Scale of Conflict

[Skonar]

Well, it's 2006, and the Alien Threat has clearly been defeated, as we are still here to discuss it.

 

Well done X-Com! I'm sure this message will reach you via ECHELON.

 

Jokes aside. XD

 

Just how large scale could the first war have been? From the game, we know that four or so bases could do it with about fifty soldiers at any one time if you're 'good'.

 

The problem is, that makes the first alien war miniscule in scale, which hardly seems rational to me, given the background material of the other games.

 

How many veterans were left around after the war? According to some fanfics and background material, it might well be absolute bloody loads of them.

 

Presuming we go with the TFTD booklet, (available for download somewhere,) we see that the first alien base was discovered in 2001, on September Twelve.

 

A terror attack is expunged in 2005, June seventh.

 

In 2010, We can safely say the war was over, because museums are opening on the topic.

 

If we go with the game itself, The first alien base could show up early as, what, July 1999?

 

What if the destruction of the Alien Brain didn't cause 'ultimate victory', so much as closed off the Alien Reinforcements and allowed X-Com to finish off those left around earth?

 

If I'm leaning towards the TFTD booklet and my own myriad presumptions on what 'really' happened, I come out with around 1800 soldiers by 2000, and more like 7200 by 2003, on active duty. Presuming that the average life-span of an X-Com soldier was around two months before death or major injury, and that the war continued from 1999-2005, We've got like 21 000 soldiers dead from 1999 - 2000, and Maybe 172 000 or so from 2001 - 2005.

 

This is roughly equivilent to every US Marine being killed in warfare, or every member of the British Army and Royal Marines and then some.

 

Of course, this also means that the active component of X-Com at any one time is, comparitively, almost miniscule compared to a national army.

 

But we still don't even know how many the other lot lose!

 

Are the aliens getting mown down like wheatgrass? Are we fighting outnumbered?

 

If you were going to invade and eradicate the population, as the aliens seem to be set on, how would you go about it?

 

Something tells me that Crop Circles are the least of the alien objectives!

 

 

Please, Ladies and Gentlemen. Discuss.

[Snakeman]

I'm gonna guess, simply based on an average of hirings, sackings, and finally some retention of good soldiers and the fact you can only employ 250 max, that probably the max number of X-COM troopers might have been up to tripple this max - slightly more if you drag your game year out to the years mentioned in those game texts.

 

But I would say under a thousand if not slightly more total - this includes washouts since, presumably they were good enough to be recommended to the program and hired before being evaluated then sacked by the Commander, just not good enough to be retained longer than most. Nevertheless I consider these types 'briefed' on the war, and probably hired on by third parties with the security clearance to know of the war prior to it becomming common public knowledge.

 

They had to have gone somewhere, so that's my speculation for them.

 

Just how large scale could the first war have been? From the game, we know that four or so bases could do it with about fifty soldiers at any one time if you're 'good'.

 

The problem is, that makes the first alien war miniscule in scale, which hardly seems rational to me, given the background material of the other games.

 

How many veterans were left around after the war? According to some fanfics and background material, it might well be absolute bloody loads of them.

 

The scale of the war was I think miniscule as viewed from X-COM's perspective certainly. However, once the brain mission was accomplished (since I do not know the actual time table between this mission and disclosure to the public - or even whether it was before it of the alien threat), its quite possible more veterans appeared who may not necessarily been solely X-COM operatives.

 

I would think that any base or alien mop up missions after the brain one could very well have been coordinated with other nations' militaries. I'd like to think that there were several tasks being undertaken that maybe we aren't supposed to be privy to aside from any "X-COM" game book canon.

 

Just a for instance - what was being done with all that surplus gear you sold? Certainly enough stuff was sold over the course of five or six game years to equip several more squads for several more bases you don't have jurisdiction over.

 

Another for instance - If enough UFO component material was sold, what might have the scale been of battles in our solar system if any? Presuming plenty of engineering capacity at any parallel outfits akin to X-COM. Even if this is supposedly low to non-existant apart from your Mars sojourn to kill the brain, what about Interceptor or Skyranger technology proliferation if any?

 

I would think that there would also be plenty of behind the scenes equipment like this in the hands of people just like you doing what they could.

