Alien subs not appearing after a while

[Bansheedragon]

I have been searching the net for information regarding a problem I have with TFTD, but have found nothing.

During my searches I came across this site which seems to still be active, so I'm hoping someone here can help me.

 

I have for some time been trying to play TFTD, but never get very far.

My problem is that after a while, 1-2 months into the game, the alien subs simply stop showing up.

I get only terror mission and alien base missions, but not alien subs appears anymore.

I have been running the game for 3-4 months gametime and not seen so much as a single alien sub.

If there are no subs to shoot down, then I cant complete the game, as I dont get the techs I need to research to complete the game.

Not to mention that its no fun to do only terror and base missions

 

Its frustrating me to no end,and after having played the Enemy Unknown(X-Com 1) to death I have grown tired of it and wanted to try this instead.

So I was curious if anyone here has encountered this problem as well, if its a bug somewhere or perhaps someone have some idea on how to fix it.

[sp1ke]

Are you checking the USO Activity graphs to see if there is Alien activity near your base, or if the Alien activity has moved to another area? Generally you need to build new bases in new areas, guided by the principle of getting world wide coverage (eventually), protecting the most important Funding Nations first, and by checking the USO Activity graphs to see where the alien 'action' is. And of course you will need detection gear on these bases. At your stage of the game you will want to be building at least a 'detection base' with an Airlock and a Small or Large Sonar near other parts of the world where there is USO Activity and/or important Funding Nations. You will at least detect the USOs and may be able to send an Assault party when the USOs touch down. You can then expand the 'detection' bases into 'intercept' bases by adding subs, stores and crew.

[Bansheedragon]

The problem is that if I expand too fast I risk overextending myself and run out of funds, already done this a couple times.

Building a new base cost money and takes time, at 1-2 months into the game I have very limited funds to expand.

I will need at least 1 sub, preferably 2, at any base I build to be able to intercept any alien subs in reasonable time, if they are too far away, I lose track of them before my sub arrives.

This of course results in a loss of points, which in turn can lead to a negative monthly score and reduced funding.

 

I never had this problem in the previous game, I could actually complete that game with a single base.

I guess this game is different in that regard.

 

But I'll try see what I can do.

[sp1ke]

Basically TFTD is, by design, MUCH harder than XCOM UFO. The conservative strategies that worked in XCOM UFO will not work in TFTD. You have to be a lot smarter, more aggressive, take more risks, spread yourself a lot thinner. Everything is more difficult - expansion, infantry combat, sub combat, detection, interception, technology. When I play I manage to get past the block you are at (not enough bases / not enough intercepts), but then I often get stuck where my base and sub tech is too low to intercept the USOs and my infantry tech is barely enough to fight the aliens in the infantry battles, and I take terrible losses. Basically a conservative strategy will not work. You need to take risks and absorb losses. If you are playing on anything other than minimum difficulty, you might want to play on an easy difficulty first until you get the hang of it. And the biggest thing to watch out for are the bugs in the Tech Tree. There are articles here and on UFOPaedia.org about that. Good luck! If you ask questions here, people will respond. The game is great, very rewarding, well worth the challenge of learning it.

[sp1ke]

The problem is that if I expand too fast I risk overextending myself and run out of funds, already done this a couple times.

Building a new base cost money and takes time, at 1-2 months into the game I have very limited funds to expand.

I will need at least 1 sub, preferably 2, at any base I build to be able to intercept any alien subs in reasonable time, if they are too far away, I lose track of them before my sub arrives.

This of course results in a loss of points, which in turn can lead to a negative monthly score and reduced funding.

A new detection base or even intercept base is not that expensive to build and maintain, but you do need to prioritise your spending. Many people get by with only one intercept sub. Yes you will miss some intercepts but you will save a lot of money that can be used to expand bases. Often a USO will land, then you don't need the intercept sub to catch it (which it might not do any way), you just send the transport sub and if you are lucky you get a tactical mission before the USO lifts off. The tactical mission will be harder with an undamaged enemy sub, but the rewards will be much higher. It's normal to sell off a lot of stuff, also to sell almost everything you recover from the aliens (keep one of everything for research) to raise money, and again, plough that back into bases and detection in the early months, then into improved interception capabilities in months 3 to 6. You have to be very, very careful with research, and only research what you vitally need. I usually do very minimal research on infantry tech, and focus on detection tech and sub tech. Other people go down the Gauss weapon route in order to start making Gauss Cannon for money (some think this is cheating, but ymmv). Others will go down the sub tech tree as fast as possible, picking up armour tech on the way. All are viable, but you need to focus, you can't just spread your research out across the board, or you won't be effective. If money really is your problem, you can start producing Medkits for profit quite cheaply and easily.

