Quote:
Originally posted by another_guest+Mar 27 2005, 08:04 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (another_guest @ Mar 27 2005, 08:04 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Juan Rayo@Mar 27 2005, 05:11 AM
... even if I loose the USA.* and If they get a base there, well, it would be close enough to AmeriCOM so I can shoot down their suply ships! So I can maybe turn this to my favor...
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I've always had the impression the alien bases are always (meaning: even if you start a new game) at the same locations.
What I don't know is how many alien bases there are at the start, whether they're building more in the course of time, or if they just stick to the bases they started with?
What I mean is, I wouldn't know if they build any bases in countries they've "conquered". [/b][/quote]
I don't know if they're static or not, but in my last game, it took me a while to get Psi Labs without which I refused to assault several Sectoid bases: one in the Arctic circle, one on Cuba or one of those islands nearby, one in Siberia north of China, and one on an island south of New Zealand or something. There have also been bases in Europe and in the USA before. I shot down and assaulted so many supply UFOs and took out some Snakeman bases that despite the large number of alien bases, I still got extremely positive scores each month. You get points just for shooting down UFOs, and I think you get penalized for not visiting crash sites, so sometimes I would shoot down an Ethereal UFO, send a crew over, then take off immediately to get zero points.
Anyway, like I posted a while back, alien bases aren't hard if you just gather your troops in the green rooms and camp the grav lift, waiting for aliens to go to you. This doesn't work if you don't have psi-resistant soldiers and they are fighting Sectoids and Ethereals, hence my avoidance of those Sectoid bases until I could assemble a large squad of psi-resistant soldiers.
Periodically check the UFO Activity graphs to see if there are any spikes; if there are spikes in a region, send a Skyranger to patrol that region for several hours to find the alien base(s).
But so what if you lose some points for alien bases? XCOM sponsors only pay something like 6 million at first, and even if they keep raising it by a million per month, selling alien alloys, corpses, etc. nets you way more in all but the first month or two. And once you get a few hundred engineers and sell laser cannons (or laser rifles or medikits if you haven't gotten laser cannon tech), the cash flow from XCOM sponsors will be almost irrelevant.
Plus, you need to stun an alien Commander at some point, so you HAVE to let the aliens have at least one base.