 

I remember in one of the introductions to the first game, it mentioned Japan's failed attempt to thwart the alien menace prior to X-COM's formation. Its planes and so forth couldn't keep up with any craft and no progress happened so they disbanded their effort- stands to reason any friendlies to the cause would adopt any tools necessary if it knew of the threat facing Earth or even had access to material on the black market for whatever it couldn't manufacture or find for themselves.

 

Also concievably, blueprint proliferation for the kinds of modules you've made for your bases could have occured at some stage. I sort of view the first war's dynamics this way, that essentially you were not just at the forefront of it but that you were buying any other Earth forces uncompromised by the threat time to build up. An example here is probably the construction of the carrier types talked about slightly before and after TFTD (one was transported out to deep space which I think was part of the backstory for Interceptor).

 

So these things I think were going on beginning with the first war, with some of these things not appearing until after it was done. I'm pretty positive that (while I'm not sure how well documented it is - it just makes sense to me) after the war was over, there would have been a period of time where there was serious military build up.

[uriaheep]

I have already given this some serious thought,

 

The first problem is - the game!!

 

If we consider that the aliens are indeed set on eradicating mankind thay would probably use biological weapons. Clearly there is no weapon of this type in the game and even if we assume there is some unfathomable reason they to not take this approach then why don't they enable a complete invasion with every soldier armed with a blaster launcher.

 

Also I have to say that recently I played a game where Etherials attacked my main base. Two of them were armed with blaster launchers and decimated the base. 10 hours later they were back - the base was miraculously repaired and the soldiers moved from the other bases held on once more.

 

I cannot see how an enemy would keep sending troops to the same base over and over again to get them killed when we have to assume a battleship would itself have blaster launcher technology.

 

I think the best way to figure out numbers is to consider that the 14 men that can fit into a Skyranger would not be enough to attack a Battleship on the ground and a more realistic way would be to send 2 or 3 Skyrangers to the attack.

Therefore I think we have to multiply casualties by 2 or 3 to come to a more realistic figure.

 

When you play a game even on the hardest setting you can defeat the enemy in what? three years?

Think the first time you ever played it. That would be the more accurate of any games you play, with all the mistakes.

Remember, humanity is fighting these things for the first time.

 

Some years ago I came to the figure of 250,000 casualties for X-Com and about 4 million for civilians based on the theory above, I also think the war would have lasted around six years but I seriously doubt that the alien technology could have been fully reproduced in this time.

[Bomb Bloke]

Hrm. Well, in most of my games, about ten to sixty soldiers survive my employ, and maybe thirty don't. Say a hundred soldiers, tops.

 

Whereas I like to hire about a hundred engineers (well, ninety to be precise), and either a hundred or a hundred and fifty scientists.

 

So all up, a few hundred heads, and that's if I'm feeling extravagent. I've always seen X-Com as more of an "organisation" then a "military force", focused on guerilla tactics. Instead of trying to beat the aliens by brute force, they rely on brains and tactics, and manage to defeat the entire alien threat without taking them head on. And they do it quickly, too. Faster then, say, the Iraq conflict.

 

Once the alien brain dies, even if there was any forces left to mop up, they've lost elerium supplies. It would be expected that the regular armies would be able to catch any of those landing on earth.

 

As a result of this, as soon as the war ends, X-Com shrinks down to near non-existence, only remaining to help salvage those UFOs that landed in the drink. Because of this scale back, some Sectoids even survive, turning up again in Apocalypse.

 

Of course, things might be a bit different if the aliens were to launch a larger assault. They have battleships which are quite capable of obliterating any earthern force. They send them one at a time, sneaking in and out of our atmosphere. A few of the things sent to any capitol would be able to level the place within a few minutes.

 

On the other hand, sending them in like that would mean they'd have to fight multiple terran craft at once (as opposed to just the fastest), and even be vulnerable to surface to air missiles. They would take more losses. Presumably, they can't afford this, so they trickle their forces down to earth in the hope that quick, hit an run attacks provide a lesser chance of response.

 

This could indicate that the aliens weren't manning the Mars base until they decided to attack, and hence weren't prepared to operate at their full strength. This is further backed by the fact that the first few waves are weak Sectoids and Floaters, and the Etherals don't start appearing on a regular basis until some serious resistance has been shown. Perhaps is was expected that only ten UFOs or so would be enough to take the planet, and the aliens arrive in our system expecting us to be using spears!