 

It's a good point about overexpansion, it's a good way to run out of money and lose. Expand cautiously with very small bases that initially just contain an airlock and a sonar. If there is definite activity in the area, expand to an intercept base with one sub bay, one stores. You don't even necessarily need living quarters for self-defence troops (a risk but maybe acceptable risk). This will keep costs down.

 

Another trick is to have more intercept bases and sub bays, than you do subs. As alien activity moves from month to month, you can watch the graphs and move your subs into the areas where the aliens are active. A rented sub is much more expensive to operate than a small base (say ten times more), so this trick can save a lot of money, compared to maintaining an active sub in every base, regardless of whether there is any alien activity in that region during that month.

[sp1ke]

Keep in mind that if a detection base detects one extra sub that allows one extra assault mission, in the base's lifetime, or if an intercept base allows two extra intercepts/detects and two extra assault missions in that base's lifetime, then that base has basically paid for itself in terms of cash. Not to mention in terms of score, keeping Funding Nations happy, aquanaut training, and technology progress.

[Bansheedragon]

Allot of stuff here I was not aware of, which explains my problems.

The first time I encountered this problem I thought it was because I was using a savegame editor to modify the game, modified it quite allot actually, but after trying to play without one I discovered that it didnt hold up as I still encountered the problem

 

I have read about some of those bugs in the tech tree, I should take the time to familiarize myself with all of them.

The worst one I heard about is the one preventing you from completing the game.

Is there a comprehensive list of bugs I should be aware of somewhere?

 

The tactic with landed subs is one I'm very familiar with from the previous game, as most of the time in that game when a UFO was shot down, the power source exploded so I could not get the Elerium 115 from them.

That is different here, I get the Zrbite from crashes most of the time regardless, but is still a viable tactic and preferable to shooting them down for the reasons you state.

Unfortunately I almost never get to the site before they take off again, unless they are close to the base with my soldiers and transport sub.

 

As for people answering questions, that is exactly what I was hoping for.

The problem with many older games like this one is that finding help is difficult at best, sometimes impossible as many sites are not maintained anymore or have fallen into disuse.

Its a shame because many of the older games are actually much better than most modern games, as long as one is not concerned with the graphics, which is not an issue for me.

I remember playing the Enemy unknown game as a teenager and still enjoy playing it

 

Appreciate the help, you have given me much to think about and I should be able to manage better now.

Good to know there are still places one can get help for older games.

[NoXTheRoXStaR]

Known Bugs List

https://www.ufopaedia...own_Bugs_(TFTD)

 

The TFTD Research Tree Bug Avoidance Guide

https://www.ufopaedia...hp?title=TRTBAG

 

You problem stems from lack of base detection. (sp1ke did a good job of explaining that.)

 

[NKF]

Just as an aside, lately I've been starting to feel this game gets a lot easier as you progress through it. It's the start of the game that often proves to be the hardest.

 

Increasing the difficulty of the game may help your situation as more enemy subs are scheduled to show up on higher levels than on easier levels. One big benefit of playing on a higher level is the increased amount of equipment that you can potentially recover, so setting up listening posts or even small unprotected intercept outposts will not prove to be that big a hit on your finances.

 

Also on the shot down alien subs, TFTD is strangely very lenient on its Zrbite recovery. The common Cruiser for example will always have Zrbite no matter how badly damaged it is on the ground unless you accidentally blow it up with explosives. The map designers have not put all the zrbite pieces on or near Ion Beam Accelerator units.

 

- NKF

[silencer_pl]

Money problems? Start manufacturing Gauss Cannons and sell them.

[sp1ke]

Yes actually NKF makes an excellent point that it can be easier playing a higher difficulty level, particularly if the problem is "mission starvation".

[Bansheedragon]

I have always played on the lowest difficulty, as I usually play for the enjoyment of playing than for the challenge.

I tried going up to the next difficulty level today, and on my very first mission against a downed USO of the smallest size, I had 1 alien throw a grenade at my team taking out those of my troops closes to here it was, leaving the remaining troops too far away to get into line of sight and fire.

Now on the next alien turn the alien did exactly the same again, and on both turns taking out 2 of my troops, so by the time it was my turn again I had lost half my team.

I never had the aliens do that before, usually they use hand weapons and only grenades if I have 3 or more soldiers clustered.

 

Is the increase in difficulty really that steep between the difficulty levels?

 

Now I dont mind a challenge but if this is how difficult it is at the beginning at the second to easiest difficulty, I dont dare think how it will become in mid to late game.

I also understand that I will encounter losses, thats not an issue for me.

But after those two turns I gave up, because I fully expected the alien to do it again if I tried to send more troops in, which would likely have cost me not just the mission but 8 soldiers and a transport craft.

