sp1ke

Like it! That sounds like a good mix of strategic challenge and tactical challenge. And yes, thematic.

Great summary! I don't remember having too much trouble getting Triscene attacks and if I remember they were more common in the city terror attacks. We're talking about the 4-square dinosaur animal things right - it's been a while?. They were always could for HC-IN and AC-IN practice (despite the IN bug). Calcinites were a right pain in the baseplate. I found them hard to spot and hard to distinguish from similar aliens. Most common on island and port missions, yes. Many times my tech tree would be held back many months because I'd failed to snag one at the opportune moment. Apart from missing them altogether, the two main gotchas I were getting a live one when you needed a corpse (or vice versa?) and blowing up the (priceless!) corpse with careless use of explosives. My teams tended to go for a policy of "contain the terror, save the planet, shame about the civilians" on terror missions and go in blazing away with HC-HE, AC-HE and grenades. Two of the rarest beasts are Hallucinoids and Xarquids. Mostly found on the outside deep sea level of alien base raids iirc. When I was researching the articles for those creatures I had a couple of "natural" save files which were like gold dust. You can't really do definitive research using synthetic save files that you've edited to include the subject creatures. As you clearly do appreciate! It's great that people are still working to improve this wiki.

What myths did your code dig clear up? (There's plenty!)

I suppose it's possible the tables are exactly the same as EU, just translated to the equivalent monster types? But no sorry I don't know.

From memory the in game Ufopedia pulls its values from the game data file. I believe the cases when its wrong are the few cases when the game engine fails to pull the value from the data files but instead uses a hard coded value?

It's been a few years since I looked at these but from memory they're unchanged from EU. Just part of the quick re-skin of EU with very little actually changing under the hood. If you check the Talk pages of the relevant Ufopedia articles there's a slight chance there might be a data dump. Also see if I did a Firepower chart for TFTD USOs. I was drafting one but I don't know if it was ever finished enough to publish it. If I did, that would have the RoF in it. I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about how to interpret the game file data for USO RoF.

If I remember correctly you need to find and take out their base(s) to stop the assaults on your base. Otherwise they will continue non-stop

A lot of flaky stuff is happening in your games lately and I suspect your save files or even game files may have become corrupt.

Which slot is the Sonic Pistol in btw? Normally (bipedal) aliens have all their inventory in the first slot, leading to the risk of game crashes when trying to manipulate their inventory.

Also it is impossible to do a live capture of a 4 square terrorist even if you stun it and even if you physically drag it inside the Triton. And also any aliens still under MC at the end of the tactical mission will have weird effects: showing as MIA is the least of it.

OK iirc, in an unmodified game: It is normal to be able to access inventory of an MCd alien It is normal not to be able to access any built in weapons of an MCd alien So the only new thing you may have found that's odd is that the Xarquid is carrying a pistol. My guess on that is that the pickup code is running (though I think that requires a patch to enable?) and the Xarquid picked up the sonic pistol from an alien or human casualty or morale failure. Not so much to use it as to deny it to you. However if you found every MCd Xarquid was carrying a single sonic pistol I would suspect some kind of hacky coding. Definitely the Xarquid is not properly implemented (coded) as its supposed to have multiple attacks including a Freeze attack (non lethal?). Re the MC of multiple squares of a large terrorist, each square is numbered and I believe you have to take them over in numerical order for best effect? All of this information is in the (online, not in-game) UFOPaedia somewhere, so you could check in there.

Another, less-cheaty option is to "milk" the Colonies for score. Kill most of the aliens and then abort without destroying the colony. Rinse and repeat as often as you can. Then before the month is over do a final mission and take out all the Colonies. The undefeated Colonies are what is killing your Score and driving the governments into the hands of the aliens. So you need to destroy all the ones that you know about. You also need to patrol aggressively to find the other Colonies that probably exist that you haven't detected yet. And I guess if you are restoring saves (which is also cheating, of course) go back as far as you can. Because the "earlier" you detect, assault and destroy the Colonies, the less Score you will lose. You are responding to Terror sites right? If not then you will also lose loads of Score.

If you really want to cheat and really find the Colony Assault missions boring, you could install xcomutil and use the "win" option to kill all the aliens in the tactical mission. (OK, I admit it, I've done that too when the tactical game gets boring and repetitive.) To be fair when you do that cheat you really should blow up some of your own guys to simulate whatever casualties you probably would have taken, and then on your next USO mission just throw all the loot out of the boat and abort. (OK, I admit it, I've never been quite that conscientious when cheating).

Hi (Not) Jake Remember your mission is to save Earth, or at least, save the Governments that are funding you? It's not about making money or developing technology. It's about saving the earth from alien takeover. That is your primary objective and everything else is just a tool in that fight. So yeah take out the colonies. :-)

maybe start another thread in the relevant forum area for your OpenXCom UFO EU AAR?