Does this game have a time limit?

[Captain Kirk]

Without giving spoilers..
In the new X-COM 2 there's a time limit where the aliens build a project and you lose if they finish it. Is there something present in this game, where there's always a time clock towards defeat?

[Colonel Sanders Lite]

No, not really.

You will eventually lose all the funding nations (except russia) as they are infiltrated 1 by 1, but that doesn't really matter. By the time that happens, funding from nations is really just a drop in the bucket.

[Starving Poet]

Yup, just a soft timer with the infiltrations, but the nations aren't considered a win / loss condition.

You can only lose for three reasons:
1. Failing the final mission
2. Losing all your bases
3. Two consecutive months of negative score / debt. The specific numbers are based on difficulty.

[Starving Poet]

Nothing you do will stop an alien infiltration mission from succeeding once it starts. You can delay each wave by up to a week or so by shooting down all the UFOs, but they will eventually finish. As soon as the last wave of the infiltration missions spawns, the country leaves.

Shooting down every single ufo has no effect on the success of the mission, just how long it takes to succeed.

And as soon as that infiltration mission finishes, it will generate a guaranteed new infiltration mission in the same region the following month.

[Starving Poet]

It's all a matter of RNG - the goods news is that alien infiltrations have lots of waves and huge built-in delays between the early ones - on *average* they take 38 days to complete one infiltration (18-56 days with RNG) AND you can add a number of weeks on top of that by shooting down every wave before the next one appears. The last few are tricky because they happen every 60 minutes, but it's possible to have a single infiltration take almost four months to complete.

[Empiro]

My understanding of the mission generation isn't complete, but as far as I can tell, it's actually impossible for you to lose all the countries to infiltration. The game has I think 8 regions (basically one for every continent + arctic), and a bunch of different missions (like scouting, infiltration, attacks, etc.).

Each region, mission pair has a weight that determines how likely it is to come up. Every month, one or two missions are selected from this table, but once a mission is selected the weight is set to 0, so that combination can never be chosen again. This means that there can never be more than 8 infiltration missions (I think it's actually less because you can't have an Antarctica Infiltration), and there are more countries in the game than that.

[Starving Poet]

Originally posted by Empiro:

My understanding of the mission generation isn't complete, but as far as I can tell, it's actually impossible for you to lose all the countries to infiltration. The game has I think 8 regions (basically one for every continent + arctic), and a bunch of different missions (like scouting, infiltration, attacks, etc.).

Each region, mission pair has a weight that determines how likely it is to come up. Every month, one or two missions are selected from this table, but once a mission is selected the weight is set to 0, so that combination can never be chosen again. This means that there can never be more than 8 infiltration missions (I think it's actually less because you can't have an Antarctica Infiltration), and there are more countries in the game than that.

Not quite -

Each mission rolls independently for each region. The thing with infiltrations is that as soon as an infiltration mission completes, it immediately generates a new one in that region. I think the code that keeps track of where missions run is really only used for Synomium Sites in TFTD, but I could be misremembering that part.

The reason you can't lose every country is a bug with Russia because of how it spans regions on the globe.

[easytarget]

Is the infiltration a base you can take out or is this the infiltration of the gov't of that country and losing it means it's gone forever?

[Starving Poet]

In vanilla, gone forever. There are certain OXCE mods that allow you to get them back.

[easytarget]

Thanks once again for responding. One follow on question immediately comes to mind. I see a mod section on the openxcom page with subscribe buttons, how does clicking on one load it into the install I have on my system?

[Starving Poet]

on mod.io? It doesn't. It subscribes you to the news feed for those mods so you know if / when they get updates.

[easytarget]

Ah, OK. Makes sense. Thanks.