The standard is to 8-man instead of 10-man those missions to sharply reduce infiltration time. And they can still be won flawlessly with 8.

With a properly setup comp/strat, it's not particularly more difficult to take on 30 or 60 enemies. There's slightly higher risk that you find yourself engaged with more than 1 pod if the enemy count is a lot higher but the map is so large you can still generally manage to take on 1 pod at a time. It's just easy for new players not familiar with the map and pod roaming behaviours to adopt positions where they will engage multiple pods and find themselves overwhelmed.

The maximum pod size should be 8. Maybe the general pod can have 9 I'm not sure. But it is very possible for pod paths to cross or for multiple pods to enage you on the same or back to back turns if you push far out too quickly.

To give you an idea of my ideal/idealized 8 man comp setup, it would look something like this

1 scout with detection reduction (like shinobi with SMG and Covert)
2-3 sharpshooters. Any build can work with stock.
1 AoE (grenadier or technical)
1 suppression gunner
1 shooty ranger
1 specialist (preferably trojan build)

Basically, value mid and long range shooty. Have some way to secure(or finish) kills (combat protocol, rangers with locked on/executioner/psi ops with soulfire. Have a few big consumables or cooldowns to help either with the rainbow pod (8 advents) or occasional double-pull mishaps but mainly exploit steadied sharpies to thin the herd.

Critical condition to have a good time and for it not to turn to a ♥♥♥♥ show is keeping your scout concealed until the last pod. So you usually want to find a good squadsight position in one of the 2 corners of the map near your starting location and do slow and careful scouting and pull pods on your terms with sharpshooters. It's common for the natural pathing to cause like 2/3 or even 3/4 of the total enemies on the map to eventually trickle to your positions even if you don't move before you really need to start moving up.

It is a bit of a slow/long mission with such a strategy but it's still effectively shorter in real time than dealing with a ♥♥♥♥ show and a lot of injuries to manage and heal and revive, etc.

Also, you should always launch the mission at 100%. Don't overinfiltrate it. The most you can get from overinfiltration is -6 enemies but it adds so much infiltration time that the force level will go up leading to higher tier enemies (and particularly higher relative to the gear you had at your disposal when you queued the mission). So 200% infil with -6 enemies will likely be harder than 100% with the extra enemies.

Apparently I just got extremely unlucky with the map generation last time.

Second HQ assault the pods were much more spread out and there was only 1 pod that had something like 10 enemies in it.

The first HQ assault all the frickin' pods were in the center of the map (and it was, of course, a base so no open ground) and it immediately turned into an absolute warzone. More than 20 enemies all aggro'd at the same time in the most crazy spots, barely removed from each other. Makes a HUGE difference. https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3490551962

What I like to do is send 1 trooper who doesn't get revealed at the start of combat ahead of the group, then use snipers to draw a pod towards me. That's only really possible if the pod spacing is, well, normal.

I'd rather just *not* have that many enemies in the first place. I'm still in the stage where most enemies are ADVENT troopers, Snakes, and MECs. What's the final few gonna look like? 15 sectopods backed up by 10 berserker mutons? I cannot wait to find out!

Golly imagine if this was Ironman. I'd have tossed my entire setup out the window after that one.

There are never more than 1 boss type enemy (sectopod, gatecrasher, hive queen) in a pod. Rarely more than 2 on the map still in the end game. If anything, you will wish there was more because their bodies are valuable for specific gear.

Most pods will resemble what you are facing in terms of their construction, just higher tier variants of the same enemies. So your "muton" pod, instead of being like 4-5 mutons + 1 berserker will be like 2 mutons, 2 muton centurions, 1 muton elite 1 berserker. Basic MECs will get replaced by either MEC archers, Heavy MEC or Superheavy MEC, etc.

Okay good. I will say as I go into the mid/early-lategame with multiple regions liberated, where I'm running around with better... everything... The enemy numbers are making less of a difference.

There were 42 enemies on the Psionic Gate mission and while I did come pretty close to taking casualties there (particularly because of those damn toxic exploding suit enemies that I forgot the name of) it wasn't too big of a deal because I went it with the maximum squad size.

I know XCOM 2's early game is pretty punishing, LWOTC just kind of amplified that. Guess that's something you just have to run into face-first and learn from with a bloody nose.

You WANT a ton of enemies in HQ assaults so you can collect those corpses. If you have trouble with those missions, do a search on youtube for HQ assaults by DevAra. Trust me, once you're properly geared up they're easy. I'm sure there's more than 1 way to do it but a shinobi plus 2 or 3 snipers is about all you need.