Translation talk:Intro sentence1/en
I just want to know... Did "we" kill any aliens during mumbai? What happened to the bodies? Will research on alien bodies get completed without the player actually researching it? -Reenen
Unanswered issues in the storyline
There isn't much story, except for a lenghty future history lesson. The US went bankrupt by help of Allah, maybe.. China nuked it's main cities in an atomic civil war, the Middle East united in a superpower... but where the aliens fit in? They attacked Mumbai with no details left for us to know. Someone had a good point - did the troops killed at least one alien or managed to recover some device?
I'm neutral to this alternative future setting, but I would like more details on aliens, after all the name of the game is "Alien Invasion". Forgive my comments, but it's ilogical for a developed invading species to wipe out entire cities, and than leave, after they spent a good time hunting down every living thing in those cities.
An other comment is that it's unrealistic, in case of an invasion (that wipes out cities), that a small task force like Phalanx, is doing all the fight and has just a poor squad with some spare weapons from the UN arsenal. It would be much more "OK" if the player is just one of many commanders that got the command of a base, and as time goes by you are allowed to command additional bases, squads and craft. After all, when the game starts it's almost useles to build a second base. From my experience with X-Com, each time I have played I had veteran squad that did all the hard work, because the stats took time to improve, and after some time developed a second and third squad for easier missions.
What happened with the space installations - sattelite network, space station... is there a human outpost on the Moon, did the aliens set their base on the Moon/Mars etc? Or do they have a mothership in orbit to serve as the last 1-3 missions? ;)
--Sirg 11:59, 10 October 2006 (CEST)
I'll let the detailed answer to Winter :) I just want to point out one detail that isn't obvious from the text on this page; Most of the text only covers the 'introduction' text ('storyline' part is a bit of a mis-name) and background story. The details about aliens are coverd (nearly 100%) throughout the development of the game while you play (ans is manifested in the various resarch documents and alien-descriptions int he wiki already). Concerning the 'unrealistic' topic ... this has been discussed again and again in the forum and several ideas have popped up how to 'solve' this. I suggest continuing the discussion there will be a better choice (just search in the forum). But as i said, the details are better answered by Winter since he's out profesional when it comes to the story-elements.
--Hoehrer 12:26, 10 October 2006 (CEST)
- I'll be writing a UFOpaedia article about the aftermath of Mumbai and the other attacked cities, once the remaining base facility descs are finished. The article will include questions about the aliens' motives and operational strategy, a strategy which makes perfect sense if you know their objectives.
- 'Giving' the player new bases as time goes by would make for terrible gameplay, removing the entire finance management aspect from the game. It's a very bad idea.
--Winter 14:09, 10 October 2006 (CEST)
Regarding the idea of "giving the player new bases" as time goes by, I was misunderstood. I wrote: the player will be allowed to build/command other bases, and by this I meant that you can't build a second base in the begining because you have to show that are up to the task of managing one base and one squad, but after X successfull missions, etc, you can "build" an other base if you want to. I think is great to have an extra reward and ladder system, giving the player more choices as times goes by and according with the player`s results.
And OK, I will search the forums as you say... Thanks --Sirg 19:17, 10 October 2006 (CEST)
Hi all, I really liked the new look storyline... There is just one line that really is out of place IMHO: "Until it was rediscovered on 9 March 2084 by an old man who remembered reading about it in a dusty file in his long-demolished office."
Then a whole woo-hah, before eventually you get: "until one aging diplomat remembered the PHALANX project."
So who remembered it? The diplomat or the old man? My vote is just scrap the first one, or add a line of an aging diplomat receiving an email from his dad - (who is the 1st old man - who may have been the inventor of the famed artificial spider silk).
--Reenen 2006/11/7
minor text revision suggestion - The Commonwealth of Oceania
"Later, with the breaking of the diamond cartels in Africa, the Commonwealth seized several leaderless mines inside its borders and used them to their full. "
Full...potential, or fullest economic advantage?
