So I've always played on easy difficulty until recently, when I jumped to superhuman. A couple things I noticed, maybe just coincidence. First off in the very beginning of a game when my interceptor had one stingray launcher and one avalanche launcher I attacked a small ship and before I could close to fire the stingray, it sped away. This repeated two more times such that I was never able to shoot it down.

Usually in my games I'll have a couple radar bases, perhaps with a hangar and interceptor, before I bother stationing troops there. I found out how risky this strategy is, and ultimately not worth it. An alien battleship somehow located my base and destroyed it outright. Remind me to always put soldiers at bases as soon as possible.

Oh a little sidenote I lost more soldiers on a mission than I have in a long time. I had just started a game so no armor and only normal rifles and autocannons, assaulting a landed floater ship in the jungle on superhuman. It turned out to be one of those situations where several floaters started just out of visual range of the LZ and turn after turn moved into range, spotted a soldier kneeling, fired one shot hit and killed the unarmored soldier. Lost 6 out of 10.

I think you'll find that it's the other way around. It's not the weapon damage that's decreased, it's the enemy stats that have increased.

A beginner level sectopod might have something like 70 front armour, and on superhuman, it has 142 (that's almost identical to TFTD's Magnetic Ion Armour front armour!). There's also an overall increase in all the other stats as well. Weapon damage always does 0 - 50%, 0 - 100% or 0 - 200% depending on the resistance modifiers of whatever alien you're attacking. You always get 0 - 200% so it doesn't matter what difficulty level it's on, you'll always get hurt. Badly.

I suppose, it's different, but has a similar effect.

Regarding your radar bases:

As a simple radar outpost, it's not that costly to replace in case it is destroyed. But when you start to upgrade to an interceptor base, a token base defense squad is actually a good idea. Note, however, that the closer you shoot down enemy ships to any of your bases, the faster the aliens will locate it. This is even more important on harder difficulty levels. Keep that in mind. I don't know for sure whether or not shooting down retaliation scouts will prevent a base attack - so I have no advice on how you deal with them except shoot them down as far away as possible. Mind shield are also good, but I suppose by the time you get them, most of your interception bases will be manned.

- NKF

Have you ever noticed ships repeatedly fleeing stingray launch range before you're even able to fire?

The smaller ships that generally are faster than yours, this normally happens with size class : Very Small, will outrun you any chance they get. As normally a single shot from 2 missiles at once will take it down.

It happens to me very often (I mean, small ships fleeing). Not only from Stingray shots, but from Avalanche also. Sometimes I manage to fire one Avalanche, and it hits and damages the UFO, but then it flees...Poor coward! Thus I try to equip at least one interceptor with double Avalanches, so to increase my odds. And then, there's also some sense in trying to follow the fleed craft. Sometimes it decelerates very soon to some more tolerable speed, so you can run it down and try one more time... <repeat as needed (or you are out of ammo)>

As for the protection of bases. Well, I haven't devoted much attention to it. Not that this is very wise, but I was lucky enough (only one base assault in 5 or 6 months - and that is on my primary base).

If you look at the UFOPaedia entries, you'll notice that the alien ships' speeds are among the things listed under each UFO. Well, your Interceptors can only outrun the small scouts (little tiny ones). So, unless they're slowing down to pick up some burgers or booze, you're not going to be catching up to them. And if you do, you'll be lucky to get a good shot or two in. Generally speaking, though, pretty much every UFO is able to run away from an Interceptor.

Like NKF said, a simple radar base isn't too much to replace - a total of about 2 million bucks will buy you a base and a couple of LR radars (or a transmission resolver). That's the price of around 16 heavy plasmas, which the aliens drop plenty of.

I get the impression ships fly at less then their max speeds, generally speaking. If a small scout notices it is being followed (ie someone locks a missile on it), it'll take off.

Most of the larger craft, however, seem to stay back to fight it out.

The missiles fire slowly as opposed to the likes of the plasma cannon, giving plenty of oppertunity for escape.

The manual notes that prior to X-Com, no craft had even managed to catch up with a UFO to engage it.

Ya all ships will probably out run you before you engage them, untill you research their alien engines that is, then their chances of outrunning you dramatically decreases.....or at least that's what it looks like to me

Once you build your own craft, you can outpace anything.

Craft plasma cannons also make it so much easier to hit enemy ships before they even think about running off, as there's no wait for the projectile to arrive. On the good old interceptors, they're a very significant upgrade.

- NKF

One that justifies their heavy elerium cost. A small scout stands no chance, however, those things often destroy the lighter craft, leaving you with no orange crystals to recover...

I was really just referring to something I noticed in the very beginning of the game when I still had stingray launchers, although it's now happened a couple times later on in the game with avalanches. I had never had a ship repeatedly break off and flee from stingray range so many times until this first game I've been playing at superhuman, so I was curious if it had anything to do with difficulty level. It also just might be coincidence.

Yeah, it definitely does have a correlation with the difficulty level. When you play on easy or whatever, the UFOs just sit there and take it, but on Superhuman they're out of there faster than Speedy Gonzales... and it's especially noticeable when you're using missile type weapons.

On my games I've actually had interceptors(Yes 2, I send one out then when he starts running out of fuel send a 2nd) run out of fuel before ever being able to fire a stingray at a UFO.

In my current game (super human, october), large scouts have suddenly changed their tactics - now they try and get as close to my interceptors as they can!

When I played first UFO, it was version 1.0 with this well known bug concerning difficulty levels. So even though i choosed veteran, in fact it was a beginner, so the enemies were a bit pathetic. Then I've started TFTD on superhuman and was surprised a little when alien subs often fleed right out of my hands, didn't allowing me to increase my score.

Oh, what is interests me, is why the large and bulky battleships has by far the greater speed than little scouts. I thought it would be opposite to that.

Scouts don't have the engine power of a Battleship, even if they have less weight.

One thing that always bugged me about UFO was the sheer size of the battleship vs your Skyranger. How the heck can you fold up such a big ship and stuff it in the Skyranger?

Well, cleanup crews that come in, clear up and head back to base before the combat team leaves the site was a good one. I mean, it also explains how all the loot gets back to base before you do.

Or, alien alloys are super light. That plus the sheer power of the alien power units, of which the battleship has 4 and the scout has nil -- hey, it doesn't need to have a power unit. It glides and blows about in the wind... I bet you could just pick it up fold in the legs and transport it about on your back if you wanted.

Hmm, wind resistance. Er, I can't think anything up to explain that. Battleships are as aerodynamic as a brick is to a dart.

- NKF

mass phasing

An elerium based field surrounding the craft moves the air particles out of the way, resulting in zero atmospheric friction.