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[GiglameshDespair]

It is explicitly stated that the aliens in nucom weren't doing an all-out attack... they're not trying to destroy or straight-out conquer humanity.

Yes I know NuCom's story. I know they were trying to challenge humanity in order to force them to evolve and unlock their potential.

Yet their plans had so many ways it could have just failed and only succeeded because the Xcom had the bad assest commander ever born.

...And if XCOM loses then you just get XCom 2. The aliens take a different path. Not, perhaps, the one they wanted to take, but they can switch gears without too much of an issue.

So their plan is low risk in that aspect. If XCOM won or XCOM lost, right up until the end it was win-win for the aliens. It was only when you board their ship they realise things might have gone awry, and even then the Uber Ethereal seems pretty confident in himself right until you put a blaster bomb through his helmet.

The information about the alien's motives and origins in X-Com: the aliens have a base on Mars in Cydonia (cunningly hidden beneath the huge face and pyramids, where no one would possibly look). The aliens are part of an interstellar empire (from the loss screen). If you lose, humanity is exterminated, Earth is rekt'd, and the survivors are mutated slaves. The end.

There is a bit more then that. Mars as you find out has a large source of basically fuel. They didn't have a fuel for an all out attack, hence their staged attack.

Again, that's something never mentioned in game. The alien fuel reserves are not mentioned. We know it's mined on Mars, and since it's still being mined in Apocalypse, that suggests a not insignificant quantity remaining.

It's not like one setback completely unravels the aliens plans now and forever.

It is a pretty big setback... and one of many.

Just play the game and think to yourself how many things have to go right on missions for you to win... How many ways you can just outright lose.

Basically the Uber Ethereal was trying a desperate gambit.  But not straight up lying - they did want us.  They just didn't mean to wake us up (psionically) except in their labs.

Well not exactly. They did want us to "wake up" psionically. But they thought we would be at least on par with the Sectoid commanders. Yet when we finally unlocked our full potential we proved to have abilities far surpassing even their own.

See my first point. Just because the aliens had Plan A doesn't mean they didn't have Plan B.

[Culise]

Thanks Culise, I didn't really interpret the Temple Ship mission as a metaphor for the war...  But in retrospect it really looks like one.  I still suspect that the Ethereal was attempting last-minute diplomacy, but I better understand why people wouldn't.

I thought the Ethereal was basically just saying "We were trying to build a perfect being, and you have that potential.  If you don't kill us, we'll unlock that potential.

@Neonivek I guess that would explain why they drop so much meld, and the slow buildup of forces.  Still, they seem more than happy to win, particularly considering XCOM2.

That was pretty much my take on it as well.  The primary difference is that the "invasion was a test" hypothesis assumes that this stated desire was not simply a last-ditch attempt to bribe the people with guns trying to put plasma bolts through their heads, but that it was also the primary concept that shaped their invasion strategy to the extreme point where testing for the perfect being superseded actual reasonable military strategy.  Given that the aliens must be invading Earth and experimenting on captured humans for a reason, the idea that they came from the very beginning to find more genetic stock to create said perfect being is thus an appealing one, and one that would have informed all of their rules of engagement.  By contrast, ideas of an insular concept of superiority that caused them to consistently underestimate us militarily or a simple lack of actual resources on their part give alternate reasons for why they neglected to adopt certain military strategies without discounting the idea that the assessment and securing of a viable human genetic stock was the primary reason for the invasion and without requiring the assumption that said idea caused them to hold back in the name of a force level proportionate to the human threat level, but the former in itself doesn't explain why they don't go full disproportionate force much sooner once they realize the truth and the latter shifts the question away from "why are they holding back" to "why did they make the journey with such a pathetic force."

Gig does make an interesting point in that Ethereal-In-Chief is pretty confident even when you have half a dozen of Earth's finest facing off against (including him) half their number in Ethereals.  It could easily be a combination of "they can't harm us anyways" overconfidence and "all for SCIENCE" tiered experimentation, and even with an addition of "we'll do the experiments we actually have the resources to develop" lack of resources.  The theories aren't actually mutually exclusive, thinking on it more closely, and to some degree complement each other (they're short on resources because they're blithely self-confident during preparation of the expedition, and they're running the experiments so systematically because they "know" humans can't do anything to them anyways, so they may as well go through the whole process instead of simply knocking everything over and starting from scratch). 

[Neonivek]

Well the other "In all Fairness" that final mission was them basically throwing everything against you and once again... you have the bad assest commander in history.

X-Com 2 is basically "What if the Bad Assiest commander in all history never came... for a few years at least"

A lot of the problems with story telling in a videogame.

[a1s]

Is there a reason so many people seem sure that the EU aliens were "losing" on purpose?

