Some "short and simple" tips to start me off. .

[Zombie]

Strong Bob:

 

Morale for the aliens is affected by 3 (and/or sometimes 4) things.

1) Kill any alien and the morale of the surviving aliens is reduced accordingly.

2) If an X-COM agent is killed, the morale of the aliens goes up (unless they are at 100% already).

3) I'm not sure, but I think killing a higher ranking alien reduces the morale of the surviving aliens more than just killing an alien soldier.

4) If you kill more than 1 alien in a round, the morale losses are added together and applied to whatever aliens are left.

 

Stun Grenade:

 

The only option here is try to kill every Ethereal that is visible. The lower you can get their morale, the better off your soldiers are. I hate to say it, but it might be helpful to buy a HWP rocket launcher and send it on the mission along with some soldiers. The HWP has a Bravery of 110 if I'm not mistaken. Ethereals are unable to panic or mind control the HWP so it might be the advantage you are looking for. Worst case scenario: Buy 3 HWP rocket tanks and just send them alone to the Ethereal mission. It may be possible to kill all the Ethereals with only tanks.

 

If killing a lot of them or the HWP idea does not work, you have a couple of options.

 

First one is to NOT go after Ethereal craft. You can still shoot down the craft, just do not go on the mission to kill them. If your soldiers are not ready, why send them to get slaughtered. Keep them safe instead.

 

Second is to reload the game from an earlier save, and hopefully the Ethereals will not show up. This may or may not always work.

 

In all probability, your mission could be won. All the years playing X-COM has taught me this: almost 90% of all missions can be won with some sort of strategy change. Do not give up. Say to yourself: "I am going to win this mission" and then believe in what you just said. For instance, if a certain soldier always goes under mind control and then he shoots your soldiers, take the weapons away from him. That may be all you need to win: one less soldier dead!

[Bomb Bloke]

I hate to say it, but it might be helpful to buy a HWP rocket launcher and send it on the mission along with some soldiers.

Fwahaha!

 

...

 

No, don't worry, I understand your logic.

 

Just another note, you score points for shooting down UFOs. If need be, you can go a month with a near acceptable score without performing a single tactical mission.

 

The only problem is, at the start of the game, you don't know what's in a given UFO until you arrive at the crash site...

 

Perhaps you could bring a tank to every mission, but don't use it in the battle unless you need it (ie for slaughtering Etherals). Catch is it starts at the front of your craft, so you'd probably have to at least offload the thing so your troops could get out.

 

Whatever.

[Zombie]

I thought you might like my response Bomb Bloke! I'm not really eating my own words though. Logic (I use the term loosely here) sometimes dictates what the best strategy is. If you are overwhelmed by psi attacks, it makes sense to bring along units that have a high bravery as well as psi strength. Tanks fit the bill perfectly: very high bravery (110) and very high psi strength (100). Next to impossible to panic a tank, never mind take control of it's actions through psi.

 

It sucks that tanks always are the first to leave the landing craft. Too bad the user couldn't specify where the tank is situated when the craft lands. I'd probably use tanks more often if this feature was available!

 

Bomb Bloke Posted on Sep 26 2004, 09:50 PM

The only problem is, at the start of the game, you don't know what's in a given UFO until you arrive at the crash site...

 

True, very true. But how often do Ethereals show up within the first 6 months of a new game? Unless you are terribly good at seeking out and grounding/destroying UFO's, the game will not send Ethereals your way early on. Even if you successfully annoy the aliens, X-COM usually only air-mails you a smaller type ship with Ethereals on it. I think the game just likes throwing a curve ball every once and a while to see if you can handle it.

 

Yep, you score points for grounding UFO's or destroying them. Here is the OSG's data on this:

UFO Type          UFO Destroyed          UFO Grounded
Small Scout            100                     50
Medium Scout           150                     75
Large Scout            250                    125
Harvester              500                    250
Abductor               500                    250
Supply Ship            800                    400
Terror Ship           1000                    500
Battleship            1400                    700

Sure, you can go a whole month just grounding UFO' s and never visiting the crash sites to mop up. All you need are a few Medium UFO's and a handful of the Smaller ones and you can get into the thousands.

