Talk:Battlescape

It's true, victory is subjective. Just a quick - well, a long-ish word on victory.

Technically speaking, dusting off from a site that's still manned with aliens can also be counted as a success if you were able to get whatever it was in the battle that you came for (be it experience, an abduction of a really difficult alien (such as an Ethereal without the convenience of the Psi Lab), capturing a certain weapon, etc). What you do not win is the loot outside the Skyranger and the UFO Alloys and its remaining components.

A fine example of this is Zombie's patented Smash-And-Grab technique with alien bases, where a base is raided, one alien is left alive and the rest are dealt with. Once cleared, all the equipment (and corpses) are then carted to the entry platforms and all troops head back to the entry points and the dust off command is issued.

The mission will read as a failure, but the score, experience and loot will reflect a successful mission. As it is a base and the victory condition for the base destruction has not yet been met (destruction of the command tables or all aliens), the base will remain on the map.

Other missions types are a lot less permanent and tend to vanish (crash sites/terror sites) or take off (intact UFOs).

So, don't read in too much to the status on the tally screen. Let the score, experience and goods that you were able to come away with tell you whether you've won, or lost.

- NKF