I started a campaign on Veteran using a nightly build from a couple of days ago, and updated to the latest nightly (2013_10_10_2011) just now, to tackle a nocturnal Snakeman/Chrysalid terror mission in Australia.
Problem 1: There was something strange about the Chrysalids and the civilians in the aforementioned terror mission. I killed a lot of Snakemen and a good bunch of Chrysalids, but only a single zombie I saw wandering down the street. This is the thing: I heard a lot of bwarghjhbl noises from zombifications coming from the fog of war, but barely saw any zombies (nor civilians) with my men's eyes. After a while, the town fell dead silent, and alien turns became very short. There was this Snakeman panicking and berserking sometimes, somewhere, and the mission ended when I found and shot it.
I got an Excellent rating, and I should've taken a screenshot of the results screen, but I can't remember seeing mentions of civilians besides reporting two had been killed by aliens. No "civilians saved" line that I can recall. The only explanation I can guess for that is that there were a bunch of zombies largely inactive in the shadows, and that they were considered neither alien nor civilian. So killing that last Snakeman ended the mission potentially before the surviving zombies had been dealt with.
Problem 2: I set up my initial base in Europe, and haven't expanded yet. I have one small and one large radar system operational. It's early May and I really haven't seen more than 5 or 6 UFOs, while I've already "attended" 4 terror sites. I made some mistakes, and allowed my interceptors to engage a significant portion of those UFOs over water, so I've really only recovered a couple. Russia whined a couple of times, and Australia once, so there's the possibility I'm just unlucky, and that the aliens are having fun elsewhere on the planet.
This is actually my first time playing on Veteran ever, so I hesitated to report this low activity as a potential bug. Maybe it's normal, but it doesn't feel like it. Graphs show considerable spikes of activity in Siberia, Australasia and Southern Africa to a lesser extent, which is mostly coherent with the whining I've gotten from the funding council. But are they really pouring everything in there? Shouldn't activity be higher across the globe? This is just my first OpenXcom game, but I remember much higher UFO traffic in the original game. On Beginner at least, but...
Anyway, I've attached my current savegame, and config file, just in case. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Reading around the wiki, I found the following quote from Julian Gollop:
Quoting from Julian Gollop's at 'Classic Games Postmortem - XCOM: UFO Defense' at Game Developers Conference 2013:
"The way this worked was very simple. Basically, if you did very well on the last three previous tactical missions and you absolutely trounced the aliens, the aliens would ramp up their end technology level and deployments more quickly. If, on the other hand, conversely you did very badly, the aliens wouldn't throw in some extra stuff. It kinda adjusted the difficulty as you went along."
That might be related to the low activity I'm seeing. When I played the original on Beginner, it was easy to thrill the council, and I consistently got Excellent monthly ratings. Maybe I'm used to unusually high activity levels because of that, because the aliens ramped up their appearances, being affected by my performance. In my current, Veteran, OpenXcom game, my monthly evaluations have been average, barely positive, which is something I'm not familiar with. It's possible my lack of resounding success is considerably impacting UFO activity. And I think it's making the game even harder (not to mention less enjoyable, admittedly), since I don't get much chances to acquire UFO technology. To give an example, I think this is the first time ever I've been forced to actually manufacture alien alloys.
