Why do you think the aliens invaded?

[Operations]

Topic title made me think of this

"Ask the aliens around for drinks"

[Betuor]

Or it could be because we multi-nuked (yes, I made that a word) their scout ship and they are back for vengence, but didn't think we had an Xenonauts/A-Com agency to fight them.

[Betuor]

Check this out for questions:

http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=The_Mysteries_of_X-COM

[Betuor]

In case you didn't check out the above:

Why did the aliens use limited force during the First Alien War?

Imagine Independence Day or War of the Worlds: UFO above the major Earth cities destroying the national leadership and any resistance. Or simply announce to Earth that they are now a part of their empire and resistence is futile. Instead, they go 1 mission each day, allowing humans to capture their craft, research their technology, discover their intentions and mount a successful defense. Don't the aliens watch sci-fi movies to see how it should be done?

Perhaps they don't have the standing forces to do so, and are in the process of building up the forces needed to do so. Perhaps they don't want to wipe out the entire power structure too fast; they want to leave some pieces in place for when they rebuild. Perhaps they're too condescending to think that humanity ever really has a chance; they've probably conquered thousands of other planets without anyone ever successfully resisting them. Perhaps they consider the X-COM project to be a rearguard action that, while a valiant effort and a credible threat, is ultimately doomed to failure because they simply cannot win in the end, which is why they undermine it. Indeed, the reason you need to launch the Cydonia mission in order to win is because X-COM simply cannot stop the aliens in a ground war; the aliens have an effectively infinite supply line and standing forces(though nothing says they're all waiting to swamp the earth), and the only way to win is to kill the command staff(which the aliens believe X-COM will not be able to do, lacking both knowledge of where the Brain is and any practical means to get there.) Arrow Quivershaft 21:06, 26 February 2009 (CST)

The most plausible explanation seems to be the one employed in the Worldwar series, by Harry Turtledove, but that does not seem to mesh with what the Brain says about having been on Mars for a while, since then they could watch the Earthlings perpetually. Of course, what it says is probably a bunch of lies. Thinking about what it says for too long also raises the question of why the aliens attacked when they did, of course... Vizzydix1 21:52, 18 March 2010 (EDT)

The aliens are completely lacking in weapons of mass destruction. When you get right down to it, their aircraft are very fast, manuevarable and durable, but they have rotten firepower. Even the battleship is unable to bring down an Interceptor in 1 shot. The terror missions and X-com Base Defences prove that the Aliens are unable to simply launch orbital bombardments... in fact, they appear to have no Air to Land weapons whatsoever... When you get right down to it, the aliens are pretty stupid. Also, their scientists seem inferior to Earth's. Seems to me that they only had the advantage of Elerium deposits and thus elerium based research. X-COM was unable to win in an all-out war with the aliens, but remember that X-com is a small little covert group with several dozen soldiers and a handful of aircraft. Can you imagine the result if the aliens had caused a joint war effort by the UN? You would have Lockheed factories converted to Avenger production, several platoons of soldiers outfitted with Flying Suits, Lasers, Heavy Plasma, thousands upon thousands of Laser Tanks... I would say that keeping the fight to covert action on both sides was actually beneficial to the aliens, really. User:Jasonred

Nope, the aliens could just invoke John's Law and blow up the planet with a kamikaze battleship at .9c. Even failing that, the alien battlefleet could come in numbers sufficent to blot out the sun.--(name here) 14:39, 8 November 2009 (EST)

Lest we forget, X-Com is essentially the Spartans to the aliens' Persian Empire. So they'd just fight in the shade (which would be a blessing in desert missions). --Guido Talbot 13:58, 16 July 2010 (EDT)

Aliens first began with smal scouting missions, so maybe all we expirience in X-Com is initial attacks by aliens, maybe the whole base was begining scouting and waiting for the invasion fleet? Aliens problably could be in sense dumber than humans, humans are adaptable and thinking, our technology advances fast, and we are fast and smart enough to stop the invasion before it begins. Aliens problably were not used to it so they thought "oh well, another invasion...". --Domenique 11:10, 19 May 2010 (EDT)