 

The only problem is Terror Sites. If you neglect one, it's -1,000 points against your score. Let's say you had +3000 points before the aliens started the Terror Site. If you did nothing, your score is reduced to +2000. While this is still a good number, the country where the Terror Site originated in will most likely be unhappy and reduce funding. Unhappy countries are dangerous because they may decide to form a pact with the aliens which cuts off funds completely from that government.

[NKF]

-1000 for a neglected terror site, eh? Anyone rememeber what an abandoned terror site costs you? Roughly, I mean.

 

When I say abandon, I mean you go there and dust off immediately (whether or not you end up soiling your pants).

 

I thought it was less than -1000. Not exactly a good score, but it's still mitigating your overall damage.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

NKF:

 

The number of points that are deducted is determined by the number of civilians that are there. Remember that Terror Sites can have anywhere from 0 to 16 civilians there? Every civilian that is killed by the aliens is -30 points. That means you could see a score of 0 to -480 points.

[Slotty]

yeah.. and you could get even worse if you actually played it and lost... as you lose points if you lose agents and/if you lose the ship

[NKF]

I thought there was some other penalty... no I think I was thinking about TFTD's artefact sites. In those there's a -500 penalty for not destroying the mission target. Anyway, sounds about right.

 

So, just visiting the site and abandoning it does indeed mitigate your damage. Hurrah. No wonder I always always advised people to never abandon a terror site.... oh ages ago. Never did work out the exact amounts though.

 

I guess it doesn't look too good when your soldiers can't even be bothered getting out of bed. At least by visiting the site, they get to assess the situation, and decide upon a tactical retreat based on the overwhelming odds.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

Yeah, it's a good idea to eradicate those Terror Sites. See, the average number of civilians at a Terror Site is 12. That comes to -360 pionts. On top of this, There is a 96% chance you will see anywhere from 8 to 16 civilians. That leaves only a 4% chance to see 0-7 civilians. If you already knew the number of civilians at the Terror Site, you could say, kill as many aliens as possible to offset the penalty, then dust-off if things became tough. Unfortunately, that's not how the game works.

 

The only problem with evacuating a Terror Mission is that if you do not kill all the aliens there, the -1000 point decuction will still get applied to your monthly score. Say there are 16 civilians there and you decide to cut your losses and run. That comes to -480 points for not saving the civilians, and -1000 points for not eradicating the Terror Site. So you would get a total of -1480 points added to your monthly score.

 

The -1000 points are transparent to the player, that is to say the user cannot directly view the adjustment at the missions end summary. You will be able to indirectly view the deduction in the GRAPHS>FINANCE>SCORE screen though.

[Bomb Bloke]

Which means that if you see a terror site you think you can't handle, you should just ignore it, thus skipping the civilians score penalty.

 

...

 

Terror missions are annoying in that it is near impossible to save all civilians in any way short of cheating. Thus your score is always lower then it could be.

[Zombie]

I would never, ever refrain from going to a Terror Site. My philosophy is: "Ready or not here I come". I would at least try to offset the potential -480 points by killing as many terrorists and aliens as possible. You'll never know how many civilians are at that particular Terror Site. If there were 8 cililians, your score penalty could be only -240 points.

 

Here are the number of points you can get by just killing or stunning all the aliens and terroists at a typical Sectoid Terror Site:

Minimum: +142 (killing), +244 (stunning)

Maximum: +246 (killing), +372 (stunning)

This number does not include points gained by recovering artifacts, weapons, equipment, bodies, corpses and ammo. If you take these numbers into considerstion, your score goes up more.

 

The main thing with terror sites is to refrain from accidentally killing civilians. See, if you kill a civilian it's -50 points, while if a alien kills a civilian it's only -30 points. If you were to (accidentally) kill all 16 civilians at a terror site you would be looking at a -800 point penalty. That's almost double if you let the aliens do it themselves! If you don't think you can keep civilian casualties to a minimum, you would be better off not going!

[Bomb Bloke]

I like terror sites. With the exception of night time etheral maps, I find them quite fun.

 

Anyhoo, I think if you mind control civilians and then kill them when it wears off, you gain points rather then lose them. An interesting way to sway the balance, even if it is exploitation. Usually by the time I'm mind controlling I'm ready for Cydonia anyway, so it makes no difference.

[Zombie]

I like Terror Sites also. I voiced my opinion way back in the Favourite Mission Type thread. If you know what you are doing, and focus on an offensive strategy to save the civilians, everything's good. But wait too long and assume a defensive posture and you will see those civilians mowed down like blades of grass!

