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Number of terror missions, alien bases and base assaults per play through


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Because I just watched a UFO on a base attack mission go from North Africa to Scotland to the Soviet Union before finally attacking my base on Rhodes. This took them almost a full day to do.
Wouldn't it be fairly obvious if they made a beeline straight for your base?
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The upside of reverting them to beeline would be to make them do something different and occasionally catch you off-guard. They might also launch more terror missions on the edges of your radar coverage. Would this require a code change? If not, it might be worth releasing as a mod.

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They were changed from beelining to wandering about precicely because people complained about how predictable they were. The pendulum swings one way... then swings the other.

So what you're saying is they need a 50% chance of making a beeline, and a 50% chance of dithering about first.

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Yes, basically. If they make a beeline every time, no good. If they dither every time, no good. But... that would take quite a lot of work, tbh. If Solver were to look at anything regarding UFO missions, it would be to re-examine the weighting of passive vs. aggressive missions and the tier bias of different aggressive mission types.

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Could you assign large UFOs to escort each other? So a base assault or terror mission could be made really hard to shoot down in the air? A wing of three langinships, or a landinship escorted by corvettes or something like that could fix the problem, at least make people aware that base assaults and terror missions are supposed to be happening.

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They were changed from beelining to wandering about precicely because people complained about how predictable they were. The pendulum swings one way... then swings the other.

I'd like to think most players' top priority is any alien ship even remotely near their base, whether it looks aggressive or not, so I don't think the beeline behavior is a problem. Quicker to shoot down and rearm the planes, quicker to get your team to the crashsite, it just makes sense to blast nearby targets as a top priority.

If anything, a quick and dirty solution would to make Base Assault missions always be carried out by a ship a generation or so higher than whatever is currently normal for ground missions for added toughness, and have the ship itself spawn a couple hours into the wave, so most of your planes are either hours away from intercept, or are already spent and mid-refueling.

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Just lost a base to a base attack in Nov, so 3rd month. Veteran difficulty, sent my F17 and a MIG to intercept a medium + 2 escorts cause that's all I had at my fledgling American base. Figured it was a terror mission or bombing raid and needed to try and do something. Went for the corvette, but the escorts got in the way, took them out, but lost my planes to the corvettes guns. Lost my base about an hour later.

Great, that was a huge investment lost.... Hub + 2 hangers + 2 planes + 2 radars. It was one of the first spawns in that wave. Now a few days later, its December and I got notified of an alien base I need to take out. Most my guys only just got armour / energy weapons. We are dooommed !

On my previous play through on normal had several alien bases I located and no base assaults. I did save scum a bit though, this time I am not - effectively ironman (though I wont risk the in game option for that until a few more bug fixes come out), and have gone up a difficulty level. While the probabilities of these missions may be the same, the extra stress on finances means I suppose, that these alien missions are more likely to succeed early game, eg I'd just transferred a fighter from the base I lost to help out another region where I'm about to lose funding. I'm certain a third interceptor would have done it. BTW it didnt go straight for my base, it was heading elsewhere I think, why I assumed it was a terror mission.

Anyhow, my advice would be not to save scum (at all!!! - unless its a game bug your correcting) and play on higher diff levels.

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Is the minimum delay (20 days) between 2 terrors or base attack a delay between the effective attack or the delay between 2 attempts?

Attempts, so far as I can tell. So if you shoot the UFO down before it reaches its destination, you've blocked it for the cooldown period. This actually makes more sense (otherwise you could just get spammed by terror/base attack missions until one finally gets through, which makes intercepting them pretty pointless in the long run), but does mean it's quite easy to stop them altogether.

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I'm planning on starting a new game with 7d cooldown on terror and 0d for base attack + decreasing each construction mission delay level with 10. I've also jacked their mission propabilities up: terror 60 and base attack 50(from 4!). Let's see how it effects things.

Edited by Skitso
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Now a few days later, its December and I got notified of an alien base I need to take out. Most my guys only just got armour / energy weapons. We are dooommed !

Actually I'd reccomend you just go. This early you'll be dealing with a small alien base, and you should be able to handle it. The boost from taking the base (As opposed to the lost income from the constant funding drain if you don't) will be very helpful in recovering. With laser weapons and a mix of wolf and jackal armor you can take a small alien base no real problem.

And Kevin, I didn't mean have all three drop troops, just have two major warships as escorts to make them more difficult to shoot down. Its an idea I'd like to playtest, there are potential flaws, but it could make things interesting. I've no idea how to execute it though, I'm just a player.

