Superhuman......5th Alien UFO: a Battleship Retaliation. two times in a row

[pkrcel]

YO Xcommers.

I unfortunately ended another Superhuman campaign in the first week of January due to losing base defence. It's two in a row with a (to me) very early and unexpected battleship (UFO n° 5 in detection, 2 small scouts and 2 scouts, one floater for sure, the rest I could not down and escaped me)

Actually in this game I've not lost yet since I built an early radar base in the USA....the game "crashed" after the 'base is lost' screen but reloading the savegame worked perfectly fine.

So, since this time I have a savegame (playing IRONMAN  ) I took the chance to look into the savegame (cheat!) and I see this:

Code: [Select]

alienMissions:
  - type: STR_ALIEN_TERROR
    region: STR_EUROPE
    liveUfos: 0
    race: STR_FLOATER
    nextWave: 3
    uniqueID: 2
    spawnCountdown: 360
    nextUfoCounter: 0
  - uniqueID: 4
    race: STR_FLOATER
    region: STR_EUROPE
    nextWave: 0
    spawnCountdown: 3810
    nextUfoCounter: 0
    liveUfos: 0
    type: STR_ALIEN_ABDUCTION
  - nextWave: 2
    nextUfoCounter: 0
    race: STR_FLOATER
    liveUfos: 0
    uniqueID: 5
    region: STR_AUSTRALASIA
    type: STR_ALIEN_TERROR
    spawnCountdown: 10140

and this

Code: [Select]

ids:
  STR_X35: 4
  ALIEN_MISSIONS: 6
  STR_SOLDIER: 17
  STR_WAYPOINT: 5
  STR_SKYRANGER: 2
  STR_CRASH_SITE: 2
  STR_UFO: 6

Does this mean that the #3 mission was a retaliation wave of UFOs? (it's the only uID not in the alienmissions blob...IIRC uID 1 is always single Sectoid small scout doing Alien Research close to starting base.)

I admit I've never played on superhuman in OXC, only tried YEARS ago in vanilla Xcom...never fared like a champ but I can'r really recall if I went through the same experience.

I'm not complaining or anything, I'd just like to know if this has to be 'somewhat' expected...I might have won of course but playing with two mods that aim to make things a bit harder at times.....it's not that I was that ready to repel cyberdisks or reapers. 

[Mustang]

Early superhuman attacks are generally the norm, even in vanilla. You just have to pray it's not cyberdisks/sectoids and always keep extra soldiers and equipment back at base to deal with it.  I usually keep 2 tank/cannons in early bases to defend, though sometimes I'll make one of them a rocket launcher. I only take cannon over rocket launcher because the cannon has a lot more ammo and can still kill cyberdisks

[pkrcel]

Eh, I know I could have fared better against floaters but still in the Xeno Operations mod those floaters had a powerful explosive I didn't recognize that blasted me away.......Xops warned not to bunch up....but hey that's SO much you can spread in a base corridor 

[Mustang]

I know what you mean, I play with the Final Mod Pack and the floaters get explosive weapons too. I ended up adopting a strategy of having all of my soliers stand just inside of doors in rooms adjacent to the chokepoint hallway. With one or two people per room, they'll poke out of the room, fire, and move back in. The closing door stops explosives and blaster bombs so long as the aliens get gunned down as they move through the airlift

It's kind of cheesy, but every time I tried to use all my soldiers or set up defensive positions inside the hallway they would die horribly to explosives and cause a panic chain leading to my inevitable defeat

[The Reaver of Darkness]

Even in Superhuman, the aliens follow progression rules. They may fly battleships in the first month, but only to defend basic missions. They cannot take retaliatory action until they have been attacked enough times, and they cannot assault your base without first discovering it through taking scouts on retaliation missions in the correct region for enough time. I don't think it's possible in vanilla X-Com for the aliens to assault your base in the first month, let alone the first week.

Sounds like something is going wrong in your game.

[pkrcel]

It happened in two distinct games, but then in the latest playthrough even thou I had to defend a gazillion times it alwasy was "sort of expected"....not impropmtu like those two.

Maybe in some PARTICULARLY "unlucky" circumstances it may happen.

[BBHood217]

Something weird happened to my game.  First day of August, a battleship attacked one of my bases.  Out of nowhere.  There were no scouts at all beforehand; I'm quite sure of it because after I was caught completely off guard, I reloaded to a week prior to prepare for it.  And when it happened again, a different race was crewing the battleship.  It's like they decided to just skip all that bothersome scouting and jump straight to the attack.

On a side note, I remember in vanilla UFO that battleships that were definitely attacking headed to your base at full speed.  Not here in OpenXcom, it's around half speed instead.  Was it an intended change?

[volutar]

On a side note, I remember in vanilla UFO that battleships that were definitely attacking headed to your base at full speed.  Not here in OpenXcom, it's around half speed instead.  Was it an intended change?

