True, although that's partially what makes it trickier early on since all your units are Rookies. But yeah, chasing aliens tends to be a bad idea no matter what, especially in a choke point though. Oh, and penetrating UFOs is fairly tricky too, since you either have to send a guy in as a sacrifice to open the door so you can spam explosives and guns, or stake it out and rely on Reaction Shots, which is risky. Yay? I did read about an enemy that can mind control your soldiers, too. That sounds fun...

I have to say, the Geoscape and Battlescape parts of X-Com are both excellent, but a lot of the brilliance lies in the way they interconnect With the capturing of alien technology, than reverse engineering it to outfit your soldiers/sell and that sort of thing.

At least at the beginning when everyone is a rookie losing a soldier doesn't matter quite as much. Losing a soldier late in the game that's been with you since nearly the beginning (and has developed into a sharp-shooting, hardened badass with mind control powers) is downright painful. One thing that I've found particularly useful is to always have your soldiers operate in teams of at least two. That way when one of them spots an alien you've got a much better chance of taking it down that turn. Also be sure you've got a full team in position before breaching any door- basically stick two soldiers on either side of a door and end the turn (this pretty much guarantees if an alien comes through the door it will get shot before it can do anything), then go through the door the next turn so you have at least two soldiers with full time units to deal with whatever is on the other side. The motion detector can also be useful to give you an idea of what you're getting into.

And the mind control is a serious pain once you start running into sectoid and ethereal leaders/commanders. Fortunately you can research mind control so your soldiers can use it as well, and once you develop the psi abilities of a few soldiers it's pretty much game over for the aliens. Use a tank to spot the first alien, mind control it, use it to scout the locations of other aliens, mind control them, then basically just line them up and do them execution style.

The tactical land battles mostly irritated me. They seemed to progress too slowly, insta-deaths, and far too much micromanagement (the nth time a soldier of mine panics, drops his weapon(s) and runs away... then I lead him back to his stuff and pick his stuff for him... maybe I should wipe your nose for you too while I'm at it).

The game convinced me that maybe turn-based tactical games are not for me, but fortunately some other TBT-games proved that wrong. Still, I think I would have enjoyed the game more if it let me play only the overall strategic part, without the land battles.

Which is by far the most satisfying thing I've ever done in videogames.

I miss X-COM. Need to play TFTD with that recent modfix.

I have the original on CD-ROM. Someday i will actually play it, i'm looking forward to the new (turn-based) X-Com to come out.

My pants will explode if someone remakes X-COM in the JA2 engine...

There's Xenonauts. X-COM clone, but with modern(ish) graphics: http://www.xenonauts.com/

i was introduced to XCOM through a demo[?] on some 'shareware' CD [yeah, one of those], it was pretty unstable [lots of crashes when switching from the geoscape to battlescape and the other way around. Not long later i've played the demo of JA:DG [in the summer of 1996], fell in love and forgot all about XCOM for a long time. When i finally got to play it for a longer time [around 2007], i just couldn't force myself to go through the whole thing. Half of the interface being text, half some hieroglyphs, and the difficulty level was a rollercoaster. Pretty unintuitive and unpolished. Though, i have to say, the atmosphere makes up for a lot of the irritation and stuff like UFOExtender/TFTDExtender fixes a few annoying bugs and features.

Bro you should have been there when things got really heated up between two sides - one for Xenonauts to be on GOG, and the other against.

The only thing about Xenonauts that disappoints me is the lack of crouch-walking. It bugged me in X-COM and TFTD, and it continues to do so in Xenonauts. I would rather see this implemented than new tilesets, TBH.

Wow, I totally missed that controversy.

Crouch-walking would definitely be nice: Costs more TU to move, but less chance of a Reaction Shot or somesuch. My main problem with Xenonauts is stylistic, actually. In X-COM, your agents are all kind of goofy and samey, but they had a nice Sci-fi elite task force feel, with the jumpsuits and everything. The shots I've seen of Xenonauts make the characters look more generic. It also feels a little too zoomed out, but that's nitpicking.

Xenonauts will be way better than XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Xenoanuts is being developed exclusively for PC, and so it won't be dumbed down to appeal the kiddy console crowd.

If you're talking about the new one, I agree. But I don't like the menu art style of Xenonaut. At the moment I'm betting on openxcom. When It's finished, it should be great.