[uriaheep]

This could indicate that the aliens weren't manning the Mars base until they decided to attack, and hence weren't prepared to operate at their full strength. This is further backed by the fact that the first few waves are weak Sectoids and Floaters, and the Etherals don't start appearing on a regular basis until some serious resistance has been shown. Perhaps is was expected that only ten UFOs or so would be enough to take the planet, and the aliens arrive in our system expecting us to be using spears!

It's a good theory but I was always disappointed by the poor resistance shown on the Mars mission. I would expect the aliens to be better prepared for the attack and have more resources at their base.

 

I can see that shouting for reinforcements for the aliens would be difficult and their transports would take a great deal of time to get to Mars, this explains the dribs and drabs but I find it difficult to believe an attack force of several races who have the technological advancements to fly through space didn't have the means or the foresight to recce our world before an attack.

 

We need a suitable explaination for this

[Skonar]

Allow me to pontificate a bit on the subject of Mars, the Aliens, and their interest on earth.

 

In relation to Mars and the Aliens, we know that a group of aliens with a great deal to do with Sectoids made a failed attempt to colonize earth in the time of the dinosaurs.

 

Mars, about two billion years ago, I _think_, had oceans that were rapidly dissolving and the climate was becoming generally unsuitable for life. At much the same time, earth was slowly becoming oxygenated.

 

If we make a massive leap of assumption, and state that Mars was the homeworld of the Sectoids, beings which are good candidates for being the model for the Cydonia Face, it may be possible that the aliens moved off in some kind of colony ships at a sub-light speed to escape the 'death' of Mars, stopping in a variety of areas but ultimately ending up somewhere near the Frontier. (From Interceptor)

 

Elerium, then, comes from the region of space around the Frontier. This may well explain why the aliens from TFTD do not have Elerium - they were sent 'back' to colonize Earth before the aliens reached the Frontier.

 

Using this theory, we must remember that the concept for Alliance involved the inadvertant triggering of some kind of faster-than-light portal type device in the Cydonian ruins. Clearly, this technology was brought to Mars.

 

In the Frontier, the aliens use black holes to move 'interdimensionally', indicating that they may well have built the portal the Patton from Alliance 'fell' through.

 

With all of this in mind, it may be possible that the Aliens sent scouts to Earth in order to investigate what had happened to their colonization effort.

 

Presumably they were unable to find out what happened to it. After all, even with alien technology, I somehow think that finding a giant starship under a few kilometers of seawater and millions of years of silt buildup is going to be rough.

 

They find us, and, for some reason, begin preparing a campaign which is not, initially, military at all. They seem to be very fascinated with taking over the governments of our world and otherwise taking over from the shadows.

 

Initially. After we've shot down a few of theirs, it doesn't take long before they seemingly start trying to eradicate us as a species, via Terror attacks and similar.

 

(Then again, one can argue they do try and kill us from the start, since if you leave a game running without intercepting anything, I believe a terror attack usually does show up.)

 

As such, Mars may well prove to be a base where they are teleporting in ships, aliens, and equipment. The attack on Cydonia and the brain somehow shuts this down.

 

The alien response to this is not swift - it takes sixty years, and would seem to be a gigantic doomsday device they try to bring in with the intent to cleanse earth in one fell swoop.

 

As such, it may be that they wanted to pull us into 'their empire', and once we are taken over, we'd have found ourselves fighting beside Mutons and Floaters on the next front.

 

Another note on scale, according to the TFTD booklet, that base that gets found may hold 'up to a thousand aliens'.

 

Scary.

 

Also I'd like to note that in my limited experience, a battleship can literally own any number of interceptors armed with regular missiles.

 

I think the reason we don't see major assaults in the game, is because the game couldn't support them. A terror attack on a major city, with no more than twenty aliens?

[FullAuto]

I always thought it was the aliens trying to take over the Earth, not destroy it. It seems quite obvious to me just from the nomenclature used (terror mission, alien research, alien harvest etc) that their primary goal is not to just wipe us out. Incorporation into the alien forces seems likely, if only after they've ruined Earth and buggered off elsewhere, then using cloned humans as soldiers.

[uriaheep]

As such using Earth for genetically altered troops similar to Mutons?

 

Yeah I like where this is going.

 

All they want from Earth is an army, to fight a war in some other part of the Universe. That would explain why there are so few aliens around.

 

They are probably just part of the "Assimilation Corps."

 

Now where have I heard that before?

