OpenXcom Forum

OpenXcom => Suggestions => Topic started by: Juju Dredd on August 26, 2013, 02:00:57 am

Title: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on August 26, 2013, 02:00:57 am
This is a mess. When the last battleship of one of these two missions enter atmosphere, no matter what you do an alien base is immediately built and in the case of alien infiltration one of the council countries quit. This seems highly unfair to me. There should be a preference to delay the consequences at the battleship's take off. This means if you crash it or capture it on the ground the whole alien mission should be a failure.

Who agree with me?
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: moriarty on August 26, 2013, 10:02:31 am
absolutely. there is a lot about the geoscape strategy stuff that needs more complexity.

(like the thing about aliens attacking your base over and over again if your base defences destroy the incoming battleships, but they immediately forget your base as soon as the battleship lands and you manage to defend the base on the ground. this needs a different mechanic, perhaps some kind of counter-attack thing where once you defeat them on the ground, you learn the location of their base of operations and are given the chance to attack them and destroy their computers.)
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: AMX on August 26, 2013, 01:04:00 pm
I'm not entirely sure, but at least the infiltration may already be fixed:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1434.0.html

Haven't seen it documented anywhere, though, so that may have been a bug...
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on August 26, 2013, 02:45:33 pm
I'm not sure this is a bug.
I only know this is this way the original game works (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Alien_Infiltration).
I believe this is intentionally done to prevent your game from running indefinitely, since a good avenger fleet would permit you prevent any alien infiltration as long as they don't send a great number of simultaneous alien infiltration missions. This is a way to figure that time runs against humans.

I think the possibility to stop alien infiltration should be an option.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: kharille on August 26, 2013, 03:11:47 pm
I do suspect that was a bug, but hey, at least in my superhuman game I ain't pestered with the loss of India.  There was a floater base there from 2 months ago.  I've seen how useless it is to fight this, but I tried taking out the floater base before they arrived.

By the end of the month, India was still in the xcom project....  suits me...
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on August 26, 2013, 03:52:31 pm
I do suspect that was a bug, but hey, at least in my superhuman game I ain't pestered with the loss of India.  There was a floater base there from 2 months ago.  I've seen how useless it is to fight this, but I tried taking out the floater base before they arrived.

By the end of the month, India was still in the xcom project....  suits me...

I'm not sure, perhaps this was a coincidence.
I'm pretty sure in the original game, letting alien bases has no other impact than reducing your score (which is not an annoyance at all if you attack the reserve ships).
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: kharille on August 26, 2013, 06:32:02 pm
I think the floater base was in middle east...  if that helps...

Maybe it was a flaw introduced by OpenXcom?....
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on August 27, 2013, 02:20:07 pm
Alien bases should be created where a Battleship and a Supplyship land together for a few ingame hours, then disappear as the base is created.
where the ships are both completely dismantled and used in the base.
When Xcom attacks both ships are on the battlescape with with their full complementary crew.

Alien infiltration is where one battleship lands on a city and one hovering around in the area but not directly above it.
When Xcom attacks you will fight in a terrorsite-esk battlescape but with a Battleship on it. And thus there will be civilians. ;)
When successful the 2nd battleship will land in the country of that city and will wait for a Supplyship to start an alienbase mission ^^
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on August 27, 2013, 11:21:47 pm
Alien bases should be created where a Battleship and a Supplyship land together for a few ingame hours, then disappear as the base is created.
where the ships are both completely dismantled and used in the base.
When Xcom attacks both ships are on the battlescape with with their full complementary crew.

Alien infiltration is where one battleship lands on a city and one hovering around in the area but not directly above it.
When Xcom attacks you will fight in a terrorsite-esk battlescape but with a Battleship on it. And thus there will be civilians. ;)
When successful the 2nd battleship will land in the country of that city and will wait for a Supplyship to start an alienbase mission ^^

What you suggest sounds me more like a custom patch, I was just going for a simple game option to set...
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on August 28, 2013, 08:53:58 am
What you suggest sounds me more like a custom patch, I was just going for a simple game option to set...