Mankind, as a whole, is incredibly cunning and full of guile. We are also incredibly aggressive. A trait that the most of the Aliens can barely concieve. Though we are weaker physically, mentally, etc, we are overly developed when it comes to strategem and war. The aliens are, in essence, have come to an inverse of Flatland. Though they are advanced, it is they who are 2D to our 3D approach to fighting. They return to earth, and through extensive research and testing, determine that inferior are strategically to humans. So...they use their advances to what they percieve as the most full advantage, and call for reinforcements over the initial months of the First Alien War. For eons, only the Sectoid make arrivals to earth. When the Brain finally realizes the situation, that mankind has woke up and is dealing with them most directly, it begins to get desperate, it sends reinforcements, but only incrementally. (Its always focused on peak efficiency). The concept of overwhelming force is illogical and some how, disdainful, to it. It prefers nuance, interogation, politics, and assessment. The Brain determine that its more effective to eliminate allies of XCOM than to face it directly. The concept of obliterating anything from orbit is reprehensible. Everything must be examined, especially the dead creatures you leave behind. Over time, it would learn man's tactics and assimilate. In fact, each race called in is an example of the Brain adapting. The Floaters bring forth an extra dimension to combat. The snakemen aggressiveness and accuracy. Mutons a culmination of superior warrior breeding, raw physical power, and determination not unlike the so called human soul. Finally, the Ethereals enter, with capacity to bring overwhelming force. In time, as they do on Mars base, they might begin joint force attacks with Mutons backed by Ethereals, supported by a mix of terror weapons. Fortunately, the First Alien War is ended before they fully develop such cunning. Hence the desperate act of T'Leth. The Brain has learned the power of anger fueled by vengeance and desperation. --BlackLibrary 11:10, 29 May 2011 (EDT)

I've always viewed it as primarily a lack of resources. Even if you get a UFO every single day and shoot them all down so that there's no possible chance of any of them being the same UFO that's still only several hundred to perhaps a thousand or few UFO's over the course of several years. And most of those are quite small and not too difficult to take out with regular old interceptors and human armaments. If used all at once it might be enough to achieve air superiority, particularly if the Battleships do all the heavy lifting. But it also might not. It certainly would NOT provide enough soldiers to mount a worldwide ground offensive. The crews on those ships aren't all that big. There's also no reason to assume that all those craft, weapons, soldiers, and more importantly... elerium are all available at the same time. It's quite likely that the aliens are cloning new soldiers, building new weapons and UFO's, and possibly receiving supplies (particularly of elerium) from deep space. Elerium is needed to manufacture a lot of their stuff as well, and we already know it's a limited resource in our solar system. Consider on top of that how much get's used up as fuel every time a UFO visits Earth. If they sent all their UFO's they would use up their reserves of Elerium all at once for a 1 day attack that ultimately would fail. Instead of conquering the Earth wholesale they are trying to influence governments into signing secret pacts with them so that they can control the population of the Earth rather than wipe us out. They do this by using terrorism to intimidate the public and inserting clones to infiltrate governments while holding secret negotiations. A steady stream of UFO missions keeps up the pressure until governments break. Lucky for us they never expected us to bring the fight to the command center on mars. Just imagine if they had built base defenses like we can for our bases. heh Lord would it be aggravating building up a crew of top notch soldiers, constructing an Avenger from scratch, scrapping together all the gear, sending it to Mars, and then watching it get blown to bits before it even lands... O,o Also consider that their UFO's have operated with relative impunity for a very long time. Presumably XCom is the first organization to shoot down a UFO? As for Earth ramping up for a full scale war, it'd be unlikely that we could really produce enough alien technology in any reasonable timescale to actually outfit whole nations armies, especially with limited Elerium. Perhaps the tech that doesn't require Elerium, but then again shifting an entire army from one weapon system to another is not as simple as merely producing all the weapons. It's an extremely long, arcane, and baffling process. Getting just the branches of the US military to switch to laser weapons would probably take at least a decade. I think that limited resources and the intent to control and dominate rather than eliminate the population of the Earth explain it. For that matter they would see the human population it-self as a resource. Hence the use of small scale terrorism rather than attempting to use any weapons of mass destruction. A bunch of aliens walking around shooting people is still pretty damn scary stuff.Mannon 13:12, 30 March 2011 (EDT)

I would have thought that the simplest answer here is best. The aliens are manifestly unable to survive outside containment or bases for prolonged periods. Further, their clearest technological advantage over the humans (at least, prior to X-Com research) is mind control. Therefore, their primary method of offence is not to get bogged down in a ground war, but to engage in the overthrow of governments by infiltration, coercion, corruption and bribery, and achieve complaisance by terrorisation of the general populace. It is for this reason that standard combat tactics involving large hierarchies are ineffectual against the aliens (when the government/command can be mind controlled and the theatre can be defined by a mobile alien force). A decentralised, partly cellular, covert approach like X-Com is preferable, but unable to win an outright ground war either (being composed of, at maximum, 250 soldiers). Of course in reality, the irony is that the aliens/bourgeoisie/Fox network have Mind Controlled you, the X-Com commander into wasting your time with retro video games instead of doing anything about their societal control! --Oogleshay 16:16, 18 October 2011 (EDT)