[Snakeman]

I think the aliens must have had a secure way back to where ever they came from before Mars. I like the idea as well that the Sectoids might have been the only indigenous intelligent Mars occupants before the planet died. If nothing else, it helps the argument for the idea that because of the events in Apocolypse, the fact you could hire hybrids of the Sectoid race tells me that at some stage between the first war and Apocolypse, either a treaty was made or an entirely separate sect of Sectoids was at play that had a different agenda than their take-over-the-world counterparts.

 

As a side note, I saw another science show about magnetic flields and it discussed the possible dangers or pitfalls in losing one for a planet. Scientists put forth the idea that if the molten core of the planet isn't rotating or something, it affects over thousands or millions of years, a planet's ability to retain its atmosphere or to halt the affects of radiation. For the purposes of a backstory, something relating to this, it could have been a doomsday scenario (i.e. the other aliens beat the good Sectoids into submission with this as the result) or it was a completely natural phenomenon.

 

The other arguments, besides that the "face" of Mars might represent them as the original residents, could be too that the bad element of that race simply shared the goals of the big brain and the "good" Sectoids were a minority or were in some way suppressed or out of the picture. Also it never says specifically that the brain ever controlled Sectoid actions the way it says about Ethereals and that they in turn controlled Mutons.

 

Anyway, I think those facts makes them the perfect candidate for any kind alien alliance that happened (if one ever did, just speculating again - the hybrids showing up in Apoc supports one, or if nothing else cloning technology).

 

Speaking of clones, there is an original game ufopedia entry that mentions how those cloning techniques could be adapted for human use. Because you yourself as a player could never make use of the technology, there's an additional argument for more trooper numbers made by other parties.

 

I also wonder, might there have been secondary fall back positions in the event of any of your bases being overrun? Maybe they were nothing more than giant storehouses of surplus gear, some might have had special modules built, or training centers, factories or the beginnings of clone production - its just that the war was progressing in such a way that you found the alien's Achilles Heal first and thus didn't have to enter into the ethical ramifications of things such as cloning. The downsizing of X-COM after the war also probably wouldn't allow for further efforts on that front more than whatever might have been accomplished.

[Zombie]

Sure, the aliens could send battleships en masse and wipe out civilization in a few minutes. Don't forget, they have fusion technology which puts our nuclear bombs to shame. But why would they bother to sign pacts with earthly governments? Why would they waste time sending small reconnaissance UFO's when a big one can blow everything to bits? Why do aliens carry Mind Probes? Why do aliens carry Small Launchers and Stun Bombs? Why terrorize civilians? Why abduct humans?

 

Truth is, the aliens need us, and earth intact. They "seeded" the earth many millennia ago with their plants and animals and are back to reap the harvest. They abduct us with the sole purpose of extracting genetic material to create alien-human hybrids. Who knows, their home world may not be able to support much agriculture anymore and their genetic code may be fouled up due to cloning, inbreeding or mutations from pollution. They need the food they "raised" on earth to sustain themselves in the short-term, and they need us to to keep their species alive in the long-term.

 

- Zombie

[Azure]

I'd say that the game (and thus the percieved 'story') was most definitely limited in scope by the technology available at the time....'terror' missions involving a few dozen aliens are the very most that can be supported under the very restrictive limits of the hardware and DOS itself. Heck, terror sites happen at major cities, yet you'll never have more than a handful of civies to save. Of course, given that it often takes hours to respond to a terror attack, you could postulate that they're all thats left, but that is certainly not the impression that the game gives you.

 

I've always assumed that what happens in the game is 'scaled down' so to speak...that it is a small scaled representation of what 'really' happened. I mean, c'mon...the best response of a global paramilitary organization is fourteen guys with a gun, a clip, and a couple of 'nades each?? You gonna try and tell me that the UN's best funding effort in the face of this threat is $6mil/month??

 

I really think the numbers need to be scaled up quite a bit to represent what "really" happened...

 

 

@uriaheep: I would DEFINITLY classify the Chryssalid as a 'biological weapon'...given the described cycle of infestation, I shudder to think what a terrorship full of them could "really" do if unleashed on a major city...

 

Azure

[Zombie]

I've always assumed that what happens in the game is 'scaled down' so to speak...that it is a small scaled representation of what 'really' happened. I mean, c'mon...the best response of a global paramilitary organization is fourteen guys with a gun, a clip, and a couple of 'nades each?? You gonna try and tell me that the UN's best funding effort in the face of this threat is $6mil/month??

