Civilians... those little buggers.

[val]

Waitaminute.  Why isn't anyone talking about the other effects an alien invasion?

To give a couple:

When a riot happens, there are some people that benefit from it.  Probably there's going to be some thieves or thugs or other such stuff about.  Which can be a real pain in the **s if one of them takes an interest to you, or even more so if points are deducted when theft is committed right in front of a soldier and he doesn't interfere.

Old wounds run deep.  There might be civilians shooting or fighting each other for vengeance during the chaos.

At least some civilians are going to be armed.  They might either make a stand against the aliens, or use the chaos to settle some grudges.

And finally, once word gets around, there's going to be militia groups.  You'll want a commanding AI for those.  They'll also be better armed on average than the regular civilian.

[Thrashard96]

well, the civs might steal some alien tech

[Hertzila]

well, the civs might steal some alien tech

And then proceeding to either being incapable of using it or shooting themselves in the foot with it.

[Sarin]

That'd be an entirely new can of worms. Scenarios like civvie hiding in ruined building, sees an armored figure, shoots at it...turns out to be PHALANX soldier who automatically returns fire...whoops. Civvie dead.

[val]

Well, he asked for it....

[Thrashard96]

true.

[ManicMiner]

Just a thought:

1. When a terror mission raid begins, generate a random value of, say, 30 citizens (+ random modifier according to map size).

Drop one for every 1 hour that passes between the notification of the terror raid, and the arrival of the dropship. At the end of the mission, reimburse one citizen for each hour the dropship was in the air (after all, it's not like the grunts can teleport to the mission site so in-flight deaths shouldn't be held against them).

So you get something like this after the mission

N civilians saved

X civilians killed by aliens
Y civilians killed by friendly fire
Z civilians killed before we responded

Success of mission = N / (X*Y*Z) * (modifier based on nation's happiness rating)

It wouldn't involve AI changes but would incentivise you to respond as fast as possible to terror missions.

[Hertzila]

So you get something like this after the mission

N civilians saved

X civilians killed by aliens
Y civilians killed by friendly fire
Z civilians killed before we responded

Success of mission = N / (X*Y*Z) * (modifier based on nation's happiness rating)

While that could work as a new way to calculate how much a nation's happiness (and in which way) changes, I'd think those values should be weighted, like:

N / (0.5X+2Y+Z)^note1

Otherwise it would mean that a civvie killed by PHALANX weights just as much as a kill by aliens in the different supranation's support for PHALANX.

note1 = You might have wanted to multiply them on purpose but, in that case, in the event that the player didn't shoot a single civilian (quite normal) you'd had divided by zero, which would not have worked.