In Progress X-Piratez! Ironman! No spoilers! Oldschool X-COM Total Conversion with mutant amazon pirates. Death to the star gods!

[Damned Registrations]

I'm absolutely in love with this mod. If you're familiar with it, skip this spoilered bit, it's going to cover some basics. If you've never heard of it before and are too lazy to read about it elsewhere, well heres the rundown:

Newbie Info

So what is this: A total conversion of the 1994 X-Com that completely changes the game. Earth was conquered 400 years ago and we are a group of escaped uber mutant women fighting THE MAN. We start with a civillian craft, a raygun, a derelict ship, an ancient lab we don't know how to use properly, and some antique weaponry. We'll need to bootstrap outselves out of the stoneage through a combination of looting, interrogations, research and making allies.

What is the game mechanically:

It's based on open X-Com Extended, and is basically that same old X-Com engine, with some QoL features. So we've got all the good stuff like the geoscape, aircraft interceptions, mission scores that influence our income, ballistic modeled accuracy, and some cool extra stuff. Some of it might be from the later 90's entries, I never did try Terror in the Deep and such.

Content wise, we're looking at a truly staggering amount. Weapons range from thrown coconuts and pointy sticks to nuclear powered flamethrowers, stasis grenades that heal while stunning, rocket launcher sized chain-shotguns, and plenty of alien tech and some magic gear too. There are over a dozen FACTIONS of enemies, each with multiple units within. Rat men, government officials, human and uber pirates, rival pirates, zombies, chemical warfare organ harvesters, trader guilds, researchers, alien worshippers, aliens themselves, hybrids... and more. Like at least twice what I listed and I've barely scratched the game.

New mechanics include some melee deflection stuff (you can walk up and shotgun a tank at point blank, but not a knife fighter) freshness (a strong incentive to finish battles quickly and not just bring everyone to every mission) mutually exclusive tech options that can influence what we can recruit and what missions we can do, a merit award system that can make our veterans into ridiculous supersoldiers with ungodly stat totals leaning towards the role they've fulfilled, multiple recruitable races with different stats, armour options, and mission elegibility. Many vehicles function as armour and therefore piggyback character stats. We can ride giant hyenas into battle. The traditional vehicle system is used for things like expendible animal minions. Which is not all the animal minions, because we can name dogs and have them gain stats and armour! And more stuff I either forgot or don't know about.

If you've got a good question throw it at me and I'll put the answer in here.

So, despite the title, I'm not totally blind to the game. I've done a few runs already, all spectactular failures. This next bit is going to be an overview of what I've done so far. So if you're new and don't want spoilers, skip this part. If you've played before, it'll give you an idea of my experience level and what you can remind me of that won't be a spoiler.

Failure History

So I've done probably a dozen runs that failed in the first 2 months, and 2 that have lasted about 2-3 years. One was with the grey codex, though I never really got voodoo up and running before dying (just a lame wand of fire and a mind probe) I did get some cool gnome ships, and repaired the sparkling hull into a war machine. Got to see a space station, had a ton of tech that hadn't led anywhere yet relating to zombies and voodoo and other stuff, but had somehow never gotten the library unlocked. Got stomped by sectopods and rocket wielding t-rexes. Took Gal superiority and had an army of stealthy snipers and a couple ogres in masterblaster armour.

Second decent run I tried without hull/drill. Confirmed to myself that this option gives you the dutchman hull and a pile of gnomes. Not sure what other benefits it might have, but my takeaway was that if I did that again I'd sell off all but 1 gnome and try get a monstrous early tech/resources lead. I instead recruited all the gnomes, which never really helped me out because they seem to be kind of shit at combat and I didn't field them for fear of getting them killed. But I didn't get to the missions they'd be good for either, like the underground caverns or stealth missions. Meh. This run just kind of fizzled out because I kept losing people and couldn't unlocked chainmail for some reason (no don't tell me why.) Also I had taken the 'male touch' tech path, which seems pretty lame since slave soldiers are basically just peasants with better morale. Never got hunting dogs as the tech implied and while the trucks might have been nice, I never really used them due to slow speed. Also, Jack and his slot machines screwed me! Barely got any of his tokens and got no decent rewards from the ones I spent. Urgh.

If you want your name immortalized as cannon fodder, go ahead and ask. I'll even try to accomadate particular unit types if you want to be a sniper, ninja, catgirl, ogre, dude, dog, attack helicopter (not just a joke!) or whatever. But be warned that not all races are equal, and the ubergals are by far the best units early on. The others tend to require some tech to even the playing field, and even then probably won't be a match for our veteran amazon babes. Good chance anything smaller than an ubergal will get unceremoniously knocked off but something I've never seen before within a dozen missions. I'll post the statblocks for the races as I unlock them in case that's helpful.


Alright, now onto the setup. Before I really get this rolling, we need to make a few choices. The first is where our first base is going to be:

Places

I'm not going to show the entire globe, but all the nations are listed between those two screenshots. Starting location matters a lot but for different reasons than vanilla x-com. Many, many missions take place in cities. So being near those will give us more access to city missions early on than being out in the desert somewhere. OTOH, fighting enemy crews landed in a jungle or forest is a bitch compared to when they land in a nice open wasteland. Being near cities also influences the air traffic near us; there'll be a ton more and of higher quality than out in the boonies. We won't be able to shoot down most of it for a long time, only the really crap stuff like bandit zeppelins. Lastly, the starting nation tends to give some sort of boon to us when we start. Might be a squad of kickass slave soldiers, a steady supply of mininukes (that we have to pay for) a pile of slaves, access to ninja gear, etc. I've honestly got no idea what is optimal (though the one that gives nukes seemed especially hard) so vote for wherever the hell you want. You can also just pick a real world location, and a bunch of area isn't within the borders of a nation so we'll just get some free tech.

