It's a system that I feel works very well - making a significant strategic choice that will very likely define your next few hours of play - but, depending on which iteration of the series we're talking about, it at worst forces and at best encourages a single golden path of research.

Make a choice over what tech you want to unlock (or lay the groundwork for next), wait several in-game days or weeks for it to complete, do it again - each time agonising that you might have sold yourself short by, say, choosing weapon upgrades instead of better armour. There's a lot of things that XCOM does different to its more measured and unpredictable precursor X-COM, but the way you research new military technology is not one of them.

But there's one very small change in WOTC that I didn't mention - a tiny thing with massive, massive repercussions for XCOM 2: War of the Chosen 's replayability.

Though it suffers from having as many different tones as the last thirty years of Dulux catalogues sellotaped together, I found in my XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen review that the latest expansion for Firaxis' game is an extremely effective remix of, basically, everything.

Xcom 2 wotc weapons