Wehrwulf
minor text revision suggestion - The Middle-Eastern Alliance
Pharmaceutical manufacturers packed up in droves and moved to the Middle-East, the only place left in the world where oil was cheap and plentiful.
I don't really get this point. I'm a biotechnologist. So why pharmaceutical manufacturers should look for a place where oil is cheap? It doesn't make too much sense :( moreover, this countries have a too-much religious culture to be a good place for researchers.
You don't need too much energy to produce drugs. You need a lot of eggs for vaccines and alcohol for mediums, but you don't have to obtain these from oil.
Suggestion for the very beginning of Storyline
I think, the SL must reflect the events of November 2008. We can pretend that that attack was the training raid for HIV-infected Humans. First raid failed, and aliens took a long pause for 70+ years to prepare new strain, more appropriate for human being.
--Troublemaker 07:52, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
...For a long time that city was named Bombay. But times gone and it was more and more often called on Indian manner - Mumbai. Once that name become its official one. On November 27, 2008 the Mumbai became an object for terrorists attack. These inhumane creatures were the species of Homo Sapiens, but who knows, if they were the Humans?
Police get the rid of these bastards. Some were killed, some captured then judged. Some civilians, locals and tourists, also were dead from different reasons - bullets, blasts, beating...
Events that follows (point to SL's events for 2010-2036) made that attack just a grim memories, just few of many violent days of human history. No one put an attention on the ease, with which the terrorists occupied most of important objects of city. These days the analytical medicine was much weaker than it is now, and no special tests were taken on dead terrorists' brains...
Streamline and Refocus the Introduction
Most of this information isn't really particularly relevant, and people tend to generate plausibility issues with it. I would suggest that the political background for each country only be entered into the game on the event of the unhappiness of that country approaching the danger point, restructured in terms of justifying suggested courses of action which might help regain favor with that nation. Essentially these would break down into whether they want a base (economic favor), more interceptions over their territory (doing something about these invaders), or faster response to incidents (prevent loss of life). Yes, I realize that all of these imply "build a base here, dummy." The point would be to add flavor during the campaign, not complicate gameplay.
I think that the introduction itself is mostly fine, if a little long. You also don't mention the technologies which have made trans-continental conflict temporarily obsolete (and thus caused stagnation of military technology). I would include three factors. First, development of "smart" weapons to the point that air space and sea lanes can be effectively and cheaply interdicted by land installations using missile batteries (whereas methods of defeating these weapons are either prohibitively expensive or simply beyond the remaining technical capabilities of what remains of the most advanced nations). You could mention that the financial collapse of America forced it to a desperation measure of selling off its most advanced weapons technologies or whatever, but I would leave it at a simple mention. Second, rapid deterioration of the global economy in the early part of the century combined with a lack of plausible reasons to support large standing armies for defense against air/sea invasion led to a general shift towards far cheaper reservist and militia models for most militaries. These localized forces vary in quality substantially by region, but almost none of them have intensive training schedules or real combat experience (outside of police and natural disaster response). In our terms they'd seem like hobbyists (reenactors, even) rather than serious militaries, but they are certainly more than capable of defending a region against an aggressor stripped of any possible air/sea support. Third, the mentioned development of thorium reactors has removed almost all global competition for energy resources, as plenty of thorium exists on each continent to supply that continent's energy needs for the better part of a millennium.
Further, while intercontinental trade does continue, it is severely hampered by the danger of high seas piracy, which no nation retains the global influence to effectively police (and which several nations covertly support). The various nations thus have little contact with or dependence on each other. The U.N. (heavily restructured and simplified) cannot really interfere with the continent spanning super-nations, any one could hold off military invasion indefinitely from without and all are economically self-sufficient. The work of the U.N. is thus almost purely humanitarian and theoretical (dissemination of medical literature rather than trying to send actual doctors and medicines through dangerous trade routes, for example), what real disputes do exist between super-nations mostly amount to interdiction of air space and sea lanes overlapped by competing defense systems. Actually putting one's forces in a position to get shot up by smart weapons was unattractive, so actual shooting is rare. Given the overall lack of large scale intercontinental trade, the interdiction isn't a significant enough problem to require more than annual "let's be friends" parties attended by high-ranking diplomats and virtually ignored by everyone else. This information could be used to clarify the undisputed international preeminence of the U.N. combined with its utter lack of practical capabilities depicted in the "PHALANX And The Mumbai Aftermath" section. I'd suggest removing most of the "secret history of PHALANX" material, since it is a mostly secret history and it doesn't really matter much (though it could be triggered by some game event or other as a flavor).