Choice two: We start with a derelict hull of alien origin. We can choose to try salvage it or just sell it off. If we salvage is there will be a further branching option later, and they are pretty cool. Selling it would give us a huge nest egg to start with and a head start on some tech that can be hard to get.

Choice three: We have to pick which faction we'll be recruiting from primarily. If we pick ubergals, we'll be able to recruit more at the black market. They're pricey early on, but also very, very strong compared to mere mortals. If we pick peasants, we'll get access to better human female milita and some sort of political rebellion arc. Never really took this option very far, so I'm not sure what benefits it offers in the long run, but they do get used for some stealth missions and the like. Lastly, we can pick access to male soldiers. Again, these are just normal humans, but they're better fighters than the women and give us access to an armored truck transport early on, which is slow but carries more than our starter craft and has a turret. Regardless of these choices, we can recruit any of them anyways from random encounters and converted prisoners and such. But that's a very limited supply depending on our luck. Peasant women are also always availible, as well as the goblin people, gnomes, and catgirls and ogres eventually. And probably more. Sectoid hybrids were in one of my runs, making good snipers.

Pseudo choice four: What kind of weaponry should we lean into? I'm partial to snipers and melee myself, but pistols, bows, thrown weapons, smgs, grenades, artillery, machine guns and such are all options as well. If there's a consensus I should go for mass machine gunners or something I'll give it a shot.

Edit: Can't believe I forgot to mention these, but I'm going to be playing on the 3rd difficulty setting, with ironman saves.

 

[std::namespace]

Starting location matters a lot but for different reasons than vanilla x-com. Many, many missions take place in cities. So being near those will give us more access to city missions early on than being out in the desert somewhere.

Werent the missions just randomly rolled at the 1st of the month from a pool of available ones (location didnt matter, research progress did)? Has this changed? You can see it in your save imho.

peasants

They used to get psy stuff later like ubers, with equal stats to ubers. Nice wizards.

I wanna see the Green Codex. Ubers. Call my bitch Masochist Slut, melee only.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Does this game still have stunrods? If so, sign me up for stunrod duty. If not, sign me up for the nearest equivalent to stunrod duty.

Let's sell the alium tech so we don't immediately die. Also, this being the Codex we absolutely cannot have any disgusting womynz on the front lines, so I vote male soldiers.

You say we can always pick up catgirls later, so that'll be us taken care of.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'll definitely be watching this. Love XPiratez but I really don't have the fortitude to stick to a game of X-Com for a year, fail, and then immediately start again knowing the "meta" to get ahead. And playing other games at the same time makes it very hard to keep all the piratez stuff well in mind.

Sign me up.

 

[Modron]

I never actually played X-piratez so I am going to vote for somewhere near Jerusalem, recruit bandits, and pursue the male touch tech tree.

 

[overtenemy]

If you get any

Spoiler

heroes or zone stalkers

I suggest they be named after the saints Dioxine, Cleve and Pierre. May they deliver us from the faggots.

 

[oasis789]

reporting for duty

1. euro start in blackmarch

2. salvage

3. men!

 

[Damned Registrations]

We're underway!

There's a lotta pictures under here.

Here's our base layout:

If you've played X-COM before, you'll realize it's absolute shit. If you've played the mod, you'll realize it's even worse than that, because 4 of those tiles are god damned rubble we'll need to clear away before we can build there and one is a cavern enemies can enter through. But starting with a custom base feels like cheating so it's what we'll work with.

Here's the location of our glorious rubble filled cavern. We're pretty central so we should witness a ton of intercity civilian traffic we can shoot down if we decide to go that route. Unfortunately, it means I'll be clicking through a trillion warning about that traffic too. Ah well.

Much like the previous post, this one is going to have some explanation type rambling in it's own little spoilered section. So skip this bit if you've played before.

WTF is this shit?!

I'm going to assume you're an uncultured savage that has never even played X-COM before, because it won't add that much to the info dump anyways. I'm also not going to try to be thorough, because the game is too huge and complex for that. If you've got questions, ask!

The gist of the game is that we have a strategic level, where we influence the world, and a tactical level, where we shoot people. There's a whole explanation of our background in the in game intro, but I'm too lazy to take that many screenshots. Here's a link to it on youtube, with some of the game's excellent music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBBnv4UvZQ

TLDR: We're escaped labrats, and we're going to do whatever we want. And we want to kill people and take their stuff.

We can research stuff,

Buy stuff (and this has a nice QoL feature where we can hide stuff so I don't have to scroll past pitchforks every time I want to buy guns)

and manufacture stuff, either for our own use or to sell at a profit. Torches aren't terribly profitable, but even this gets us nearly a 2 to 1 return on the wages of our runts.

There is an in game encyclopedia. Probably the biggest one in any game ever made. And it's full of cheesecake. And words. So many words.

I won't be posting all of these, because there are hundreds, possibly thousands. But I'll post a bunch I think are fun or relevant.

It's actually so large the TABLE OF CONTENTS won't fit on a single page. There's like 3 more topics under that.

This one is "Tools of the Trade"

Individual weapon entry.

And we can even go deeper:

There's another entry for the ammo too, because of course there is.