 

You know, I am starting to have some doubts whether that -1000 point penalty gets added when you abort a terror mission. See, in the OSG it says that you get -1000 points if X-COM ignores a Terror Site. I checked in the SCORE menu under GRAPHS to see if my score went down by just -480, or -1480 or -1000. From what I could determine, if you were to visit a Terror Mission and abort, your score only goes down by what happened in the mission. I'll have to check this out a little more careful in the first month when your score is naturally lower!

[NKF]

Pardon me gents, I'm going to sidetrack the discussion for a moment here:

 

As I'm on leave at the moment, I might be able to find some time in between replaying Fallout II and deliberating on whether or not to open that budget copy of Commands II I grabbed the other day to put together another experiment that I've been wanting to test. I have a few problems that I need to iron out first, but I thought I'd put the idea up first and see how it's received.

 

I want to find out for sure how the damage modifiers work. As much as I respect the information in the OSG (it was written by someone in-the-know), I think it would be best to have a bit of first hand knowledge.

 

That is, I want to make up a map filled with every type of alien creature imagineable (all disarmed, stripped of armour and any psionic powers and 0 stamina recharge so that they can't move, and then have all their health set to 200) and a sample of weapons containing every damage damage type to test.

 

Then it would just be a tedious matter of shooting every one of these aliens once, recording how much damage is done over and over.

 

Would it be better to have a single map filled with lots of one type of alien, lots of soldiers with identical weapon sets and make a similar save for each species? Or just make a single map filled with a menagerie of aliens (maybe 3 a piece)? The last one would be fun, but it won't be much use for gathering of statistics.

 

At the moment, my main problems are:

 

1. Should I edit the weapons so that they all do the same level of damage (100) just to make it easier to compare the damage levels? This would mean an additional download (and would force you to temporarily backup your obdata.dat file - a good idea in any case).

 

2. I need to find out whether I can change the species' damage modifiers with a simple sprite change. If not, I'm going to need some help locating savegames with these aliens present - I've only got floaters, sadly.

 

3. Stun damage is difficult to gauge as it's not got a numerical display.

 

4. Not really a problem: But I might make a separate save for the large units. They take up too much space. For them, I'll need to stop them from moving and then separate their last 3 quarters and put them elsewhere so that any area effect weapons tested on them will only damage the one part.

 

Assuming I don't forget or get distracted, I'd like to get this one done. Any thoughts?

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

NKF:

 

I was planning on doing something similar to what you describe in the very near future. The one problem I have with the scenario you describe is altering the aliens' stats. I'm not talking about TU, Stamina, Bravery, Reactions, TA, FA, Strength and Psi. What I am worried about is changing Health and Armor, the two things you are trying to study! If you change these numbers, you will never be able to accurately gauge your data against the OSG's damage modifiers.

 

Wouldn't it be better to modify the particular weapon damage up or down depending on the alien? At least the aliens Health and Armor would remain unaltered. Please tell me if I'm not understanding you correctly NKF!

 

I would suggest making one map filled with the same type of alien, and having the same number of soldiers with an identical weapon. Then just make different scenarios for the other aliens. Why? There are 12 aliens in X-COM. If you were to do 1000 hits for each alien, that would be 12,000 hits before you could report the results of any single alien. If you do each alien separately, you could compare and report your results for a single alien race with a finished analysis.

 

Stunning: Stun damage is indeed tough to quantify. You just have to guesstimate the number because one is not given. It is not too tough to get a ballpark number. The problem is time. How much do you want to spend guessing stun values.

 

Seriously, this is a HUGE undertaking on your part. If you need any help whatsoever let me know. I'm your man for reloads - I have enough of them under my belt. You can also trust me to get the job done right the first time, and on time. Again, I am more than willing to help you solve this problem for one and for all!

[NKF]

Let me see if I can clarify what I'm trying to do here.

 

I want to know exactly how much damage a weapon of a certain type will do to a certain type of unit type. Say armour piercing damage against a muton.

 

I know the OSG gives info on the damage certain aliens can take from various damage types. I'd like to find out exactly what they are, without the unit's armour skewing the percentages. This is mainly because armour changes from difficulty level to difficulty level, so it's one thing on beginner, but it's a different matter entirely on superhuman.

 

The changing of the health of the alien test subjects and the weapon damage levels are inconsequential.