[brad]

I think it would be best to never actually say why they attacked. Only very rarely in sci-fi is a good explanation given for an alien species to spend the vast resources needed to invade another world, and often it's a let down when you find out what their plans and reasons were. For example, the Cylons were supposed to have some great, brillant plan, but in the end...didn't.

They are aliens after all, their motives, strategies, and ways of thinking should be alien and mysterious.

X-COM Apocalypse actually had a half-decent reason behind the alien invasion. The real alien masterminds were parasitic microorganisms living inside alien ground troops. The aliens actually weren't invading Earth, they were invading the humans.

Edited November 13, 2011 by brad

[DarkPonzu]

I think it would be interesting if the invasion had to do with the time the game is set in. Maybe there is a good intention behind it. The U.S. and USSR are able to start a world war at any given moment, so the aliens are like a U.N. peacekeeping force from space. They want to shut down the two rival superpowers in order to save humanity from itself. That would be especially interesting considering it would kind of make the Xenonauts the bad guys. Then again, the aliens did shoot first On the other hand, the notion of actually declaring war on your enemy before attacking them is kind of quaint in today's day and age.

2nd theory: The aliens are time travelers from the year 2011. They saw how messed up we are, traced the problems back to the late 70's and decided to go back in time there in order to stop the events of the next 30-40 years from happening.

[Lokik]

When trying to think that why the aliens didn't just attack in full force to begin with, I always kinda figured that the aliens in Enemy Unknown weren't really an intergalactic empire or something like that, but a relatively small group with limited resources, closer to an aggressive cult than an army. The Brain obviously being the "cult leader", and the Ethereals being his devout followers and the other races being the remnants of species previously conquered in a similar fashion.

Would explain why they use terrorist tactics and infiltration instead of a full blown military invasion. The humans of course were far more intelligent and aggressive than they anticipated, the first species to reverse engineer their technology so fast and use it against them.

As for the motives of the attack, this is something I'm happy to leave as a mystery. Still, I think it has something to do with the humans themselves, given the aliens interest in cloning, genetic engineering and crossbreeding humans with Sectoids.

Or perhaps they are just big jerks.

Edited November 9, 2011 by Lokik

[Moonshine Fox]

I did....in one of my 'sane' possibilities. Also blamed the Illuminati, Moon-Nazis, Deep Ones, Divine Whales and Frost Giants. Opium also made an appearance.

What did we EVER do to you?

[Moonshine Fox]

Also, on a more serious note, I always thought the UFO:AfterXXXXX games got the aliens rather well. The Reticulans were a single race and the other "aliens" you met were merely mutated humans or livestock. The Star-Trekky mish-mash of races of the first XCOM games always struck me as very odd, though I enjoyed it alot. Gameplay wise they were very good, but storywise it made less sense. Most of those races had absolutely nothing in common. Heck, two of the humanoid races weren't even bipeds.

[Sathra]

The other Deep Ones. The crab-people corrupted by the darkling song of the Dragon-Whale.

I quite liked the Reticulans. The sounds they made when they died always made me happy.

[Joeneren]

Do we really care? Fact is that they are here and they want to steal our cookies, and we can't let that happen!

2nd theory: The aliens are time travelers from the year 2011. They saw how messed up we are, traced the problems back to the late 70's and decided to go back in time there in order to stop the events of the next 30-40 years from happening.

Yeah i saw First Contact and it sucked, so deffinately not that plz.

Edited November 13, 2011 by Joeneren

[Dix]

Humans have been altered over the last few centuries as part of an experiment by an unknown race, aimed at making us into a self-sustaining, self-directing, space-capable & highly aggressive bio-weapon.

Now that the rest of the races in our galactic neighborhood have found out they are scared enough by the experiment's results that they have decided they cannot allow us to remain uncontrolled. They either don't want to wipe us out as said manipulation was not our choice, or else they don't trust each of the other races to not keep a few specimens and start over, having seen our potential, so they will control us as a group to maintain the balance of power.

...or, y'know, they're just here to steal our cookies. Those bastiches.

