The game looks hard as hell.

Maybe you should consider posting in the release thread or the subforum dedicated to the game?

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_battle_brothers_d7425

https://www.gog.com/forum/battle_brothers

I tought it was quite tough, more so because i tried to avoid what should be a normal event during the game: crew dying during combat. Some specific encounters can also be almost impossible if you dont have a good enough weapon counter to the enemy namely skeleton army or orks. Still have to replay a game after the latest update.

I was enjoying the game a lot until apparently I passed a level trigger or something. Suddenly my crew which I had carefully guided through many quests and missions found themselves utterly unable to win another battle. Every encounter became a bloodbath because the enemies were too numerous and too well equipped for my crew to fight against.

Prior to that the game had been fun and enjoyable even though I occasionally lost some crew, but this obvious difficulty trigger destroyed the game for me and I haven't touched it since. Difficulty triggers are fine but the overwhelming power of the trigger I passed made winning a fight impossible since enemy archers started one shotting over half my crew before our melee lines met and my archers still needed 3-5 shots to get a kill. Can't win in that kind of environment as attrition wiped me out before any real contact with the enemy could be achieved.

Sounds way too hard for me. Thanks for the response. Thanks for the response.

Sounds like you might have left the late game crisis as the default 'random'. If you get the Greenskin invasion or the Undead Scourge, it can easily hit you when you aren't ready. Unfortunately you can't turn off the late game crisis. I'd strongly recommend setting it to 'war', as this is a crisis that you can pretty much just ignore if you want to, and only set the crisis to random or one of the other ones when you feel like you've mastered the basic tactics and want a bit more challenge.

To the OP, it is a somewhat difficult game because the mechanics are rather opaque, and the RNG can have a fair bit of effect on how well you do. Once you know what you are doing, it does get a bit easier (though the RNG can still screw you.) I highly recommend using the wiki (http://battlebrothers.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_Brothers_Wikia) as a reference while you learn the game, if you do decide to try it.

Probably worth mentioning that the devs do seem to follow the Dwarf Fortress philosophy ('losing is fun' is a message on the loading screen.)

There are 3 difficulty settings, and the lowest one honestly isn't very hard. But it's a game where you're supposed to learn as you play, and it's pretty much impossible to win an endgame crisis until you've learned to build your mercs effectively.

Also, one important thing to know is that the game seems to scale contracts in terms of difficulty according to how many mercs you have and their average level, but not gear. So an easy way to manage difficulty is to prioritize getting decent gear first and only hiring new people when you can afford to give them good gear.