Alien supply missions

[Tsathoggua]

We know that the aliens have to supply their bases on a regular basis.

 

Does it actually affect their performance if you keep hammering their ships on resupply missions? if you wait until they land and before takeoff, send in the troops and slaughter the buggers?

 

If that were done multiple times in a row, would they, if they, for instance already had technology such as sonic cannon, disrupter pulse launchers, shock launchers, vibroblades/TL/HTL etc. then have to start scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to find something with a trigger to pull and something to load it with? have less ammo? poorer weapons? some aliens unarmed that would normally carry a weapon? less other stuff to loot?

[silencer_pl]

I don't think so. I think it only offsets the loss of points because base is operational every day / hour.

[Tsathoggua]

Well if you kill aliens, there are fewer next time if you bugger off after a snatch and grab.

 

Wonder what happens if you stun as many as possible, disarm and revive everything (other than tentaculats of course, NOBODY likes a stunned tentaculat:P

[Zombie]

If you are eluding as to how unrealistic supply missions are when it comes to bases, then absolutely, I agree. If you are asking because you don't know, I guess I better explain.

 

There aren't fewer aliens the next time you visit a base after a smash 'n grab (assuming you kill everyone and leave one alien alive). The game is coded to repopulate the base to approximately the same levels each time you visit (there's some randomness involved to make things interesting though). You could stun and revive all the aliens in a base but there wouldn't be any more aliens the next time you visit. Say you kill all the terrorists but leave everyone else alive. Same deal, those aliens (dead, alive, stunned, whatever) will be "replaced" with a totally fresh crew (including terrorists and weapons) next time you visit whether or not a supply ship visits.

 

Say you decimate a base leaving a only a single soldier cowering in an upstairs room who soiled itself after you gave it a taste of it's own medicine by anal probing it relentlessly with the barrel of a Harpoon (see, there's a use for the Harpoon after all)! Next time you visit, the base is completely fresh with a new layout, new crew, new weapons etc. You would think that a supply ship would be in charge of this, but if you visit a crashed (or landed) one there isn't extra weapons lying around, there aren't terrorists, nor are there commanders. You'll always get the same crew.

 

You can get creative by visiting the landed supply ship, performing the old smash 'n grab, then aborting. The ship is now magically airborne no matter if you left the place a smoldering crater or left a single soldier alive to unrealistically pilot the craft without proper training. You need to shoot the ship down, but when you visit the crash site there's a new crew of aliens, new weapons etc. How is that possible? Who resupplies the supply ship?

 

- Zombie

[Tsathoggua]

Damn. ONE alien left alive in the entire base, probably shaking off the effects of a thermal shock weapon, be it ours or theirs only to discover that both its kneecaps are shattered hideously and beyond repair. And sees a sonic cannon with a curiously kneecap-shaped pair of dents in the echo chamber, covered in its own...its...something less than pleasant is floating in the water of the base, right by the alien's face, unbeknownst to 'mr' aquatoid until it opened its mouth to start howling in misery, compounding same more than it thought possible, once 'mr' aquatoid becomes... 'mr' aquatoid (just think of the 'toid' bit as having a kinda brooklyn/italian accent, spoken around the roach of a zoot kept hanging from the corner of the mouth of the speaker;D)

 

And this one little bugger somehow manages to scrub the walls clean of gore, alien faecal matter and innards that took on a new role as out-ards, crawl through the base floor by floor, legs broken/seared off and spine snapped and the pieces driven into various internal organs, in general looking like the chunky bits of digested fat adhering to the shitpile to grab the dustpan and the broom, then sweep up the base, scrub the blood and guts and tags reading such things as 'X-com woz ere', 'gill man? remember that tasoth girl you were seeing last night? well I'm probing her VERRRY thoroughly, and I'm not using protection either...know what? your hybrid program is a success NOW, at any rate;)) 'Score-three nil to X-com this season' ' off the walls, all the floors, ceilings if the strike team happened to be wearing magnetic ion armor then, having dragged every last corpse from the local seafloor and inside the base into a heap outside, collapse on the floor after the recoil from a salvaged, if a bit battered and bent disruptor pulse launcher sends the round somewhat closer than intended, causing the shockwave from the detonating disruptor pulse round to messily bisect the creature.

 

And then tomorrow morning, the quadriplegic heap of gibbering pain suffering and misery has both halves magically sewn back together by alien medical tech so advanced that our little green 'friend' does not even have to miss his yoga class that evening?

 

Damn. Seems like they must be employing staff from the very same agency that the cleanup crews X-com employ to scour the seabed or terrorized city/hijacked ship etc. etc. to do their cleaning and resupplies!