What exactly would you propose?
Personally, I'd leave the post-termination mansions relatively missionless, or give them some sort of local mission set. Probably not something you'd do, since you're already invested in your present work.
Easiest thing would be to put in a Ufopedia blurb post-termination, explaining that some isolated strongholds are still holding out and weren't taken down in the general purge. Perhaps with big red exclamation marks for the more dense among us.
The fact that manors still do that after their HQ is down is a side effect, and I'm not sure if can be disabled at all; but even if possible, I wouldn't do that, because that would be boring.
Using retaliationOdds? But I'd actually
like to get a retaliation. Nobody has invaded me yet, perhaps because I'm too successful?
And IMO fighting these same guys even
after you've supposdedly rid yourself of them is also boring. YMMV.
We can't get too carried away, since players who allowed dozens of manors to appear will get completely swamped with who knows how many missions per month.
Well, then they deserve it?
I mean, if they're exterminating the cults on time, that won't be a problem. And I'd take too many missions over virtually none any day. At worst, the player can ignore most of the missions and concentrate on the mansions themselves.
OTOH, you're right, too many extra cult missions would also be bad, but right now
I don't recall a single one. Maybe I did do one or two and don't remember, but it's still far, far on the side of 'too few' rather than 'too many'.
And getting to play with their aircraft and eliminating these missions that way would also be much more interesting than what we have right now.
I fear it might take away some mechanics from other organizations which should be more advanced/dangerous.
Should I really put every feature in early/mid game?
You do have a point here. But you already
gave the cults retaliation and interception. I wouldn't mind taking retaliation away from them, and giving it to the MiB, the Syndicate, or even the Hybrids or Cyberweb.
Not sure if this level of intelligence you have on a cult would make sense. An armoured convoy is one thing, two Skodas filled with angry gopniks is something else.
Gopniks can do as they please. I'd at least want the helicopters and fighter jets to show up on radar. A Priest of Dagon taking a helicopter (and some Gillmen) to the fight doesn't sound too outlandish.
What do you mean by "actually not happening"? Are they broken?
Read my
edit. Basically, I can see them manifesting in alienMissions for a while, and when the countdown reaches zero they just... disappear.
Edit: I suppose I'll try to summarise what seems to have come out of this discussion as problems with the cults (and their air game) right now and what
I think could be done to mitigate this. Others of course might have different ideas about whether these are worth solving and how.
- Problem 1 (the OP): Terminating a cult and still having to fight leftover (invisible!) manors is confusing.
Solution 1: Make a pop-up a la the 'woe is us!' messages that explains this situation.
Solution 2: Take regular cult missions away from the manors after termination. Maybe lock it behind some sort of research ("Remnants of EXALT" or whatever).
Solution 3: Replace their regular missions with less ambitious ones.
- Problem 2: Some of the mansion-generated missions seem not to work, i.e. they spawn no mission site. Infiltration and street fighting I'm sure about, maybe there are others as well.
Solution: Fix it. I'm not even sure how the current rulesets for those are supposed to work, given all the differences with the actual working missions (e.g. the OP's assassinations).
- Problem 3: There's really no regular cultist air traffic for the player to meddle with.
Solution: Make some. Gillmen being hidden in water tanks masquerading as fuel truck convoys driven to ritual terror missions, Liquidators cruising around in black helicopters, Red Dawn driving BMP's filled with gopniks to turf wars, BL Mandarins riding in private jets filled with hand-picked goons...
- Problem 4: The interceptions are a bit toothless (as Rag pointed out).
Solution: Make the manors' interception radius bigger (kinda simulating that they call in an asset from somewhere else and don't have airbases of their own). Maybe take a look at their effective speeds vs X-Com transport craft, so that anything below the Skyranger is relatively fair game and needs an escort or planning.
- Problem 5: Cultists launching regular attack helicopter and fighter jet sorties with no pushback from the local government pretty much destroys my SOD. And apparently krautbernd's, too.
Solution: See Problem 4. Make a Ufopedia entry to explain that these are not cult assets but governments being tricked into 'defending' their airspace.
- Problem 6: Cult retaliations.
Solution: Does it need one? They never retaliated against me for ~28 months and countless missions flown against them.
Edit2: I figured out what's wrong with infiltrations and street fighting. You're using non-existent fake UFOs, STR_MEDIUM_GROUND_CONVOY_{CULT_NAME} and STR_CULT_STREET_FIGHTING_{CULT_NAME}, while there's only STR_MEDIUM_GROUND_CONVOY defined as a UFO.
I suspect there may be others, too.