 

The increase in health is just so that the unit doesn't die outright from a test weapon that does double damage. It doesn't matter how much health the unit has. The increase is just to see how much health was lost after every given attack.

 

And the changing of the weapon damage levels, well it's just for the convenience of being able to see how much damage is done without having to go "Uh, alien has 62 health, now it's 28, um, subtract the two, divide by pi, pass the six, discard the one, um, oh right 34. " (I know, I know, it's a bit exagerrated)

 

Instead, You'd go "Right, was 200, now it's 158. Um, 100 minus 58. The answer's 42"

 

Well, that's how it would go in my head. It's really more of a ploy to preserve my sanity (and laziness).

 

Let's say an alien has 200 health, and I've got a laser that does 100 damage. If the unit only takes half damage from laser, you'd only see a loss of 50 points from the 200. If the unit took double damage, you'd lose up to 200 hitpoints (the unit would die in this case).

 

Oh, I suppose I don't need to do that. But you might end up with 26 AP, 46 laser, 80 plasma, 50 high explosive, 60 stun, etc. It would just make things easier if they were all the same number.

 

 

---

 

Just as a reminder: Weapon damage is calculated as follows:

 

Damage = (Weapon damage * damage modifier) - armour

 

I don't even remember how many tests I made until I realised how simple it was... ugh.

 

Weapon damage is a random number up to the damage levels listed in the ufopaedia. Armour is the level of damage reduction provided by the section that's being hit. The damage modifier is what we're looking at here. I generally just say they're 0.5 (half), 1.0 (normal) or 2.0 (double) - but that's just generalising a bit.

 

My overall goal now is to find out the exact (or at least approximate) levels provided by the 'damage modifier' bit to each aliens (and X-Com unit).

 

So, when all is said and done, we can confidently say to another player, "Yes, a Steam powered Sectopod takes 3.1214 damage the from all tank treads", or, well, something to that effect.

 

- NKF

[NickAragua]

Wasn't this a "short and simple tips" thread to start with?

[NKF]

Just sidetracking a bit. The end result will be a short and simple tip, like:

 

Mutons can take X damage from AP, Y damage from Laser, etc.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

Ok, I understand what you are doing now, NKF.

 

Just to clarify armor ratings first:

Armor on the more advanced levels (Experienced, Veteran, Genius and Superhuman) are exactly double the armor on Beginner.

 

Alright, I get the reason why Health is at 200. (I did some preliminary tests with some of your soldiers in your Chryssalid test game with grenades).

----------

One question though: Say a unit takes normal damage (100% of listed UFOPaedia damage). To what extent does armor play a role? If you are assuming that it skews the results, shouldn't we also check damage incurred with, and without armor to be sure? To be more exact: is the specific armor of an alien resistant to that type of weapon, or is the body itself resistant? Get what I am trying to say here? If armor plays no role, than you are indeed correct by stripping it off the alien for a comparison test.

 

I have a couple of questions about your damage equation:

Damage = (Weapon damage * damage modifier) - Armor

 

First, the term Armor in your equation. When you shoot a soldier who has armor, his armor rating does not always drop down to zero, and then any extra damage subtracted from health. Sometimes the soldier might have 80% of his armor left and still get killed because health reached 0. Are soldiers armor and alien armor identical? Or does the full brunt of the power "eat" through all the aliens armor first, and then the rest goes to health?

 

Why not rename "Weapon damage" to "Weapon power", and "damage modifier" to "unit susceptibility". Isn't this more descriptive and less confusing than an equation with the word "damage" appearing 3 times? I find it easier to understand this way, but to each his own I guess.

 

My offer still stands NKF. Once you get things hashed out on how to proceed, and formulate a plan of attack, I'll be more than happy to give you a hand testing things out. I am just as interested in the results as you are (and maybe more)!

[Stun Grenade]

maybe we should make a "calculations" thread?

[NKF]

I think there was one. But that has been lost in time.

 

The names in my formula can be changed with whatever you want. The words I use are just the first thing that come to mind when I'm trying to remember the formula. Not the best choice of words, I admit.

 

As for armour = the 'armour' displayed in the stats for all units in the game (and I mean everyone) is just simple damage reduction. That's it. Nothing fancy there.

 

Say my bullet ends up doing 20 damage, the target takes normal damage, and the section I'm hitting (front plates, say) has 15 armour. Before the 20 damage is subtracted from the unit's health, the 15 points are first subtracted off of the damage.