[Tycho]

your playing with the vanilla game? In TFTD, the aliens will use grenades, unlike EU where they hardly ever use them. If you cluster your men up, it only increases the odds the AI will decide to throw. A good strategy is to keep your guys spread out more and for two guys to run and explore while a third (and forth?) covers them. Next round just switch the roles as the team advances. Refrain from exiting the sub en-mass as your just daring the aliens to throw a grenade.

 

The alien AI decision making doesn't change with difficulty level. The largest jump in difficulty after beginner level is that all aliens will have full armor and health starting with experienced level. After that, they only get better firing, throwing, and psi/MC skill with each level. Also, the number of aliens spawned in each mission increases with difficulty.

[Bansheedragon]

Yes I play vanilla.

In this case I had 4 of 8 soldiers outside the sub, I had at least 4 tiles between my soldiers after exiting the craft.

I had sent them in different directions specifically to cover as large an area as possible, and I never liked clustering my soldiers specifically because of the risk in losing them to an alien grenade.

 

Another thing is I always send out a fully crewed craft if I can, but usually keep at least 6 of them in the craft, unless I have reason to bring them out, as a reserve in case something should go bad and I need more troops out or in case I decide to abort after heavy losses so I dont lose the craft as well

[sp1ke]

Bansheedragon, sounds like you were showing good caution in that tactical mission but were unlucky. TFTD is hard and there are often bad reverses where it's tempting just to start again. I think that NKF is right and TFTD is most difficult at the beginning. There's a certain midpoint where, if you can make it to the midpoint, it starts to get easier. As mentioned above, you might not find it that much harder on higher difficulty levels, and may even find it easier because of the greater supply of missions, and therefore greater supply of score, loot and training opportunities.

 

It's just an excellent game with so much challenge.

[Bomb Bloke]

Another point worth considering is where you're putting your bases. The world is divided up into small "zones" within which USOs will randomly choose waypoints and landing sites. Well, semi-randomly. It depends on their missions. In the early game the RNG goes out of its way to choose zones located near your base. Anyway, it's possible to situate yourself too far away from these, limiting the amount of craft that will go by or possibly avoiding all alien activity completely.

 

Generally in TFTD, the further away you are from land the more aliens you'll find (whereas the exact opposite is true for UFO:EU). So don't try to set up shop near "important countries", instead aim to police their nearby oceans.

 

This situation was a royal pain to sort out when I merged the two games. It does make for an interesting idea for a challenge, though - intentionally place all your bases in a dead-zone (or just set up a base with no detection capabilities), and see how far you can get by relying on the radar/sonar capabilities of your interceptors alone.

[Tycho]

At the beginning, the game only creates two missions: A research mission in the zone of your base and a Terror mission. The terror mission's zone is chosen randomly.

Shooting down UFO/USO will delay the arrival of the next one in the mission but a successful interception may start a retaliation (locate base) mission, which might be assigned to the zone where your base is or the zone where the alien craft was intercepted.

At most ,you might have four missions going in the first month and, if your unlucky, the terror mission will be assigned to a zone beyond your detection range.

If your highly successful with your detection and interception, you could have a created delays in the rest of the missions so that the UFOs arrive sporadically with huge gaps of time between each one.

Even with the start of a new month, only a single new mission (chosen randomly) and a new terror mission are chosen. Their zones will be random. Each mission has a delay before the first ship arrives, assuming you have a something in that zone to detect them at all.

 

(Mission selections are not quite random: each type of mission will be performed in each zone once per game. This is not true for retaliation and base supply missions, which are started by special rules.)

 

It may not be until the third month before enough missions are in-progress that even with the delays your causing by interception, there are enough alien craft being generated to keep you busy. By that time you'll usually have more zones covered, as well.

[Bansheedragon]

@ Bomb Bloke, Thyco

 

You are raising some interesting points here, which has left me with more questions.

 

I used to set up my first base in the South Pacific some way out from land, because it seemed the most logical way to do it.

Out in the sea, not close to land, should make me detect the most USOs, was my reasoning for placing it there.

And since the south pacific was the largest open sea, I thought it was the best place to put it.

 

Then after reading some on the net I saw a guide that recommended I put it so I covered as many funding nations as possible, with some suggestions to where to place it.

This lead me to place my first base in the Indian Ocean instead of the South Pacific, which really didnt change much of anything.

 

It seems to me that I always manage to place my first base in an area with the least activity.

Started a new game yesterday, placed base in Indian Ocean, only to have the Northsea and Antarctica be the areas with highest activity and very little around my base.

After expanding to the Atlantic, close to the Northsea, with a small detection and intercept base, the activity seemed to move to another area I didnt have covered.

 

So where would you suggest I place my first base?

And do you have any recommendations on where to place a detection/intercept base if I have high activity in areas like the Northsea and Mediterranean, which appears to me to be small and secluded areas where there is little point in having a base.

 

There was another thing I was wondering about as well.

