Talk:Alien Appearance Ratios

Don't Alien Retaliations depend on who you shot down. So in August if you shoot down lots of Snakemen Ships they will retaliate not the Ethereals who have 40% chance to be the race on the Retalation?

Retaliations are done in two ways. The aliens can be generated to appear on retaliation scouting missions, with the race determined by the probabilities in these tables. This means any race can start scouting for X-Com bases to attack even if you haven't shot down any UFOs of that particular race. They still have to find your base to attack it though.

The other method is the instant base attack. Every time you shoot down a UFO, the game has a 2% chance to instantly retaliate against the interceptor's home base and will send a battleship straight to the base without having to scout for it. In this scenario, the race is determined by the crew of the UFO you shot down.

I think it was determined that researching the Martian Solution (or was it Cydonia or Bust?) may generate a base attack as well. -NKF 17:21, 19 June 2012 (EDT)

I have never seen either of those ways in the Collector's Edition. The only way that works in the Collectors Edition (verified by examining MISSIONS.DAT) is to shoot down a UFO, which has a difficulty-level dependent probability of immediately generating a Retaliation scouting mission of the same race as the one you shot down.

Note that since DOS does not do an awesome job of default-initializing its files, that garbage data in XBASES.DAT can do strange things. For the Collector's Edition, correctly tweaking that file will convert the next mission by that race into a base attack, and cause the scheduled mission to be rescheduled for later. -Zaimoni 17:21, 19 June 2012 (EDT)