It isnt that long of a wait. Ten minutes at high level play, and maybe two minutes each turn for low level.
I still haven't seen OP decide which Xcom we're all playing. Apocalypse is the least buggy of the three, its also my favorite because of the awesome city scape battles and battlescape terrain destruction system. (Note : Battlescape and Cityscape are two different things for clarification, Battlescape is the tactical view with operatives killing aliens on foot. Cityscape is where you do all the UFO shooting and where awesome can happen if you have a collapsing building crash down on a UFO.) I have to admit though the story is open ended and explanations for certain weapons or actions are sometimes downright silly and plainly exist because of the Devs feeling certain design choices were nesscary. Util doesn't work on Apoc, it doesn't need to. TFTD takes the cake for difficulty since unlike the original UFO:d has a working difficulty setting, and it has some broken enemies. It also wins first place for bugs in reason I don't feel I need to explain. It needs Util to be playable. UFO:d has bugs but its the original, I think UTIL eliminates alot of the bugs related to TFTD and UFO:d but the 80 item limit table in the UFO:d and TFTD Engines cannot be solved and makes base defenses ... difficult. Util is very helpful here.
We aren't doing multi-player Xcom from what OP has said so far, were swapping saves to run Xcom for a round (One month for each person or in Apocs case one week.)
I was thinking UFO Defense, I'm trying to get XcomUTIL working on my laptop (64 bit windows 7) and it hasn't gone amazingly. Will keep trying.
im willing to play, but a year seems too short imo, ive had 2 years pass without any substantial happenings once