Red_Avatar: I got them all on Gamersgate already - never got round to playing the new ones though. I heard they had bad balancing issues. Is there any XCom fan who played them here to give us their opinion?
I qualify as an Xcom fan. My first version of Xcom had an 8 digit code to enter from the manual before I could play (v1.0) on three HD floppies. Thankfully, the 1.3 patch removed those requirements, but oddly changed the sound effects to be odd. I finished the game, and beat upon the 'brains' of the operation.
As for Xcom 2 - never finished. Got bored playing shipping mission after shipping mission. Each one of those terror missions was a two parter. Did a three parter at Atlantis, so I think I made it halfway.
Even modded Xcom 2 a little bit to make the weapons less limiting. Basically converted the 10 clip, low accuracy harpoon weapon to a 20 clip to a mid range sniper rifle. Never found out how to declare a weapon as underwater/non-underwater. Had lost interest by then.
As for the UFO series - Aftermath:
There's a ComboMod Beta (3.03) that enables many more weapons (there are minor bugs also, but they are not game breaking, that I saw). Aftermath is more for the people that just want to get on the battlefield, and the heck with base management. You can keep as much of the items as you wish - in fact I never found a way to dispose of unwanted items. I finished it in six months playing about 1/2 hour to an hour each night. It took this long because about half-way into it, I discovered I'd triggered a game breaking bug, and had to start over (see FYI). The real-time/pause action is also a little jarring to Xcom fans, but overall, I think it moves a lot faster than xcom style - human-turn / alien turn type games, so the two part missions were finishable in under 1/2 hour. Towards the end, though, your characters have to do a lot more rocket-dodging - something akin to Xcom 2 and those #@*! landed battleships - where everyone is clustered around the door with those underwater guided missile launchers - arg. Then again, by that point, you'll have the Flak cannon to use against them (evil grin). See if your shield can stop a 30mm shell! *ahem*
So, if you are looking for a casual tactical Xcom-light game, but one that your characters return and grow in, and you don't mind changing your gameplay style to get around a few bugs, this is a decent game.
FYI, if you wish to avoid game breaking bugs, when directions say you have to carry something in your hands but it fits in your backpack - carry it in your hands before you go over the green box return area threshold. Otherwise, it will say 'mission successful', even though the game considers it to be a failure. Lucky for me, I found a way to import my old party into the new game.
Afterlight:
I'm fairly new to this game, and it has a lot more base/resource management than before. There are also factions that you have to deal with. Afterlight from here says 2.0 - they mean 1.2, and there is a 1.3 fan patch that was blessed by the developer Altar. I'm a little hazy on why the Grays have lasers, but, hey, whatever. The base management, however, requires that you carefully weigh the consequences of what you build
FWIW, There's a ACM v1.4 (Total Conversion Mod by Okim) that fixes a lot of the balance issues in Afterlight by adding more varied guns and fixing artwork and sounds for current guns/armor - but at the same time
increasing the time it takes to get said guns. He has also modified the research tree, building purposes, armor slots(?), and perfected scopes and vambraces (something with one of the human groups you meet). Some of these don't work, or sound odd, etc... Works fine with version from GoG. However, don't expect it to work with patch 1.3, as 1.3 moves around some of the things that ACM 1.4 tries to fix. It's a pretty large mod, weighing in at 75M (135M uncompressed).
There's also a Aftershock Rebalance Mod, but supposedly Akim has incorporated the spirit of most of the changes that ShadoWarrior made. So much so, that ShadoWarrior is no longer updating his Rebalance Mod.
Afterlight:
As for Afterlight, I don't know much about it. It's probably certainly worth buying, but I'll wait a bit until I finish Aftershock.