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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.
In the original UFO, no. The hardest mission is the first psi mission (～always in January-March), and about the only way a decent player can actually lose a campaign (other than by major unforced errors or self-imposed challenges like failing to check one's finances before the end of a month, ignoring terror sites on purpose, or attempting Cydonia without psi) is to have one's main base destroyed by aliens in January (NB: UFO and TFTD start in January). Part of the issue is that the campaign is designed to be played blind i.e. for you to waste a lot of time researching the many topics that don't lead anywhere, and having any idea what you're doing means the aliens don't scale fast enough. Part of it is that the aliens just don't scale much at all on the strategic level; aliens do increase their operational tempo somewhat as the game goes on, but they don't ever get any better at getting past X-Com's radars and interceptors, while those radars and interceptors get staggeringly better, and as mentioned you can trigger an Alien Retaliation on day one. And part of it is that psionics are just broken in UFO and TFTD (psi-troopers will quickly reach the point of being able to mind-control 3 aliens at once, with 100% reliability, at any distance, and they don't need personal LoS to the aliens; this turns missions into cakewalks once you get to that point).
Terror from the Deep improves somewhat on this, with the "first psi mission is an utter ball-buster" problem mostly fixed (at least relative to TFTD's overall higher difficulty), the strategic game being somewhat more loseable later on (due to Artefact Sites, which can't be avoided and have crippling penalties for failure, as well as the point threshold of a "bad" month being stricter on the higher difficulties), and aliens scaling a bit more. But, well, I've played TFTD on Superhuman (the top difficulty) twice (no save-scumming, to be clear), and the loss the first time was (*drumroll*) from having my main base destroyed by aliens in January, triggered - to my best guess - on day one (the second try won). It's still definitely a pattern.
Apocalypse definitely doesn't have reverse difficulty. The late-game is easy, yes (though the tactical game still isn't rote despite said easiness), but the early-game is also easy; it's the midgame where things get a bit tricky (although honestly, not that tricky; I'd definitely rate Apocalypse the easiest of the original trilogy).
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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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