[2.5_dev_13/01/19] Aircraft radar unable to find mission on ground

[Quizer]

During campaign play I suddenly found my approval rating in Asia drop at the end of day (00:00), which made me conclude I'd missed some terror mission or something in Asia, where I have no radar installations. So I load up my save from a day earlier and send my 2 interceptors and my dropship to scour the entire Asian continent for a ground-based mission. However, no matter how much I sweep the area, my ships never find anything.

In the meantime, I've created a small mod that makes it cheaper to build new bases and radar installations and causes them to build instantly, to let me experiment with base placement more easily and figure out the base locations that give me optimal coverage. So, by this point I'm wondering whether I'm just to dumb to search the right areas or whether the mission is somewhere else in the world and the approval rating for Asia is just collateral damage, so I load up my mod and drop a radar base on Asia.

And voila, it instantly discovers a ground mission at the extreme southern edge of the asian mainland. So I load up my regular, unmodded game again and send my planes over there. But for some reason, no matter how many hours they spend hovering or flying over that spot, they never find the mission. For some reason, only a ground-based radar installation (base or tower) is able to find the mission.

Is this intentional? I thought sending planes to sweep areas outside your radar range was to be a valid gameplay tactic. But if the aircraft can't discover missions on the ground, that puts a bit of a damper on that idea.

[Anarch Cassius]

Odd.

This contradicts my experiences with alien bases which have both times been right under the nose of my main HQ but weren't discovered until interceptors passed over them. I believe each detection source has a chance of detecting things each tick and they stack. I think it also gets better the closer they are to source/distance of the radar grid. So I think a base detects at half it's max range as well as an interceptor does as half its, so major bases should be the best but more eyes in the sky have always worked for me.

I know that isn't directly useful but I'm basically saying this sounds buggish since it doesn't match other behavior I've seen.

[Quizer]

There was no way I missed the mission site due to random chance. I had 3 planes practically on top of that mission spot for 10+ hours, and I played through that timespan multiple times. The planes never found the site, but as soon as I popped down a base with radar or a tower, it found the site within 5 minutes. (The problem with radar towers is that even if you set the build time to zero days, it only checks at rollover (00:00) whether it's finished building.)

So this either has to be buggy behavior, or different sources of radar are intended to be unable to find different things. I'd like to know which it is.

[geever]

You are right, aircraft don't look for ground missions. Looking for an alien base is a different mechanism. The funny thing is that only aircraft and nations are looking for the alien bases. Base radars and radar towers are not.

Created a feature request for it: FR#629 - aircraft should search for ground missions

-geever

[Quizer]

Thanks! At the very least aircraft should be able to search for alien missions on the ground. Ground-based radar not being able to find alien bases may be intentional - maybe an alien base is too hard to see from the ground? But I agree these game mechanics should be investigated.

[Quizer]

Is there an info mail about alien bases around the time when they start appearing, so you know you have to send out aircraft to search for them? (I've never gotten this far in the game so far.)

[geever]

Is there an info mail about alien bases around the time when they start appearing, so you know you have to send out aircraft to search for them? (I've never gotten this far in the game so far.)

No, there isn't. How would you know?

Hint: If you start seeing supply ships, follow them and patrol where they land.

Btw. nations look for alien bases every day, so there is a chance that they detect a base for you.

-geever

[Quizer]

Yeah, you wouldn't know when the first base is built, but the hypothetical mail could be triggered by finding the first base. I was just worrying that the player wouldn't know that aircraft can find bases. But if the information that supply ships establish bases is in the supply UFO research article, that's okay, too.

Nations find bases, too? That's useful, I guess. How high is the chance for a nation to discover a base - high enough to rely on it?

[geever]

Nations find bases, too? That's useful, I guess. How high is the chance for a nation to discover a base - high enough to rely on it?

Another trick is investigating XVI spots as alien bases spead XVI too.

Nations search is useful, but if you have a suspect it's better to investigate the area yourself.
(Nations search probability depends on xvi level and how much the base was supplied)

-geever

[Quizer]

I don't even know what XVI is... I guess I should progress further in the campaign first.