Proposal:
You don't automatically know about every landing. Possibilities:
* UFO is being tracked by your radar, then lands: You always know that it's there.
* UFO is within distance X from your base: You always know that it's there.
* UFO is greater than distance X, but less than distance Y, from your base: the odds of automatically knowing that it's there are (Dist-X)/(Y-X).
* UFO is greater than distance Y from your base: You don't know that it's there.
* Every time click, unknown alien landings can be discovered and the discovery reported to you (such as "The intelligence service of the United Americas has reliable reports of alien activity in Fargo.") A mission parameter could give the chance of the aliens being discovered each turn that they're there (remote areas are less likely to be caught). Of course, if you're relying on a report, it could be old; that X might disappear off your map before you can get there.
Rammifications:
Strategic base positioning will become important -- nay, critical -- to success, when combined with my recent patch that makes nations actually care if you stop the UFOs or not.
Prerequisites:
Many more missions should be in place for this to be doable (see "Map diversity" thread where I offer to do this. Its prereq is that the autogenerated maps get debugged so that I have enough missions). Otherwise, many locations might almost never get a mission.
For example, if you build your base in the southern tip of South America, due to the fact that the beginning of the game has no missions near there currently, the only way you currently could find out a UFO is if it's discovered by a country -- and then you'd have to race to get to it before it disappears and hope for luck. Thus, I consider "getting many more maps into the game" to be a prerequisite, which means fixing autogeneration.
