When first alien base assault mission?

I am in mid-January and still no base assult mission happened to me. Am I too efective in taking down enemy UFO or it is just my luck? I am playing on Veteran difficulty level. I vaguely remember that in Beta the first such mission was in November the latest.

Unless you have the building that tells you what a UFO's mission is, it can be difficult to determin if a UFO is on a Base Assault mission or not. If you shoot down every UFO you see then there's a strong chance that yes, you've shot down all the UFO's trying to blow your [stuff] up.

Edit: this can also cause you to see very few alien bases for similar reasons.

When first alien base assault mission?

Never, if you're playing decently. It baffles me that so much focus was put on achieving overwhelming air superiority balance-wise, but then nothing was implemented to keep said air superiority from locking you out of 3/4 mission types in the entire game.

Guess I must be playing rubbish then or on too hard a difficulty, (I`m on Veteran) cos i`ve got two Alien bases on Earth asking to be attacked and I`ve failed twice trying to take them. It`s happened every game I play after the first year or so.

Play on a harder difficulty, you guys are obviously just too good.

Thanks for your responses. Guess I need to gives some space to the invaders, although it feels a bit awkward. I guess switching to Insane might be even better idea, but is it possible in-game? I do not want to start a new game.

In all strategic games, including UFO: Enemy Unknown, I always strived for a superiority on a strategic layer, which I guess is not uncommon thing to do. I was kind of hoping that regardless of that bases will just spawn. Which UFO construct bases? Corvette, Landship?

Which UFO construct bases? Corvette, Landship?

Depends on what stage of the game you're at, but mostly landing ships and carriers.

Depends on what stage of the game you're at, but mostly landing ships and carriers.

Thanks! And how about changing difficulty of already running game? Any known hacks?

Depends on what you want to change, exactly. You can't change the game difficulty per se, but you could mod the modifiers for the difficulty your on to make them like those of a higher (I assume that's what you want?) difficulty. Don't know if that will help get alien bases built, though.

(For what it's worth, my Dynamic UFOs mod is intended in part to address this issue)

Your mod certainly looks like worth trying out! For sure it will add some flavour to my game. Do I need to start a new one game or it will work with the old one?

Also, if you don't mind me asking, which files I should edit to make the game more challenging?

Thanks!

Dynamic UFOs will work if you load it part way through a game, but I don't know how well balanced it will be for that. So it might be safer to start over. You could always try it and see first, though.

As to your other question: do you mean the difficulty levels, or something else? If it's difficulty level effects, they're all contained in gameconfig.xml. Just scroll down a bit and you'll see them all together in a block. They should be pretty self-explanatory what they do.

Is it possible to make it so the UFO assault mission just comes in such an overwhelming force that you can't realistically stop it? In the OG they really only happened because battleships were extremely difficult to shoot down until the end of the game.

Is it possible to make it so the UFO assault mission just comes in such an overwhelming force that you can't realistically stop it? In the OG they really only happened because battleships were extremely difficult to shoot down until the end of the game.

Funny you should ask, Kabill, Dpelectric, and I have been working on a mod that does just that!

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11009-FTD-Mod

Aim of this mod is make the Fury relevant again as well as incorporate the unused destroyer and dreadnought assets. There's some small discussion in the first half, but the second half is where we get the most work done. Currently ongoing, we need some testers ATM.

It's mid January for me as well, and no alien bases. In the second wave of december, I left alone every mid and large size alien ship; just let them do whatever they wanted and took the hit in relations.

first week of february, same thing. letft everything alone that wasn't hovering right over my base, or was a small fighter. even let a terror mission get started (aside: holy crap! terror missions are HARD). hoping ignoring aliens will at least get a base established somewhere in the world.

I'm working from memory, but I believe the default is a minimum 21 day delay between base building attempts.

turns out after fast forwarding two months, the only ships that tried to build a base in december/january/february were medium landing ships with two fighters as escorts.

none of the other ships tried to build a base.

so, don't know if that's a regular pattern, and I'm not going to retest it again, since that took quite a while, but for anyone looking to encourage alien base building, try letting any medium landers with escorts have free reign.

of course, the other thing those are likely to do is attack your own base if they find it...

In the AM_Construction.xml it says it has an escort chance of 500. I don't know in the slightest wth it means, if it's a chance out of x, if it means it happens after the ticker gets to 500 or what... but it's there if you want to look deeper into it.

In the AM_Construction.xml it says it has an escort chance of 500. I don't know in the slightest wth it means, if it's a chance out of x, if it means it happens after the ticker gets to 500 or what... but it's there if you want to look deeper into it.

The escort chance doesn't actually mean anything (it's not used in code at all). The chance of an escort spawning depends on how long it is since the UFO type currently spawning for that mission has been doing so. So when a new UFO type for a particular mission starts appearing, there's no escort chance. Then it climbs until the next type of UFO starts appearing, at which point it resets and starts again.

EDIT: This means that, because Landing Ships stay in play for so long as base constructors, by ~January they're almost certain to have an escort when on a construction mission.

ah, that explains it.

thanks muchly.