Holy spawn-point quench...

[magic9mushroom]

Just had a terror mission on Superhuman with 13 Floaters and 0 Reapers. No, I'm not kidding. There were also only 7 civilians, of whom I somehow managed to save 4. There were a few empty yards, but still...

 

Yes, it's really Superhuman. It's DOS version, but I hex-edited out the Difficulty Bug. Checked IGLOB.DAT to be sure; offset 60 is 04.

 

Anyone else had missions like this?

[Zombie]

No, haven't had a terror site like that, though I normally play the windows version. There should always be terror units at a terror site (on Superhuman min:6 max:10). If your executable is unmodified except for the difficulty bug thing I don't see what could have caused it. Check the exe for alien loadouts to eliminate one variable and unitref.dat to see if Reapers were in the list. If the exe is unmodified and all the other stuff checks out, then my guess is the map modules and number of spawn points available was playing a role. 13 is the max number of Floaters that could show up on Superhuman though so that looks fine.

 

The civilian thing I wouldn't be worried about, on Superhuman there are a lot of aliens that need to get placed on the map first so they take priority. If there aren't a lot of spawn points I think some civilians may not make it in (that's my theory anyway).

 

- Zombie

[magic9mushroom]

<-- misread the wiki, reading the total aliens expected and forgetting to subtract the Reapers to get the number of Floaters expected

 

So, I'm guessing what happened here is that the algorithm decided to spawn 13 Floaters and 6-10 Reapers, but the map was really short on large-unit spawn points (there were a lot of small houses with fences and empty dirt patches, now that I think about it) and the one or two that were there happened to get taken by Floaters before the routine got around to spawning Reapers (since IIRC terrorists spawn last). I've actually noticed a pattern on Superhuman of large terrorists failing to show up in expected numbers on Terror Missions (since there's no UFO to have a zillion spawn points inside); I was just taken aback by a big fat zero Reapers, and I guess because the mission was over so fast (4 turns, zero casualties, and this with Laser Pistols and no armour) I mistakenly thought there were supposed to be more Floaters.