I think I might have to swear off II. I keep having promising runs ruined by car explosions behaving in ways I don't expect. This time I had a near perfect run up until, in the second mission, I moved the assault up to a car and threw a grenade at a sectoid two cars down. So you'd think the two cars closest to the sectoid would blow up, right? Nope, the entire row of three cars exploded at the start of my turn, and I have no idea why. They exploded at the start of my turn which means they caught fire my previous turn, but the aliens didn't fire overwatch which means I did it. But grenades don't have that big of a radius, so. Who knows. Then the rest of the squad died in a way that I'm pretty sure wouldn't have happened if the assault was alive.
This doesn't hold a candle to the last game I played before EW came out. I get to the first terror mission (you know, the peak* of the game's difficulty pre-expansion) with 4 promoted soldiers, take out most of the aliens with 1 loss. Then the aliens fire, miss, hit a car causing it to catch on fire. Then during my turn a truck explosion I didn't know was coming (because of a glitch where the car fires sometimes appear in the wrong place on trucks, usually to the side and mostly in the ground) kills someone, causing half the squad to panic. And by that I mean panic behind the now on-fire car, which was not on fire at the start of my turn.
So yeah, 0 to dead with no warning, on an II run that was my best chance ever of winning. Fuck car explosions.
*barring certain maps and council missions you can randomly get before then