No alien bases?

I am farming ground missions for fun and profit. The date is may 1980. My current to-do mission is to interrogate the alien leader, which I am postponing in order to stop the hidden game 'ticker'. Of course, it doesn't work, since the invaders are throwing carriers and battleships at me now. Thats fine, even more fun and kinky stuff for my team. The problem is, the aliens are not cooperating: none of them wants to build a base on our good old Earth. I admit, I have air superiority with 3 bases and 13 marauders. Surely, my guys shot down an unknown number of base-building UFO's in the past. I don't have the hyperdrive decoder yet, so have no idea what is the mission for any given UFO that spawns around.

So, I decided to just do nothing and advance the calender for roughly 2 months, no interceptions. The result is, lots of funding loss (no regions lost yet, and the balance is still in the black), had 2 base attacks, both on my main base with my crack team,so no problem.

But, alas, no alien bases. I am not playing the ironman game, so saving/loading back and forth is possible but it didnt help so far.

Ideas?

P.S.

I dont really like the idea of multiple teams, I am using one single team composed of 8 elite veterans and up to 2 rookies/trainees + my Hyperion tank.. My 2.nd question is: how many MAG batteries per base are needed to shoot down any approaching base attacker? In UFO X-com, the old one, it was enough to have I think 2 fusion ball defences per base to be 99,9% safe from base invasion.

Thanks for reading

Surprised that you haven't had a base-building mission in that time. Either that's a bug or you just got (very) unlucky. For what it's worth, you don't need to raid an alien base to capture a leader (but I suspect that's not why you care, so that might not be much consolation).

As regards base defences, it looks like you need two hits from a MAG turret to destroy a Battleship and they have a 50% chance of hitting. So you need at least 4 to have a 50/50 chance.

Thanks, kabill. Indeed, must be a streak of bad luck. I am using a different tactic now: since UFO's attack in waves roughly every 4-5 days, just when the first UFO from that wave spawns, I save the game, and let them wreak havoc until the whole wave despawns (about 7-8 of them, 2 smalls and the rest carriers and maybe one battleship, can't tell). If the enemy base appears, good, if not, I reload before the wave and retry. So far, no luck,no base. Got two terror missions though. Might take a while to get the base I fear.

Having fun though. Trying to nab a couple battleships for the singularity units, want to try the Fury

P.S. I need the base run to be able to research the hyperwave decoder and upgrade my facilities.

P.P.S: just 'discovered' the power of MAG carbines (shotguns)for clearing UFOs. Every rifleman has a MAG rifle and a carbine in the backpack, except for my two support guys with magstorms and predator armors. Those two raked 100+ kills each so far

Can't wait to raid an alien base.

If you really want an alien base to happen you could change the 'chance' value in AM_construction.xml to something really high (say, 1000) to make it more likely. I guess it's a kind of cheat, but it might save you some effort.

I should mention that alien ticker advancement is completely unrelated to anything the player does. You cannot delay alien advancement by refusing to do missions (that's a really silly game concept I'm glad Xenonauts does not have.)

Don't forget, there might be an alien base, but you need to scout it out to find it...otherwise there's a very random chance of a funding nation discovering it.

If you've got complete air superiority...that might be why.

Remember that a specific UFO is required to actually reach a destination on the Earth's surface for a base to appear (since it has to be constructed). The aliens aren't setting up bases by beaming them fully created, after all.