magic9mushroom

Oh, and for the record here's the full set of ways you can lose: 1) Get a score below X for two months in a row, where X is -900/-800/-700/-500/-300 for Beginner/Experienced/Veteran/Genius/Superhuman respectively; 2) Get a balance after funding/expenses that's below zero for two months ever (there's a bug where this flag is global instead of local to savegames, so it can happen the first time under certain circumstances); 3) Get a base destroyed by aliens when you have no other bases (NB: dismantling your only base doesn't cause game loss); 4) Attempt T'leth and fail.

Old, but still accurate. UFOs/Alien Subs generate -1 point every half hour, or -2 if they're landed/touched down. That's -48 a day per ship, or -2976 for two of them for the 31-day month of December (assuming they count as in flight rather than touched down on land; double it if they're touched down). I think this is, in fact, the culprit; you presumably had a slow couple of months (particularly since ACTS.DAT would have run dry near the middle of 2042) and weren't able to overcome that giant malus. EDIT: If you want to continue (though aren't you getting a bit bored?), you'll probably want to delete those subs so they don't keep scoring for the aliens. Go into LOC.DAT with a hex editor, set width to 20, and zero out all the rows that start with a "01", then go into CRAFT.DAT with width 22 (so each record takes up 5 rows) and set all the records that start with something between "05" and "0c" to start with "ff" and have the rest zeroes. This should delete all Alien Subs currently on the globe. Back up your game files first; I haven't tested this.

Resolved. Finally figured out what the issue was; my browser hadn't been updated in a while, and I'm guessing CloudFlare found that suspicious. After updating browser, CloudFlare remembers that I'm human and serves me the proper version of pages.

I have no plugins. Opened an incognito window and still got the shitty version of the site.

Clearing browser cache/cookies does not work. Using Microsoft Edge does work (my usual browser is Ungoogled Chromium). I suspect CloudFlare may have something to do with this, as I get a CloudFlare verification screen every time I load a page in Ungoogled Chromium when I didn't seem to in Edge (and TTBOMK that's not supposed to happen normally). Is it possible that CloudFlare thinks I'm a bot and is deliberately serving me a shitty version of pages?

The short version is: "Good idea. Please do it." The long version is that StrategyCore/UFOpaedia has/had a lot of people (including me) very willing to do massive amounts of testing on UFO/TFTD but not all that many willing to do it on the remake (I've never even played it). And, well, you can't put something in the UFOpaedia if nobody knows it - somebody has to find it out either via testing or code-dig. Contacting modders (such as those responsible for Long War) might help you with a code-dig. As for simple testing... well, my general advice is "if you want something done, do it yourself".

For the past couple of days it's been not loading the wiki formatting correctly. Attached image to show what's happening.

I find the brainsucker launcher quite flavourful. It drives home the idea that the aliens aren't really thinking about this properly at the start, expecting to get little/no resistance and thus equipping their beachhead with an infiltration tool (as brainsuckers are the key to The Real Alien Threat) rather than, y'know, a weapon. There's a lot of UFOpaedia entries noting that they slowly shift away from infiltration toward combat and eventually to sheer spite with Overspawn and the Apocalypse Mission. They also keep you on your toes tactically, adding enjoyment and also blocking off certain tactical options (1-man squads, in particular, are effectively closed off because brainsuckers from launchers come from unexpected directions and frequently won't be seen/targetted until they're on someone's head).

I think nullifying the Toxigun's ability to pierce shields mostly does the job on the Battlescape, because without an easy shield-piercer (and neither stun grenades nor psi are easy) you lose all your looted shields and have to build your own (which is very slow). The bit that needs more effort to fix is the Cityscape, since the aliens' late air game is rather anemic (the idea of Escorts stunning your craft for the capships to blow up is nice, but non-escort-tasked UFOs almost never fire their weapons so the capships do not actually capitalise on it, and besides that there just aren't enough FASes and Escorts to put up much of a fight) and you also get giant bucketloads of money from Cloaking Fields which gets you permanently out of money troubles.

Back up, thanks.

It's been down for the last 3 hours or so, possibly longer.

Is it always-online DRMed? And do you need a credit card number to make this "purchase"?

If you live in the First World, even A1FI probably won't literally kill you. It's bad, but not existentially bad; a runaway would be existentially bad, but most estimates say we'd literally run out of fossil fuels before we could trigger that.

I mean, technically yes, but it's an unlikely situation. It's usually pretty obvious when a colony gets built (flotilla of four or five subs including a Dreadnought or two, plus often a country leaving), the Alien Activity graphs are a dead giveaway (as are the supply runs, if you have a Transmission Resolver), and they're numbered in order of construction so if you miss a couple early on you'll know about it when you find later ones. I'd say that if you know there's a colony there, you're supposed to find it. But honestly this is the least important of the challenges anyway. Attached to the OP, with instructions.

Okay, so here's a set of fairly fluffy challenges that I think would make for a tough game when taken together, while still allowing you to have fun (4-mission TFTD is well into masocore territory). 0) TFTD on Superhuman difficulty. 1) Iron Man. 2) Council funding only (hacking PURCHASE.DAT to zero out the sale price of manufacturables and recoverables is enough; I'm not a monster). 3) No use of Control Implant. All other weapons and tactics (aside from exploits) are fine. 4) You can't run from Terror Sites (and Artefact Sites). You can ignore them entirely, you can win them, you can fight to the death and lose the sub, but you can't give up once you've landed. (If you get a stuck alien in a ship mission, you can kill it via save editing - again, not a monster.) 5) Destroy all the Alien Colonies before hitting T'Leth (this really isn't that hard compared to the others - but it's thematic). I think the combination of #2 and #4 should keep the strategic game more of a nailbiter than it otherwise tends to become. I know when I was doing my run with #1 and #3, the tactical game remained crushingly hard while the strategic game was reduced to a farce after May or so (I eventually gave up on #3, but that was because the aliens were being very uncooperative with Calcinites and I got sick of just spinning the wheels). I think that in TFTD there are no infiltration-immune countries, so #2 puts you on a timer (though not an especially-strict one), and #4 makes actually losing from score at least kind of plausible (I ended up running from a Tasoth ship in April - if I hadn't, I'd have gotten a -300 that month either from ignoring it or getting wiped out). So, anyone feel like trying this? EDIT: Hacked PURCHASE.DAT attached (all manufacturables and recoverables have sale value $0). Unzip this into the folder containing the save you want to limit to Council Funding Only (not the main game folder - X-Com stores this data per save), overwriting the file already there. There's nothing in particular you need to do to undo this - clearing out the save or saving over the slot with an unaffected game (such as a new game) will both get rid of the alterations. This should work for both DOS and Collector's Edition, though I made it with DOS. Don't try to use this on a game of UFO: Enemy Unknown - it's not compatible. PURCHASE.zip