Editing XCOM (section)

=== XCOM: Long War ===
The big daddy mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown made by a small developer known as Pavonis Interactive that is single-handedly responsible for XCOM 2's thorough mod support (alongside Firaxis [[Blood Ravens| "borrowing"]] some notable aspects of this mod for the actual sequel), Long War is a ''very'' extensive rework of the entire game from the ground up. While the mod greatly expands the classes, perks, weapons and armor players can gear up their dudes with, it also greatly enhances the aliens' arsenal, which now adapts and evolves to combat the player the longer the game goes on. The number of changes made to the game is well into the hundreds and the difficulty is so stepped up that it makes the vanilla game a walk in the park comparatively. This mod is almost universally praised, to the point that not only did Firaxis make it a point to make the sequel as mod-friendly as possible, but they actually partnered up with the Pavonis team to help develop the core XCOM 2 game as well as the first wave of miscellaneous mods to showcase how easy it is to plug-and-play community made content into the game.

As said previously, this is pretty much ''the'' XCOM mod.  It's such a big mod that a lot of other XCOM mods are metamods designed to modify ''this'' mod!
==== Long War Rebalance ====
The largest Long War sub-mod, Long War Rebalance completely overhauls everything drastically for the 3rd time, from base management to even air combat. In terms of difficulty, LWR tries to maintain the sweet spot between bullshit (early-game Long War) to cake walk (late-game Long war) while reducing the tedium in base-game and LW. One of the most boring parts of LW (and vanilla impossible) was overwatch creeping, which was the solution to prevent a possibly game-ending pod activation. While XCOM 2 alleviates this with concealment, LWR removes the ability to overwatch hidden enemies (only OWing visible enemies), and activated pods activate nearby pods (An Outsider pod may alert every pod on the map!). Before you shit your pants, UCross (the main dev) made pod activation much less punishing by giving Your Dudes a free movement point if they have no action points, similar to how aliens can scramble if activated. This produces a much more fast-paced game, allowing you to dash to your content.

Despite how horrible it sounds to face two or three pods, they're never as large as LW, and classes have been reworked to shoot multiple times (Infantry can hit 4 times with correct build). Even then, most pods can't be instantly wiped like X2, thanks to innate DR in cover for both XCOM and xenos (~30% DR in half, ~60% DR in full), so the enemy will usually have a chance to hit, and they can hit hard. Every alien (and EXALT) unit is now a serious threats in the battlefield, with even the weakest units having serious potential. For example, Sectoids now have Psi Panic and a buffed Mindfray in the beginning, making them fantastic in annihilating rookie brains, and Drones have the ability to Holo Target and heal a Cyberdisc back to half health with Master Mechanic. In LWR, there are less aliens, but they can be serious threats in themselves.