on the Hard difficulty, but now that I'm level 25 I'm getting chewed up by all the enemies because they are all at least level 25 as well and still outnumber me many times over. Each enemy has 25-30 hitpoints while my mutants have something like 7-10 or whatever, and my weapons do like 7 points of damage. There's just no way in hell I'm going to be able to proceed, since the enemies are tougher and more numerous in every consecutive map, but I'm not levelling up anywhere near the same pace. Also the scrap is very scarce, so I can't afford to buy grenades or anything since all the scrap goes to the medikits. I just don't get it. Should I start over on the 'normal' difficulty? Is the game actually playable on that way?

[dominuskevin]

You need to change your tactics - Don't watch too many. It will spoil the fun of figuring it out.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwba43MpMuUQ7eCXmKJ7pn82YYQ1Thc3H

P.S. - This is not me.

[conductiv]

there is a heavy stealth focus in this game, so the crossbow, silenced gun and shard pistol are your primary tools of death. at higher difficulties you are at a disadvantage if you go loud out of the gate.
-enemy view distance is relatively short, you can fairly reliably close into enemy positions without being detected and getting the 75% chance to hit..that can then be improved by high ground, moving closer or well lit conditions to ensure a hit. (or abilities like moth wings)
-enemies hardly keep track of each other, and arn't alarmed when a patrol suddenly goes missing or when a dude who was alive 2 seconds ago is dead when they turn around again
-enemies won't alarm others if they don't get a turn. this makes disables like hog rush and circuit breaker insanely strong. it also allows the player to stack silent weapon hits on the enemy for multiple turns.
-you have quite a number of CC abilities that recover quickly (usually 2-3 kills will refresh the CC, note that the team needs to make the kills, not the unit who's ability is on cooldown per-se)
-enemies immune or resistant to CC effects are not extremely common, and its usually possible to take out the majority of their allies before taking on the final 3-4 hugging said unit of the zone.
-some units have pockets spread out so far you can go loud without alarming other groups of the zone.
-even in loud battles the AI tends to target the closest unit, and every enemy unit seems to have a favorite move to use. this can be used to bait attacks on mutants that are outright immune to those moves. (depending on armor or skills like iron skin) causing the AI to waste attacks.

[MacKaris]

Actually now I did manage to squeeze through the hardest part. The problem was that I was stuck in a point where all the enemies apart from the robots at Metal Fields were at least level 35, and all my characters were level 25 and my weapons still only did very mediocre damage because I had 'wasted' some 60 weapon parts upgrading the 'wrong' weapons. I actually had to go sneaking around the enemies in several maps such as the Lair of the Horned Devil, Scraplands etc just so that I could collect all the possible scrap and weapon parts without having to fight anyone. That allowed me to upgrade the silent weapons a few times, and at least one of the loud weapons too.

Then I took out a couple of the robots at Metal Fields silently by first disabling them with the EMP grenades. When I did go loud there, I was able to win because fortunately they were all too dumb to attack me all at once, and instead only came at me one by one while the others mostly stayed back in overwatch for no reason whatsoever.

It was at this stage that I realised that you don't actually even need silent weapons to kill off an isolated enemy silently (!!!), you just need to be far enough from the rest of them, and kill them during the initial turn so that they don't alarm the others. Also you can dismantle the useless weapons at the upgrade shop and turn them into weapon parts. Those revelations, along with all the exp, scrap and weapon parts from the Metal Fields actually made the game so much easier that now it's just basically casual sailing all the way.