Xenonauts: Crashed UFO Assault Sim

[Steelpoint]

I've currently logged about 100 hours on the full release of Xenonauts. More during the alpha/beta. I'm currently finished the game twice on Insane and am currently half way through a Ironman Insane run through.

Xenonauts is a great game in my opinion, however it is not without its share of faults. However I want to bring up what I believe to be one of the bigger faults, or annoyances, of the game.

The inability for aliens to do anything.

I have never had one of my bases attacked by the Aliens, Terror missions are also a rare sight, I've only had one or two terror missions occur. In my current Ironman play through I have yet to see a Terror mission. Alien Bases are also uncommon, I've always had at least two Alien Bases in any playthrough be constructed by the aliens, both around the same month and both early in the game.

The reason for this is two fold.

• Ability for the player to maintain air superiority, effectivly shooting down any UFOs preforming these missions.
  
• Being able to easily guess what UFOs are preforming certain missions (In my experience, UFOs with escorts are the one's doing assaults/terror missions).
  

The reason base assault missions always fail for me is because the UFO has to expose itself to my bases radar, and interceptors, to do the attack. Terror Missions and Base Construction can be done because they do it away from my bases. Until I get Marauders that is.

The only way I will ever encounter a base assault is if I intentionally let a UFO preforming that mission do it. So essentially, the only ground missions I am doing are assaulting crashed UFOs.

In XCOM, Terror Attacks were a constant threat until the late game.

This problem has most likely already been noted, I just wished to share it, as its unfortunate a good chunk of the games ground content is extremely rare to encounter. Of course it can be a conundrum since if these events occur to often it can get annoying.

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I did have a weird solution of the Aliens occasionally using "stealth UFOs" instead of the normal UFO if the player was being very consistent in stopping a certain mission from occurring. A stealth UFO would be a variant of the mother UFO (So Stealth Landing Ship) that carries less soldiers, has no weapons, loses in combat instantly, but cannot be detected by normal rader, only rader used by interceptors.

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Thanks for reading.

[Solver]

I think that, at some point in April or May, something really went wrong with the mission distribution. I know base attacks were fixed to a degree later, but still, yes, the game usually ends up having much less mission variety than it can actually support.

There is a super-simple solution: kabill's Dynamic UFOs mod. It is, in my opinion, one of two mods that are absolutely essential to enhancing the gameplay quality. With Dynamic UFOs, I often get surprised because it simply eliminates most predictable aspects of what happens.

[Chris]

We considered putting auto-terror sites and auto-base attack missions in the game, but people got riled up about us dumbing the game down and turning it into new XCOM and so forth.

In a simulation it is possible for you to mostly shut down the alien invasion if you get ahead; that's the downside of actually having UFOs spawn all the missions.

[LordJulian]

Any possibility to create new mission types and tweak AI behaviours such that some UFO crash sites makes the aliens more aggresive and charge at the player's dropship, where the area is fortified to allow your soldiers to take positions and defend the dropship like a makeshift defense map? Adding local forces to stand their ground near the dropship?

Or perhaps keep the aliens so defensive that they set up a perimeter around the UFO, not even venturing an inch off their positions that the player has to send their troops in a well-defended base?

Or even better, some alien bases are outdoors, don't know how this fits it though.

I was planning to make a suggestive map thread about this, but I'm not sure if this is possible.

[Steelpoint]

I think I'll consider the dynamic mod once I've finished my current playthrough.

The main reason this is a problem though is simple if you look at the inspiration.

In XCOM, Battleships would preform base attacks, and Terror Ships would preform Terror Missions. Both of these ships were very difficult to shoot down until near the late game. However in Xenonauts your fighting ships that scale with your power.

Once you encounter Battleships in Xenonauts, you should be using Marauders which are the perfect counter to them.

[Solver]

Shooting down things in the original was not so difficult once you got updated weapons. Which did not require the late-game. You only needed Avengers for Battleships, and you could handle even them with normal interceptors.

Xenonauts instead counters by having smaller radar and plane range. If your base is in Egypt, Condors cannot engage in Asia well beyond Iraq. Foxtrots are lucky to strike into China only if they do not need to chase the UFO much. Until you get 3 bases with interceptors up, there are going to be large parts of the world that you just cannot reach, although whether UFOs spawn there or not is random. Which is all fine, but the ticker system used tries to match UFOs so that you can constantly shoot at them at about the same level of comfort. This is one thing that Dynamic UFOs mod changes, it also gives a chance of encountering a UFO beyond your comfort zone - a Corvette may well show up 2 weeks into the game.

[skaianDestiny]

Ahem, shameless plug, but the FTD mod I've worked on with Kabill in my signature helps alleviate some of the monotony by adding two new UFOs that are extremely hard to kill that do Base Attacks and Terror missions.