How to delete my XCom Saves?

So first a confession: I was playing iron man, but I would cheat in that at the beginning of every month I would make a backup of the game. Then near the end of the month I would restore the game, or re-save depending how I did for the month.

In doing all this I totally messed up my save menu. Half the games will not load anymore, because the file is not there anymore. But more importantly is that I can't delete the games from the in-game menu. When I try to delete it just goes back to the top of the list.

My concern is I saw a youtube video about if you have too many saves the game will no longer save.

Any thoughts on how I can fix this issue, short of a re-install?

The XCOM saves are kept in:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\SaveData

So, I would assume that deleting all of the save files in that folder would delete all your save games. But make a backup of the folder in case so you can put it back to how it was if it doesn't work.

I posed the same question:

more or less a duplicate of: Where are the savegames located in x-com enemy unknown?

The games are saved in
Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\SaveData

And deleting them works fine. I always deleted all savegames older than a few days so kept my latest ones. Never had any trouble with it.

The list of savegames was refreshed ingame after the next restart. (btw: I always deleted them when the game was not started to avoid any unwanted side effects).

I got XCOM Enemy Within and Enemy Unknown at the same time through Steam, and I believe this pattern works for both. It also works with XCOM2. The other answers didn't work for me because Steam kept recreating the files. The saved games are in C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\SaveData as above. Back up your entire SaveData directory before starting! I've also used this with Enemy Within.

1. Delete nothing from SaveData. If you want to save any games, copy them out and renumber them save1, save2, etc.
2. Start XCOM, online and connected to steam.
3. Get in windowed mode if you aren't already, or just use Windows-D to show your desktop.
4. Delete the SaveData folder.
5. Go back to the running XCOM, online and connected to steam.
6. Exit to desktop.
7. Start XCOM, online and connected to steam.
8. Copy in your save game files.
9. Restart XCOM. Your selected save files should be there. If you do see one with an error (something about a mismatch) that one won't work, and will crash XCOM. You probably thought that one was your last save, but it may not be.

Alternate method, tested with XCOM 2. There's a little less manual effort in this one.

1. Back up your SaveData folder.
2. Start XCOM, online and connected to steam.
3. Get in windowed mode if you aren't already, or just use Windows-D to show your desktop.
4. Delete the save files you don't want to keep from the SaveData folder.
5. Go back to the running XCOM, online and connected to steam.
6. Exit XCOM to desktop.
7. Restart XCOM. You now have just the files you left. No renumbering of save files are needed (at least for XCOM 2).