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Note that the original X-Com always played on Beginner difficulty. The developers never found out about this bug, and so may the sequel extremely more difficult, thus making it not at all fun for all but the most hardcore strategy gamers.

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That can't be right. I fondly remember playing it on impossible, and almost all of the aliens started with heavy plasmas, and aside from that even the smaller ufos had twice the number of regular units.

Gamespy mentions it here: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/x-com-ufo-defense/1216654p3.html

Wikipedia claims that the difficulty didn't reset until after the first Battlescape mission, which might explain things.

Aha! http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Known_Bugs#Difficul...

It was only on the DOS version, the windows version did not have the bug; perhaps you played the windows version?

IIRC it reset the difficulty on loading a savegame, so if you started a game and played for a couple of hours it would be at that difficulty.

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