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I played through vanilla Xcom years ago and it got a bit stale after beating it on highest difficulty. Recently season 7 of Christopher Odd showed up on my Youtube feed. The various mods were very intriguing so I decided to give it a go. The number of mods in the steam workshop are legion and it’s hard to find the cream of the crop. The curated list was really helpful for me, you can find it here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2703595442

The list has 335 mods, about 13gb. It does require a decent machine to play.

Using the community launcher is highly advisable as it is much more reliable than the factory one.

https://github.com/X2CommunityCore/xcom2-launcher/releases

The discord server is quite active and I got good support for some config issues I had.

https://discord.gg/christopherodd

I’ve played about 200 missions since January, I think I’m hooked. The mods offer a totally fresh take on the game. New classes, skills, weapons, enemies, maps … you name it. Great tactical puzzles.

You say Xcom but this seems to be referring to Xcom 2, specifically War of the Chosen.

I have a couple hundred hours in Long War of the Chosen. It’s a great game but I think my love affair with the game is over, just overplayed it. Do you know how a game with all these mods compares to LWOTC?

That’s right: i made an assumption here that nothing else is being played.

I have played only a little bit of Long War years ago. As I understand it, the Better Advent AI is a big part of it. The enemies act a lot smarter and support each other way better. Plus it’s long. A campaign will be 100-150 missions.

The curated list includes a bunch of new or modified enemies. I offed an Black ICE Mother Brain yesterday and that was loads of fun. Some of them, like the Berserker Omega are ridiculously overpowered. I wont’t play this Ironman as it’s just too easy to loose an entire squad through a single misclick. All the basic enemies have been redone in multiple versions depending on the force level. It goes up to 20, I think. The current force level is now displayed at the top of the screen.

The greatest difference comes through the new classes and how they adjust the power curve of the game. The early game is now easier and the late game harder - which is the exact opposite of vanilla WOTC.

The classes are very varied, loads of new abilities. I love the Phalanx and Keeper classes as they allow for very different tactics. Unlike vanilla, your soldiers garner ability points which you can then spent on abilities when they level. Vanilla is a choice for one between 2 per level. Here there’s up to four abilities and you can chose more than one - provided you have enough ability points. This makes squad composition so much more varied.

Edit: the season kickoff on YouTube gives a pretty good introduction, i think it’s well worth watching.