 

If the armour is able to make the damage 0 or negative, no damage is done and that's that. But if damage is done, then the game just subtracts the remainder of the damage off the target's health. Also, the game gets to damage the armour plate as well (not to mention inflict some critical wounds and stun damage). Not sure how this is calculated. But this would be for another experiment and another time.

 

And no, the unit's modifiers don't have any effect on the armour. Only the ... okay the weapon power.

 

Been trying to set up a scenario, but excuses keep piling up and I'm constantly getting sidetracked today. Spent the morning trying to understand parts of the ufopaedia and research files (was wanting to have a shortcut and get all the tech I need right away). Then I suddenly decided to watch my Slayers DVD collection, even that got aborted and I ended up fiddling with the connector plugs at the back of the TV set to see if I could rearrange them somewhat. I'm going to at least find a suitable map and get all the test gear in place before the night is through. I can fiddle around with the game pieces in the morning.

 

- NKF

 

edit: Right, before bed, got the battlefield set up. Now just need to erase the alien weapons, duplicate the player's weapons 7 more times, 'plant' the aliens in one spot, and see if a simple sprite change is all I need to get the damage modifiers. I know a simple sprite change is enough to allow a zombie to hatch a chryssalid and a cyberdisc to detonate on death.

 

But here's an interesting observation I made. The male and female civilians are different sprites! So why the heck didn't the programmers just toss in a random number of male and female sprites together in a terror mission? Instead we getting mono-gendered rural villages. A bit perplexing, don't you think?

[Zombie]

So if the game decides that the unit will be hit/hurt, the damage first gets subtracted from the armor, and any remaining damage is taken off the health stat. Just indulge me here for a second. I am almost 100% sure that sometimes the bullet (or whatever) does partial damage to the armor plates as well as health. Let's use your example. Bullet does 20 damage and the armor is 15. I know I've seen where the bullet reduces the armor to say 13, and manages to reduce health too, even though part of the armor (2 points) is still intact. Am I crazy, or does this happen?

 

You don't have to rush things NKF. Just take your time and get the scenario set up properly. The damage modifier question has been around for 10 years, it can wait a little longer to be answered.

 

That is strange why the civilians at a Terror Site are all one sex. I noticed that while doing my 2000 reload fiasco. Like you said, since there are 2 different sprites, it should be easy for the game to mix things up a little bit. Strange!

[NKF]

Well, let me see if I can explain in another example:

 

Let's say an alien fires a heavy plasma at power armour trooper. The game crunches some numbers and ends up dealing 120 damage. The X-Com target is hit in the front plates. Power armour offers 100 front protection.

 

Therefore the final damage done is = 120 - 100 = 20

 

So, the 20 points are then subtracted from the target's health. Also, because damage was done, the game then decides to:

 

1. Add stun damage - No idea how this works.

2. Cause critical wounds- usually a number between 0 and 3.

3. Deteriorate the armour by a few points. Not sure how this is calculated either.

4. Reduce the unit's morale - again no idea. But bravery is obviously a factor.

 

(Amazing how much work the game has to do to execute a single attack. Most other games just reduce hitpoints and that's that)

 

Basically, armour completely stops so much damage, and the armour level stays constant until damaged by a successful attack. If it completely absorbs the attack, it stays the same.

 

If it was damaged after every attack that it completely blocks, with a bit of persistence, even a standard pistol would be enough to kill a superhuman sectopod! Personally, I wouldn't mind that at all, but that's not the point.

 

But yes, say if you have a weapon that only barely breaches a unit's armour level. This will still reduce the armour somewhat. So after every attack that is able to get through, it gets easier and easier to hurt the unit with that weapon. One good example is in TFTD. Lobstermen take half damage from HE, and superhuman lobstermen have something like 12 under-armour. A gas cannon with HE shells that do 65 damage will only be able to do between -12 to 20(well, 20.5) points of damage per shot (compare - the sonic pistol does between -24 to 16 damage to the same lobsterman from any direction. Only it does 80/2 sonic damage against 24 armour).

 

As for how much damage is done to your armour: I do not know if this is subtracted from the final damage level or whether it's a simple dice roll (like 1d4 - 1, which looks like what's done for critical wounds). I have no way of testing for sure because of the one thing that makes this game what it is. The random number generator.

