UFO: Alien Invasion: Difference between revisions

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* [[Alien Invasion]] - [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|You read the title, right?]]

* [[Antimatter]] - Played with: Humans can barely make a few molecules at a time with the comtempory tech, while the aliens seem to be able to fill particle accelerator weapon magazines and spacecraft fuel cans with ''grams'' of it.

* [[Area 51]] - The icon for UFO Yard sites is stylised "'''51'''"

* [[Artificial Stupidity]] - Some aliens allow themselves to hide in places where grenades [[Death From Above|can be dropped on them]].

** And while they are at it, they often bunch up together allowing a single soldier to kill a number of them in a single turn, especially if you have explosive weapons or flamethrowers. Aliens also doesn't know how to pick up items from the ground, and if they run out of reloads, they will just stupidly walk around like an idiot unless they have a melee weapon.

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* [[Break Out the Museum Piece]]: Played with. All of the base designs, battle tactics, strategy, and organization are copied right out of the old PHALANX manuals and documents. However all the old equipment is replaced with the latest in 2084 technology.

* [[Combat Exclusive Healing]] - Medikits can only be used in battle, but are capable of healing wounds in a single turn which would require days of hospital time to recover from.

* [[Construct Additional Pylons]] - Not strictly unavoidable, but... there's no need to cover the whole planet in highly developed bases just to have radars and aircraft at hand, then chase down every UFO with interceptors that, after all, have limited range and high costs to risk. There are separate radar towers and missile batteries. Aliens eventually will notice radar signatures and launches and attack such places, but when it's not a base, it's trivial to replace. And the more decoys you got, the less likely they'd to choose a base as the target. However, [[Cap]] on external installations is rather low, and you still need to build more bases in order to build more of those.

* [[Curb Stomp Battle]]: In story the first few attempts to battle the aliens resulted in this... And we were the ones getting stomped. The first battle the soldiers didn't even know what they were fighting before they got wiped out.

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* [[Cut and Paste Environments~~|Cut And Paste Level Elements~~]] - Most of the battle maps tend to rely on pre-rendered sections of terrain being put together in different combinations, just like the original X-COM games.

* [[Death of a Thousand Cuts]] - If you're not careful, your combat teams will suffer this during periods of heavy alien activity - during particularly hectic periods there can be five or six missions every ''day'', and with no time for your troops to rest and recuperate between missions, all the little wounds add up surprisingly quickly.

* [[Dummied Out]] - Flashbangs, smoke grenades, and all incendiary weapons (minus the flamethrower) have disappeared from the human arsenal as of ~~the latest release~~ due to [http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=5943.msg47315;topicseen#msg47315 bugs]~~. There are plans to restore them, however - the~~ 2.4 ~~dev version~~ brings them back.

* [[Dummied Out]] - Flashbangs, smoke grenades, and all incendiary weapons (minus the flamethrower) have disappeared from the human arsenal for a while due to [http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=5943.msg47315;topicseen#msg47315 bugs]; 2.4 brings them back.

* [[Earthshattering Kaboom]]: Well not earth shattering but if the Antimatter Storage ever loses containment, kiss your base and a good dozen miles around it goodbye.

* [[Elite Mooks]] - Your forces are ''humanity's'' [[Elite Mooks]], the best and brightest soldiers culled from the elite elements of every nation's militaries and law enforcement agencies.

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** Note that there's also a small chance low-morale troops will go berserk and take out their rage on the ''enemy'', which usually turns out just as badly for you, because it generally results in them charging blindly into enemy fire. It's quite [[Badass]] if they survive, though.

** It's also possible for friendly or hostile soldiers to freeze up completely if their morale is low, cowering uselessly behind the nearest piece of cover.

* [[Energy Weapon]] - The somewhat [[Halo]]-esque looking plasma series of alien weapons.

* [[Energy Weapon]] - The [[Wave_Motion_Tuning_Fork|somewhat]] ''[[Halo]]''-esque looking plasma series of alien weapons.

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** [[Frickin' Laser Beams]] - Played about as accurately as man-portable lasers can be - they are ''extremely'' accurate <ref>sniper rifle (aimed shot) has 0.9 spread of basic assault rifle (aimed shot), laser rifle (''any'' mode) has 0.5</ref>, has good effective range <ref>equal to sniper rifle</ref>, but have relatively low damage <ref>equal to assault rifle</ref> and VERY low stopping power, and their beams can be scattered by smoke, fire and dust.

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*** Ditto for Particle Beam, except it is substantially more powerful, but slightly less accurate and subject to same penalty to fire and smoke.