How about all the Meld? Every mission has free Meld in it, which serves 0 purpose*. Except of course to fall into X-Com hands. And they way Vahlen and half a dozen science guys just figure it out over a particularly productive weekend? Does that not scream "plant" to you? Meld was the "devil's sword" that X-Com was to "wield". If they prove worthy.
(*)I can stretch my disbelief enough to assume it had a use during abductions, dubious though that may be. But that undamaged crates of Meld are just lying around a crash site? While, literally nothing else fell more than 10 feet away from the ships? Nope, it's just too much.

[Rolan7]

Actually that quote was me

Well, it's kinda weird that it's "destroyed" after a certain time limit, right?  But I think it emits a cloud of smoke as it seals up.  The sealing up part is weird, since XCOM could certainly bust it open.  Something happens after that timer, and my theory is that it releases the nanites in a cloud.

Edit: To seed the world with mutagen, basically.  For SCIENCE and all that.
Why would they have to land to spread nanites?  Because XCOM is a battlefield tactics game, basically.  Gameplay trumps story in some parts.  There's plenty of room for a soft-sci-fi excuse too.

And yeah, there are a lot of explanations for what happened.  I think that's a mark of an interesting story.  When there's plenty of information, but still multiple valid explanations, and they aren't mutually exclusive.

[Flying Dice]

Um. Apart from canon being that the Ethereals were pulling their punches because they wanted humanity to develop into a species of warrior-psykers? This is further supported by the indirect evidence of their force composition: Ethereals themselves are psionically powerful but physically weak, and each of their current slave races has a similar tradeoff, being potent either psionically or physically and terrible in the other domain. Humanity presented an opportunity to gather soldiers who were both.

Note also the key line used in reference to the Ethereals themselves:

We who failed to ascend as they thought we would...

, as well as the implication that the Uber Ethereal and their Temple Ship were a minor splinter group from a larger polity.

Also note the reference to "what lies ahead", a nebulous future threat.

If you're paying attention it's fairly self-evident that the Uber Ethereal was specifically attempting to groom humanity into the perfect soldier caste, and possibly develop individuals suitable for Ethereals to possess. It went wrong because the plan worked too well and humanity bootstrapped its way into victory.

[Rolan7]

Citation needed on it being "canon".  Sure, it's possible they were trying to train humanity through hardship, but I don't believe it.  Just to summarize the two main reasons, since I kinda went over this at length:

The psi-abductees prove they didn't need XCOM at all.  They made psi-humans before XCOM.  They then tried to use them to destroy XCOM, unless that was just another "test".  Which is still possible, but it's not my theory.

In XCOM2 the aliens crush XCOM outright, and they still get exactly what they want.  Which, I think, is abductees and volunteers to extract DNA from, and experiment on (ADVENT).

Also:
Shen was guessing
The Uber Ethereal had its back against a wall, and I don't think it even claimed that this was their plan explicitly.  Just explained the situation and made an offer.

[Flying Dice]

Dude. Listen to the dialogue.

I mean, sure you can hem and haw and try to split hairs, but at the end of the day the Uber Ethereal literally said the following at the very end when it knew it was defeated:

Behold the greatest failure... of the Ethereal Ones... we who failed to ascend as they thought we would.

We who were cast out. We who were doomed to feed on the Gift of lesser beings... as we sought to uplift them... to prepare them... for what lies ahead.

*After killing the Uber Ethereal in-game*
This is not your path! Not your purpose! You need our guidance to hone this power... without us, what are you?

That's about as clear-cut as it gets.

[Culise]

The issue, Flying, isn't that he isn't disputing the Ethereal motives for coming to Earth in the first place.  He's disputing that the Ethereals were pulling their punches because of those motivations, that the motivation led them to adopt a strategy of the tiered, sequential challenges to aid in the uplift of humanity.  He's pointing out, and though I disagree, not entirely unreasonably so, that if they had the means, they could have just come in and taken over by going full force right from the start and simply imposed their own systems of society and governance in order to gain full scope for fulfilling those motives as is implied in the four alien-captured psikers (Annette and the Furies) and, now, more explicitly spelled out by the consequences of an XCOM defeat in XCOM2.  Thus, he asserts that it is probable that they did not have the means at the time of their arrival to simply enforce a diktat upon the Earth, and by extension was prevented from building up such a force by XCOM. 

EDIT: Added a bit more.

[puke]

I mean, sure you can hem and haw and try to split hairs, but at the end of the day the Uber Ethereal literally said the following at the very end when it knew it was defeated:

Behold the greatest failure... of the Ethereal Ones... we who failed to ascend as they thought we would.

