Aliens everywhere! Am I the only one...

[Roxlimn]

Ah. That's why. In my previous games, my boats were getting attacked outta nowhere with no prior instigation on my part. In my most recent game, I didn't use boats at all - just explorers, and I was able to trade right through all the aliens swarming my land. No issues. Once I did the Ultrasonic Fence quest, though - it was open season.

 

[BroOfTheSun]

re: Aquatic Aliens, by my experience green Krakens will attack anything on their way, but it's rather unpredictable. Sometimes it will move towards your embarked explorer. Sometimes it won't move towards your gunboat.

Other green aquatic aliens will only attack your boats and units which are close to nests. The trick is that "close" isn't two tiles away, a lot of people seem to think it. "Close" is X tiles away, where X is the number of moves of the unit in question. This works in land too; your marine parked three tiles away from a nest won't be attacked, but your combat rover will. So your patrol boats that are four tiles away from a nest will annoy the aliens and will be attacked. This also holds for boats up to four tiles away from land-locked nests.

That sorta makes exploring the seas with embarked explorers slower, but safer; there will be times when you will be super-careful with your boats, moving them one tile a time, and they'll end the turn four tiles away from a nest inside the fog of war, somewhere you haven't explored yet, two rippers and two dragons will emerge from nowhere and eat it, and you'll be, like, "WTH?"

I'm not sure about this. In my games, I frequently move explorers and other units through alien territory (close to nests), even on top of nests, and they weren't attacked. In these cases, I also haven't attacked or done any damage to alien units that would cause alien aggression. I've even moved unguarded colonists close to a nest or basic alien unit, and they weren't attacked (the colonist was only at risk for one turn before I founded an outpost). So I don't think distance to an alien nest is the only factor in the equation, when determining if aliens will attack your units. Part of it is also if you've attacked the aliens. Once you've attacked aliens, I think they will attack based on how close you are to the nest. However, aliens mostly hang out by their nests. So we may just be noticing alien attacks more when closer to nests since they are there.

What I've found in my experience, is that if you don't attack the aliens, they won't attack you (with exception to colossal aliens such as krakens or worms). You can move explorers, even unguarded workers/colonists (if you're feeling brave) near basic aliens, and they won't attack you. This doesn't apply once you've started to piss them off or attack them. Colossal aliens seem to be the exception. Krakens and worms will pillage/destory anything in their tile, whether you piss off the aliens or not. I try to avoid putting any units at risk of being destoryed by colossal aliens. Sometimes a Kraken won't kill my explorer that's within range of it, if I haven't started attacking the aliens yet.

I also noticed that settling cities adds to alien aggression. I played a game where after settling several cities, aliens turned orange on me. I didn't attack any aliens or pillage any nests. So the act of settling the cities added to alien aggression. I can't remember if this is a base CivBE feature or something new with BERT.

 

[WiseGreen]

I didn't test the "never attack the aliens" thing yet, so I don't know for sure. But I assume that once you fire your first shot what I said above becomes true.

 

[BroOfTheSun]

I didn't test the "never attack the aliens" thing yet, so I don't know for sure. But I assume that once you fire your first shot what I said above becomes true.

I agree with that. Just wanted to add more to the discussion. I usually don't attack the aliens until I'm ready, meaning I have the farming virtues/traits and army ready to go. So you can take advantage of their passivity until you are ready.