Here's a list of hideout structures. We can't necessarily build these, but we know their stats and probably something about what we would need to build them. We also don't have all the structures in our base listed here. Just because we own a thing doesn't mean we get it's entry. Often we'll need to research it first, and often we'll need prerequisite tech to do that.

Alright, enough of the explanatory crap. I'll probably do a few more of these but they'll hopefully be shorter in the future. Again, feel free to ask about stuff you want to know or just details you want to see.

So I buy a few bandages and set our initial 3 brainers to work to the bottom of the tech tree. We'll have to wait about a day before we unlock the black market proper so we can buy the starter gear I want for-

Well fuck me, that was insanely fast. Hasn't even been 24 hours yet.

We're going in ladies! This might be ill advised, since I have no ideal what kind of ship it is besides 'very small' and that it had a top speed of 800. You can do some metagamey shit to figure out which ships are which even this early, but I can't be arsed. Besides, it's very, very likely to be the academy looking to recapture us.

Our glorious warriors. We, uh, don't have proper clothing yet. And our equipment is mostly assorted pirate crap and literal trash. It's fine!

Also, let me know if you guys prefer the full size screenshots, the thumbnail versions, or a mix depending on if it's full of tiny words. Also, any tips on how to make the game look significantly better. There are like 200 filters (I'm fine with the pixels but I'll apply one if there's a consensus) and the resolutions seem to screw up the UI scaling if I change them. But I'm probably just missing a trick.

Behold, the battlefield:

It's, uh, night time. Fortunately, we have mutant eyeballs with nightvision. We can actually see enemies at 12 tiles to a human's 9 in dark conditions. And we can see terrain out much further than that.

Speaking of enemies, we have 2 right here. We landed very close indeed.

As I thought, it's a squad sent to reclaim us. Luckily, they're practically unarmed. This one's just got a bat and the other a cattle prod.

Open fire!

I, uh, didnt realize the molov is a 2x2 area that spreads north of where you aim. No matter, we'd rather take her alive anyways.

A third inside the ship behind the door. This one has a crappy rifle. Time to send in our best melee fighter to subdue them.

Welp, those cattle prods work pretty well. Acadamy nurses are pretty shit all around, but their reactions aren't the worst, and we're all still pretty green. And using terrible gear.

Manatee had better luck however, and managed to take out the rifle user with bare hands and dodge the cattle prods on the enemy turn. Two handed weapons like rifles tend to be basically hopeless in melee and the lower level enemies are too dumb to walk away before trying to fire, so sticking a melee fighter next to a ranged enemy, even if you've got no TU's left to attack, can be a powerful tactic.

Another nurse approached from out in the darkness here. Oasis will take her out with fists too, no sense wasting that ammo on a harmless target with a bat or prod.

Enemies also suffer a huge evasion penalty (50% by default) when attacked from behind, as well as lowered ability to reaction fire. Manatee manages to take this one out as well.

Yet another nurse over here behind the rocks. In retrospect, I should take a screenshot zoomed out to show the overall battlescape.

This one had a smaller club and a tiny laser pistol. Luckily we only took a single shot before taking her down.

Pretty much a perfect result! We don't need the infamy right now, but each point gives us 333$ at the end of the month when it resets. Captures tend to give about 50% more score than kills, with some exceptions.

And we can do stuff with our captives! Like ransom them for money. Not the best option in the long run, but probably our best bet at the moment. Also, another nice QoL feature here: anything we sell 100% of in the post battle loot screen, is automatically flagged to be sold in all future battles too. So I don't need to manually sell the vendor trash each time. We got some nice stuff here besides the nurses too. The stun baton one had is actually important for our research, the engine is worth a lot of money right now, and medical supplies will be important later and hard to get.

Some stat gains. Sadly 2 of us missed out on the xp, but I'm just glad nobody took major injuries.

oasis789 Has been declared Best Girl apparently. It's based on a bunch of factors, mostly mission participation but also stats and kills.

We get titles too! These are a special system in the game that get awarded depending on actions in battles. Like being unconscious or getting injured... uh hopefully we get better ones next time.

Well, an extra hp for a point of Freshness isn't a bad trade, per se. And yes, these can stack copies up to a point. Some can be gained multiple times in a single battle.

Could definitely have turned out much worse. But the risk paid off, we'll be able to afford more runts to kickstart our manufacturing with that loot.

First 'research' is done, we've found the local town. The local town is always this one, by plot contrivance.

It unlocks our first 'enemy' examination too, though these guys are allies.

We can recruit them as well pretty early if we so desire. Of course, we recruit the cute goblin girls instead.

Stuff unlocks very quickly in this game, especially early on.

Hunting Bows are going to be our friends for the early game, due to their accuracy, range, and ability to cheesily fire over a hill or aircraft at enemies that can't see us to shoot back. Also, they only require a flat 25 TUs to fire, which makes them great for ubers that tend to have very high TU stats. And kills with them will reward a bunch of nice titles.

Another tech finished!

We've gone from just 4 options to... uh... lots. Over a dozen? We'll prioritize unlocking better outfits and recruitment for now.


And then our national bonus arrived! This usually happens before my first fight.

Our prestigious local government we are earning protection money from.

Here's the stats on our roster:

You want the numbers, don't you nerds?

And our newest arrival, a gnome. Sadly, pre-recruited so we can't interrogate her for gnomish secrets.

As you can see, gnomish stats tend to be... extreme in some areas. That makes them very well suited to specific weaponry. However, it's not displaying her lack of armour. Ubers have 20 on all sides just from their skin. Gnomes have... 5 I think? That's the default for normal creatures iirc.

