This game will be wayyyyy too easy if you don't play Iron Man (true Iron Man, not the one where you can just reload the beginning of the last battle). Choose the “dead is dead” setting. That's iron man essentially, saving after every turn in combat and pretty much after most actions you do or changing scenes etc.
Then the setting right below called “to the bitter end” states that “saving the game during combat is forbidden”.
Now if you turn on both, you essentially have a game that auto-saves but not during combat, so you can always go back to your most recent save game which is the start of combat. Effectively making the game not a true iron man game.
So when you start a new game, you have to pick “dead is dead” and DO NOT pick “till the bitter end”. The “till the bitter end” option would be best suited for non-ironman players who still want the additional challenge of not being able to save manually during combat.
I restarted with these settings, and it is indeed much better this way. It's especially good for the first playthrough as the AI's ambush attempts and the plot twists are more effective this way. Although there are a few silly things like the poachers inexplicably getting angry at me, invalidating a major quest to get a free NPC.
I am rather enjoying the writing and the setting is fresh enough.
I would never recommend the iron man setting in any game, for the simple reason that bugs happen (and sometimes, constant autosaving impacts performance). If you really want to play ironman, just don't reload.
As for the difficulty in general, it gets easy fairly early on and stays that way for a good while, certain setpieces and special maps notwithstanding. The difficulty does ramp up later on, however, and the endgame can be properly challenging.
Well, I'm not sure about that. For example, I came back from dinner IRL and decided to play. Went into a random dungeon. Didn't know the mechanic and stats for crocodiles and I didn't notice that their retaliation range is actually 2 tiles rather than 1 as for all other characters. One half-dead crocodile approached my squad and stood nearby. I shot at him from across a tile with Kalyna, and it critted her with retaliation, nearly killing her and sending Buns into flight. But I didn't notice that Kalyna was across two tiles and just thought it was a graphical artifact. Then it turns out the red outline isn't the actual range and I was supposed to guess that the crocodile hits from afar. So my Barry who stood 2 tiles away diagonally and was not covered by the red outline threw a molotov. Turns out he was also subject to crocodile retaliation. As Kalyna, he got a crit and nearly died. The molotov also alerted a nearby shooter who shot at Kalyna from across a dark cave in his alertness animation, and killed her. All right, I thought, shit happens. So I tried to move Barry away, and he got another crit from the crocodile that killed him. So all the weeks of training and planning are now lost, and the whole plan for the game is ruined.
But you must trudge on. In reality, you have some replacement characters for that. Sure, it was a bother to make a strong character out of Kalyna with her low wisdom and I was looking forward to use her special ability with hollow point bullets. And I also made Barry the mechanic because Livewire is OP, which took a while, and Barry is quite a key character. Anyway, I got annoyed and alt-F4'd the game on Barry's death. Then I reopened it and it turned out it didn't save all that damage. I played with the croc's range in mind and easily beat that fight. Then I thought that this is cheating and it defeats the whole point of the game. So I wanted to load the battle and have Kalyna and Barry die as they should. But it turns out it already saved the victorious battle.
So ordinarily with strategies, I would consider this game lost due to cheating and start a new one from scratch. But the issue is that it's too much of a traditional RPG to restart. You'll have to do the same dialogues, the same filler fights, and so on all over again. That isn't fun at all.
I concluded that instead of simply dropping the game for good, I will fire Kalyna and Barry or maybe kill them to burn the bridge.
Conversely, if you had the actual saves even to compensate for bugs, you'd be constantly tempted to use saves. "Oh I didn't know the interface meant that", "oh it was a bug that the poachers aggro'd", "oh I didn't know the abstract representation of grenades is like that", etc.
(That said, the inability of the game to communicate what it means is a somewhat annoying source of difficulty.)
