Aliens Own Earth

[Slaughter]

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Aliens_Own_Earth

I read about this a few times but never had the time or courage to get it working

Seems like the ultimate challenge mode to me. Wonder if a mod that makes the aliens start with 20 alien bases of random alien races is possible to include, maybe as one of those optional mods that comes with Open X-COM.

One could even make multiple versions of this - say, Aliens Established on Earth, where they start with a few bases (say, 1-5), or Aliens Midway Dominant where they start with 10 or so bases.

[Cooper]

You could remove all alien missions in January and add a ton of Alien Base missions instead. Combining this with having a starting base without radar, and the radar taking a month to build will create a similar situation. Not optimal, but the best thing possible with the current ruleset as far as I can think of.

[Countdown]

This sounds like a fun challenge. I know this isn't the "prettiest" way to do it, but why not just start a new save and paste the bases into the save file manually? It's certainly way easier than the method they used in the wikipedia article with the original game. Here is an example with 20 bases. Just paste this into the bottom of a new save file and I think you'll be good to go.

Code: [Select]

alienBases:
  - lon: 0.794450458986522
    lat: -0.39771296142549517
    discovered: false
    race: STR_SECTOID
    id: 1
  - id: 2
    race: STR_SECTOID
    discovered: false
    lon: 2.6822049677036088
    lat: 1.2474004471717521
  - lon: 3.46677
    lat: -1.50118
    discovered: false
    race: STR_SECTOID
    id: 3
  - lon: 6.215181956637795
    id: 4
    race: STR_SECTOID
    discovered: false
    lat: -1.0008164704586089
  - lon: 4.99533
    lat: -0.713071
    discovered: false
    race: STR_FLOATER
    id: 5
  - lon: 4.21773
    id: 6
    race: STR_FLOATER
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.594151
  - lon: 3.58619
    lat: -.384051
    discovered: false
    race: STR_FLOATER
    id: 7
  - lon: 2.52076
    id: 8
    race: STR_FLOATER
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.768338
  - lon: 3.06239
    id: 9
    race: STR_MUTON
    discovered: false
    lat: 0.717057
  - lon: 6.18485
    lat: -0.348121
    discovered: false
    race: STR_MUTON
    id: 10
  - lon: 0.846802
    id: 11
    race: STR_MUTON
    discovered: false
    lat: 0.269569
  - lon: 1.41095
    lat: -0.123931
    discovered: false
    race: STR_MUTON
    id: 12
  - lon: 1.56444
    id: 13
    race: STR_SNAKEMAN
    discovered: false
    lat: -1.20414
  - lon: 2.00611
    id: 14
    race: STR_SNAKEMAN
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.699225
  - lon: 1.75396
    id: 15
    race: STR_SNAKEMAN
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.310365
  - lon: 5.53716
    id: 16
    race: STR_SNAKEMAN
    discovered: false
    lat: 0.396936
  - lon: .246568
    id: 17
    race: STR_ETHEREAL
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.72513
  - lon: 4.96365
    id: 18
    race: STR_ETHEREAL
    discovered: false
    lat: 0.185755
  - lon: 1.26905
    id: 19
    race: STR_ETHEREAL
    discovered: false
    lat: -0.688082
  - lon: 2.20492
    id: 20
    race: STR_ETHEREAL
    discovered: false
    lat: 0.299191
From the Wiki article, it sounds like the main challenge is meant to be just overcoming the number of bases rather than finding the bases. However, if you want to not know where the bases are at the start, just pick from a long list of random lat/lon coordinates. You'll have to first go into debug mode to compile a long list of coordinates that aren't in the ocean and then just choose randomly off the list without knowing where they are. It might be tedious to make the initial list, but it's easy.