Well it would make sense ^^
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: KiethSomataw99 on August 31, 2013, 07:39:05 pm
Well, when I played, the main infiltration wave appeared over Brazil, and i managed to shoot down the supply ship, the terror ship, and the first battleship in quick succession, which of course, delayed the second battleship significantly. The month ended before it arrived and Brazil payed me normally. The second battleship then  entered the atmosphere west of the US but I shot it down before it reached Brazil. I believe that once the second battleship arrives over the targeted country, the pact is signed. That did not happen with Brazil.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on August 31, 2013, 09:04:58 pm
Well, when I played, the main infiltration wave appeared over Brazil, and i managed to shoot down the supply ship, the terror ship, and the first battleship in quick succession, which of course, delayed the second battleship significantly. The month ended before it arrived and Brazil payed me normally. The second battleship then  entered the atmosphere west of the US but I shot it down before it reached Brazil. I believe that once the second battleship arrives over the targeted country, the pact is signed. That did not happen with Brazil.

Interesting I read on the internet Ufopedia, that infiltration missions succeed the minute the Battleship entered the atmosphere... :\
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on September 01, 2013, 01:09:32 am
Interesting I read on the internet Ufopedia, that infiltration missions succeed the minute the Battleship entered the atmosphere... :\

Have you read my first post in the topic? This is exactly what I said. I did not specify I was talking about the vanilla version of the game, because I thought OpenXcom would have kept this behavior, perhaps that made my post somewhat unclear.
As I already said, I strongly believe this is not a bug, but this is done to ensure player will lose over time, he cannot continuously repel aliens and play an infinite game. This makes sense, even thought I believe this is illogical.

This is why I suggest there is at least a single option to define how infiltration missions succeed.
- one value of this option could mean "like in the vanilla game", unstoppable. This should be the default value for this option.
- another value could say "destroy/crash/prevent from taking off the last battleship and the infiltration fails". Other ships could be considered as decoys.
- another value could say "if any large infiltrating ufo succeeds, infiltration succeeds."
- perhaps other simple possibilities.

This should be in the base openXCom.
I believe other more complicated way to determine if alien infiltration succeed should only be implemented in a custom mod.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on September 01, 2013, 12:15:25 pm
I still prefer my idea about this... ^^

Alien bases should be created where a Battleship and a Supplyship land together for a few ingame hours, then disappear as the base is created.
where the ships are both completely dismantled and used in the base.
When Xcom attacks both ships are on the battlescape with with their full complementary crew.

Alien infiltration is where one battleship lands on a city and one hovering around in the area but not directly above it.
When Xcom attacks you will fight in a terrorsite-esk battlescape but with a Battleship on it. And thus there will be civilians. ;)
When successful the 2nd battleship will land in the country of that city and will wait for a Supplyship to start an alienbase mission ^^
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: KiethSomataw99 on September 03, 2013, 10:57:08 pm
Perhaps OpenXcom could be made so that if the Second Battleship is shot down or assaulted, there is a chance that the pact will not be signed. The sooner that happens, the higher the chance. If that happens a message on the monthly report goes "(Country's name) was interrupted in signing a secret pact with the aliens and has decided to maintain funding toward the XCOM project." Of course, once the second battleship arrives, the alien base will appear, regardless whether the pact is signed or interrupted.

Of course, they could make it so if a certain number of countries sign pacts with the aliens, 8 or more i guess?, then they will force the council to terminate the project, with the monthly report message, "A majority of the sponsors have signed pacts with the aliens and unfortunately, they have forced the Council of Funding Nations to terminate the project. They have persuaded the remaining sponsors to deal with the problem as they have. We can only hope we can come to some accommodation with these apparently hostile forces, and the general populace will come to terms with these alien visitors."
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on September 04, 2013, 08:52:16 am
Why not make a diplomatic mini game with this?

Where you need to debate the aliens with the country in question... XD
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Mr. Quiet on September 04, 2013, 09:20:45 am
Where you need to debate the aliens with the country in question... XD

Can we bring our Laser Rifles to this debate? ;D
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Danny on September 04, 2013, 01:33:04 pm
Pure diplomatic :P
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: hstech on October 12, 2013, 08:56:55 pm
I'm not sure this is a bug.
I only know this is this way the original game works (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Alien_Infiltration).
I believe this is intentionally done to prevent your game from running indefinitely, since a good avenger fleet would permit you prevent any alien infiltration as long as they don't send a great number of simultaneous alien infiltration missions. This is a way to figure that time runs against humans.

