aliens

Author Topic: Prevent automatic success of alien bases and alien infiltration missions.  (Read 29125 times)

Offline Falko

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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

Offline Harald_Gray

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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.

Offline Falko

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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

Offline Arthanor

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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.

Offline BBHood217

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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.

Offline Hobbes

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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:




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.
« Last Edit: August 11, 2014, 09:59:58 pm by Hobbes »

Offline Ademordna

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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.