Constant (and annoying) base defense

[ulairion]

...also known as "Maybe we should take down the huge neon 'Welcome to X-COM Main Base' sign"

 

So, my main base gets discovered by Mutons. The battleship lands, and thanks to a mix of good luck, a good layout, and psi spamming, the mutons get their purple asses handed to them. I clean up the mess, sell the bodies to the local fast food joint, and carry on. Less than five minutes after that, I get a decoding: Battleship, Mutons, alien retaliation, my base.

 

The thing is, in about two weeks of in-game time my main has been attacked no less than ten times. I read somewhere that succesfully defending the base makes the aliens "forget" it for a while, but this is absurd. I'm getting almost an attack every day. As you can imagine, I keep winning every single time, but it's not stopping them.

 

My soldiers are grinding their stats upwards like an obssesed WoW player with a time machine, but I'm growing REALLY bored of playing the exact same mission every 5 minutes. That, and my base's staff is getting rather tired of cleaning the blood stains on the hangar deck.

 

So, is this normal, or is there something wrong with my save? What could I do? The Mind Shield is about a week from finishing, should I just hold the line until then? Would that stop the Mutons from drowning my troops with their corpses?

[Sgt. Strike]

Well, you may have a base in the area, that you've downed some supply ships, right? And they have figured out where your base is, and is sending out battleships to try and take yours down. It might be a good idea to do some scouting via Skyranger/interceptor, and try to find it. I would suggest starting with roughly where they start to appear.

[NKF]

Capturing UFOs on the ground doesn't get that 2% chance of scheduling an instant base attack that happens when you shoot down UFOs.

 

I'm hardly an expert on this matter, but having heard various players experiencing the same thing, I think there must be some glitch that's preventing the game from clearing the base attack flag. Care to upload the savegame somewhere so we can take a look?

 

Coincidentally, are you using any mods like Seb76's loader or the ET patch?

 

- NKF

[ulairion]

I did the scouting without finding anything (and, of course, with YET ANOTHER battleship going against my base). They appear from al over the world, my main is around Greece and the battleships appear anywhere from Japan to South Africa.

 

I think I'm using a loader, but I can't remember where I got it from.

 

Here's the save btw: https://www.mediafire.com/?wa0s8k9dgxde377

[NKF]

You might have to reupload that file. The game's complaining that the save is missing the the site.dat file. Continuing to load the file results in a really-really messed up game with crash site on land, bases consisting of airlocks (some with several days to go), etc.

 

Either that or my RAR unpacker (7-zip), is not unpacking the file properly. >:] Definitely missing the site.dat file though.

 

edit:

 

Actually, you might not need to upload the file. I was doing my regular browsing of the xcomufo forums and user Louisdefuines had posted about the exact same problem as this. He then discovered a previous thread that detailed a fix for it. I'd completely forgotten about that fix. Also it brought up one of the possibilities why you're getting so many retaliations.

 

Two things to do:

 

If you're running the game in Dosbox, first alter the game cycles and at least play through the next retaliation mission or so. The Dosbox emulation cycles and your CPU speed might at such a combination that the aliens are able to do thousands of checks in an instant. Lots of vintage Dos games are adversely affected by the CPU speed and weird things can happen.

 

If all else fails, there's a method to reset the alien missions completely. Start a brand new game and save it in a separate slot. Copy the missions.dat file from there and replace the mission.dat for your current save with it. I suggest making a backup of your game just in case. This resets the missions back to what they were when you started the game, with one UFO targeting the region you set your first base (in the new game you created) and I think a terror site. All your progress so far will not be lost.

 

 

- NKF

[ulairion]

I replaced the mission.dat file and everything's working great. Thanks for your help =)

[kyrub]

Looking at your corrupted missions.dat file:

 

- there are 3 retaliation missions scheduled at once

 

1 of them is in Europe (0x110)

1 in South east Asia (0x1B8)

1 in Siberia (0x1F0)

 

The interesting information:

- when I changed the race from Mutons to Floaters in my Europian retaliation mission, I still got Mutons

- when I sped up the Europe retaliation, a scout appeared trying to locate my Europian base !

- finally, I found out about the other two scheduled missions, one of them (South Asia) was Mutons, which, changed to Floaters, worked just right. I got retaliating Floaters in Europe (launched from Australia Ufo Base).

 

Summa:

The bug stems from the fact that there are more retaliations scheduled on different continents. It seems that the problems lie in the choice of target.

Had those retalions have been aimed at your Asian base, your Europian could be saved by shooting down the scout. Somehow, the game keeps sending the battleships at the same target. I'll look in the code (or maybe Seb's around to speed up things?).