Alien base

[Strzelec]

Hi everyone,

I have attacked the alien base for the first time and it turned out that alien's turn lasted about 4-5 minutes. Considering the size of the map I'm worried that I won't be able to endure playing 1-2 minutes and then waiting 5. Could you please advise me what can I do in order to reduce the time needed to wait?

[pete conway]

I find in situations like this... making a cup of tea, putting the linen in the washer and doing other shortspan household chores is recommended, that way you can have your cake and eat it... if you make cake between turns as well that is!

[Strzelec]

Thanks, but this is definitely not an option for me, because actually I like the concept of alien bases so much that I want to PLAY IT and not do other things and checking the game from time to time.

[anonymissimus]

So AI turns are so slow not only for me.
Well, a base attack is the most time consuming type of mission. Plan for 3 hours at the very least.
Only good thing is that the AI turn time will become significantly shorter over time (with each alien you kill).
In 2.6, it is possible to win the mission by holding the PSI device room or the power core (the one with the light green illuminated tanks) for a number of turns. This tends to save 2 hours or so (but I still need 3 or 4).

[Strzelec]

Thanks, but I was thinking rather about some settings changes which can increase the speed of the game.

[hwoarangmy]

I guess this time is not long just to allow you to make coffee (I may be wrong, UFO AI devs might want to make fun of players ^^ ).
More seriously, if there was an easy way to speed up the alien turns, I guess it would already been done. I don't know what slows down the turn (computing for aliens within vision ? Decide what to do ? Pathfinding ? ). But AFAIK, there is no way to disable anything that increases alien turn speed. And during alien base attacks, where there are loads of them, it can take ages as you already noticed :-(

Anyway, I remember seeing some threads about speeding up alien turns so it seems to be already known and is probably not easy to deal with. If you have some skills with code, you can have a look

[Strzelec]

Sadly I have no such skills... Anyway, thanks. I only wonder why I encountered less than 10 aliens during the battle while I'd already searched most of the rooms so the question is: what are actually aliens doing to stop the attack? I also remember version 2.4, where aliens' turns were much faster...

[Strzelec]

How many turns do I have to hold the command centre to win?

[Strzelec]

I mean the PSI device room

[anonymissimus]

IIRC at least 3 and not more than 5.
If any aliens are around in a turn as well, it doesn't count for you (analog to when defending a human base). To make sure you increase your "have been holding the target zone for x turns" - counter, you should have a stationary unit within the zone (always the same unit) and no alien must have shown up during these turns.
Well, the aliens seem to have a strong tendency to accumulate in the target zone areas. This is again analog to base defences. There are two target zones, either of which can be used to win the base attack, so the usually 22-24 aliens are at least divided by 2. A few are spread over the rest of the base, thus meeting 10 aliens seems reasonable.

[Strzelec]

Thanks, but It didn't work for me... I have been holding the command centre for at least 10 turns and NOTHING (There were no aliens nearby). One soldier was standing right in the green mark till the end of the battle (I finished it by killing all the aliens). Please let me know if you know what causes the problem.

P.S. I play 2.6, downloaded it in the middle of February.

[anonymissimus]

There was some bug with illegal memory access once, perhaps you hit it but for you it didn't crash as it did for me. If this happens with a recent built then it certainly sounds like a bug.
I do recall that I finished a base attack via the target zone objective at least once. It was the one in the power core room, don't know whether it makes a difference.

[Strzelec]

Maybe it makes, because I remember that the last alien was killed when my soldiers were standing in the entrance to the power core room. I also remember that after killing this alien suddenly the hovernet appeared (I didn't press the finish turn button) in the tile which couldn't be seen from the soldiers' positions and it simply died, then the battle finished. I don't know if there were another aliens which appeared in a similar way as this hovernet.

[anonymissimus]

Unlikely.
I see hovernets suddenly appearing and "dying"; that happens when seeing the position where one of them previously died without watching that happen (e.g. from grenade damage, made rage by another alien, hit while vision blocked by smoke and so on).

[Strzelec]

I don't know if we talk about the same situation. I'm pretty sure the hovernet wasn't hit previously. Also you said that this happens when SEEING the position in which they died, but my soldiers were unable to see it when this happened and I'm sure about it.