Bits of this material could be included in the UFOpedia entries for starting tech, like the AA51 Cicada, which could be described as "capable of 100% successful intercept and destruction of any known or theoretically possible aircraft built by human technology." This would be the endpoint of the arms race, a defense system that no human engineer can even imagine beating. It would also explain why there's only one available on the planet at the start of the game. That also intrinsically explains why nobody but PHALANX can shoot down UFO's...most air defense systems, though advanced compared to modern standards, haven't been challenged in decades and thus have never bothered to upgrade to meaninglessly over-powered technologies. --ChunLing 15:08, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
A comment on perspective
Insightful comments. I'd like to add some reflections of own:
Evacuating the space stations and established moon base seems implausible. Faced with a clear threat of alien invasion it would be a natural response militarize installations like that.
On a more general note, having the background story and politics worked out in detail is great for the development but I think as to what is actually spelled out, the ideal is a fast-paced, present-time, personal descriptions with any necessary background conditions mentioned naturally in the passing, as they are natural knowledge for any reasonably educated person of this time and age. I to put it bluntly, the present articles feel a bit out of place in a compilation such as the UFOpeadia because these broad strokes of history would be covered in school books and the general news rather than what I imagine to be the PHALANX operative briefing documents. If these things are to remain presented through the UFOpaedia I would suggest a framework and style centered on the operational significance of the situation in each of the regions and events. (e.g. I imagine a historical briefing on the earliest modern encounters with the invaders might have passages along the lines of
"The earliest documented direct contact with the alien forces in modern time was the initial attack on Mumbai, 3rd of March, 2084. (For a historical account of evidence of alien presence on Earth up to and including PHALANX[hyperlinked] under US administration (1955-2027), see 'Historical evidence of Alien activity on Earth'[hyperlinked]) Our reports of the Mumbai raid begin 06:15 when airstrike alert and emergency broadcasts were triggered from Mumbai's garrison after making visual contact with ships with six small alien vessels. The Mumbai garrison comprised 260 military operatives, all of which lacked real combat experience, like most of the world's conventional forces at this time. Commonwealth military spending in the area had been decreased steadily, at pace with the global demilitarization, but our Commonwealth sources state the troops still in place were well supplied and had regular training. Mumbai was still relatively heavily equipped with fully-automated air defense systems and it has been estimated that they should have been able to completely deter a moderate-sized airstrike based on modern conventional technology. There is nothing to suggest that remote scanner systems detected the alien invaders before the vessels came within visual range, but military reports from the attack are relatively scarce, as the garrison ceased transmissions by 06:19. All local media recordings recovered were damaged beyond usability, but remotely transmitted recordings from the military installations and civilian surveillance systems reveal gray humanoid aliens massacring humans and animals using primarily highly portable hand-held, ray-based weapons. This picture is confirmed by the more believable testimony from survivors. In contrast to many of the subsequent attacks on major cities (see below[hyperlink]), the Mumbai raid does not seem to have featured use of any alien battlefield robotics[hyperlink]." etc
See what I mean? Directed to someone who need to get up to speed on the aliens, but with little fragments about the state of the world lurking at the edges. (Sorry for posting without getting into the details of the world construction properly, but I just know that if I set out to go through the wiki and game first, I wouldn't get around to writing) To offer some praise along with that, I really like the style of the research proposal /report system. It does a lot for precisely this in-role touch for briefings. Anyway. There's my two cents, maybe I'll be back here when I have actually played though the game.
--Mirari 18:40, 9 July 2009 (UTC)