Seems trustworthy. Also, she can actually aim a gun, not that she can carry much of one.

PS: I can change the character appearances if you don't want your gal to have tumblr hair or whatever. It's just a bunch of presets, but there's like 70 or something for the gals alone. And let me know about the the image layout and video settings stuff.

 

[std::namespace]

If you've played X-COM before, you'll realize it's absolute shit.

I mean, its not horrific. You can probably delete the Corridors connecting to the Hangar and reposition Barracks. Thats about it?

Unfortunately, it means I'll be clicking through a trillion warning about that traffic too. Ah well.

Isnt there a shortcut like Ctrl or Alt or Shift and Cancel when a craft appears that ignores it later. Though that might be per individual craft.


Give me a Handle for Stun, I have the Bravery, Pipe is gonna kill waaay too much. It already has like 45 average concussive damage on Hit. Nurses have 30 HP on default difficulty... This kills the nurse...

 

[Damned Registrations]

Though that might be per individual craft.

It is. Still useful when some 5000 speed warship is zipping back and forth across the world, but won't do much for the 101 other things making trips between cities.

Pipe is gonna kill waaay too much.

Yeah, I was half expecting to find something other than nurses, the ship was moving at a speed I hadn't noted one going before. You've got enough melee you can use basically anything already tbh, my biggest concern is not giving you the 'traditional' title.

 

[Optimist]

Playing XPiratez on Ironman must be pure masochism.

Anyways make me into some Zone Stalker dude or somesuch, please. Happy to start as rifleman/ medkit carrier, to be then bumped up to rocket launcher, if I'm lucky enough to live that long.

Go grey.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Here we go killing again...

We've got another mission:

These function like the terror missions in the original games, in that they spawn randomly around the globe, rather than dynamically when an enemy craft lands or is shot down. Many of them (including this one) also spawn in cities. The same city will have the same battlescape each time AFAIK, so memorizing which ones are suitable for which types of combat would be very useful. I've got no such knowledge built up though. There are plenty of cities and plenty of other things to learn. Though if I see that one with the damned catwalks again I'm never taking another mission there if I can help it...

We get nice little descriptions of what we're getting into before the mission starts as well. Weather means what it says on the tin. Landed ships have weather too, it's simply a surprise (but reflects the location.) "Sea" is the threat level. It ranges from Gentle, Calm, Normal, Uneasy, Stormy, and some others I'm sure. It's not an entirely fair estimate though, since things like terrain layout and enemy type make a massive difference. Helpful for a spoiler free run though!

We're still waiting on some wounded to recover, so I'll be passing time until midnight. Hopefully the mission won't despawn before then, as this one is basically a milk run. In the meantime, we finished some researches:

Quite often researches finishing (especially interrogations) will give us an entry on something else for free, either something specific or from a random list of related weapons or whatever. In this case it gives us the details of the extractor we started with, which itself includes some tutorial info. I really like this style of doing things. Gives the player useful info at a reasonable pace, in a way that feels like a reward rather than a chore.

Also finished the prereq for recruitment. Did I mention I love these pictures and the writing?

Our new list of research, current and the stuff that is important in the near future. Which, to be fair, is nearly everything we can research right now. We're still a week or two away from seeing a lot of extra side projects.

Onto the mission! We still have some wounded gals, so we're operating with a smaller crew this time, and brought the gnome along as a 'sniper.' With a gun meant for shooting rodents. Welp.

Different enemies this time, but still bottom of the barrel. These guys also mostly use melee weaponry, but have a bit more armour. They also don't ransom for much and I don't want any more wounds so I'm going to mostly just kill them off instead of trying for captures.

If we hold down Alt we can get a display of how much damage our attack will do, with our stats and range factored in. Unless we haven't researched the weapon we're using yet.

Round 1 was a flop, and all our ranged attackers are missing, bouncing off or hitting for kittens, so I send in our melee expert to redeem herself after the last mission. Masochist Slut 'handles' the offender with the first strike. Nicely done.

Next we climb up this ramshackle watchtower to get some good firing arcs. As you can see, the bow can hit targets from well beyond our 12 tile nightvision range. There's also a 50% accuracy penalty for tiles we don't have line of sight too, as well as a flat loss per tile, dependant on weapon, for firing beyond the ideal range. Even so, 18% accuracy for a weapon you can comfortably fire 3 times a turn at enemies who can't see you is nothing to sneeze at, and it gets much better with increased throwing skill.

A lot of the easier missions are characterized by setups like this, where enemies haplessly wander through lit areas in night missions, and we can fire at them with impunity. This won't work so well later on, but it's a godsend for these early battles. Our gnome here has a decent hit rate even from dozens of tiles away.

And she lands the shot! Not even close to a kill, but she bled the fucker, so he'll take damage over time for the rest of the battle unless healed just like we would. He's also got a molotov, which is actually kinda scary.

We send our masochist out to secure nearby buildings. Enemy AI is quite random, and can often just chill in a building for many turns making you think it must be empty before popping out and killing someone from behind. Melee builds are excellent for fighting in buildings for obvious reason.

One of the tricks I found really effective is to exploit vision ranges for reaction fire. The reticle here is green because the shot is both within the weapon's ideal range, and within visual range. You only make reaction shots on enemies within visual range (though you can reaction turn if it would bring a target into that range as well) so by placing manatee right here, I can make sure we'll fire on an enemy that gets within melee range, instead of potentially wasting shots on enemeies harmlessly milling about further away and having no shots left for the one closing in.

Just realized this screen is a reference to the Doom cover art. Nice.

