I'm a little annoyed because I just lost half my experienced soldiers do to a weird quirk were you cannot retreat from attacks on landed UFOs. My first non-rookie deaths happened because right when I decided to make an organized retreat before stuff got bad, I realized that there was no skyranger to retreat to. Sort of makes sense in hindsight, since UFOs are faster than the skyranger and could chase it down, but a little warning would have been nice.
Don't get me wrong though, this game is awesome. I'm playing on classic ironman, and the difficulty is perfect. You can't win all your fights, but the battles feel fair and the overall war could go either way. Or at least, feels like it could.
Hilariously, I also failed the first VIP escort mission, but for a different reason. There was one sectoid in between the squad and the skyranger, and I didn't want to worry about advancing through bad cover with that thing around and a three health VIP in tow. So I had our crazy lethal female heavy, "Flash", blow it away with a rocket. She gets the 10% scatter chance and shoots a crate directly in front of her, bringing her and the squad medic down to one health and blowing the VIP sky high. It was the first mission we had any casualties on, or failed. And the only casualty was a rookie.
After that, xcom hit hard times. Most of the experienced soldiers are dead, and we entered the first terror mission with Flash leading three rookies. That was a complete loss, but we took some aliens with us. Which is to say, we killed all the floaters without meeting any of the Cryssalids, and then had our first encounter in an enclused three story building. One badly wounded rookie nobly sacrificed himself by running up to a Cryssalid that was right next to a civilian, saving the civvy and filling the alien with lead at point blank. Then Flash killed both of them with a rocket.
Now, only the squad medic and a granted-as-reward assault sergeant remain. We have some cash reserves, so I intend to repeatedly send each of them into battle with three rookies until we either have a sizable force of squaddies or every last man is dead. Thankfully, the two sergeants will be assisted in his mission by the most advanced accomplishment of our scientists: a single suit of carapace armor, way before we really should have researched that. With luck, we may eventually gain enough alloys to produce a second suit of carapace armor, and from there we can surely save the world.