So I just had a terror mission on canada, and I moved one dude within my blue area, just one dude, a half move, and bam, 4 seekers, 1 cyberdisc, 3 drones, and during the enemy turn, 4 crysalids came and attacked...
That mission also had a pod of mutons, and another 2(! 2?!) pod of crysalids, and some weird rainbow pod with 1 zombie (that lived 3 turns and never transformed), 1 muton, 1 thin man, 1 sectoid, 1 seeker, and 1 floater.
Sounds like the mission from hell...
I killed virtually everything but that rainbow pod in effing 4 turns, including the turn moving from my LZ, it took me like 2 more turns just to find the rainbow pod, and like 4 turns to kill it because that zombie was actually HIDING from me in this weird truck parking lot thing. My point is... the pod count would make it a terrorist mission from hell, but somehow only lost 4 people, zomg.
Terror missions are so luck based. So much better than my last one where like 6 people died before I spotted a single enemy after 2 turns of full out sprinting.
edit: exalt missions: I find many are quite easy because as you mentioned, just run your agent around 1-turn'disarming' everyone like every 2nd turn once you find more than one or two pods. But the ones where you have to defend an encoder and then a...I forget the names. Those things that NORMALLY 'hack' the enemies don't have their tops spinning, so I just assumed you can't disarm everyone...are you saying they still work like that in those ones?