X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"
Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.
I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.
X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.
Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.
You're very wrong about the accuracy thing, but dead on with the pod mechanic. Inactive pods don't behave in a realistic way, and the turn based system means that being spotted by an alien can mean instant ruin if it happens at the end of your turn. The player shouldn't be punished for taking actions in the wrong order if it's not possible to know what the correct order is.
I can't personally think of a way to remedy it without just removing the "entire team goes at once" mechanic, but it's uniquely frustrating to accidentally reveal the wrong tile and basically give the aliens a free turn. Activating a pod should at least give your entire team free overwatch or something.
Mods can help with some of the AI issues, the stealth thing is actually intentional design where pods move towards a fireteam.
This ends up as more of an experience thing in the reboots that comes down to slowly moving up a map and never double dashing - blue and yellow moves at the same time - unless you're doing something drastic like running a Bladestorm Ranger/Templar into a pod because you know it will scatter than and Bladestorm will still mean several attacks of opportunity. Templars are slightly better for this than Rangers as sometimes a Templar can learn Fortress which prevents fire damage, so accidentally meleeing a Purifier with a flamethrower doesn't end up being lethal.
It used to in the original if you left soldiers with enough AP.
In harder difficulties/battles, it forces the player to move their characters very slowly to compensate for that unfair mechanic. So if an enemy is spotted, at least it's at maximum range, and gives the player more chances to counter it. In addition to what I listed in an above comment, this adds another layer of frustration to these types of games, and why I no longer play them.
And that slow movement was directly cited as the "wrong way" to play by the game's director, which is why he added a very low time limit to basically every mission in Xcom 2. Which had a mod to remove it within like 2 days of release for how much everyone hated that idea, and I believe one that doubles it is even a baseline difficulty option now.
The Pod system heavily punishes speed, which worked in EU/EW because it worked as a soft stealth approach to all missions in exchange for being a bit boringly slow at points. Xcom 2 throws that out the window and basically forces you to make bad decisions in the name of "speed" because you will literally die unless you use every single blue move going towards the objective.
Initially the game rewarded moving slowly, which is why they added the controversial meld mechanic.
As amended, an aggressive strategy that risked your soldiers had long term rewards.
This is why Reapers were so OP in WotC. They could end up telling you everything about a map and do so while in stealth and often almost right next a hostile. Getting them before the other factions could literally make or break some playthroughs they were that good.
I didn't realize you could get reapers. Actually, I may not have played with WotC because I was done with the game before the expansion came out. I get your point tho.
The game values information. You have to move to get information. You have to make guesses. You win some. You lose some. It's not a perfect game. But it's a great game.
XCOM 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I just really hate having a great run destroyed because the enemy pods all sprint directly toward my squad while the game pretends they just coincidentally all happened upon us.
Yeah XCOM 2 original unmodded was the one with "line of play" right? I think Long War did away with it.