This son of a bitch actually brought a gun to our clubs and pointy sticks fight. We can actually examine the weapon itself by clicking on it after examining the enemy, assuming it's been researched. Handy for telling apart harmless small arms from deadly large caliburs, figuring out enemy ranges, etc.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2wdSXJHsc9BoEwDKRuG9ak

Things are going well so far, no injuries, enemies are showing up slowly enough to handle even if they need a lot of arrows to put down.

Probably one of the best melee weapons we'll have for a few more weeks. Weapons like these with flat numbers in the skill rating tend to be great for amateurs with low stats. Conversely, they're dangerous in the hands of even weak enemies.

Our gnome has been landing some nice snipes from that tower. The targets flash different colours depending on the result; black for stun, red for wounds, white for armour damage.

This was apparently not as safe a spot to hide as I though, the Baller was smart enough to walk around and get a shot off past the cover. Fortunately it was only a graze.

Can't get you out of trouble indeed:

Was a bit closer than I'd have liked, but another good mission overall considering our crippling lack of gear and experience. Everyone is growing fast:

The loot looks lame at first glance, but those agents ransom for 72k a piece. Which we're doing, because we need money way more than their intel right now.

Some better titles this time:

This one doesn't show up too often for obvious reasons. There are ways to try and farm various titles, but outside of a few of the really, really good ones, I won't worry about that too much and will just settle for giving people general specialties and low hanging fruit.

Plot! This is why you're all here, right? We researched this only because it's trivially easy and if we don't we'll get it as a freebie instead of other, more difficult researches later when interrogating academy personnel.

Random stuff like this happens from time to time. It's influenced by a ton of things and has such a huge variety it really adds to the replay value.

Another mission popped up. We'll be skipping this one. Even if we didn't have wounded on the bench, these guys have some dangerous weapons and traits. We'll be seeing them later for sure though.

More story research.

More importantly, we finished our pirate style research, giving us access to a ton of new outfits:

This is what we really want though. Day/Night camo values mean enemies need to be that many tiles closer to see you. For normal humans like we've fought so far, reducing their effective range from 9 to merely 7 is a huge advantage. The boosts to reactions and throwing are also great. It's got other advantages too, like balanced weather resistance, inventory space, and respectable evasion (the amount adjacent enemy attack accuracy is penalized by.) It is also classified as 'infiltration gear' which lets us use it on some missions that wouldn't allow proper armour.

We get another easy search party landing site to take care of. I won't be showing all of these, but they have potential to be serious windfalls or disasters this early on.

Molotovs (and any other source of fire or light) can be great for creating asymmetry in line of sight during night battles. Though it can also spread and kill off stunned targets if you're not careful.

I gave our gnome the raygun in case something dangerous happened to be here and she reaction shot one of the nurses into a pile of ash. Eh, serves em right.

Hmm, I seem to have missed a screenshot here. Gandalf landed a molotov on the last enemy. It wasn't fatal, but fire does MASSIVE morale damage, which coupled with the deaths and captures to that point, broke the last nurse left. 'Enemies surrendered' on the list shows enemy targets that were still standing, but had at any point during the battle been stunned or lost their nerve and dropped thier weapons. It makes taking people alive a lot more viable and helps end missions without needing to track down the last wimpy guy hiding in a closet somewhere.

Stats for the stat god!

There are quite a few 'useless' titles like this. I suspect at least some of them will have special meanings later on, like something you can only do with gals that are or aren't murderers or the like. Regardless, I like seeing the achievements pile up on veterans.

Research plods onwards!

As the infodump implied, the recruitment options it unlocked here are mutually exclusive. What it didn't mention is that a 3rd option would be availible if we had "Recruit local Peasant" researched. I suspect there maybe be even more options, but it's hard to say and I don't want to be spoiled on it. What I do know is that these recruitment techs are required for a lot of other very important techs, so avoiding them until we've got laser weaponry isn't a viable option, at least not for me.

Another random event. I'll probably post most of these aside from the really repetitive ones, I just love them.

Well, can't complain since it only cost a dollar...

Manpower acquired. If nothing else, we'll have an option to panic recruit people if everyone else is wounded. We may end up using quite a few depending on what we get thrown our way by RNGesus.

Meet our newest recruit. Not the uh, most promising stats, I must admit. But that can be fixed in the long run. If he doesn't die. Honestly the best bet might be ending up in a bed for a month or three until we unlock training regimens.

Can't complain about the style. Sadly, requires a whole different set of research for armour. Punk provides 9 armour, which is better than the standard 5 but a far cry from the 20 the gals get. We'll give him a shotgun once we get a real one, that should help train up firing. Stunrod duty might be a bit too suicidal at the moment with these stats, but we can keep one in the quickdraw slot and practice with it when possible.

 

[Average Manatee]

It really is kind of astonishing that the writing is so good in X-Piratez. Manages to be more enjoyable to read than 99% of AAA games while also being helpful mechanically and stays in character.

 

[Gumsmith]

Make me an Ogre and have me carry one of those terrain smashing tools if it pleases you. And maybe a weapon that gives strength condemnations too

Salvage the ship and pick Red.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Surprised you didn't go JACK SPARROW for maximum Codex nuttery!
Have me as a gal or peasant cap'n, let's call her "Belém Belle", one of my future descendants. Give her a pleasing brown-skinned appearance (is curly long black hair a thing here?), because that's what true northern brazilian beauty is like.

No sense in going for captured Ballers right now, they have really weak ransoms and right now you lack Brainers to be mass-interrogating dudes.
Never went with Male Touch, this is gonna be quite peculiar.

