Thanks to an interview over at Rock Paper Shotgun, Firaxis' Jake Solomon has revealed their RTS update to the beloved series will go above and beyond to recapture the essence of the original, including in the challenge department with the inclusion of an Iron Man mode.

"We like to play Iron Man," he told the site. "And so it's something we want to actually systemically enable where if you say "I want to play this game in Iron Man", then you've only got one save slot and all auto saves and all your saves go to that slot – and the only thing you can do is save and exit.

"Of course, you get to some point where if you lose too much, I'll give you the option [and] say "do you want to turn off Iron Man", you know, "are you done? Do you want to turn off Iron Man and continue to play normally?"," he added.

As for the decision to remove Time Units from the update, something that has ired many fans, Solomon simply pointed out that at this point in time, with some of new additions they've made to the game "it just didn't map to the experience well".

"With all these new abilities and things, it just created this barrier between "I know what I want to do and I know how I'm going to do it", and instead it became this sort of thing where you were, like, "I'm not quite sure what I can do, and so I'm just going to let it sort of play out"," he explained. "So in this case when we had Time Units, they ended up making the game more shallow, because all these different abilities and combos, all these interesting things, were never getting used because people couldn't think about them that way."

The rest of the interview is a decent read for fans of the series, and anyone steadfast in avoiding the FPS entry in the franchise but excited for an RTS reboot will find some juicy nuggets (such as the potential for mod support).

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is due to land some time in 2012 and is being developed by Firaxis Games. Stay tuned to AusGamers for more as it becomes available.