We who were cast out. We who were doomed to feed on the Gift of lesser beings... as we sought to uplift them... to prepare them... for what lies ahead.

Reminds me of Childhoods End.

Whats with all the fanciful conjecture?  Its all pretty cut and dried, spelled out in plain terms both in the game and in the publicity for the new game. 

The two dudes I quoted have it all sewn up.

Can we conjecture about other awful things?  Like how about if the Volunteer shows up in twoCom by popping into that dimension from a different timeline?  I find the plot and art direction of the new game sufficiently disappointing, that I wouldn't put such shenanigans past them.

they could have just come in and taken over by going full force right from the start

Says a man who overestimates the logical capabilities of the script writers.   Or maybe they only realized that too late, and twoCom is their "mea culpa" for their oversights in the previous plot.

[Rolan7]

Thanks for the quote, but it doesn't at all demonstrate that the aliens were holding back...  In XCOM 2 they won, which gave them plenty of time to harvest and experiment on humanity.  "Preparing" them.

Small point, they're really not talking about humans specifically in that second line.  They're talking about all the gifted races they've had to "feed on", their thrall races.  And sure enough, given time and resources in XCOM 2, they enhanced their Sectoids as well as much as their humans.  Even the non (barely?) gifted races under their control, like mutons.

But if the aliens weren't trying to crush XCOM, what's the explanation for XCOM 2?  They tried to prepare humanity, but were accidentally too rough?

We certainly didn't fail a significant test, because they still value our DNA to a crazy degree.  They're still genemodding humans, and didn't leave after abducting years of samples.  They must still think we hold the key for "what lies ahead".  They clearly didn't need XCOM to succeed...  Which is a simple explanation for why they apparently tried so hard to destroy XCOM.

Can we conjecture about other awful things?  Like how about if the Volunteer shows up in twoCom by popping into that dimension from a different timeline?  I find the plot and art direction of the new game sufficiently disappointing, that I wouldn't put such shenanigans past them.

Uuugh, I am really worried about that sort of possibility.  Though, maybe it's a red herring.  The big tweet just says that the Volunteer didn't die at the end of XCOM 1.  That doesn't mean they'll try to shoehorn them into XCOM 2.  It would have to be cross-timeline BS since XCOM definitely didn't get to psionics research.
https://twitter.com/solomonjake/status/535236820221841410

[Egan_BW]

Who says the ayys lost in XCOM1-won-verse?
They certainly left a legacy.

[Flying Dice]

Sorry, I misunderstood--

I'd thought that that part of the assertion had been self-evident. Yes, obviously on the one hand you have "game mechanics", but purely fluffwise we know the following:

1. They began with small, light, infrequent attacks using only their weakest troops. They slowly scaled up the threat level and intensity of their attacks over time.

2. Despite having psionic mind control which is demonstrably capable of functionally puppeteering human governments, they establish such holds on macroscopic power infrequently, slowly, and only in areas where XCOM repeatedly fails.

3. There aren't massive swaths of land completely overrun by Chryssalids, despite a certain mission demonstrating that it would be laughably easy to seed a few dozen locations with nascent hives.

4. Despite having a fleet apparently measured in scores if not hundreds of ships, the aliens launch them piecemeal, deploying only a few at a time, and scaling the threat similarly to their ground units.

5. As above, Meld Canisters. More specifically, their distribution. I think it's fair to argue that they're distributed intentionally to get Meld into human hands as part of the uplift process. Remember how Meld works? You get more when you've been doing poorly on missions and less when you've been doing well.

6. With the size of their fleet and the quality of their shipboard weapons, the aliens are easily capable of Independence Daying a few dozen major cities, which would undoubtedly make it easier to subdue humanity. They didn't.

7. Connected to 4 & 6: Early on, you've got four interceptors and shit weapons. If they just wanted to conquer Earth, why didn't they launch a few dozen ships every time you sent out an interceptor? It would be painfully simple to utterly shut down XCOM's early air game even with half a dozen fighters, never mind a battleship or ten.

Do I need to go on?

[Chiefwaffles]

I myself just like to think that they wanted to test humans at first, but at around halfway through or some other key point in XCOM's plot, started realizing that it wasn't such a great idea after all, but couldn't mobilize enough of their forces in time.

Because it feels rather disappointing to know that you only won because they let you.

[puke]

Smarter aliens with access to an interspeciated army would have run some good-cop / bad-cop false flag kind of shit.

Oh, I see you have a classic sectoid invasion here.  Let us, the benevolent etherials, help you out.  Unfortunately, were pathological pacifists and can't fight on your behalf, but we can offer this tasty tasty meld.

Sheesh, no wonder the dipshits weren't allowed to apotheosize.