Talk:Alien Infiltration

So, once the supply ships and battleships arrive, is it too late? Is there no way to stop the infiltration, and will you always lose that country's funding? Rlbond86 21:41, 20 January 2010 (EST)

So far I find the only way to stop it is to shoot down every scout ship before it enters the REGION of its destination, no matter it's ocean or land. -Pagan 11:26, 12 February 2013 (EST)

I notice the article says 'you have several options available to you', but doesn't go on to list any. I assume one of them is to eliminate the base and, hopefully if done before the end of the month, it renegs the pact (by breaking their contact with each other or possibly giving the funding nation reason to keep faith in the X-COM project and tell the aliens to bugger off), but is this possible? There should be more details here. I personally think it should be possible to undo the 'damage', if you're paying enough attention, and obviously have the tracking capabilities to do so, and address it quickly enough, at least.

In my case, at least, I've been playing OpenXcom 0.9, and I eliminated an Infiltration mission utterly, and cleansed the Base (it was the first one they built, too, and right in Washington, D.C.- just a short jaunt away from my HQ near the Lake Erie/Ontario merged body of water on the Geoscape weirdness- silly low-polygon limits resulting in quirky and inaccurate terrain layouts), and, even though the month hasn't ended, the savegame data seems to imply no pact status changes, so I think it's dealt with. The Infiltration mission's still active, though, but it's been essentially reset back to the first wave and postponed HEAVILY, by at least another month, it seems. Not sure if it's going to just continue or eventually vanish from the savegame when the spawn countdown depletes, but either way, it seems like a major victory. --StormhawkAPS 14:14, 4 October 2013 (EDT)

There is no way to completely stop an infiltration mission. The most you can do is delay the outcome by shooting down every UFO that preforms the mission, which heavily delays the arrival of the next UFO. The final "wave" of ships spawns in rapid succession. It is possible to delay this outcome by intercepting one of the initial ships in the wave but this usually can only be done if you have avengers and can intercept the first ships very quickly as there are only a few hours between each ship. Once the last ship in the mission has been spawned, the pact is sealed. There is no way to recover a country that has signed a pact. The game will not end if you lose all the countries, including Russia. (Russia can't be infiltrated normally due to a oversight.)-Tycho (talk)

What of the current wave of aliens that are running the infiltration mission? Can you cause them to reset and start over after holding them off for a certain amount of time? -NKF (talk) 00:00, 2 December 2014 (EST)

Not that I see. The routine that handles updating the data every 30 minutes will go through the MISSIONS.DAT database and decrease all timers for active missions. When a timer reaches zero, it spawns the UFO to which the mission counter refers, increases the counter, and then sets the timer for the new stage. When you shoot down a UFO, this time gets increased. In the case of infiltration, if the value of the next stage is greater than 8, the "sign pact" routine runs. In zones where there is more than one country, the MISSON.DAT entry resets back to stage 0 so the aliens will start to infiltrate the next country in that zone. -Tycho (talk) 22:51, 2 December 2014 (EST)

Since you mentioned it, what's the oversight that causes that Russia can't be infiltrated? I've heard about this for years but no one ever explained why this happens. Hobbes (talk) 14:15, 3 December 2014 (EST)

Everyone believes that (western) Russia is part of Europe, which it is, but only the western part and only for determining the cost of starting a base. In the code for determining what country will sign a pact, as the result of successful infiltration, Russia is part of Siberia. However, the chance of an infiltration mission in Siberia is 0 from the beginning of the game. - Tycho (talk) 16:06, 3 December 2014 (EST)

That's something I had already noticed (no infiltration missions set for Siberia) but the confirmation required is how the countries are assigned to the geographical areas used by the MissionZones. Meanwhile I did a search for a previous post where I talked about this and Warboy1982 states that the location of the countries' name is what determines the assignment of a country to a region, which makes sense. Thanks Hobbes (talk) 17:20, 3 December 2014 (EST)

If you look at the differences between the zone map and the country map under the Geoscape map. It would seem that any alien activity that occurs within what we consider Western Russia/Eastern Europe would have the alien scores penalize the Europe zone then Russia specifically. -Tycho (talk)

I mentioned MissionZones but I actually meant the Regional zones, which are used for base construction costs and the UFO/Alien on the Graphs, as you mention, and to generate alien missions. As Warboy1982 described on the OpenXCom forums, once an Alien Infiltration mission is successfully completed on a region, the game choose on the countries present in that region, and it assigns countries to regions based on the location of the country's name on the Geoscape (which can be different from the name's locations on the country map on the Geoscape page).

Mission Zones are used only for UFO trajectories (which are determined themselves by the settings Alien Missions, which are somewhat described on the MISSION.DAT page), including their entry/exit areas, and patrol and landing locations. Moscow actually belongs to a MissionZone located in Europe, so you can get Terror Sites and UFOs landings (in Alien Infiltration missions, although the infiltrated country won't be Russia). Hobbes (talk) 19:01, 3 December 2014 (EST)

PS - I'll eventually write a page about how the game generates Alien Missions based on what was discovered by OpenXcom's developers. There's already information about this on the respective game file pages but it would be nice to describe the whole process. It will contain a lot of spoilers though. Hobbes (talk) 19:14, 3 December 2014 (EST)

I don't understand what is meant that the location of the countries' name has to do with the zone, except maybe from a developer's standpoint as they were coding the game. It's an array that determines in what zone a set of coordinates belongs to. Am I misunderstanding you meaning? I see that most of western Russia falls under the Europe zone for this purpose. Also, the game doesn't randomly choose the country in a zone at the time of a successful infiltration. The order is predetermined. The landing sites of the final UFOs are chosen randomly, but that has no impact on what country will sign (as you mentioned).