So far you are doing quite well, no squadwipes nor vehicle-loss.

Avoiding Ratmen until you have some decent guns is always worth it.

Wait so THAT's what the Sea thing meant?!

I started using bows early and later dropped them, felt like guns were more worth it.

 

[oasis789]

no dogs?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Neophytes and Turrets and Shamblers, oh my!

Lets start with a general base status report: We got no fucking room for people but lots of room for loot.

Sadly, our best option to fix that at the moment is turning some of the rubble in our base into caves. This costs 100k each and gives us room for 15 more people, along with a few animals and supplies each. It also stops enemies from being able to spawn in these tiles, which is a huge pain in the ass. Lastly, it creates a ton of rocks, which would literally cost us money to get rid of. The only real upside is that the caves can be overwritten with other rooms later on, giving us a partial refund of both time and money spent.

Another mission popped up. We won't be taking these until we have some more firepower, however, in spite of the nice loot and mostly weak enemies.

We finished the secondary male research tech, which gives us a few tertiary benefits besides being able to recruit dudes. it also costs us 200 infamy, or 66600$.

We do get a lootbox though. Lots of stuff like this in the game. It gives us a manufacturing option to open it, which takes only a few hours and will give random items. You can technically middle click on it in the manufacturing page to get a list of exactly what it can give you at what odds, but I prefer not knowing, honestly. I'd perhaps be on board if it only listed things I've already received, but learning that magical air to air missiles exist just because I found an object that could potentially contain them feels bad. Ditto for some info you can get from items regarding what enemies they drop from and what techs they lead to.

Not too shabby! We'll be able to use those machineguns as really, really shitty craft weapons that are only suitable for taking out unarmed enemies, and basically helpless unarmored ones at that. Still, better than nothing. The gun almanacs we'll hoard for now, they let us research random new guns, but if we use them now we'll likely get info on a bunch of more common low tech stuff first. Better to use it later and unlock good stuff.

We get another nurse search party. I wasn't even going to mention this honestly, but uh, Strange Fellow ate some lasers to the gut while trying to bumrush the closest nurse. The combination of terrible reactions and low TU's allow even incredibly lousy enemies like these to get reaction fire.

Masochist comes in for the rescue while Strange Fellow runs back to our airbus to get patched up. Lasers sadly do a lot more hp damage than wounds, which means we don't really have a chance to recover that lost hp. He'll be out of commission for at least a couple weeks.

By some miracle, this dumbfuck of a nurse walked up next to the doors and turned her back to them. She's even holding a rifle so she can't punch back. However, I forgot stun battons actually require decent reactions and melee to have a chance in hell of hitting. Should have given him a handle. Even with the backstab bonus, our actual hit chance is probably in the neighbourhood of 5-10%.

But he pulls it off with his last swing! Nicely done.

Hot damn we got 132 apples! Those give that much score for a reason.

Masochist Slut got some bravery, bumping her up to I believe 90? Bravery is fairly hard to raise compared to other stats, mostly gained via healing wounds or shitting your pants constantly. In this case, it was from patching up one of the nurses so we could take them alive. And also punch them some more if the first aid got them back on their feet. Sadly Strange Fellow didn't get much in the way of stats. Wild stat gains are one of the perks of being female. We also got the Nightengale title for several people, which is rewarded for doing night missions and grants extra night vision every other level. Very nice to have. Sadly imgur seems to think it's pRon and so deleted the image? I'm assuming that's what happened because it tells me the image no longer exists. Bah.

This is the kind of traffic we might potentially shoot down. It's either a party on foot or perhaps some trucks or something equivalent not moving at full speed. But we'll need craft we can mount a gun on first.

Free prisoner! Nice, although students are bottom of the barrel, even less valuable than nurses.

We finished an important research, opening on of the 4 main tech branches.

Manufacturing X-Grog represents a major boost to our income. There will be even better options eventually, but for now this is great. We've gone from making about 4k per runt per month, to 9k.

Races are an interesting mission type that reward you for keeping specialized vehicles available, preferably spread around the globe. Sadly, we don't have the car we'd need to enter, and even if we did, it's all the way over in DU's back yard so we'd never make it in time. It's a shame since it gives some nice rewards for no risk.

This one isn't really a random event, but a guaranteed one after a bit of time passes. We're prompted to select from another set of exclusive techs, which only take an hour to finish.

We, uh, don't want any of the options she gave, I'm pretty sure.

This is a real milk run of a mission. The only gimmick to it is you need the ability to damage terrain. Makes for a neat little tutorial to that end, as well as basically free xp and loot in the early game.

Generally these missions have 3-5 people inside the little 3 story tower, as well as a guard outside. But they're all wimpy civilians, regardless of faction. Well, unless they're zombies. You need to destroy the little mannequin before you can open the door. Or just bash a hole in one of the walls.

Meet the second of the 3 major human factions, the Church. Their grunts tend to be unarmored, low skill humans with reasonably decent weapons for what they are. They also tend to cause infarmy penalties for killing them since they're basically just brainwashed kids. They give crap intel when interrogated but ransom for a nice chunk of change.

Along with the X-Grog we also got the ability to craft whips, where are EXCELLENT for capturing weak civillian types like this. They only deal 15% of their stun damage as hp damage, and inflict masive morale and TU damage, meaning if you land a hit (and it's very accurate) the target won't be able to reaction fire. It also scales quite well with stats, doing extra damage based on throwing and reactions, and training both. Lastly, it has a 2 tile range, which makes it perfect for hitting people in the nuts when you're trying to go up a grav-lift, where a proper melee weapon would be useless.

