Part of the reason for the delay is due to XCOM - specifically The Long War mod.
Over Christmas, I purchased the XCOM enemy within DLC which was on sale at Steam. Fair warning - Steam sales are dangerous! I didn't get very far in the game before I got bored. To be fair, part of the reason I got bored was because I was itching to try out The Long War mod.
If you've never heard of it, The Long War mod is pretty much considered THE essential mod for XCOM. It changes up the game massively - so massively that I'll leave the detail to the link above. However, in brief, you have new classes, more soldiers, new equipment, a new tech tree and tons of voicepacks and maps added to the game (strictly speaking, the maps weren't added but recycled from the special missions which in the past, weren't used for normal missions). Naturally, to take into account all the new toys and skills you have - the difficulty in the game has been ramped up massively.
What is really impressive about the mod though is the way it forces you to change how you play.
Soldiers now suffer from fatigue after a mission and need a rest before going back out into the field. And the missions come thick and fast so you really don't get much chance to rest! This means that you are constantly cycling through soldiers so you have to focus on building up a great squad rather than relying on just a couple of super soldiers. The fatigue mechanic also makes SHIVs (robots) useful again - in the base game, they were just a waste of time and its great to now actually use them regularly. This is combined with an increase in the base squad size from 4 to 6 soldiers so that you don't feel punished by including the SHIV in your squad (bearing in mind that SHIVs don't gain experience).
This design philosophy permeates through the whole of the mod. Another example is that fighter kills are now tracked and fighter pilots gain experience and get better as a result of this. Suddenly, choosing which fighter to send out on an intercept has much more meaning.
The one big problem that I can currently see is that The Long War really is a long war. You have so many tactical battles that progress in the game slows to a crawl (which is further exacerbated by a slowed research speed). To be fair, this isn't a problem if you love the tactical game and are willing to spend lots and lots (and lots) of time on it.
In my case, with the lack of time I have to game, I can see me taking months to play through this mod. Hopefully, it doesn't impact my blogging schedule too much!!
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