That's true, yeah.
It's also true that Long War is absurdly more difficult than the base game, and that some people who understood and enjoyed vanilla are going to find it overwhelming.
It talks about "learning to retreat", but introduces *even worse* snowball mechanics. They made it easier to hold on after some failures, but harder to actually recover since the battlescape gets exponentially harder. Exponentially because of the worst mechanic introduced: Damage Reduction. The difference between DR and health is that group attacks don't work against DR. Low on specialists, because you're *losing*? Rookies have no options against high-DR enemies!
Also regeneration lol
It's waaaay more difficult than oldCOM, at least to me. Too bad oldCOM has a bad interface and gets super repetitive. I'd rather give Openxcom another go, maybe with some mods, then finish LW.
My last LW campaign was going well, btw. I got really lucky capturing the first supply ship. I savescummed a bit to capture the second. Mostly because I was so starved for resources, but also because even a single extra point of enemy DR would have wrecked me. I was getting bored, and a resource setback would have just limited my options further. LW introduces a ton of cool toys but really makes you save up to use most of them. Hence the name, I guess.
Pods are so large and wander so fast, that I was often in the insane situation of needing every hit to be a one-hit-kill. Against these supposedly advanced alien invaders. Can't finish enemies off with pistols, because DR means they often take 0 damage! Can't advance for a flank, because the fog - or even the visible area - is teeming with more enemies. Destroying cover with explosives helps, but costs an entire action - and the direct damage is sad, even on a direct hit.
Site Recon went pretty well too... Well, after savescumming the first turn. Much like the supply ships, the trick turned out to be not advancing at all. Riveting tactical gameplay. Once the initial hellswarm was removed by stages, it was pretty normal.
Then the game crashed to desktop reliably when loading my first covert op retrieval. I hadn't had crashes up to this point so I googled about Exalt bugs, and found out what I could expect from their missions. Screw. That. Alien conquerors being overpowered and inevitably winning is one thing, this just looked dumb.
I'll agree that I'm "too casual" for Long War, but in my opinion, that's not saying much.