User:Magic9mushroom

Hi.

1) It's a pun on my interest in fantasy novels and fungi. I don't use, sell or possess hallucinogenic drugs.

2) "The big move", if you saw that as an edit reason, was my changing every instance of "USO" to the official term "Alien Sub". I would be highly gratified if we could keep it that way - there were over 70 pages with it and I don't want to have to spend 2 1/2 hours on it again.

Battleship Farming

I'm not sure whether this deserves its own page, so I'm putting it here.

There's a little trick I discovered to obtain huge amounts of money and points and fair amounts of Elerium in UFO (it should also work in TFTD but Leviathans and Bombardment Shields are much harder to obtain). You will need: 1 or more Avengers, Plasma Beams, Fusion Ball Defences, Grav Shield, Hyper-Wave Decoder.

How to execute:

1) Intercept lots of UFOs. You were doing that anyway, right?

2) When scouts start appearing with the mission (obtained via Hyper-Wave Decoder) of "Alien Retaliation", leave them alone.

3) Build six or more Fusion Ball Defences and a Grav Shield. Don't build a Mind Shield at the base that you're using for this trick.

4) When Battleships start appearing, shoot them down and recover them with Avengers.

5) Enjoy your points (likely just shy of 1000), money (2 million or more), and Elerium (around 50)!

The reason I call this a "trick" is that it's a way to generate artificially high UFO numbers in order to give you something to shoot at. Alien Retaliation missions that have found your base will not ever end until a Base Defence mission is forced - they will not end on Battleship interception and they will not end if the Battleship is destroyed by your base defences. Here, the Battleships will be turned into confetti by your defences even if they are not intercepted (12 shots of Fusion Balls vs. 3 required to kill it gives 0.0009% odds of making it through - less than 1 in 100,000 will survive), so you're guaranteed a constant and plentiful supply (this is necessary because Avengers are usually damaged by fighting Battleships and as such all of them might still be damaged when a new Battleship appears). It's probably a good idea to keep a lot of Avengers in the base if you want to keep this up for a while, since a single Avenger will be in repairs for almost a month after destroying a Battleship (remember to transfer the crews to undamaged ones).

I find this to be a valid alternative to waylaying Supply Ships for Elerium (allowing the prompt destruction of the associated bases). By the time you have Avengers and Fusion Ball Defences, money and points are largely irrelevant, though it can still be fun to see five-digit scores at the end of a month.

Good trick. It highlights the fact that Retaliation mission logic is dumb and inflexible, which is a design flaw. Also that Battleships are too weak (I made some suggestions on my Talk page for making them tougher )

Would you add this to the Exploits section do you think? Spike 20:25, 11 February 2012 (EST)

It's a much more minor exploit than most of the ones on that page. Supply Ship piracy is just as exploitative, it's just better known. Where would it go, anyway? Magic9mushroom 01:53, 12 February 2012 (EST)