Edited November 15, 2011 by Dix

[Quartermaster]

To fit in with the Cold War idea, it could be that the alien species are not actually a unified force and are in competition with one another in a war of proxy. The aliens may have black hole generators (or some other insanely destructive technology) which could result in mutually assured destruction of both sides. To gain an advantage the races may be attempting to get humanity on their side by armed coercion. Massive fleets may not be mobilized because each side would view it as an act of aggression leading to an escalation of their conflict. This may have resulted in the current state of affairs with each side sending relatively small fleets to coerce the human nations to ally with them. This scenario could result in an interesting end game where the goal of humanity is to prevent the escalation of the alien's Cold War.

[anotherdevil]

I kind of like it, but the ultimate plot hole is that how would humanity help them if they're mostly dead? And why get humans when we haven't even gotten space craft, surely the other races are much better at this then little old squishy us?

[Sathra]

Slave troops?

They have a lack of ground combat experience in useful numbers, so enslaving humanity, OR wiping it out in an extended planetary war would give large numbers of experienced troops and useful tactical/strategic experience.

There's also the 'deniability' angle. Being able to throw heavily armed suicide troops from a completely alien race at enemy planets and wage proxy wars through them would be very useful.

[plucx]

1-)For our oil reserves!

2-)They think we stole copyrighted material

3-)They feed on emotion so they are bent on torturing humans (animals are just not looking like the real deal)

4-)Aliens enginered humans as a weaponised version of themselves. Did not work out so well and they are pissed off.

5-)To subdue mankind as a subspecies in order to exploit earth natural ressources, thing went wrong they left in pyramidal ships (SG1).

6-)Mankind is a product made to produce organs, were not meant to become as dangerous as we became, they can't refuel as before.

7-)They need a younger race to take up their civilisation since they became geneticly corrupt. They declare war on mankind in the hope we assimilate their technology and in the process make their civilisation survive by being imatated by another species.

8-)Aliens are bored so they make a sport of going after humans.

[Fudrukur]

I really dont GaF why they are here. Just effn kill em! They are smelly, different and they dont speak American. The only reason I need. Oh and they took our jobs...

[Gorlom]

I really dont GaF why they are here. Just effn kill em! They are smelly, different and they dont speak American. The only reason I need. Oh and they took our jobs...

This is supposed to be a joke... but damn it scares the hell out of me.

PS. are we talking americanised English or native american languages? DS.

Edit: On Topic: (inspired by a hitchikers guide to the galaxy take on cricket)

The alien civilisation has abandoned religion* for long enough to make it mostly rumors and percived with extreme (and injustified) prejudice. Seeing how religious Humans are and considering all the wars that has spawned with religion as a reason (read excuse) they take us for being extrememist zealots that once we aquire sufficient tech level we will want to purge the galaxy from anything and everything except for our Gods "chosen people".

In fear and desperation they decide to wipe us out before we can wipe them out. "for the good of the galaxy"

(*The aliens are satisfied with the explenations for life and everything offered by science, and their legal system is foolproof resulting in no need of threatning devine punishment in this life or the next)

Edited February 3, 2012 by Gorlom

[Fudrukur]

Yes, it was a joke.

[Davoren]

Plot of a recent book about an alien attack (forgot how it was called):

Wipe us out before we can take them out. Nothing personal, but you never know what the new kid on the block is gonna do so why wait to find out

[Gorlom]

Plot of a recent book about an alien attack (forgot how it was called):

Wipe us out before we can take them out. Nothing personal, but you never know what the new kid on the block is gonna do so why wait to find out

Wow that is one boring reason. Is it a deus ex machina solution or something? Or do you get to know the reason early on with a proper motivation as to why that reason is ok?

[anotherdevil]

Boring to us perhaps, but you never know what has happened in the past to make the aliens think like this

[Gorlom]

Boring to us perhaps, but you never know what has happened in the past to make the aliens think like this

Indeed I'd like to hear that story before I'd accept that as a reason! and it better be riveting! (spelling?)

Make that up now Davoren!

[anotherdevil]

'Riveting' gets past spell check here...

Maybe they were bullied by the first space people they met, so they just nuked them all, and have continued doing so for ever and ever and BOOM!

[Gauddlike]

Aliens have attacked to try and steal the Colonels secret recipe for Kentucky fried chicken.

All of the other planets in the galaxy have to eat normal boring chicken or chicken-like creatures.

That is why they started picking on red necks.