If this is so, then it was pretty sloppily done. The defense against Infiltration is simple: Get Hyperwawe Decoders ASAP, build 100% world coverage even if you would have one or two "normal" bases and the rest to be just access lift, Hyperwave Decoder, General Stores (to hold the ammo) and a couple of Hangars to hold Interceptors so that you can shoot down everything quickly. Then shoot down any small UFOs which are on "Infiltration" mission as soon as they appear and the aliens will never get to the point of signing any pacts.

Well, also when I had only the lowly Radars, what I did was to build 8 bases right at the beginning of the game. At the first day I ordered 7 bases having a radar to spot any UFOs and an armed Interceptor to shoot it down. Before the end of the month I could destroy them all. I then bought truckloads of Avalanche missiles and shot down everything that was "Small" or smaller. My abilities to do some speedy research were initially pretty limited but I was able to contain the alien's invasion to small UFOs only, collecting the loot until I got enough money to build additional labs and put scientists into them.

Basically, the aliens could manage to do some scouting pretty unhindered during the first 26 days but after that they had really BIG troubles getting any scout down to Earth and back. And if they tried to do Terror during the first month, I took the commitment to shoot that dreaded Terror Ship down even if I had one or two Interceptors down. And despite the defendability of my detection bases being rather pathetic (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Base_Layout_Strategy), they could not even do any retaliation because the Battleship seems to not contain any detection ability so if all the small scouts got destroyed, they could not figure out where that pesky base of mine actually is when the Battleship was ready to do the attack.

And I was still able to capture a Navigator to get a Hyperwave Decoder. I was even able to obtain the Psi technology during the wait: the Ethereals showed up and as I had my Stun Rods ready from the day 3 (the first 2 days they were in the mail :) ), I took my time to capture one alive.

This strategy worked because the alien's AI was quite stupid (at least at the Begginer difficulty, see below). The aliens tended to send the UFOs one after another at least early in the game. During the first month they probably did only "Research" (which makes sense, you can't do anything more complex to the human race when you don't know where it is living and how it is living so on and so forth). Later when the search&destroy system was in place, they kept sending a single small UFO every now and then and see them disappear into thin air instead of sending a swarm of them in an attempt to discover why these scouts are disappearing.

I was thinking that when I shot all these scouts down, they could not figure out any suitable location for the Infiltration and thus did not bother trying to Infiltrate. However this place (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Alien_Infiltration) seems to suggest that it is probably not the case but I am not sure. What I know is only that when I shot down the scouts, the aliens would not send the last wave containing the main crew.

So I don't know if the bug is in the "instant success" thing of the last phrase of Infiltration or it is in the ability of the player to render the mission impossible by killing the scouts but there has to be a bug somewhere.

To be honest I was playing only "Easy" difficulty. I don't have any experience from the harder versions of the game and I don't have any experience doing this in the OpenXCom (I am goint to fix  that as I have OpenXCom armed and ready). And also I liked this kind of "alien stupidity" because that allowed me to hold them back until I had my assault (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Hyper-wave_Decoder) combat (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Laser_Rifle) equipment (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Psi-Amp) ready. Then I allowed them to do selected missions (so I could receive more resources to expand my initial combat kit ;) ).
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Sharp on October 12, 2013, 09:16:29 pm
You don't lose by losing countries.

Quote from: https://ufopaedia.org
How to Lose
  • If you are in debt over $1 million at the end of any month, after funding and maintenance has been calculated, the council will give you a warning. The warning they give about not going over $2 million in debt should presumably read $1 million. The 2nd time you are over $1 million in debt, the project is cancelled. However, there is a rather large bug. There is actually a check whether the "Has X-COM received a financial warning?" flag has been raised. If no, a warning is issued and the flag is raised. If yes, then the game ends, and the flag is lowered. HOWEVER, this flag is erronously not connected to any particular savegame, it is global across all savegames. This allows strange results when saving and loading games.
  • If you have two consecutive "bad" months in terms of score--

-900 (Beginner)
-800 (Experienced)
-700 (Veteran)
-600 (Genius)
-500 (Superhuman)
  • If all X-COM bases are captured by Aliens. (But you can stay in the game by starting a new base before your last base is captured - see Access Lift.)
  • If you fail your attempt to destroy Cydonia!
I think the debt bug is fixed in OpenXCOM, but afaik you can lose every single funding country and still keep playing.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: hstech on October 12, 2013, 09:33:03 pm
Ok, quick fix to this post.

