Alien Activity

[chris.staddon]

I've been playing 5 months (2.5 Dev) and have yet to see anything other than scouts, fighters and never more than 2 harvesters. I actually let the aliens get a strong enough foothold to launch an attack on my base, hoping maybe that way I'd finally see a Corrupter or a battleship. But no. They invaded with... another harvester. (good choice of craft... NOT)

Yet when I go into the data files, there's other craft out there. So... can anyone explain how the alien activity logic works? If "alien activity" has to be above 300 for something to happen, what is the 300? Days? Months? And presumably there's a way to tweak the gameplay slightly, so corrupters appear earlier... what would I have to change to bring on a proper invasion?

[H-Hour]

The timing of the campaign is currently undergoing significant revision. At the moment 1 day = 1 alien interest on normal difficulty. So if you are playing on normal, 300 alien interest means 300 days.

[Jon_dArc]

For the purposes of your current game, debug_showinterest and debug_interestset are the console commands that would be useful. I regularly use debug_interestset to accelerate things when the aliens are taking their sweet time.

~J

[chris.staddon]

Thanks for that; I'm having a blonde day though. How does one go about debugging? Or are the "alien activity" parameters in one of the files in 0ufos.pk3?

[Nokim]

Thanks for that; I'm having a blonde day though. How does one go about debugging? Or are the "alien activity" parameters in one of the files in 0ufos.pk3?

Just try mentioned commands above in console (Shift-~).

And you should consider playing on higher difficulty. In general difficulty level just makes alien interest rise quicker and employees' salaries higher. So all interesting parts you'll see sooner without any commands in console.

[ManicMiner]

How many based do you have? Typically you need at least three with working radars to pick up on stuff but on the default difficulty level you might not see anything bigger than a harvester until you've spent more than six months in the game - and that's not including the fact some ship appearances seem to be triggered by research levels.

Just as an idea, is the alien interest "balanced" per region later in the game so that (for example) if you have a base which routinely shoots down everything that goes near it the aliens have very high interest in it for terror missions, base assaults and infiltrations but don't fly supply ships into that area without sending heavily armed escort ships as well?

Conversely, it'd make sense if any part of the map not so well patrolled by Earth defences were used increasingly frequently by scouts, supply ships and harvesting missions late into the game because the window of opportunity for their missions to succeed without detection is being focused into ever smaller areas of the map.