Aliens too passive?

[Empiro]

Hi all, I've been playing the nightly build (1/11 build), and one thing I've noticed is that the aliens barely do anything at the strategic level.

I've played all the way to June at the veteran difficulty, and it seems like the only thing I encounter are Floater scout UFOs. I see Sectoids now and then (scouts mostly), had one Snakeman terror mission, and 0 encounters with Mutons whatsoever.

Other than a Floater battleship on retaliation mission that flies around Asia (not very close to my base), I think I've only seen 2 medium sized UFOs (abductor class). In addition, I think I've only seen a UFO landed once (and it took off before I could assault it).

Pretty much the only missions I see aliens doing are research, abduction and terror. I haven't seen a single UFO on infiltration or base (might have been one on harvest, but not sure). I took a look at my save games, and it pretty much bears out what I said above -- nothing but sectoid and floater research/abduction/retaliation missions and 1 snakeman terror mission.

Maybe I've been just lucky to not get tons of infiltration and other missions, but it just feels like in the original X-Com the aliens are way more aggressive (or at least diverse) with their mission types. Basically, in my game, I'm bored -- I've researched almost everything, but barely have any elerium to build stuff, and I haven't even had the chance to capture a psionic sectoid to start my psi project.

[Quixote]

I'm also playing on veteran difficulty, and I've had plenty of alien activity. MAybe your radar coverage is not good enough? I just encountered Ethereals now at the end of May, apart from that it has been Sectoids, Floaters and Snakemen.

However, I do notice that it seems the original game sent out more medium and large type UFOs earlier in the game. They seem quite rare in OpenXcom, though I have sen some (harvesters and abductor types).

[Empiro]

I'm also playing on veteran difficulty, and I've had plenty of alien activity. MAybe your radar coverage is not good enough? I just encountered Ethereals now at the end of May, apart from that it has been Sectoids, Floaters and Snakemen.

However, I do notice that it seems the original game sent out more medium and large type UFOs earlier in the game. They seem quite rare in OpenXcom, though I have sen some (harvesters and abductor types).

No, I don't think radar coverage is the issue -- I've had Hyper Wave Decoders up since the beginning of March, and a base that has good coverage across Europe + North Africa and one that covers North America. Almost all the the alien activity charts read 0 or close to 0, so stuff isn't really happening that I'm not detecting. I took a look at the code that generates the missions, and it looks like the game just generates a terror mission + 1 other random mission every month. That seems a bit low compared to the original game, but I guess it's possible if you're very luck (or unlucky), you'll get a bunch of small alien missions like research.

[Quixote]

No, I don't think radar coverage is the issue -- I've had Hyper Wave Decoders up since the beginning of March, and a base that has good coverage across Europe + North Africa and one that covers North America. Almost all the the alien activity charts read 0 or close to 0, so stuff isn't really happening that I'm not detecting. I took a look at the code that generates the missions, and it looks like the game just generates a terror mission + 1 other random mission every month. That seems a bit low compared to the original game, but I guess it's possible if you're very luck (or unlucky), you'll get a bunch of small alien missions like research.

I can hardly believe that the code only generates 2 missions per month, as I'm currently in late May and have had nearly 40 crashed UFOs, in addition to the terror missions (can't remember how many of those, but it would be around 1 per month if I'm not mistaken...

I'm pretty sure the original game threw more missions at you, early on, with a good mix of UFO sizes and missions. It seems all the UFOs in my game are small or very small, at least until several months into the game. But I don't see a shortage of the small ones at least.

[yrizoud]

My last game is on 16th of July, 45 downed UFOs out of 68 (in save file, section "ufos:". Ships have an increasing id, and crashId gives the crash_site_N)
Ships seemed to be rather varied. Lately, small and medium scouts seemed more rare, but maybe it's because a fraction of them get destroyed in airfights, so I don't remember as many land battles.

Note that if you let aliens proceed on their missions, UFO activity accelerates a lot.

[Empiro]

I've attached my save for good measure. The game is mid-june, and there's been 15 missions total generated (1 terror + 1 other each month, 2 floater retaliations, and 1 sectoid retaliation. Only 5 landing sites so far (and I didn't catch any of them), and a total of 33 UFOs (21 shot down). 0 bases established, 0 infiltration attempts. Maybe my game just was that (un)lucky where the aliens barely do anything.

[Quixote]

I've attached my save for good measure. The game is mid-june, and there's been 15 missions total generated (1 terror + 1 other each month, 2 floater retaliations, and 1 sectoid retaliation. Only 5 landing sites so far (and I didn't catch any of them), and a total of 33 UFOs (21 shot down). 0 bases established, 0 infiltration attempts. Maybe my game just was that (un)lucky where the aliens barely do anything.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "mission". If you had a total of 33 UFOs that would be 33 missions right there, wouldn't it? If every UFO has a mission, which I assume..

If you went to 21 crash sites, I don't understand why you wrote you have almost no Elerium either?

[yrizoud]

As I understand it : 33 UFOs flew by, none could be attacked while landed, 21 were shot down (and assaulted), the others escaped.
Crash is quite likely to destroy Power source, which also destroys the Elerium.

[Warboy1982]

i've checked this against the original source dozens of times. we're 1:1 with it.
missions weights are dynamically generated each time you start a game, so there's no "guaranteed" order the aliens will do mission in, they'll simply randomly choose one according to the weighted distribution.
a "mission" consists of multiple waves of UFOs, between 1 and 3 at a time. these missions generally take a few months to complete.
every time you shoot down a UFO, you delay the arrival of the next wave by a random amount, and potentially trigger a retaliation mission.
the ids for UFOs in the save files don't actually represent the total number of ufos so far, just the ones that you've detected.

[Quixote]

missions weights are dynamically generated each time you start a game, so there's no "guaranteed" order the aliens will do mission in, they'll simply randomly choose one according to the weighted distribution.

So if I read that correctly, in some games the aliens will be doing more recon missions, which means small and very small UFOs, and in other games they will be doing more harvesting and abduction, meaning more medium size UFOs?

Interesting to know that, even though it seems a bit odd way of doing it (in the original game)

[Empiro]

I see -- I guess with extraordinarily bad or good luck, the game could be significantly easier or harder. I guess I was a tad unlucky in mine in that it really stalled out my PSI research, and Elerium harvesting, but otherwise had an easy time.

[Jo5hua]

You may want to try a higher difficulty and report back. 

[Angelus_EV]

I finished the game at beginner and no base defense at all

[Warboy1982]

try enable aggressive retaliation and cranking up the difficulty, i'll be very surprised if you don't get assaulted at LEAST once. 

[Angelus_EV]

Yea next step expert and then....