I did order 8 bases with Big Radar, General Stores and Hangar after I edited my fresh savegame to match the "Super Easy" difficulty. This means I gave myseld $2.000.000.000 USD so I could forget about financial stuff completely and focus on the plot.

Once I completed this "Super Easy" game, I started a "normal easy" game which was a vanilla Easy. In this type of game it does not fit into your initial budget to have 8 bases with a Large Radar, General Stores and an Interceptor with generous supply of Avalanche missiles. However it is still possible to schedule about 90% world coverage (Australia, Antarctida and some remote arctic locations had to be left out) with large radars during day 1.

I don't yet know how it will turn out to be but I started my attempt to take it off.

Also, another interesting option is to give myself a generous supply of money (say $100 million) but disabling all of the government funding completely (set funding cap to 0 and currend funding to 0). Then I would have to earn it all from the field operations and/or manufacturing.

The third interesting option would be The Privateer Way (https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Yet_Another_Scheme). This would also in addition to editing the council funding away would require editing the manufacturing costs so that no items can be manufactured for profit. The only income could be to shoot down the UFOs, recover them and sell the loot.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on October 13, 2013, 02:09:14 pm
This is surely pure luck.
I also always shot down infiltration scout as soon as I see them, and yet I lose council members.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: sender on October 14, 2013, 07:35:20 am
Either it's not pure luck or I've been incredibly lucky. I've never had a defecting nation in the dozens of games I've played other than the first few times I was doing really, really poorly. And this includes all of X-Com, TFTD, and OXC. And I always play on Super Human. As for bases in general, the only time I've seen them is when they are constructed during the first 2-3 months before my interceptor screen is up or when I intentionally let them land because I just don't care.

Get a worldwide surveillance network with matching interceptor support ASAP. It's the most important milestone in the game. No more terror missions, no more bases, nothing but tactical missions that are on your terms.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on October 15, 2013, 01:49:57 am
But I do! And I lose funding nations anyway...
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: BrianW on October 23, 2013, 07:33:28 am
I think It´ll be cool if one could get the  countries back... like a special mission to the capital of the country in question where you need to kill all the aliens and one or two human traitors!!!!! I guess that can be done right? 
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: KiethSomataw99 on October 24, 2013, 01:48:52 am
I do believe that there should be a way to get countries to break the pact with the aliens: if you've been doing excellent overall and had a lot of XCOM activity within the country, and you've eliminated all alien bases within the country, the country will announce its support to XCOM again. The monthly report message will read: "(Country's name) was impressed with your excellent performance and has agreed to nullify the pact with the aliens and start funding the project again."

Of course, the funding increase will start from $0 and be increased from it.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Juju Dredd on October 24, 2013, 09:16:04 pm
I do agree with that idea.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: kharille on October 25, 2013, 02:31:30 am
Kill the mind controlled president surrounded by all the numerous aliens.  Maybe an xcom2 size map with 50 odd aliens and masses of terror units?
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Shadow on October 25, 2013, 03:37:25 am
I'm against the reversal of alien pacts. A nation who has allied itself with the aliens has been deeply infiltrated in critical levels, and cannot be considered trustworthy anymore.

However, I'm in favour of being able to stop Alien Infiltration missions in any phase. If X-COM can't pull that off, they deserve to suffer the consequences.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Ademordna on August 08, 2014, 09:17:00 pm
Hi,

The infiltration missions are clearly broken. I have full hyper wave decoder coverage all over the dry land (even Pacific islands) since months now. I did not miss any of the infiltration scouts, I blew them up or downed and recovered them. This way I was able to stop completely the first infiltration mission. But when the second happened (different continent and species), although I promptly killed the scouts, the very large still appeared and China quits. It's the second openxcom game where this happens (I abandoned the first for the same reason, thinking it was my fault).
This never happened to me in the vanilla game and I've been playing that one on and off since childhood. So no, this is not how the original behaved.

The principle is this: if you do everything right you should not lose. This goes for any game that calls itself strategic or we'd be playing poker.

There's plenty of good suggestions already but the version 1.0 (13-06-2014) still hasn't applied any nor addressed the original problem. It's a pity for such superb work. Please fix.