* [[Fixed Damage Attack]] - The Needler guns.

* [[Flechette Storm]] - Riot shotgun on full auto sends downrange 7 loads of flechettes. Can be very messy.

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* [[Frickin' Laser Beams]] - Played about as accurately as man-portable lasers can be--they are ''extremely'' accurate but have relatively low damage and VERY low stopping power, and their beams can be scattered by smoke, fire and dust.

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** Ditto for Particle Beam, except it is substantially more powerful, but slightly less accurate and subject to same penalty to fire and smoke.

* [[Grid Inventory]] - Another carryover from the X-COM series, complete with the accompanying [[Inventory Management Puzzle]].

* [[Guns Akimbo]], [[Dual-Wielding]], or [[Sword and Gun]] - Can be done with some accuracy penalty. You can also dual wield a 2 handed weapon with a handgun, but you cannot fire the 2 handed weapon without the other hand free. Even if you only use pistols though, you still only able to fire the weapons one at a time. The only advantage of wielding 2 weapons is that you don't have to pull out the other weapon from your holster when you need it, which cost some TU (just think of the advantage of having a handgun in 1 hand and a kerrblade or stun rod on the other).

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* [[Infinity+1 Sword|Infinity Plus One Gun]] - The Coilgun in 2.3, though you need to obtain an alien needler in order to get it.

* [[Instant Home Delivery]] - You can sell equipment at one base and immediately buy it back at another for the same price. What makes this especially egregious is the fact that there's also a "Transfer" option that allows you to send equipment between bases, but this generally takes a few days, whereas selling-and-rebuying happens instantly.<ref>This has since been mitigated by introducing a slight price discrepancy between buying and selling, but the problem of instant delivery remains.</ref> New recruits (Scientists, Workers, and in recent build Pilots too, not just soldiers) are delivered instantly as well.

* [[Karl Marx Hates Your Guts]] - As of v.2.4 you can produce anything available on market, but making an item costs exactly as much as buying the same. It would make some sense if making an item ''and'' paying the workers was comparable, but it's not the case, so you either fire workers, suffer losses while they do nothing, or find something non-trivial to do. After some time, other parties begin producing th stuff you can build, too.

** Speaking of Marxism, the reserve of most items on market is ridiculously low (the whole Earth's supply are below ''X-Com Apocalypse'' levels!), and only thing production of non-exclusive items does is... eliminating deficites. So if you burn some ammunition faster than it can be supplied, or want to keep the stock as off-site reserves, an idling workshop suddenly becomes useful.

* [[Kill It with Fire]] - Flamethrowers are deadly against most aliens since their armors, while good against bullets can barely protect them from the flames. It is also one of the two starting weapons, the other being Grenade Launcher, that continue to be useful until the end. The only weaknesses are limited range, heavy weight (which precludes weaker soldiers from using it without a heavy speed penalty), and its rather bulky ammunition.

* [[Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better]] - Played with. Although bullets are quite good against unprotected alien flesh, alien armor does a disturbingly good job protecting its wearer against gunpowder-accelerated projectiles, and as such by the mid-game the vast majority of the standard human arsenal will be obsolete. The grenade launcher and the flamethrower remain useful for the entire game, as the former can be adapted to fire a cartridge version of the alien plasma grenades and the latter is a cheap way to light things on fire, but they aren't technically firearms.

* [[Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better]] - Played with. Although bullets are quite good against unprotected alien flesh, and flechettes are even better, alien armor does a disturbingly good job protecting its wearer against gunpowder-accelerated projectiles, and as such by the mid-game the vast majority of the standard human arsenal will be obsolete. The grenade launcher and the flamethrower remain useful for the entire game, as the former can be adapted to fire a cartridge version of the alien plasma grenades and the latter is a cheap way to light things on fire, but they aren't technically firearms.

* [[Leeroy Jenkins]] - Some alien crafts appear to behave this way in recent builds, charging blindly towards vastly superior enemy forces rather than running away.

* [[Magnetic Weapons]] - The Bolter rifle, the alien Needler, and the Coilgun from the v2.3 release.

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* [[More Dakka]] - The human grenade launcher has a burstfire setting. Also, the plasma blaster is powerful and rapid-fire, but has terrible accuracy, putting it squarely under this trope.

** The Needler is pretty much the epitome of this. Instead of normal sniper weapon which fire single powerful slugs, this one actually go the other way around by spamming hundreds of small needles instead.

** The human machine gun is, ~~[[Captain Obvious|~~obviously]], rather good at this, making it an extremely useful suppression weapon in the early to mid game.