Conventional radars have 10%(small)/20%(large) chance to detect and scan every 30 minutes. Retaliation battleships are flying with speed of 2700knots, and large radar detection distance is 2577 miles, so radar manages to scan almost 2 times. To be precise - battleship covers large radar range in 57 minutes. First time let say be LARGE (20%) and second time is SMALL radar, thus 10+20 = ~28%. You can be unlucky and get only ONE scan. In this case chances will be ~25%. Since it's very large ship which is flying very high - there's a chance modifier +20%. So it will be 30%.
According formulas of theory of probability for "at least one probable event": Chance = 1 - (1-chance1)*(1-chance2) = 1-(1-0.24)*(1-0.36) = 0.5136 = 51%.
So roughly each one of two battleships manages to get to the base without being noticed by radars. Unless there is a hyberwave decoder (it will always get its 100% chance).

That how it should work.

And it's always RNG issue.
If you want to disprove probability ratio, you can make a save, put "retaliationTarget: true" to all your bases (to make all bases revealed to aliens), and in the alienMissions section set "spawnCountdown: 1" for the retaliation. And then load this save, like, 100 times, and count real %% ratio (after putting saveScumming in the advanced options to ON).

I've made a check for the base with single large radar (0 is failed to detect, 1 is successifully detected).
1000100010 0010100011
0001100111 0101001100
0001101001 1111001001
So experiment proves 26 successiful detections from 60 tries, which means ~43% chance.

Theory: with single large radar it will be two scans with chance 24% (considering size and altitude). 1-(1-0.24)*(1-0.24)=1-0.5776 = 0.42= 42%

So probability formula (theory) is in perfect line with facts.
It's bad idea to make any conclusions from pretty random events. Until you gather any weighty statistics.

Stop doubting in OpenXcom

[BBHood217]

Um... what?

I was only making an observation about an attacking battleship's speed, how back in the original UFO Defense they'd basically ram right into your base at top speed (5000) as detailed in the UFOpaedia wiki and how that apparently has been changed in OpenXcom (possibly deliberately, and one I welcome actually).  I'm not entirely sure how you got "radar scanning probability" out of that post of mine

[volutar]

You're right about speed of 5000. For some reason OXC crafts are going with speed of 2700, while vanilla should go with speed of 5000.
Though it's unclear from "radial" speed stored in the save, what exact speed they are flying (visible speed may not be related to actual).

Code: [Select]

  - id: __RETALIATION_ASSAULT_RUN
    groundTimer: 1000
    waypoints:
      - [5, 4, 100] #This should always be 5, 4, 100
      - [5, 0, 100] #only the 0 altitude matters
Speed should be 100% of craft.
AlienMission.cpp:242 ufo->setSpeed(assaultTrajectory.getSpeedPercentage(0) * ufoRule.getMaxSpeed());
Percentage is 100. That means ufoRule.getMaxSpeed returns wrong value. Value of LargeScout (previous wave) for some reason.
In any case - that means it should be even more brutal. And chances to detect ramming battleship are about 25%.

[kkmic]

Hey volutar, stop scaring the new guys

[darkestaxe]

A few thoughts:

1. 'Aggressive Retaliation' may make it possible for the aliens to assault your base in the first week, ask someone who's seen the code on that mod/option.
2. I do not use Aggressive Retaliation I had multiple similar experiences with sudden base attacks before the requisite scouting in my most recent game, however I didn't post anything because I can't be certain an undetected scout didn't get lucky. Regardless I was watching the .sav file pretty closely and any retaliation mission would have to have detected my base within a week of starting.
3. Volutar, why are you a 7 post rookie?

[volutar]

"Agressive retaliation" is bad naming for that kind of alien strategy.

It actually means they are SCOUTING (detecting) your bases with every craft, not only with those which are on "retaliation" mission.
Frequency of retaliation itself has nothing with it. They are initiating retaliation after first alien craft being downed by xcom.
So it's kinda "constant" mission, since alien crafts are constantly downed.

Anyways, this "constant scouting" is really quite realistic in terms of "intellegent" behaviour.

Thing is, the 1.0 release contains wrong alien craft range value, thus chances to detect xcom base is ~10 less than vanilla. This was fixed after this commit. Scout range was increased from 80 to 268.

So people were avoided that kind of mission before. And actually were loved that. Why? I don't know why people are affraid of base defense mission? Every mission kind should be played at least once.

It is possible to estimage probability chart for the globe, by gathering statistics of numerous alien crafts flying over the earth by their "random" trajectories. I bet there are some places where they checking less often than in others. But making that chart would break all the "mysterious" invaders.

[ivandogovich]

I'll chime in here with a question:

Once they find your base, will they ever stop sending attacks at it?  Like after a first base defense, does the counter reset, and they have to find it again, or should you expect a steady stream of base assaults?

Cheers, Ivan

[volutar]

Once they find your base, will they ever stop sending attacks at it?  Like after a first base defense, does the counter reset, and they have to find it again, or should you expect a steady stream of base assaults?

When they find your base they will be sending battleships until Base Defense mission will be initiated. If you'll be shoting them down with defensive systems - they will come back more and more. But if they will lose Base Defense - they will forget about that base, and will have to find it once more. Yes, this is illogical, but it's gameplay-wise. Just imagine if they wouldn't forget about your base, like, ever.