aliens

Author Topic: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.  (Read 29115 times)

Offline Danny

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #15 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

Offline Mr. Quiet

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #16 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

Offline Danny

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #17 on: September 04, 2013, 01:33:04 pm »
Pure diplomatic :P

Offline hstech

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #18 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.
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, 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 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 combat equipment ready. Then I allowed them to do selected missions (so I could receive more resources to expand my initial combat kit ;) ).

Offline Sharp

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #19 on: October 12, 2013, 09:16:29 pm »
You don't lose by losing countries.

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.

Offline hstech

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #20 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. 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.

Offline Juju Dredd

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #21 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.

Offline sender

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #22 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.

Offline Juju Dredd

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #23 on: October 15, 2013, 01:49:57 am »
But I do! And I lose funding nations anyway...

Offline BrianW

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #24 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? 

Offline KiethSomataw99

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #25 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.

Offline Juju Dredd

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #26 on: October 24, 2013, 09:16:04 pm »
I do agree with that idea.

Offline kharille

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #27 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?

Offline Shadow

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Re: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.
« Reply #28 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.

Offline Ademordna

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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