** The human machine gun is, obviously, rather good at this, making it an extremely useful suppression weapon in the early to mid game. Its range is the same as for assault rifle, the stated damage is only marginally better, but penetration is ''visibly'' better and 20 bullets at e.g. 5% hit probability give 64% total; scoring more than one hit becomes likely too - which is good, since Tamans rarely keel over from just one bullet.

* [[Multinational Team]] - The game's code even tracks them by nationality, although there's no indicator of country of origin in the interface yet.

* [[Obvious Beta]]: Justified because, well, it's still a beta. Remember, save early, save often!

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** Also several times he will also realized just how technologically advanced they are compared to us.

* [[Pistol-Whipping]] - You can bludgeon aliens with your guns in recent 2.3 updates, though proper melee weapons will do a better job.

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* [[Randomly Generated Levels]]/[[Cut and Paste Environments]]/ - Most of the battle maps tend to rely on pre-rendered sections of terrain being put together in different combinations, just like the original X-COM games.

* [[Relationship Values]] - For each of the multinational power blocs funding your organization. Their happiness with you influences the amount of money you receive and the number and quality of recruits you're given - a nation that barely tolerates you will give you barely any money, and either very crappy troops or no troops at all, while a nation that loves you will shower you in money and give you the best and brightest men they can find.

* [[RPG Elements]] - Your soldiers have a series of stats and skills that improve with use.

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** Averted later with the Antimatter specs. The Chief Science Officer says at one point about current antimatter production on Earth "That may sound like a lot Commander but it would take us 80 million years to make a gram of antimatter at the current rates."

* [[Short-Range Long-Range Weapon]] - The sniper rifle from earlier build appears to be unusually inaccurate even if it is used in what is normally Assault Rifle range. Fixed in newer build. Laser weapons are exact opposite as even the pistols are deadly accurate at long range, but they don't do much damage to compensate it.

* [[Short-Range Shotgun]] - Largely averted. The riot shotgun has decent range--if not necessarily great stopping power at maximum range--with flechette shells, and can alternately be loaded with slug rounds. The micro shotgun is a bit truer to this trope, though.

* [[Short-Range Shotgun]] - Largely averted. The riot shotgun has decent range - if not necessarily great stopping power at maximum range - with flechette shells, and can alternately be loaded with slug rounds. The micro shotgun sidearm is a bit truer to this trope, though.

* [[Shown Their Work]]: All over the place. It helps that anything wrong will quickly be pointed out in the forums.

* [[Shout-Out]] - The Plasma Pistol looks a LOT like ''[[Halo]]'''s plasma rifle.

* [[Spiritual Successor]] - To [[X-COM]], of which it is basically a direct remake (the ''weapon progression'' is ~~even~~ ~~the same~~) and somewhat to the ''[[UFO Afterblank]]'' games.

* [[Spiritual Successor]] - To [[X-COM]], of which it is basically a direct remake (the ''weapon progression'' is similar, too) and somewhat to the ''[[UFO Afterblank]]'' games.

* [[Standard FPS Guns]] - This is not an FPS game, but the weapons appear to have this idea, one for each family of weapons. It's actually [[Shown Their Work|justified in-story]] - a program called 'Excalibur' was instituted that selected a range of different weapons from throughout the world in various different classes, collecting the best weapons humanity has to offer and providing them to your troops in a standardized form.

* [[Standard Status Effects]] - What the flashbang does, the aliens don't have them since they don't care about stunning or collateral damage anyway.

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* [[Wave Motion Tuning Fork]] - Plasma weapons ''appear'' to work on this principle based on their shapes, but [[All There in the Manual|reading the in-game UFOpaedia entries on them]] reveals that the plasma itself is actually generated internally, and the 'tuning fork' assembly is actually a pair of spinnerets which generate a thin film of an advanced plastic-like material to (briefly) contain the plasma, thus forming it into a projectile.

* [[We Have Reserves]] - It is possible to play like this, but unlike in ''[[X-COM]]'', this strategy is strongly discouraged in this game due to the limited number of recruits available per month (especially on harder difficulty) and the bad starting stats of new recruits. You have to train them and keep them alive.

* [[With This Herring]] - At last, averted. Not only you immediately get weapons both quite lethal (until aliens start wearing good armor, at least) and ''convenient'' enough to give everyone, but also armor decent enough to make [[One-Hit Kill]] with the weakest of common alien weapons very unlikely... Oh, and you can build useful installations other than bases. Recruiting stil can be a problem, though - as in, on medium difficulty when you'll build the second laboratory, there won't be enough of scientists to quite fill it.