Talk:Alien Retaliation

Re: Conclusions

Just a thought about the last edit in the conclusions, you don't get any points or loot from destroying the Battleship with base defenses, so an impenetrable base isn't going to provide the same rewards as a supply ship farm raid (done via a Skyranger to work around elerium shortages). I suppose there's always shooting the battleship down before it strikes the base and then raiding it, but I don't recall if this stops the raids. Worth a ponder anyhow. -NKF 03:12, 30 July 2009 (EDT)

Indeed, I was referring to an "intercept all the BBs for fun and profit" strategy (after all, they almost always have at least 1 power source left, and there's a TON of valuable loot). The repair time of Avengers, however, means you need a fallback if too many of your Avengers are in the shop, hence why the base defences. Generally I'd only do this with 1 base at a time, as you're limited by repair time anyway.

By the way, shooting down the BB does NOT unset the flag. So this IS a valid "unlimited Elerium" method.Magic9mushroom 05:27, 31 July 2009 (EDT)

Retaliation Triggers

I understand that UFO Assaults / USO Assaults don't trigger Retaliation missions, hence the Mod in UFOextender / TFTDextender.

Do Alien Base Assaults / Alien Colony Assaults trigger Retaliation missions? They really should, even more so than successful shoot-downs. Both raids, and actual destruction, should be responded to. Base milking (through legitimate combat, not through exploits) is a legitimate tactic for X-COM but a real vulnerability for the aliens, so they should respond in massive force. Spike 07:54, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

Flight Patterns

Retaliation battleships seem to be unique in that they will fly at maximum speed at the lowest altitude. This makes them extremely difficult to detect with anything other than the Hyperwave decoder, but once detected their intention is immediately obvious.

Retaliation scouts often won't land, making them distinguishable from other missions. --Bobucles 4 Jan 2013

Tricky triggers

Did anyone ever encounter the situation where, on Beginner difficulty, you destroy a small scout, shoot down and recover a medium scout, ground assault another medium scout and BAM! Retaliation in the middle of the FIRST GAME MONTH, before you got even a single research project done and without ever spotting the incoming battleship? Because I just did. And I didn't even mod the game to retaliate against ground assaults. It would seem that for some reason, the first three UFOs were all retaliation scouts... are these aliens prescient or what?--amitakartok 15:53, 17 March 2013 (EDT)

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. It tends to happen more often on the harder levels as the instant-retaliation chance when you shoot down UFOs is scaled by the difficulty level. Battleships zipping through to your base between small or large radar pings does happen. NKF 00:40, 18 March 2013 (EDT)