But the UN isn't funding X-COM, now is it? It's a covert operation drawing sums of money from governments willing to shell out what they can for the purpose of destroying the threat. Even then, these governments can't give too much, otherwise the citizens might wonder where all this money is going. Still, $12 million a year can be hidden in the books for a while, but the longer X-COM remains in business and the better they protect, the more the country will fund.

 

- Zombie

[Snakeman]

I was still editing while you two posted heh. Good point Zombie, biological weapons or widespread type doomsday weapons makes no sense for the aliens to use. They seeded the planet after all, and a war like this will affect everyone if it dragged out into a conflict if attrition longer than the typical estimate it took to kill the brain.

 

So between the aliens being "careful" as well as you in the conflict - keeping things more so than not on a special op scale to missions means to me that both sides were buying time. You were buying time to come up with other ways to fight and help Earth fight, and they were buying time to either teleport in more ships or their clones to come online from Mars labs.

[Zombie]

So between the aliens being "careful" as well as you in the conflict - keeping things more so than not on a special op scale to missions means to me that both sides were buying time. You were buying time to come up with other ways to fight and help Earth fight, and they were buying time to either teleport in more ships or their clones to come online from Mars labs.

True, true. But I don't think the aliens are buying time for more ships or clones. They want the war to carry on so that they can infiltrate all the countries and do their thing unimpeded. In theory, they win because of a stalemate and the reluctant agreement of the governments to look the other way.

 

X-COM on the other hand, may be buying time in the beginning as practially everything they have to work with is underpowered. Alien stuff is so much more potent then the terran equivalents. But once this technology is recovered and researched, X-COM can forge ahead full-strength. And the aliens have an Achilles heel: their leaders and commanders can be made to "talk", uncovering their secret location on Mars. Instead of a mutual stalemate, X-COM forces can now launch an offensive. Humans basically have the upper-hand as they change strategies - the aliens do not change strategies because they cannot. (Does that make sense)?

 

- Zombie

[Knan]

@uriaheep: I would DEFINITLY classify the Chryssalid as a 'biological weapon'...given the described cycle of infestation, I shudder to think what a terrorship full of them could "really" do if unleashed on a major city...

 

Heh. In the pen-and-paper x-com roleplaying/tactical game I ran some years ago, the players absolutely failed to take down the chryssalids in <random US city>... so a few days later, major newspapers carried the story of a "terrorist nuke" in <same random US city>.

 

On the other hand, polar bears and finnish hunters were other unintended victims of harried x-com soldiers on mission.

 

Fun little excersise. Rather more complex to visualize than our standard combat situations in other games. Even then, our squads were rather undermanned ... four soldiers with standard earth armaments against a supply ship are shaky odds.

 

[Snakeman]

Absolutely Zombie. The aliens' strategy remained the same probably because it was the safest way to cause chaos while not risking the ecology they also needed, and X-COM really couldn't go on the offensive very often early in the campaign but their campaign could change over time.

 

I do have a bit of a nitpick when it comes to the disclosure of the alien threat to the public though. If enough terror attacks in major cities happened, there are bound to be survivors who just won't believe the government hype. The more people that witness the aliens first hand, the harder that coverup becomes.

 

And to my knowledge those men in black guys don't have the mind erasing blinky flashy thingy

 

While X-COM most likely stayed secret until the end of the war, I can't believe the alien threat could stay that way the more aggressive they became during it.

 

Another thing not touched on in the game books or novels is enough info about collaborators with the enemy. Countries that sign pacts clearly know we're not alone in the universe and only did so for the false hope and protection that aliens and their technology would leave them immune from their overall agenda (I've noted that infiltration missions, abductions and terror missions still occur in countries even after having signed pacts).

 

In addition, I would have thought there would have been several sideline wars taking place between nations who sided with the aliens vs those who hadn't. I mean it does fit with the alien agenda of making us waste our resources in futile engagements besides all their political misdirection.

[FullAuto]

As you gain more and more intel in the game, it basically tells you that you've shot down lots of UFOs, killed lots of aliens, but you're making no headway, and have to deacpitate the alien forces. If I'm remembering the game correctly, that is. So they not only have better technology, but outnumber us considerably.

