Stuck Without Ethereal Commander

[ConradeConehair]

Hello,

I just want to say that I’ve been loving this mod so far, but as of right now my Vet/IM playthrough is stuck near the endgame. I've completed the Cyberweb, Zombie, Cult of Apocalypse, etc. arcs and have researched all the alien tech available to me (including my own walkers). I have captured and interrogated an MIB commander, but I've played about a year or so (into 2001!) without seeing any arbiters/ethereal retaliation missions. I've seen only one mission by normal ethereals, but I was unable to trigger a retaliation by shooting them down.

Is this to be expected? Admittedly, the last six months or so in game I've zoomed through using debug mode to kill enemies in battlescape our of boredom, but I really expected to see an ethereal commanded by now. Any help is appreciated, I’d love to finish up this mod and see the endgame content.

[Stone Lake]

It's not expected, but is possible - eth retal only spawns 33% per month, and if your bases are discovered, you may get Dreadnought instead of Arbiter. Attach a save and some of us may look into it.

[ConradeConehair]

Here's the save. It's on XCF 3.1, which may be the issue. I don't know how compatibility works between XCF versions, but I may try updating to see if it fixes the problem.

[Stone Lake]

You have 3 (!) ethereal retals in log, including this month's. No idea how'd you miss all of those.

[ConradeConehair]

Well, I feel dumb.... I played through May and got the Arbiter as you mentioned. I am unsure how I missed the other ethereal retaliations, I have Hyperwave decoders everywhere. Oh well, thank you for the help!