10x
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Falko on August 08, 2014, 09:27:01 pm
i could not avoid/prevent infiltration if the battle ufo appeared in oxc and in original so from my experience its correctly impemented
but i would like to have the option to avoid/prevent/revert an infiltration
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Harald_Gray on August 08, 2014, 09:49:40 pm
I never considered alien infiltration much of a problem. The original game was hardcoded so that the aliens never infiltrated Russia, meaning you would never lose because all the coutries quit. By the time you had reasonable radar/decoder coverage, so you could have a reason to gripe about infiltration being hard to stop, your main sources of income were selling loot and manufacturing lascannons, so losing a country or two meant next to nothing.

If the OXC follows the no-infiltration-in-russia rule (and I hope it does) the impact infiltration has on gameplay is next to none.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Falko on August 08, 2014, 10:05:12 pm
If the OXC follows the no-infiltration-in-russia rule (and I hope it does)
as far as i know that is still the case
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Arthanor on August 11, 2014, 05:21:32 pm
I never considered alien infiltration much of a problem. The original game was hardcoded so that the aliens never infiltrated Russia, meaning you would never lose because all the coutries quit. By the time you had reasonable radar/decoder coverage, so you could have a reason to gripe about infiltration being hard to stop, your main sources of income were selling loot and manufacturing lascannons, so losing a country or two meant next to nothing.

If the OXC follows the no-infiltration-in-russia rule (and I hope it does) the impact infiltration has on gameplay is next to none.
It's not really about gameplay, or "boohoo aliens cheat I can't win!" since indeed the funding you get is rather small after even just a few months of recovering stuff from UFOs.

The issue is the immersion, the self-consistency of the setting, where it makes no sense that some missions cannot fail. If the country is happy and you shoot down the alien diplomats, then the country should not defect. Having automatic success makes the game feel scripted, instead of fluid. And I like XCom because the game is fluid in general. There's no script that's followed and predictable, (almost) everything happens just by following sensible flow of events and consequences of success/failures.

As a workaround, I am thinking of looking into saves and reinstating countries that defected "wrongly", but with a significant decrease in funding, to represent that after the alien mission, they are much less enthusiastic about the XCom project.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: BBHood217 on August 11, 2014, 07:14:00 pm
If the OXC follows the no-infiltration-in-russia rule (and I hope it does)

Actually it does, because Siberia's STR_ALIEN_INFILTRATION mission weight is a big fat 0 (meaning it won't run any infiltration missions there at all).  I suspect this was intentional.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Hobbes on August 11, 2014, 09:55:24 pm
Actually it does, because Siberia's STR_ALIEN_INFILTRATION mission weight is a big fat 0 (meaning it won't run any infiltration missions there at all).  I suspect this was intentional.

Europe can be targeted on Alien Infiltration missions and Russia also belongs to Europe:

(https://www.ufopaedia.org/images/thumb/c/ca/WorldMap_CountryZones_Ufo.png/720px-WorldMap_CountryZones_Ufo.png)
(https://www.ufopaedia.org/images/thumb/b/bd/WorldMap_RegionalZones_Ufo.png/720px-WorldMap_RegionalZones_Ufo.png)

The reason why people think that Russia can't be targeted most likely has to do with players seeing very likely that Russia would quickly fall due to its size but that doesn't happen since there are no infiltrations on Siberia. Plus, with 6 countries in Europe there's only 1 chance in 6 that Russia gets chosen to be infiltrated. And there's also a part of Russia that belongs to Central Asia, so it could be targeted for infiltration there as well.

Unless someone actually points me the exact code thatprevents Russia from being infiltrated this is what I think it is happening.
Title: Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
Post by: Ademordna on August 21, 2014, 04:12:09 pm
It's not really about gameplay, or "boohoo aliens cheat I can't win!" since indeed the funding you get is rather small after even just a few months of recovering stuff from UFOs.

The issue is the immersion, the self-consistency of the setting, where it makes no sense that some missions cannot fail. If the country is happy and you shoot down the alien diplomats, then the country should not defect. Having automatic success makes the game feel scripted, instead of fluid. And I like XCom because the game is fluid in general. There's no script that's followed and predictable, (almost) everything happens just by following sensible flow of events and consequences of success/failures.

You're right on the money, that's the problem, the failure of logic and self-consistency leading to the loss of immersion.