[Accounting Troll]

My current theory on what the aliens were up to is as follows:

 

The aliens you fight in the X-Com games have always been under control of the Micronoids. Although Sectoids are used as food in Acopalypse, so are some human abductees in Enemy Unknown - to the aliens this mrely represents efficiently recycling the excess population and preventing them from consuming resources.

 

The micronoids evolved as parasites, using the bodies of other lifeforms when they needed to build anything. When they developed interstellar technology, they started looking for other worlds to colonise, but they were only interested in worlds that had an native intelligent toolusing species to use as slave labour. The presence of the Gillmen caused the aliens to try to colonise Earth 65 million years ago. The environmental devestation of the botched attempt caused the Micronoids to lose interest in Earth until humans evolved.

 

During the First Alien War, the alien strategy was based on infiltration, with Micronoids taking over the minds of Earth's political leaders so that they could take over the planet with an intact environment and six billion slaves. Why else would a country like the USA that spent 50 years fighting Soviet attempts to infiltrate other countries sign a pact with aliens who had already demonstrated their hostility towards humanity? The aliens could easily have exterminated humanity by transporting a few chrysalids to Earth - considering their high rate of population growth, the job could have been done inside a year with the expenditure of very few resources. I presume there was some sort of safety device that would prevent this from happening.

 

It was inconceivable to the Micronoids that X-Com could be any more than a minor irritant to their plans. They were an ancient race known to have masterd interstellar travel over 65 million years ago; by their standards we were a primitive species that had existed for no time at all.

 

The Cydonia base was no more than a forward command post for the conquest of Earth, and its elerium stores the equivalent to a rural petrol station. The alien forces were arriving from outside our solar system through the interstellar rift the Patton later accidentally triggered. The destruction to the Cydonia base accidentally closed the rift, preventing the aliens from reinforcing their troops on Mars and Earth. Remember that if you lose, the aliens launch a massive invasion yet X-Com never found the storage and manufacturing facilities needed to support such an invasion.

 

Although the aliens were defeated, they had gained something out of the war. Genetic engineering of human abductees had created a new and useful species - the Etherials. The dead Etherial in the etherial autopsy entry in the Enemy Unknown Ufopedia shows residual signs of humanity.

 

The reawakening of the alien colonists had been planned for the later stages of the invasion. Without the logistical support of their space-based brethren, the reawakening took longer that it would otherwise have done. Once again, the aliens underestimated humanity and were defeated.

 

Despite these two defeats, the aliens did not regard humanity as a potential threat until the 2060s when the crew of the Patton helped the Ascidians beat off an invasion (the events of the cancelled X-Com Alliance game) and humans developed a practical means of FTL travel and started blowing alien mining colonies to dust. The panicked attempt to exterminate humanity failed with the consequence that the aliens were driven out of this part of the galaxy.

 

In Acopalypse, the emphasis was back to infiltration of Earth. In an interview about the cancelled X-Com Genesis project over at The Last Outpost (I'm too tired to find the link but if any of the other staff find it, feel free to edit this post) Dave Ellis said that it would turn out that the aliens in Acopalypse were trying to weaken humanity prior to the invasion of Earth that would have been the starting point to the events of X-Com Genesis.

 

EDIT: with regard to the public disclosure issue, I would have expected press releases acknowledging the existence of a UN taskforce dedicated to fighting the aliens, but no specific information that could help the enemy. You can conceal the abduction of the occasional farmer, but you can hardly conceal an alien terror attack, and the X-Com counter attack on a city like New York or London. Better to admit thare's a problem but emphasise the fact that Something Is Being Done and that humans are winning some engagements than to deny everything in the face of BBC footage of UN soldiers and aliens fighting it out.

[FullAuto]

https://www.thelastoutpost.co.uk/games/dave-ellis-genesis

 

Although it has to be said, some of Eliis' statments are, quite frankly, dubious. Example:

 

The absolute honest answer is that we hadn't really figured out what the Apocalypse aliens were all about. We were hoping to kind of breeze by that point and get back to the original aliens. Sorry I don't have a better answer, but that's the honest truth.

 

In 1999, I was seventeen, and drinking heavily. But even I could have come up with a better explanation than that.

[Skonar]

I have to admit. Having looked over the data from that interview, and getting a similar answer in a since-lost E-mail from Ellis when I tried to track down some info, basically it was a similar answer.

 

Ellis also made a lot of changes to the X-Com series that made it very America-Centric, and kind of approaching a Star-Trekkishness.