Some decent swag; the blackmarch is a nice pistol for the early game, the money purse will lead to some nice stuff in another month or so, and the neophtes we'll sell off for now.

How the hell this stuff gets past the robo-filter but the Nightgale one didn't is beyond me.

We unlocked these courtesy of our dudes and contact with tiger transport, one of our first contacts. It's basically utter shit as an interceptor but it is technically capable of shooting stuff. I've never actualy deployed one in a mission be 12 crew capacity and a heavy gatling turret seem like a huge upgrade over what we have.

Which is good because we got a mission for white shamblers, which we absolutely want to take.

We'll need to buy some winter outfits so our gals don't suffer hp damage every turn just for existing on a map that cold. Obviously it's pretty shit gear, but the mission shouldn't be that difficult.

Well fuck, I forgot to transfer all the equipment from our bus into the trucks. This just got a fair bit harder

Hmm, the trucks have headlights, open hatches instead of closable doors, and one is pointing it's lights at the back of the other. Not gonna lie, this is pretty shitty for night missions. We could easily walk out of one of these and die to reaction fire before we even see what we're fighting.

On the other hand, this heavily armored turret will be basically impervious to anything we've fought so far.

It can even do a little sweep to reveal nearby hostiles before we get out. I still don't like it, but it's not bad for such a cheap vessel.

The shamblers manage to find us before we find them. Luckily this one missed his attacks. Though even if he had hit, they tend to cause so much more stun than hp damage that they almost never kill people. The real danger is getting overwhelmed and having everyone get knocked out, as they are quite sturdy.

Well, sturdy compared to a human anyways. They're weak to fire and our turret dishes out up to 120 damage a shot. This close, even it's terrible accuracy isn't an issue.

Gandalf's terrible accuracy, on the other hand...

Sadly, the first one we took down burned to death while it's buddy was wandering around aimlessly. We find it and it gets into a slap fight with Masochist Slut, who manages to take it on despite the furs weighing her down. Unfortunately, since research consume most subjects, and we've got one alive and one dead, we won't be able to turn either of these into nice fluffy, expensive hats. Loot wise, the mission is a bust.

Our Cunning has enabled us to get basic merchant contacts, which opens up a ton of stuff at the black market.

For now, it's mostly utter crap like this stuff, but once we research some guns, we'll be able to buy them here. That blackmarch pistol, for example, will be an option I think. We get some other nice stuff too, like flashlights, wire, and fire extinguishers.

It's been a long, eventful month, but we're off to a great start. We've got enough of a nest egg and income set up to confidently hire at least 3 more brainers, doubling our research rate. Alternately, we could invest that cash in starting a second base for even more income, but I feel like that's a risky option when we don't have a good way to defend our bases yet. We'll focus on teching up and keeping our Hands alive, on the premise that we'll be able to keep making a lot of money from easy early game missions for now.

no dogs?

I wasn't planning on it since they tend to die very, very easily, but we can recruit a few. Should we just get the basic guard dogs or some named ones that can gain stats? I've never really used them before honestly, besides having some guard dogs bark kids into unconsciousness for the lulz.

 

[Reinhardt]

how much for anal?

 

[Reinhardt]

add me, btw. name her... Echidna.

 

[Azira]

If you add me as a gal, I'd like her to be called Dolores. From the latin word for pain, "dolor".

 

[Damned Registrations]

The clickbait title goes here.

Our crew was apparently not impressed with our exploits last month. Well, codexers bitching about everything is certainly thematic.

We kick off our new month we a new mission:

Temple missions tend to have a ton of civilians we'll lose infamy for killing. OTOH, they also tend to be pretty fragile targets with a lot of cash. I'm not that worried about building infarmy right now, so this kind of mission is fine. Our first contact is a perfect example: a standard non-uber mutant girl, not even armed. Good for both intel and ransom.

Manatee's throwing skill has gotten to the point we have perfect accuray on targets within ideal range. Since it also has minimum damage, this is a very nice step towards reliably controlling these easy battles.

Another basically harmless target. These guys are in the grey side of the law, neither outright bandits nor upstanding citizens, with no particular allegience.

Another example of why night missions are so much better. 4 soft targets standing under streetlights while we hide in dark alleys.

We've got our 3rd enemy type here too, the lowest rung of the church's ladder. These guys are weak, slow, innaccurate, poorly armed and cowards. Honestly their most annoying feature is that it's hard to avoid killing them accidentally.

Gandalfina here is set up in a sniping position on the rooftop to the left, and can still get ~50% accuracy reaction shots against these hapless twits. We'll try pull someone else up here too and farm some reaction exp.

Another mechanics I can't recall might have been in the base game: enemies with too much stun (more than 4x their current hp) take damage each turn. The little ghost symbol here indicates that this is occuring and the target will likely die from it unless you cure some of the stun damage. Of course, if they have like 3 hp left, there's basically no wiggle room between being awake and dying of overstun. Part of why the altar boys are hard to capture.

Proper view of the temple and the street. I really like the map designs in this game. So many little details, nice and colourful when it's lit up, and lots of interactive features like destructible light sources, chest high walls, and so forth.

Gandalf's morale (purple bar) is quite lacking here, so throw back some happy pills. Morale management is actually pretty difficult in some missions, and our rogue outfits make the problem worse. We'll get better tools for it eventually, but for now it's a struggle. The pills improve morale at a significant cost to stamina.

Another option we have for capturing enemies is hitting targets already on the floor. You can't use melee for this, but whips do a great job!