 

 

- NKF

 

Update: Well, it seems just changing the unit's sprites, while it does introduce several unique properties to the unit, is still a cosmetic change when it comes to the damage-type modifiers. Seemed a bit odd when I was using a soldier disguised as a sectopod quarter and all the weapon types were doing the same amount of damage as the lasers. (I set all my test weapons to 50 damage a heavy cannon, laser pistol, heavy plasma and stun rod. That should cover all the major weapon groups I'd imagine!)

 

As I have absolutely no idea where these resistance modifiers are stored at this moment in time, I'm going to have to cut and paste aliens from existing games. That's going to be a real problem as I don't have too many games with Mutons or Ethereals.

 

It also seems that the game crashes every time I have a soldier with an armed weapon staring at the lone sectoid test subject (will add more via cut and past later). I'd forcibly removed its weapons by editing it out completely from the data files. It almost seems like it's crashing when the game's trying to determine an opportuntiy. I might be able to fix this by editing in an empty gun for it (and for every other one I end up cloning).

[Zombie]

Thanks, NKF, for describing armor to me. I understand it fully now! All I can say is: "Strange"! It's odd how X-COM handles armor.

 

Morale vs. damage:

 

I did some trials this past August on the effect of morale against inflicted damage. Nothing major, just around 200 reloads or so. According to my results (with bravery being a constant) the amount of morale that gets deducted is directly related to the amount of health lost. For instance:

Morale Drop               Health Lost Range
     0           0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 
     1          10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
     2          20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
     3          30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
     4          40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49
     5          50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59
     6          60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69
     7          70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79

So let's say you lose anwhere from 10 to 19 health points. That equals a reduction in a units morale of 1 point. And so on and so forth. Interesting fact: Fatal Wounds do not affect morale loss, only a reduction in health does.

When I get X-COM up and running again I will continue these tests more vigorously. Hopefully I can get some games with Mutons and Ethereals for you NKF!

[Zombie]

Returning to the Terror Site discussion for a bit...

 

I wanted to find out if the -1000 points for ignoring a Terror Site is applied in addition to the penalty for aborting the the Site. Got to the 30th of January 1999 and saved the game (no Terror Sites yet). I wrote down my score up to that point which was roughly +750 points.

 

Now I sped time forward until a Terror Site started. After the site disappeared I checked my score again which was -250 points. Then I reloaded the game and waited until the Terror mission showed up again. This time I visited the Terror Site and aborted as soon as I got there. Since there were 16 civilians there the end-of-mission report said -480 points. When I returned to the Geoscape screen, I checked my score again. It was roughly +250 points.

 

So by ignoring the Terror Site, my score got pushed into the negatives, and when I visited the Terror Site and aborted with 16 civilians killed by the aliens, my score stayed in the positive range. The -1000 points are not added to the -480 points for aborting. Therefore, it is very important to at least visit every Terror Site you find. If things look tough, abort. You will actually cut your points lost by more than half (-520 points) just by visiting!

[Bomb Bloke]

: We've reached the terror site, sir.

: Ok, we'll take a quick looksie outside.

 

*units hop out of the craft, and take a look around*

 

*people are seen running around in terror as the aliens chase them*

 

: Seen enough, sir?

: Yeah, just wanted to stretch my legs before the trip home. Let's go.

 

Anyways, yet more on terror sites!

 

Apperently this OSG thing you all go on about (yes, I know what it stands for ) says terror sites stay on the map for a certain amount of time.

 

Now, in my observations, they only dissapear at dawn, and of course stay around so long as you've got them targetted.

 

Nothing new there, but I came up with this experiment. What if you were to observe a terror site. Half an hour or so before dawn reached it, target it with a craft. Once dawn passes over the site, tell the craft to return to base. Does the terror site stick around until next dawn, or does it leave the map before hand?

 

If it turns out that you can keep the site on the map in this way, and it only dissapears at dawn, does the same thing go for other mission sites? That is to say, do they ALL leave the map at a certain time, such as dawn? I haven't observed them in the same way as I watch terror sites, because crash sites stick around for days (terror sites don't) and landed craft leave at any time.

 

If missions only clear at a certain time of day, then perhaps they can be kept around indefinetly, not by always having a craft target them, but by having a craft target them at those certain times!

 

I'd test it myself, but I have other things to do... Sorry...