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Alien Mission Tickers


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How exactly do these things work?

ex this is the air superiority Alien Mission

  • Ticker :: 150 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • Chance :: 20 <<▬▬ i understand this one i think
  • Escort chance :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean as far as what the number Actually means
  • Once per wave :: TRUE <<▬▬ when is a wave?
  • m:airplane.alien.fighter :: 0 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • m:airplane.alien.heavyfighter :: 300 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • m:airplane.alien.interceptor :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • e:airplane.alien.fighter :: 0 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • e:airplane.alien.heavyfighter :: 300 <<▬▬Whats this mean
  • e:airplane.alien.interceptor :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean

what i'm looking for

  1. What the numbers actually mean?
  2. what kind of scale are these numbers from ex. 0-1000 or do they even have a scale?
  3. does lowering the tickers mean they show up earlier? if so does that mean that these numbers represent a certain amount of time?
Edited by Falidell
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Ticker is a number that increases everytime you shoot down an alien craft and with time. It's basicly an indicator of alien invasion progression.

If hte ticker is 500, alien cruisers start showing up. If it's 1000, alien battleships start showing up. And so on.

A wave is a period of activity AFAIK. Several alien craft will move at the same time. Variousalien crafts and missions will be spawned. If its once per wave, than only one will ever be spawned.

m indicates main (I think), or hte lead aircraft

e indicates escorts.

So thereis a high chance the lead aircraftwould be interceptor or fighter. Could be the chance is tied to a ticker, so if ticker is 500, you get an interceptor. If it's 300, you get a fighter.

Same thing for escorts.

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If you pay attention to the way enemy UFOs spawn, (or if you just savescum repeatedly on the Geoscape the way I did, just to reverse-engineer how it works,) you find that enemy UFOs spawn on specific days just after 00:00 GMT.

These days when the wave spawns appear to be on days ending in 1 or 6, or every 5 days, starting on the first of the month. (Excepting the 31st day of any month with 31 days.) Any UFO that is still around after about 4 days tends to "escape back to orbit" by the fourth day.

The actual UFOs don't spawn at exactly midnight, they tend to wait until 1:10 or so to start actually spawning, and spawn one every 10 minutes or so after that. Where they appear is apparently utterly randomized, but savescumming shows that you can just keep reloading at 23:59 the day before a wave to make aliens keep spawning in different places, until you make them all spawn over land and within interceptor range, if you are so inclined.

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so a wave happens 6 times in a month on

  • 1st
  • 6th
  • 11th
  • 16th
  • 21st
  • 26th

makes sense i'll test this out to verify later

thankyou wraith_magus that solves the "when are the waves"

now for the ticker numbers What is a ticker..

what values do the ufos give to the ticker shooting down versus not shooting.. what value is time to ticker.

numbers i require numbers om nom nom numbers lol

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If I may?

Alien missions generate a "score" for the ticker (the values of which you can find in gameconfig.xml), which as others have mentioned is a hidden progress bar for the scale of the alien invasion. As the ticker increases in value, certain mission types become active (mission types are also dependant on non-ticker variables. the air superiority mission won't become active until you shoot down a UFO). As Trashman has said, the ticker also governs the general level of UFO inside a particular mission. It used to be that the ticker also controlled when waves would appear, but it doesn't any more.

SO.

Ticker: <number> When air superiority would become active (in addition to you shooting down an aircraft)

Chance: <number> indicates the chance that missiontype will be picked for that specific missiontype

Escort Chance: <number> Pass. I used to think this was the ticker value needed for an escort, but the data from testing it is inconsistent.

m: <number> indicates when the UFO type "ranks up" according to ticker.

e: <number> indicates when the escort type "ranks up" according to ticker.

How mission types generate ticker scores varies. Some generate ticker score when they generate an event, including research, ground attack and bombing runs. The scouting mission type generates ticker score for as long as the UFO on the geoscape. Others depend on completing an objective, such as base construction (doesn't generate ticker score itself, but the base does) or terror missions.

EDIT: Addendium. I went back to gameconfig to see what the scores were. They've almost entirely been set to zero. Which is... interesting. They were considerably different in v18.x

Edited by Max_Caine
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OK, going through the gameconfig.xml to actually grab some hard numbers...

