Is this a good place to start playing XCOM?

great!
thank you for recommending it Any Forumsros!

It's a great game, but the strategic part (which has the only real fail state) can be annoying. The tactical part is absolutely fantastic.

As someone who has recently played the first nu-com and a bit of WOTC, as well as watched the vanilla second on youtube a shitload of years ago, my opinion is that the first one is a better entry point. WOTC is good but has too much shit in it, to the point where I felt compelled to do a playthrough of vanilla 2 to just get my bearings again. I'm told about the progress on the avatar project long before I made it to the mission where we discover such a project even exists, because of all the sidetracking I was going through with a gorillion new missions and research and such.

The game is pretty sweet, OP. Go for it!

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Play EW through the vanilla campaign on Normal/Classic difficulty, kinda enjoy it, then install Long War, and get sucked into addictive loop of playing through hundreds of hours

Definitely the best game to pirate

What exactly does the Long War change about the game?

eh nu com is rather braindead
play jagged alliance 2 instead

Do note that in XCOMs, the tactical battles are only half the game. There's a whole strategy-management layer that's arguably the more important part of the game. You don't get game overs if you lose a fight, but rather when you go bankrupt.

makes the game 100 times longer

That's it? Sounds underwhelming.

It's a very bloated list of changes, some good, a lot of bad, but yes most notably it makes the game unbearably long

XCOM:EU/EW is much more like classic XCOM in how it behaves, with setting up planetary coverage and interceptors and so forth.

On the other hand, I think XCOM2:WOTC has a lot more wild stuff going on in the battlescapes with special units, lots of plentiful specialty gear and so forth, as well as more special mission types and conditions. Stealth mechanics also make the game feel a bit more even, as you don't tend to blunder into and activate pods in quite such a "Well I guess I'm fucked" fashion.

If you played Xcom:UFO Defense way back and want to feel a modern take on it, do EU/EW. If you get pissed with the bullshit and want a more polished experience at the expense of losing some of what made Xcom what it is, XCOM 2 is generally more frustration free (though not entirely; sometime you'll run into weird edge cases in line of sight or unexplained interactions which can and will fuck you on ironman runs; I suggest playing with free saving just in case you run into one of these unlabeled traps).

Is there one for 2? I kinda find the idea of a very longterm game for XCOM 2 intriguing since I am given that much more freedom in designing the characters I use, so I'd feel more compelled to see them grow.

In general it fleshes out pretty much every single aspect of the game and makes it infinitely more complex experience in both strategy and tactics
>bunch of new gameplay mechanics like system of soldier classes and skills, officers or fatigue after missions
>new technologies, equipment and variants on top of it
>enemies have new skills, variants, and have improved behaviour
>campaign alien AI is no longer random and simply mirroring your own progress, but is now limited and dependant on its own resource and research simulation and makes decisions and distributes missions based on it
>e.g. you can potentially stomp the aliens to the ground that they pretty much never get past their low tier units but the AI can also run economical approach and run only very hard or specific mission types on your ass
>or if the AI gets a winning streak against you, they'll limit their combat missions and will focus on resource and research management instead, i.e. breathing space for you but if you don't strike hard, then every following encounter will be harder

There is but I haven't played it, from what I hear it wasn't very good