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Question about early game


Squaddie

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I've just started playing this again after many years. I was never good at it and always found it too hard.

 

Currently playing DOS edition - v1.2 with Xcomutil.

 

Now I've just started playing at Beginner level and within about 10 mins of playing I've already got my first Terror Mission. I don't remember Terror Missions coming so early in the game. Does that sound right? Could they pop up at any time? Also I remember I used to see lots of "Very Small" UFO before larger ones come about. But my first one was "Small" UFO. Again is this normal?

 

Just wondering if my game is broken somehow by the patches and Xcomutil.

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How many days in were you before the first terror mission? Also I take it you would have cleared one or two UFOs by then?

 

For the UFOs, the choice of ship for the first few UFOs is random so you are likely to see anything up to Large Scouts. So this is normal.

 

- NKF

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Now I've just started playing at Beginner level and within about 10 mins of playing I've already got my first Terror Mission. I don't remember Terror Missions coming so early in the game. Does that sound right? Could they pop up at any time? Also I remember I used to see lots of "Very Small" UFO before larger ones come about. But my first one was "Small" UFO. Again is this normal?

 

Just wondering if my game is broken somehow by the patches and Xcomutil.

 

From what I remember, aliens (or to be more exact, the executable) begin terrorizing missions at the beginning of every month. By "terrorizing", I don't mean just the Terror Site itself, but instead, a series of ships which culminates with a Terror Mission at the end of a month. Check out the MISSIONS.DAT page of the xcom wiki.

 

ufo-c time-c ufo-type
0	 2.5h* m.Scout
1	 1w	 l.Scout
2	 1w	 Terrorship
3	 1w	 Terrorship

 

So in this example, the terrorizing mission starts with a medium scout (2.5 hours after the start of a month), then a large scout a week later, a terrorship a week after that and finally another terrorship a week after that (this is the one that creates the terror site I believe). So total time is 3 weeks + 2.5 hours or basically a month. As you can see, there are not any small scout ships scheduled to run terrorizing missions, so it makes sense you didn't see any. tongue.png

 

All the alien mission types are different though. Some have more ships culminating with a battleship, while others don't. The aliens usually don't schedule many missions for the first month, but sometimes you will get a harvest, abduction or research mission too. Those missions start with small scout ships and work their way up to the big battleships.

 

So it sounds right, don't think XcomUtil is to blame for anything. wink.png

 

Welcome to the forums by the way! :)

 

- Zombie

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Thanks guys!

 

Hmm so it should be 3 game weeks before my first terror site mission? I don't think it was that long. I had only had one scout mission before the terror site. As I said this happened all in the first 10 mins of play! I hadn't even researched any laser weapons yet. Could be that I was spending time building some facilities and buying new items. And maybe there was some time before my spotted and shot down the first scout ship. My base is in USA so I thought it should spot UFOs pretty easily.

 

Maybe I'll start again just to be sure.

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The times given in the MISSION.DAT file are the average times between each stage. The range is 50~150% of that time. In the CE version, after starting a new game, a harvest mission is created in the same region as your base and a Terror mission is started in a random region. If you intercept any UFOs, a retaliation mission will be created, either for the region of your base or the region where the UFO was intercepted. In some games, I get a lot of detections very quickly, in others almost a whole month can pass before I see the first UFO.

It's possible that you might get a terror mission very early if the randomizer generated the minimum time between each stage and the first terror ship had the right trajectory to start a terror site. Usually the flight path for a UFO is based on a randomly determined array and most arrays don't have the first terror ship end on the city to initiate a terror site, but it can.

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From what I recall from a previous discussion about the non-stop base attack bug, there could be some abnormal behaviour caused depending on the speed of your computer and your Dosbox cycle settings. Many old dos games behaved strangely under certain computer speeds, and UFO is no exception. I couldn't say what this magic number is as it varies depending on your computer's processor speed.

 

If they're still coming much earlier than expected, try and adjust change your Dosbox cycles up or preferably down and start a new game and see if it helps.

 

- NKF

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