Talk:Terror Mission

TODO List

• Redo section
• Notes on the penalties of ignoring a terror site vs. visiting but aborting the terror site

General Discussion

I removed the old discussion pertaining to mind controlling as it has been resolved through MikeTheRed's experience testing. Below you will find some text from a page called "Terror attacks". I'm deleting that page as that one obviously meant to be called "Terror Mission" *ahem*. Anyhow, I didn't want to delete the page outright as some of the info could/might be used here. Feel free to incorporate as much/little of this text as you want into the article. Anyone can remove this comment. --Zombie 17:44, 12 March 2006 (PST)

Lovely debriefing."...the crater where the gas station is used to be" made me laugh.--X-COM:Turcocalypse 11:01, 22 April 2006 (PDT)

Terror attack text

Upon noticing the threat posed to them by X-Com, aliens will scout out desirable cities, then attack the city using a large team of foot soldiers and the terror weapons associated with them.

The mission involves various smaller UFOs, which search for potential targets. When an area has been selected, a Terror Ship will drop off a strike force at a city, then take off directly into space.

Aliens have little to gain from carrying out these terror missions, but they know X-Com has much to lose. The purpose of these missions is to discredit X-Com. If a terror mission goes well for the aliens, nearby countries that fund X-Com are likely to lower funding, and pull out of the project altogether of an Alien Infiltration mission succeeds shortly afterwards.

The best way to deal with terror attacks is to shoot down the Terror Ship before it can land. When this is done, the aliens have to start the whole mission again, starting with the scouting UFOs.

Re: Debriefing

Since the debriefing is some gibberish I wrote up in a long forgotten post ages ago, I don't really see that it needs to remain in the main section. It was fine at the start, but I think we've advanced the wiki enough that we can move it out to the field manual or even remove it entirely. Any thoughts? -NKF 00:41, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

The Field Manual seems to me right now a mismatch of articles and my own material there seems almost useless. How about if the debriefing was moved to a separate page and a link added to it on the See Also section of this page? Hobbes 00:55, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

Moving it here for now. -NKF 01:53, 3 September 2010 (EDT)

A Debriefing

An excerpt from a soldier's journal who shall remain nameless:

'-- it's very strange. The aliens don't appear to want to kill the poor citizens they're terrorising. At least not at first. They won't hesitate in the least and will immediately open fire on the civilians the very moment our dropship lands in the area and lowers its access ramp . If we ignore the terror alert for a few hours, they'll kill the townsfolk anyway.

They appear to know when one of our ships is en route to the site, and will patiently wait for us to arrive. I wonder if we have any moles in the organisation, or if the aliens just have awfully powerful scanners? They just know. I guess that's all there is to say about it.

Sgt. Mikhail Okabe says it all boils down to psychological warfare. They want to break our morale by making us watch helplessly as they slaughter the people we're sworn to protect. If we arrived and all the civilians were dead, we'd probably not think twice about it, or at least not as much if we were to watch them being murdered before our very eyes, or having to listen to their tormented screams. Or maybe it is to hamper our firepower, similiar to a hostage situation? Just the other week, Captain Jason Smith spotted a cyberdisk... several feet away from 2 civilians! Though it pained him to do so, he had no choice but to give the order to fire the Rocket Launchers at it, killing cyberdisk and civilians together. I have known some officers try to save/spare civilian lives, and cause the death of their entire squads. In the end, we are at war with the aliens, and in every war, there is collateral damage.

The aliens also seem to do something to the civilians before we arrive. At every terror site I've been to, the locals always appeared to be in a rather addle minded state, and walked about as if they're in a dream. They'll merrily walk through a hail of flying lead just to let the aliens get a better shot at them, and yet they won't seek shelter in nearby buildings or the relative safety of our dropship.

The third time they attacked Novosibirsk, I remember trying to protect an old woman from one of those furry bipedal aliens that was chasing after her. Instead of getting behind me for protection, she stared at me with a vacant smile, turned around and walked towards the alien and... That happened only a week ago, but every time I try to rest, my sleep is plagued with the same nightmare. If this keeps up, the base commander's going to need to find a new firearms instructor, and I'm going to be sporting a new jacket with very long sleeves.

But I think that's not the worst of it. If we knock out any civilians during the battle with our shock sticks, they just change. I don't really know how to describe it, except that they become someone.. no something else. . I've a feeling these people, who are in a very weakened mental state, are holding onto their minds for their dear lives. Any interference on our part just causes them to lose concentration and are thus defenceless against whatever it is that enters their heads and practically kicks them out so that it can then make itself at home.

These posessed civilians are harmless when awake, but we are still required to deal with them somehow. No matter how we decide to do that, our Damage Control specialists jump in and 'vanish' any of the affected persons. It's a very hush-hush matter. Even the inspection team from the UN who come around to assess the damage aren't made aware of the posessed civilians, so we are not credited or discredited for this little mistake of ours.

After the aliens have been dealt with, the rest of the civilians seem to recover after a few hours, and have no recollection of what had just happened to them. This is rather convenient and saves having to lug all the brainwashing equipment out there. But one does have to wonder how Damage Control is going to explain the big crater where the old gas station should be, or what's up with that inside-out vege-mart. "

-- User:NKF pasted by JellyfishGreen 13:18, 25 Apr 2005 (BST)

What To Bring To A Terror Site

I would say that if you show up at any kind of terror mission apart from Floater/Reaper without at least having laser weapons, you are in big trouble. The best you can do is pack as many Rocket Launchers and Lg Rockets as you can carry. Forget the civilians. Attack the Cyberdisks/Chryssalids/Zombies with direct attacks by Lg Rockets using multiple shooters per target. Level the place. Take the hit on the civilians. Don't worry about blast overlaps, take the hit on lost loot and bodies. You're just trying to survive here.

Of course arming everyone with a launcher and copious amounts of Lg Rockets is not a great situation when also encountering Psionic aliens for the first time.

Once you have lasers or better, you should be fine, lasers or plasma weapons are general-purpose for any mission, you don't need to bring along additional heavy weapons unless you want to. Except for Ethereal/Sectopod terror missions where you should bring Heavy Lasers, Laser Tanks, or Stun Launchers.

Spike 15:49, 5 October 2010 (EDT)

Mention that the spawn points may be quenched?

Okay, so I just did my first Terror Site of a new Iron Man Superhuman run, and got 4 Reapers + 12 Floaters. That's 2 Reapers less than listed as the minimum in "Alien Deployment". And no, I didn't fall prey to the difficulty bug; I checked with a hex editor afterward to make sure and in any case according to that selfsame table 12 Floaters can only happen on Superhuman.

I suspect what happened was that it ran out of large-unit spawn points for the Reapers, as there were a great number of small houses and no big garden or petrol station. Do you think it merits a mention that there may be less on any given mission due to spawn-point quench?

(It's unlikely to occur on actual Terror Ship missions, because the UFO has half a dozen large-unit spawns inside it - probably for this exact reason.) Magic9mushroom (talk) 08:53, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Same thing happened with my second terror mission (only 3 Cyberdiscs). So it's at least reasonably common. Magic9mushroom (talk) 02:58, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

The link to Large Units is broken, because the page is actually Large units (no capital U) - what's the cleanest way to fix that? Just change the link? Create a redirect page? Move the page to Large Units, for consistency? AMX (talk)

I changed the link. Thanks for the tip. Magic9mushroom (talk) 03:31, 15 July 2018 (CEST)