You apparently gain 3.336 points to the ticker every game-day, regardless of anything else. (And again, nothing makes this go down.)

Counter-intuitively, the way the score seems to be designed to work is that, yes, the more UFOs you shoot down, the more missions you clear, the slower the invasion becomes, and the less aliens they send up against you. Fumbling and not having a clue what to do actually makes the aliens send harder aliens faster. (Which, counter-intuitively, means the game will either be too hard for noobs, or easy for a long time for the experts.)

However, it seems as if none of the events UFOs do actually increase the counter - all the ticks increasing events are functionally dummied out by having an increase of 0 points.

Hence, the game just plain seems to hit 600 ticks (the tick where the most powerful events all seem to take place, and hence, the "endgame" tick) occurs at about 180 days into the game, no matter what you do. Of course, since all these things are dummied out, that is either slated to change later, or else was what was previously intended to occur, but the designers decided against it.

Also, even when the ticks are implemented, it doesn't seem to matter, according to how the xml is written, whether the UFOs are destroyed or not, or even whether or not the aliens are doing anything but flying in circles. They simply generate ticks per minute for being on the map. (Hence, bombers can bomb humans, and research scouts can abduct humans, but there's zero impact on their actual research or progress, or the game at large whether they do anything or not besides how many negative points you take to your relations.) Apparently, even whether you destroyed them or they escape or not doesn't matter - they transmit up-to-the-minute data about whatever it is they are doing, and returning to the mothership with their data cores doesn't make a difference.

(Also, wow, the spelling errors in the comments and variable names make my head spin. Also, apparently, not even the people writing the comments knows what some of the functions are, or what they do - fun with legacy code, apparently.)

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i Feel Derp didn't even know that stuff was in GameConfig.xml

thank you very much guys for your help with this. it's been bugging me for a while.

edit:

my aim was to make my own modifications to these tickers for personal use. i felt like the big guns showed up too soon for me to catch up with the research portion of the game and that there wasn't enough fighters and interceptors to take down my fighters, and base attacks didn't come often enough( average 1 time each complete game) among other things.. basically i felt some portions are too easy and others too hard.. i also changed a variable to make ufos be "Destroyed" more often. forcing me to be careful if i needed some money or an item to research from the ufo i am attacking... basically my very own personal balance changes

Edited by Falidell
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Oh, and I was wrong about it happening on days numbered 1 and 6.

It turns out, it's just "every 5 days". I expected it to reset to the first of every month, but it doesn't actually do that, except on those months where the days naturally line up. (I.E. September and October.)

Also, you start with 4 UFOs per wave, and it climbs up to 8 by the 600th tick. It says that it climbs parabolically, by the way, and doesn't have any apparent randomization. (Keeping in mind each month, more-or-less, is 100 ticks, right now.)

Edited by Wraith_Magus
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Having looked back through several beta discussion, Aarons' comments suggest that there is a specific timeline of events, based upon when the ticker hits a certain point. I think that Aaron has done away with how the ticker previously worked, and has it running as a straight timer. I know from many comments by the developers the ticker never goes down, and is not intended to go down.

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Yeah, I remember seeing a spreadsheet...

Here.

However, when I read it:

Keep in mind when looking at this that it is the roughest guide - I specifically do not want there to be a "right" way to play the game in terms of the number of bases, when certain research is accomplished etc... but all things being equal, the above shows what should match with what. Some of it may also be a bit out of date. Some of it we also have not achieved yet (the number of base attack incidents being far too high currently, for example). Alien counts are the minimum number for a UFO, there can be up to 50% more, or less than the stated number if it was shot down and they died in the crash.

That gave me an impression that it was just a rough guide, not necessarily the only way forward. As it stands, it's the only way forward - the ticker is inviolable. You get endgame content 6 months into the game, no matter what you do. (They also "desire" you to do 6 missions a month - HA!)

