Time for a massive dig, but seems better than starting a new one.
As mentioned ...here... I finished playing X-COM Apocalypse again last night, defeating the aliens on superhuman without cheating. I also got thinking about the X-COM games as a whole and thought I'd make a topic to see if anyone else has an interest in them, but this threads already here.
Firstly, has anyone seen XENONAUGHTS?
In the absence of any true sequel on the horizon, seen as "XCOM" has decided to go all 1950's small-town FPS, it looks like Xenonaughts is going to be our only fix. Set in the Cold War, it's looking promising, and i highly recommend pre-purchasing and trying out the alpha/beta releases (Though we are bound not to talk about them outside the official +closed+ forum). It's certainly a lot more true to form than UFO:ET ever was.
UFO:ExtraTerrestrials has a gold version available on Steam which is far superior to the non-gold version, and GreyFiend has a great mod for it ...here...
There's also a UFO:ET2 on the way ...here... Which is actually set on Earth (YAY) and adds aircraft carriers for bases too!
So it appears that whilst 2K is the latest company attempting to butcher the X-COM franchise, there's a lot of other people working to fil the niche 
XCOMUTIL has been passed to someone else by it's creator, Scott Jones, and "BladeFireLight" now has a 9.7 BETA version ...here...
XENOCIDE has sadly ceased to exist
UFO:The Two Sides is looking great
Open X-COM is a faithful multi-platform remake
UFO: Alien Invasion is now an OpenSource Project
UFO2000 is as strong as ever
UFO: Cydonias Fall looks promising, but updates are irregular and slow (years apart even)
StrategyCore hosts a HUGELY out-of-date list of things ...here...
The very best weapons for taking out the aliens were the type B toxin guns (the type c was better, but you only got it at the very end after taking out the queen) though that required manufacturing which was too much effort for me, so I stuck to energy weapons.
Not entirely true, you simply have to have researched a LIVE Psi-Morph, Micronoid and researched "The Real Alien Threat" to know what the "real" aliens you are fighting are for the Toxin Type C. To play this way you only have to keep a game going as long as you can with Toxin B and NOT attack the Alien Dimension as you can hold the aliens off until they start sending Psi-Morphs and Micronoids in ships to you where you can pick up the LIVE specimens to research, then attack the Alien Dimension after you get bored.
Alien Gas (AG) weaponry you can only get after the Alien Queen, but you WILL need it for the final building in the Alien Dimension which contains hoards of nasty surprises
What i really want to know is how you can grab a LIVE Overspawn as i have no idea how to knock the thing unconscious with a vehicle, but i've seen people who've managed to research live versions somehow
Some of you may remember a SaveGame editor for Apocalypse, known as the Midnight Editor, by Marcin Wichary. I actually spoke to him a few months back after stalking him on the internet and contacting him. The result is that i have a copy of the absolute final version he made (Internal rev 1.02D [v0.63D]) and whilst i have nowhere to host it, he's happy for me to pass it round. So feel free to PM me if you want to cheat Apocalypse.
Finally, I've been trying to track down a copy of the long-lost Apocalypse BETA for years (I even wrote to Microprose when they still existed, but they didn't want to give as the game was only two years old at the time).
I know that it was circulating some years ago after Microprose went down the pan and it went for abandonware, unlike the final version and pre-curser games that are now of course owned by Atari/2K and therefore untouchable without buying. So if you know where to legitimately obtain the BETA, or even if you have a copy of it yourself, please PM me, don't post here as not to antagonise the mods
For those who want to know, all the X-COM games can be bought on Steam. Even though i own multiple copies of the originals, I've bought them again here to support the franchise and get versions that work with XP/Vista/7 through a custom DOSBOX 