Edited by Irishguy117
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And Kevin, I didn't mean have all three drop troops, just have two major warships as escorts to make them more difficult to shoot down. Its an idea I'd like to playtest, there are potential flaws, but it could make things interesting. I've no idea how to execute it though, I'm just a player.

It could be done, but I'm not sure what would happen with crash sites (as, in theory, all of the UFOs would spawn crash sites, but since escorts were never supposed to do this it wouldn't surprise me if it leads to CTD-land).

It might be better, then, to produce some new UFOs (based on the bomber/strike cruiser?) that are large and heavy hitting, but don't spawn crash sites.

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It could be done, but I'm not sure what would happen with crash sites (as, in theory, all of the UFOs would spawn crash sites, but since escorts were never supposed to do this it wouldn't surprise me if it leads to CTD-land).

It might be better, then, to produce some new UFOs (based on the bomber/strike cruiser?) that are large and heavy hitting, but don't spawn crash sites.

Would you entertain the idea of a functional triple crash site instead?

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What, you mean three crash-sites on the same map? I think it would be more or less impossible to do, as you'd have to make maps especially for it and add in code to support those maps. I'm also not sure whether it would be a good thing: they'd be so monstrously difficult compared with other missions (at least with fair sized UFOs) that I think they'd be out of place.

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What, you mean three crash-sites on the same map? I think it would be more or less impossible to do, as you'd have to make maps especially for it and add in code to support those maps. I'm also not sure whether it would be a good thing: they'd be so monstrously difficult compared with other missions (at least with fair sized UFOs) that I think they'd be out of place.

So it would be a spike in difficulty and would require some changes in the code to make them work just fine and not appear out of place?Sounds like it might just be possible then :)

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ZERO base assaults

ZERO alien bases

A couple of terror sites ( a red circle with an alien face in it) but my combat planes got to site it vanished.

What was that? Are you saying you had a terror site pop up (you get a notification box telling you what it is - then indeed a red circle tag) you sent interceptors, and it disappeared? Without the nuke notification?

This sounds like a pretty big bug, if that is the case. I have never sent an interceptor to a terror mission before (only drop ships) so I have not seen this.

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So it would be a spike in difficulty and would require some changes in the code to make them work just fine and not appear out of place?Sounds like it might just be possible then :)

That would actually be pretty awesome. I'm actually getting an interesting idea for an alternate style of terror mission, maybe 1 out of 3 times or so instead of being an elite team of the aliens best it could be a veritable swarm of low level aliens. Could be interesting, and I can definitely justify it as the aliens spreading out to cover a large part of the city faster. Its a bit subjective as to whether or not that would be fun though, kinda depends on the alien AI and how much ammo you think to bring.

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Currently in like Feb or March. I've got 4 bases (getting to that later), plasma researched and Marauders up and running.

The only terror thing that ever appeared was a Bomber with two escorts. A pop-up came up something about terrorizing a city and requesting interceptors to the site. So I did. I sent some interceptors, destroyed the bomber and its escorts .. and that was it. The Soviet Union was extremely happy with it, though, as I'm pretty sure the funding increased by like 100k.

I haven't seen any proper terror missions, nor base assaults. I've done three alien base missions, because South America was undefended (without radar coverage) for a looooong time. I built a base in North America, not knowing that a base in Middle America would be sufficient to cover both N and S America. That resulted in two alien bases and reduced down to 44k funding before I managed to get a base with a radar and two marauders up there. The third base appeared somewhere in Siberia, which was sneakily established outside of the radar range of Europe's base in Malta and the Asian base in Indonesia.

Not expecting any terror missions, bases or base assaults from now on, though. I've got absolute control of the air.

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During my Insane playthrough, I decided to do some testing on the matter, especially concerning how my effectiveness to shoot down UFOs was affecting the presence of terror sites, alien bases and base assaults. I would make a save and let my game run for a month or two without shooting down UFOs, taking (mental) notes of what the UFOs actually did (I did this multiple times in various stages of the game). Once I left them alone I noticed that terror sites (which I had gotten a few off earlier) and alien bases (which I had had 1 of earlier) did happen regularly, whereas base assaults were extremely unlikely. I did manage to see two base assaults on two different bases though, but they did happen very rarely, compared to the other two.

On a side note: Are base assaults based on "Ground Attack" missions?

Edited by Slandebande
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