In the X-Com/EU game it was relatively easy to determine what countries/areas my base covered, where as in this game I have a hard time figuring out where the borders between one sea and another goes.

So I was wondering if there was a map somewhere that showed the borders of the various seas as well as the names of the seas.

It would make it allot easier to determine where to place a base to cover a given area, especially my first base.

 

You have all been very helpful here, and its greatly appreciated.

I actually started the game over a few times to incorporate some of the advice given as I felt it was more orderly when doing it that way.

These games are good classics which never get old in my opinion, they dont make them like this anymore, so I think its great that its still possible to get help with them.

[Tycho]

 

In the X-Com/EU game it was relatively easy to determine what countries/areas my base covered, where as in this game I have a hard time figuring out where the borders between one sea and another goes.

So I was wondering if there was a map somewhere that showed the borders of the various seas as well as the names of the seas.

It would make it allot easier to determine where to place a base to cover a given area, especially my first base.

 

 

https://www.ufopaedia.org

 

look at the Geoscape topic under Terror from the Deep.

[Bansheedragon]

Damn I looked at that page just yesterday, just didnt look closely enough.

I had not expected the zones to be that blocky, I had expected them to be more "naturally" occurring.

But at least its what I was looking for and should help me better plan for base locations.

[NKF]

Places like the middle of the Atlantic or just off the sea of Japan (as per the tutorial in the old manual) are often recommended as decent places to start off. The region map adds a bit of weight to these recommendations as they are situated near several zones and reasonably close to a decent number of the countries.

 

For base placement strategies, one approach I often like to use is to halve the globe then quarter it. That is, your second base being on the opposite side of the globe, then two listening (and later intercept) outposts half way between these bases on the turnwise and anti-turn-wise sides. Use up the rest of the base slots as you see fit.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

Just want to point out that the zones I was referring to are different to the regional zones (which are still very important, in fact more so) - there are many much smaller zones littered around the map which are used to select where USOs can travel. In TFTD these are all tiny, especially when compared to UFO:EU (meaning that subs will tend to land at predictable locations), and there are a few spots where they're quite sparsely placed (meaning it's possible to place bases such that you won't see USOs).

 

Other random fact for the day: the different sorts of terrain on the seabed and allocated as huge clumps, and are hardly mixed up at all. If you play a mission near your base and find out that it's in a volcanic area, odds are just about every mission you play that campaign will be either a volcanic map or a generic seabed/coral map.

[Bansheedragon]

Places like the middle of the Atlantic or just off the sea of Japan (as per the tutorial in the old manual) are often recommended as decent places to start off. The region map adds a bit of weight to these recommendations as they are situated near several zones and reasonably close to a decent number of the countries.

 

For base placement strategies, one approach I often like to use is to halve the globe then quarter it. That is, your second base being on the opposite side of the globe, then two listening (and later intercept) outposts half way between these bases on the turnwise and anti-turn-wise sides. Use up the rest of the base slots as you see fit.

 

- NKF

 

The tutorial in the old manual may have been useful for the old game, but since the game I play is a newer version with some updates it dont seem like the old tutorial is of much use.

I tried a few games staring in the Atlantic, then I tired the Sea of Japan, I had nothing happen for a month and then a terror mission on the other side of the globe from each of those locations.

 

I really wish there was some way to determine in advance where the optimal locations for placing my first base was.

It seems that no matter where I place my base the heavy activity is always in some other location.

If I try to build a base in one of those locations the activity shifts to a different location where I dont have a base, while the locations where my bases are appears barren.

 

If I didnt know better I would say the game is somehow preventing me from progressing.

[Zombie]

I can't explain why the aliens would constantly be choosing to attack/focus on the opposite side of the world from your base - it's contradictory to what I've seen. What difficulty level are you playing on? With that said, if I encountered this alien behavior my base building strategy would remain exactly the same. North Atlantic first, then the Sea of Japan, and then possibly North Atlantic to cover Euro syndicate and some Africa. Keeping those areas happy are the priority (at least initially). As we know, funding from countries/areas tend to make up only a small fraction of your monthly income when you are selling excess weapons, corpses and equipment on the black market (especially in later months). So keep those areas happy and it should see you through the rough times when the aliens turn to other areas with less funding to attack. Heck, I normally LET the aliens have full reign of some lower funding areas if it means I can protect the big spenders properly. Eventually you'll have so many bases with overlapping radar coverage that there will be no more areas the aliens can hide.

 

- Zombie

[NoXTheRoXStaR]

I can't explain why the aliens would constantly be choosing to attack/focus on the opposite side of the world from your base - it's contradictory to what I've seen.

 

Exactly. With one or perhaps 2 established bases, the rest being sonar outpost for your fighters I can't imagine this happening. Something is amiss here for sure. I don't want to call BS just yet, but I've played TFTD so many times.