what's with auto missions?

[wcanyon]

I was finding that there were way way too many missions for me to go through them one by one. I've played up till about the end of the first year. So I started trying auto missions. The thing I'm wondering about is why I try an auto mission, lose the battle, but not lose any men. Then send the team back in... over and over and over and over... and then wham success with no losses. It seems broken. I didn't see any sliders that said "be super careful when running an auto mission" but I've never lost any men on an auto mission. Typically lose 1 or 2 on a manual mission.

[Duke]

Can anybody plz comfirm that ?

[geever]

Can anybody plz comfirm that ?

I think that work like that. Not intentionally, it's buggy...

-geever

[Aleks]

Yeah, it is totally broken in 2.3 stable. Auto-mission also never loses base defense missions, even when i send guys without weapons.

[Jarkill]

I find it ironic that the stable versions are least stable of them all.

2.2.1 had the cloning bug, 2.3 has reaction fire and auto resolve.

[Aleks]

2.3 also sometimes refuses to save my game(no matter how many times i click "save"), so I have to exit and lose my progress from the last save. Guess I'm not the first to notice this bug.

[iamrawr]

2.3 also sometimes refuses to save my game(no matter how many times i click "save"), so I have to exit and lose my progress from the last save. Guess I'm not the first to notice this bug.

try playing for a 4-5 more days then try it again, it usually works for me.


I've never lost anyone in auto missions, they also don't register in missions completed and enemies killed in individual unit stats.

[Duke]

It seems that we do not have an SF-tracker item for the auto mission bug(s) yet. Could somebody  please create one ?

@Aleks:
Refusing to save the game is a *critical* bug !
1. Plz open a tracker item
2. Did you notice anything special about the circumstances when this happened ?

[Aleks]

@Duke:
Ok, I'm trying to reproduce it and gather additional info now.

[Mattn]

@Duke:
Ok, I'm trying to reproduce it and gather additional info now.

please open the game console (shift+esc) and type
    setdeveloper DEBUG_COMMANDS
that will help us to see what exactly is executed when you hit the save button

[Jarkill]

Yeah, it is totally broken in 2.3 stable. Auto-mission also never loses base defense missions, even when i send guys without weapons.

Haha, I just lost a base defense automission. My reaction was pretty much "What..?"

Also, whats with the game SPAMMING UFO'S AND TERROR MISSIONS AT ME?

I've faced like 20-40 missions, every single one of them being the same 4-5 Taman format. The only difference is that eventually they got Plasma Blasters instead of Pistol/Sword combo.

[Ebenezer Grymm]

Well this kind of stinks.  I was hoping to get into 2.3 but after reading all these problems I think I'll just wait until 2.4 and hope for the best.

[TDarklighter]

Auto-missions always succeed, and though it may be a bug, I consider it a blessing in disguise.  During my routine few hours of play, Earth is swarmed by fifty some odd active UFOs and about ten or twenty terror missions.  If I stopped to fight every single battle, a day would never pass in the game before I had to log off for bed before work.

The fact that they always win is not a bad thing in my opinion.  The soldiers gain no experience from the fight and the spoils are usually minimal if there are any, meaning I'm only getting credits off the sale of the UFO itself.  This keeps the game flowing while giving me the option to lead a ground mission every few UFOs.  The only catch is the "Crashed UFO" which wasn't mounted with the Auto-Mission code.  Only way to keep the map clear is to hit those for ground missions, or wait until they go away on their own which can take a couple of days of game time.  Given the choice, I hit those for my body count.

In another post, it was mentioned that the game sometimes confuses base assaults with normal ground missions.  When I first saw this, I thought I was going to be attacking an alien base like the news page said.  I haven't seen any alien base missions yet - how will we know when those are available?

Edit:
I figured out why the Crashed Ufo missions are not auto-missionable.  They're flagged as story elements and thus they must be played out.  Is it safe to change the "true" to "false" without breaking the game?

[BishopX]

Some crash mission are auto-missionable...perhaps it's related to research?

[dingoperson]

Ah, so that's why UFO crashes aren't automissionable..

I found a peculiar inconsistency with regards to whether I got any items or not from the missions. Seemingly at random, usually I would get x/y items, sometimes 0/0 items.

Also, in release 2.3, automissions would either succeed with no dead soldiers, or fail with no dead soldiers (it looked like simply the mission dialogue disappeared, but at the top of the screen it would say 'battle lost'). Supposedly this would be based on a score with a random element, so if the score was good enough you had a chance to win, and if you won you would lose no soldiers, and if the score was poor you had to try again.

The problem for me was that more and more into the game automissions would fail, so I would have to retry and retry 4-5 times. This *could* have been due to my soldiers getting crappier - but I upgraded them with nano armor, the latest weapons and all. I would guess the scoring is somehow off so that either the alien score increases too quickly by far (or it increases forever whilst yours are capped by equipment which tapers off) or your score increases too slowly.