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thats another helpfull piece of intel and i feel slow now because i usually don't get lasers untill the 3rd month lol my last game lasted 1 year 8 months!!! =(((((( due to me not having enough money to build labortories and hiring scientist so research was slllloooowwww. even at 4 labs 60 scientist.. plus the money required to actually manufacture the stuffs like lasers, plasmas, wolf armours, and such EEEK

edit:

however that screen of the excell doc really does help me out on how to plan my changes on the game i actually really enjoyed the 1 year 8 month game so i think i'll change things to last about that long. lengthen the tickers and such so that way i don't feel rushed for money.. think i'll increase the damages on the alien weapons tho.. so they don't hit often but they will kill you without armor. making trained solders more valuable and worth naming. as it stand i usually only lose 1 guy on a battleship crash site. too safe

Edited by Falidell
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I don't know about you, but if one of my guys gets shot with anything larger than a plasma pistol, it's usually fatal without armor. Even a plasma pistol can get lucky and one-shot a guy, at that.

Try an AlienAITickerIdle value of 0.001142 - that will cap out enemy invasion sizes at a year into the game. (So those last eight months will be where you face the battleships.)

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na usually i can get a guy to take a few hits and MOST of the time they just get to visit nurse Sexy for a week or so they won't die too often if i pull them back to support positions away from the front lines. i'll have to give that a try thanks for the tip wraith

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Sorry Wraith, but I've been thinking about what you've written, and I can't see how it's counter-intuitive to say "If an alien squadron succeeds in it's mission, the invasion ticker is advanced". I can see that doing that means the game punishes poor players with quicker access to nastier bad guys and bores good players by keeping around easier bad guys, which makes for a frustrating experience both ways - I believe it should be the other way around, where good players are challenged more often, and poor players get a chance to improve, but I can't say on the surface that it would be counter-intuitive to say that if aliens succeed in their missions, they wouldn't advance the invasion.

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You could look at it this way; any invasion has a plan, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

The aliens succeeding at their missions is them remaining on-plan, so they see no need to accelerate their efforts or try new tactics. Things are proceeding exactly as they should be, from their perspective.

We start stopping them from succeeding, start throwing their plan off, that's when they need to start switching things up. Accelerating some aspects, stopping some to try and develop new tactics.

It can be effectively twisted to justify any timescale you want, with a slight amount of handwaving for 'alien perceptions and though processes' Want things sped up? "They're accelerating their plans in response to our efforts." Want things to slow down? "They're having to pause while they analyse our actions and try to get their plan back on track." or even "They've discarding the plan and are creating a new one."

Anything you want, from the same lore. Elegant, I think >: D

Edit: The key to strategy is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory. Victory being whatever game design you want. Of course.

Edited by Elydo
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Or, to put it another way -

Aliens keep kidnapping humans with no major problems? Just send more scouts, do careful, methodical research, and advance at your own pace.

Aliens get slaughtered every time they pass into the atmosphere? Time to try different tactics - send in better-armored ships (even if we aren't QUITE sure we have properly adjusted for atomspheric pressures, if the alternative's getting everything blasted, it's still worth the risk of long-term bugs in the system or a crashed UFO of improper pressure seals if they're going to see heavy combat, anyway,) and send in heavier military troops.

Even if they send in big ships no matter what starting in December or so, you could have something like a separate "Xenonaut Lethality" ticker that tells the aliens to have more guards and soldiers, and less noncombatants in their ships doing research runs.

Hypothetically, if you want to be really clever, you could make it work both ways - killing lots of aliens means less noncombatant scientists doing the research, so their research goes slower, but more up-front hostiles coming down to do direct damage. You slow the invasion, but make the invasion itself more brutal when you are succeeding and murdering every foo fighter that comes on radar.

=====

... Of course, in my own fridge logic moment, if Falidel is capable of surviving for over a year, even while drastically "behind" on research, anyway, I don't think sliding the ticker back a bit is going to be necessary. (If you can survive reapers and elites on wolf armor and lasers already, why do you need plasmas?)

Edited by Wraith_Magus
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Well, how much "ahead of the curve" you can get right now really depends entirely upon having the chance to capture a UFO/alien type/weapon, anyway. If you want to get ahead, the only way to do so is to fight the tougher aliens.

Giving players the chance to fight the tougher soldier types early by doing well means you get the chance to get those high-tier weapons earlier, as well, even as the alien UFOs are still relatively smaller.

Hence, you are getting your reward earlier if you get a harder fight earlier. It's just that the pie has an orc guarding it.

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