Psion units seemed to appear in a very particular order (i.e. +1hp in island one, explosive death island 2 etc) until you unlock all 4 islands, whereby any of them can appear in any map, regardless of which island you're on. Mantis enemies and blob bosses also appear in island 1.

Basically the game gets considerably more difficult to play from scratch after you get all islands unlocked. ANyone else seeing this (or seeing it as an issue?)

From what I gather, when you start a new game, no matter what island you pick first, it will be the easiet, then the 2nd island will have small increase in difficulty and so on.

But, I think you're correct that more things are unlocked, so there might be a small window of percieved difficulty increase shortly after unlocking everything.

As for bosses, I think it might be random.

In reality, the game should get easier the more you play since there is little randomness to the game. I started on Normal, and the game is getting pretty easy after playing it for awhile. So, I think I'm going to bump it up to Hard.

I played Easy and lost 4x in a row (3 of which on the very last round of a 5-island game) and 1 of which in the last last state of the last battle.

On my 5th play, I did a short play and only won by the skin of my teeth, having no viable way but to sacrafice 2 of my mechs. Even my last Mech, to survive the last round, was lucky that of the 4 enemies on screen, 3 chose to target him (w/o webbing him) and 1 targeted a building (but if I was to take 1 more hit from a building, I'd lose) So my science mech pulled the guy off the building and I won by the skin of my teeth.

And that was "Easy". Sure. Easy. Cause as we all know, you should fail multiple times in a row when something is Easy, lol.

Truth be told, there's enough randomness in the game, where you can, if like me, just have horrible pick rates and luck of the draw, despite good tactics, and still end up losing. The best you can do at times is to mitigate inevitable damage, but as with card games, you gotta know when to fold and to hold. Thing is, folding doesn't always come with a Round 2.

5 tries playing this game probably isn't enough to figure out a strategy. This is a game that has to be hard starting off or it'll be just too easy later on.

I've been surprised several times where I thought all was lost and I just sat there thinking until I figure out how to turn it completely around.

Also, this is a game that rewards you the better you do. The more challenges you complete, the more reputation you get to buy things. It begins to add up where by the end, your mechs can be pretty badass.

I only have a few attempts and one victory (on Normal) under my belt so far, but I didn't notice any change in difficulty in terms of the types of enemies until I tried a new mech squad. That seemed to trigger different kinds of Vek that I had previously only seen later in the game or very rarely when using the Rift Walker squad. Could that be what you're seeing?

I personally played 3 times on normal, and achieved a 2-island Victory (it was my first time reaching the volcano island).

Honestly, to me it seemed to get a bit easier the more I played, because I started to get the hang of how positioning really works, and the fact that taking damage with your mechs is simply just another mechanic you need to use. Having a pilot with the Armored trait and another one with the Shield trait also helped.