Yet another new enemy. She's pretty much what you'd expect.

We finally get inside the church and meet the boss.

We, uh, don't want to get in a firefight with that right now. He's not THAT strong, but he's probably on par with a gal, and that gun is very scary in a random sort of way.

The text at the top here is another nice QoL feature: after enough time has passed, enemies will be revealed on the minimap, asuming you've taken most of them out already. As it turns out, the priest is right next to the entrance we're lined up against, so we effortlessly take him out.

We get ANOTHER temple raid mission right after, pretty much the same day. The last one went perfectly, so we're still in fighting condition. And that pink haired chick standing just outside our spawning area is a temple maiden enemy. Stuff like that is why reactions and weapon variety is so important. You don't want a pile of rocket launchers only to find out a zombie is breathing down your neck. You can also see this map is totally different, a backwater village instead without any lights to be found.

Oof. Gandalfina gets surprised by a savy gal with a crappy smg that snuck around our front line. Right on the verge of death, but luckily we gave her a shotgun and we're in 'can't miss' territory.

Unluckily, tet another enemy is hanging nearby as we try to move towards someone to stitch us back together. We do manage to take him out too though.

Another new enemy. As you can imagine, these guys provide a nice ransom and not a lot of resistance.

The medic we sent has had 3 back to back bouts of insanity. Gandalfina is in serious danger of simply bleeding out at this point.

We send Average Manatee back as well. Also somewhat lacking in the morale department, but between the two of them, they manage to avoid a stupd death here.

As you can see, not only the village but the church layout is quite a bit different, with a pair of auxiliary buidings enemies might hide in and snipe us from.

We get inside to be met with a nasty surprise: The priest was hiding behind some curtains to ambush us, and the bastard has a flamethrower!

Did I mention I like the weapon artwork in this as well? For such a huge variety, they really didn't slack on it. There's nothing lame like palette swaps or sloppily reused assets. I can identify a shocking number of weapons from their sprites.

The boss goes down, and luckily he was the last man standing, so the gal that got lit up didn't finish burning to death. You can see the infamy hits for the dead enemies here too, if we had captured nobody, we'd be in the hole for over 150 infamy after a successful mission.

Any mission where nobody died and we get bravery is one that makes me happy. Soldiers panicking is a nightmare that easily spirals out of control. It's actually why Gandalfina got shot to begin with, a random morale break led to walking right towards and enemy and burning all TU's, predictably eating a ton of reaction fire. It was a miracle they didn't finish her off on their turn.

The loot for these missions is insane. We won't be selling off all of it, but if we did, it'd be a cool half million.

Scads of titles still piling up.

I skipped it early, but Manatee has been getting Archer in addition to this one. Archer is +2 throwing per level. There's also medival and thorny that can get earned with basic arrows. Focusing on a weapon this way can get particular stats really out of hand. I'm aiming to get to the point where we can fire arrows at enemies we can't even see directly with perfect accuracy.

A list of soldiers ranked from least to most kills, along with their wounds. Being laid up for over a month is rough, but certainly better than death. Wounded duration scales with absolute hp lost, not proportion, so gals with 100+ hp can potentially be stuck healing for over 100 days. At least until we get better medical tech going.

Summary of title bonuses for our most accomplished killer. Not bad for a mere 10 kills. These bonuses don't count towards traning caps either, allowing units to exceed their normal racial maximums.

One last mission for this update. This is actually my favourite, a milk run among milk runs.

There is a problem. Literally every gal is totally exhausted, and will likely just got berserk and shoot eachother if I try to send them in here. not to mention 3 are wounded. So we'll only send in the gnome and the 2 bros.

This is why this mission is a milk run. The bandits are always huddled around a campfire, letting us freely take potshots at them.

Err, well, it turns out it's not quite a milk run when you're using soldiers that barely hit 50% accuracy even from 7 tiles away, which is basically within bandit sight range too. Retreat!

Our first loss. We at least managed to avoid losing the craft, which would have been a huge loss as we can't simply buy another of it's ilk any time soon.

RIP Strange Fellow. At least you died a free man.

He'll have some good company before long, I'm sure.

 

[std::namespace]

Research 1 Shrine Maiden now.

dogs

Cheap, plenty, has radar, nasty fucking stats, they should be everywhere really

I think the Cutlass might outperform the Bandit Knife on all the Ubers you have now, even accounting for accuracy and TU cost.

Also, I dunno if you know but the Pipe adds 1.25 of the base damage as Stun on top. So if Slut rolls 50 concussive to HP, it then adds another 60 in Daze on top. Its better than the Ax against anything you'll face for a long time.

 

[Average Manatee]

I skipped it early, but Manatee has been getting Archer in addition to this one. Archer is +2 throwing per level. There's also medival and thorny that can get earned with basic arrows. Focusing on a weapon this way can get particular stats really out of hand. I'm aiming to get to the point where we can fire arrows at enemies we can't even see directly with perfect accuracy.

Just doing my job boss.

I'm not sure I'm understanding the Valkyrie title correctly. It improves your stats after you die?

 

[std::namespace]

It improves your stats after you die?

Spoiler

there is some kind of resurrection ingame now

Also random spoiler if Damned Reg doesnt know: dont take the Mansion infiltration mission with units you dont want to lose, send a peasant army if anything

 

[Gumsmith]

Nice little gun that tommy. Priest shenanigans like that are why I usually smash my own entrance somewhere less exposed, though it'd be a bit tricky if you're taking morale penalties.

Rest in peace Strange Fellow He was a good man.