 

I think he did some good work, but I really hope that if development on Genesis had gone ahead he'd worked out some better concepts for it, and maybe learned to respect Apocalypse. (Which so many people cannot do, alas!)

 

As for micronoids.

 

I'm not too sure that'd work, given the existance of the martian brain and the sleeping horror - unless you did some revisionism to make them more like Psilords.

 

Personally, I've always thought that the Patton and Alliance et al ran foul of the Micronoids back in the 60s, which is why the game got cancelled.

[Snakeman]

Maybe I'm must mixing up the timeline, but I thought the events in Interceptor (or was it enforcer?) or prior to it was when the Patton disappeared, then the stuff in Apoc happened - and wasn't Genesis supposed to be about returning to Earth from the frontier to save it?

 

I dunno what to take as canon beyond what has already been out. TFTD I'm shaky on just by virtue of not playing it beyond its demo many years ago. So forgive me if I'm not up on lifeforms such as micronoids or whatever a psilord is

 

Also I just thought I should chime in for anyone who's visited the Xenocide forums. Under the thread about alien motivations or whatever it is, there's a thread titled "Why?" I think that has a lot of similar dicussion in it that might be interesting.

[Skonar]

Got a link to it? I've been unable to find said topic. It sounds like potentially useful reading!

[Snakeman]

Sorry about that, after the forum rearrangements over there, I had a harder time digging it up but its under the Laboratories subforum - X-Lab: Alien goals/motives, Storyline

 

https://www.xcomufo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4041

 

A lot of the material here are either ideas for Xeno's backstory, after version 1, or just things people would want further elaboration to where the originals are concerned.

[Bomb Bloke]

I figured that the Sectoids who appeared in Apocalypse society were simply Sectoids from the original war who surrendered once the brain got clobbered, or hid in the shadows until the humans were happy enough to live with them.

 

I'm not sure that they were ever under Micronoid control... The UFOpedia put their objectives down not as "crush kill destroy" but rather "gene farming". If all the aliens were controlled by Micronoids, they'd all act the same way.

[NickAragua]

I think the key thing is to not take the gameplay too literally. If you did, then it follows that the "Best of the Best" of the world are attacking the aliens without any of the tools available to the modern military (recon aircraft, air support, snipers, body armor and helmets, etc.), and yet have the ability to instantaneously disassemble and transport UFOs back to a base half a world away. Meanwhile, landed alien ships allow X-Com skyrangers to land within as little as a hundred feet of them without so much as a peep, and attempt to "terrorize" human cities with population in the millions using 10-15 aliens. Additionally, the aliens always descend into the suburbs, and limit their activities to a (roughly estimated) 1000-square-foot area, and finally, are unable to mount any sort of tactical coordination despite having achieved interstellar travel.

 

So, with that in mind, the scale would be fairly small. Maybe not as small as depicted in the game (again, "terrorizing" a major city with 15 guys?), but fairly small for the most part. When we're talking about assaulting/recovering a UFO with 10 guys on board, you're fine with a single skyranger. An alien base? Two or three. Terror site? The local army probably helps (I'm just glad they abstracted the negotiations part - "What do you mean we can't fly our guys over Turkish airspace?"). X-Com isn't a massed infantry charge unit, it's a spec-ops unit. In the beginning, you'd probably have a horrendous casualty rate per mission (I generally have about 20-30% of a squad dying on superhuman against an equal size force, and yes, that's a horrible casualty rate for a modern military force, especially given that X-Com is basically the best of the best of the spec-ops).

 

Also, contrary to game mechanics, beyond a certain point, throwing more scientists at a problem does not necessarily solve it faster, nor does throwing more engineers at aircraft construction make that go faster. This isn't a frigging assembly line factory in Kamchatka or whatever, it's a high-tech research and manufacturing facility. 250 people dissecting a single dinky little sectoid? Yeah, right. 200 guys working on making a single laser rifle? Please.

 

Anyway, out of all that rambling, I would say, over the course of AW-I, X-Com consists of under a thousand soldiers, and three times as much support staff. Additionally, I'm sure that many times more people than that are indirectly involved in helping X-Com (weapon manufacturers, the guys who buy sectoid corpses for $20k apiece...)

 

The aliens, of course throw much more material overall at the problem, but X-Com has the advantage of concentrating force in a specific area.