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Table of Contents
Torque Tycoon > Game Components
Ambushes
An ambush is an enemy group that appears ahead of a cargo flight in an insecure region, on open ground or a road near a village or known site along the route. It sets up some way down your course and outside the range of its own guns, so the first thing that happens is not a hit. No enemy ground unit is ever placed close enough to a Tycoon landing pad for an approach to fly into one. Its likelihood and strength depend on regional Security. Unrest makes ambushes more likely, heavier and more frequent in its region, and a region-wide unrest also raises the risk in the neighbouring regions. The group threatens the cargo route rather than creating a guaranteed exact marker on the map.
You are warned about 20 seconds before the group appears. The warning names the settlement you are flying towards and the bearing to it, so there is time to turn away, climb, route around it or call for an escort. If the aircraft carries no heading, or there is no known place ahead to name, the warning still comes but without a direction.
Damage taken while carrying cargo reduces its delivered value. A shoot-down drops loaded crates at the crash site, where they can often be recovered unless destroyed. If an ambush ends with the transport surviving and no enemy killed, the region loses Security.
After an ambush, you get a breather before the next one finds you. The pause follows the pilot, not the airframe, so flying home and respawning in another aircraft does not clear it. The region has a pause of its own, shortened while it is in Unrest. AI transports have no pilot behind them, so for them the pause follows the aircraft.
AI transports defend themselves and use flares, but continue their route instead of pursuing attackers. Player escorts can protect both player and AI cargo flights. Any available threat information follows the Enemy Detection rules: a raw bearing cone has no range, while a sufficiently strong multi-station fix may appear as a bounded area or calculated point.