[JohnBooty]

    I'd disagree with the "single play through" and 
    "pointless starting weapons" comments though. For 
    me it was multiple play throughs learning about 
    what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually 
    a thing that kept me coming back.

Absolutely! Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough... or your second, or third. It's not fair. But it makes you keep coming back. And when you finally learn to beat those bastards it's just exhilarating! In retrospect, I'm not sure how it manages to hook us. But it does. For me, perhaps it was the (intentionally) pulpy 90s-style, X-Files-style, paranoiac alien invasion/infiltration plot.

In many ways we could say X-COM broke so many rules of game design. By any conventional standards it's way too hard at the beginning and you'll generally be way too overpowered at the end, if you've got the flying armor suits and such. But that is part of its unique charm, intentional or not.

    Played the newer versions on Xbox 360 and mobile, 
    and whilst fun, they had removed far too many features 
    to keep me engaged for more than a few hours. 

I thought the 2012 reboot was just good. Like you said, I think it removed a little too much of what made X-COM.... X-COM, though there was certainly much I loved.

For me, though? XCOM2, and particularly the "War of the Chosen" expansion, actually do surpass the originals.

    OpenXcom is a much better offering, especially on mobile.

I've been putting it off for years. I need to dive into that.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

> Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough

Personally I don't recall any big problems on my first playthrough. The biggest obstacle was understanding that we need to capture a live enemy commander to progress further. Other than that, things were pretty ok, considering that difficulty glitch.

Funny thing was that I've figured out that the game has TANKS only on 3rd game. Before that, what did those "HWP" mean was rather unclear.

[JohnBooty]

This is rather difficult to believe!

At a minimum... there's no way to know that the alien base invasions are a thing, and unless you've laid out your bases in order to facilitate their defense -- setting up chokepoints and such -- they are easy pickings for the aliens. That's something you could get right by luck the first time... but there's no reason to lay your base out in such a way unless you know about it.

It's also difficult to know things like which weapons you can manufacture for strong financial returns. The midgame is tough unless you stumble upon this.

Also, just in general, winning strategies to beat the aliens aren't that easy to come by. Takes a fair amount of experimentation and heavy soldier losses. It's really tough to progress if you lose a lot of soldiers and/or drop ships.

And on your first play through it's also not clear what timetable you're working with and how fast the alien threats ramp up. Some of that is tied to your progression and some isn't IIRC.

Aside from the base layout thing, savescumming can definitely help obviously. =)

Of course, I know there were revisions made between the Euro, US, and Playstation versions. I think there were some difficulty tweaks. Not sure. So perhaps we had different experiences in that regard.

[kapp]

"Missile Defences" base structure was available to build right away, so that was at least a hint :)