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Re X-COM and reverse difficulty: I think this is mostly a result of players not being willing to sustain losses. If you reset whenever something goes wrong (save scum or campaign scum), you'll get ahead and because the game rewards success it will become easier. Many games "reward success" but inflate away your winnings so fast they might as well not have. Love the modern XCOM reboots. You should try long war. I much prefer 1 to 2 but I could say the same about the base games.
I'm not convinced that this is true, though I could be mistaken because I did in fact save scum in both games. But my understanding is that the high end of player progression is above the high end of enemy progression, at least in comparison to the early-mid game. The aliens get stronger over time, but eventually they max out, and it's before you've maxed out, so the difficulty just goes down from there. Once your people have enough health to not get one shot, and you get psy abilities and stuff, you effectively outscale the enemies. If you're not save scumming it might take you longer to get there, and you'll have a chance of outright losing the game before you do. But if your people survive long enough and you get enough upgrades they reach a level that the aliens never do.
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Yes and no. XCOM is snowbally by design. You are in a race with the AI, and the way to win is by growing in strength faster than it does. Otherwise it will slowly grind you down and kill you by the mid and late game.
At the same time, players tend to overestimate how bad losses are. You absolutely can come back from losing missions and men. Early game recruits are easily replaceable, and in the late game you should have an abundance of high level troops with strong gear, so that you can tank even some heavy losses.
Especially the expansions to XCOM 2 give you so many opportunities to recover and come back, with multiple viable paths to success. They really are great games, and more forgiving than they seem on the surface.
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Maybe I'll follow @FiveHourMarathon's lead and start playing Long War when I become a father.
Starting an infamously difficult and lengthy modded campaign after becoming a new dad?
Sure. Why not.
It's a game you can play with one hand on a mouse and the other hand holding or rocking a baby. One which you can walk away from at any time, change a diaper or deal with some other issue for an arbitrary amount of time, and then seamlessly resume. It actually does seem ideal (though the same could be said about any turn based offline game).
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