You have kind of been told what triggers it, but I also missed it, because there's a lot to keep track of.
The main problem is that whatever event was warning me of this coincided with like, 4 other things it might have warned me about, and many of the events don't seem to warn of anything at all. My plan for now is to just try a bunch of shit to get more info. Which runs counter to the whole 'hunker down and build a team' plan, but constant missile swarms have kind of rendered that plan hopeless.
Protip (it's game mechanics with obscure buttons, but it's also probably mentioned in one of the infinite numbered research tips): Disable the gun after the enemy ship has xploded. Disabled guns won't be reloaded in base.
Yeah I knew about that one. It's annoying though.
they arent low tier, very mid, 50 frontal, sniper+spotter and 20 nv
Seriously? Shit. I hadn't grilled one yet this game. They've been going down fairly easily for all that.
RE: grav boots cats. Remember that Grav armor makes turning cost 3 TUs rather than 1 TU. You can kind of cheat normal movement costs in this situation by strafing. Strafing left/right into cover only costs 5 TUs, which is cheaper than 3+3 TUs to change direction twice and 4 more TUs to take a step.
Cats have some weird mechanics with the grav armour vs others too, being able to run at all for example, and burning stamina to move even through the air when doing so.
Don't they show up in ANAL?
I don't think so, or if they do it's in the form of X% REA or whatever, and I don't know their REA.
Otherwise, this run is going to crash and burn once he's unable to get important techs in time.
Nonsense! We shall prevail with our strength of arms and the loyalty of hot catgirls. Missing the library for so long as certainly a mistake though. But must stuff like that is signposted fairly well I think; I'm sure I grabed that tech early on previous runs, and only avoided it here because I remembered the crap about the pogroms and not the library (which didn't unlock at the time because I got it so early/)
Just set up a perimeter in the darkness with the ship lit up and take pot shots until they are all dead. Takes forever but at least its simple and easy. Much better than maps like the mansion.
That's fine if the weather is good, but spending 20+ turns in a desert is a no-go for me. It's also kind of impossible if the terrain has a lot of cover, like forests or jungle. Nope, necroplanes are worse than the mansion. At least there I could group up and cover the exits instead of just being nebulously surrounded from the entire map with blood hounds and guys that might have literal cannons.
Onward!
Shit, we really should have brought a nun. Will be nice to get revenge on these guys though, and should provide a ton of xp.
Ouch. Yep, I remember that shit now.
Holy shit that hurt.
Well, on the upside, looks like it used over half his TUs, so it'll be safe to finish him off now.
Oh come on! At least nobody got hurt this time. I'm guessing that gun relies on plenty of small hits that didn't get through the liquidator armour.
Another bastard over on the edge has an assault rifle. Probably with AP rounds.
We t
We 'killed' the lesser zombie trooper with the rifile, but he simply transforms instead of dying. Now he's basically a normal zombie. Except also armoured.
Defending the craft without being near a wall is very awkward. Fortunately nothing is too close by, so we should be fine.
I try to get a scan on the sentinel but there is a bunch of smoke in the way. Actually, the smoke is from a Chryssalid grenade we threw at the bastard. The damage should be extreme vs zombies and bypass armour. It didn't kill him though. I was hoping to see exactly how much damage it did.
Well, maybe if the area is lit on fire the brainer can see him? We get reaction fired through the smoke though.
Yeah, that sucks. Still pretty lucky though considering what happened to the werewolf, even accounting for their weakness to lasers and fire.
The busted up trooper approached the back of the ship, so Robroy steps out to deal with it. The bardiche proves highly effective.
Enemy phases are stressful here, zombies are very unpredictable and are usually easy to kill by virtue of their terrible pathing. But if they randomly beeline someone and start biting...
Jaedar has to bust out the fire extinguisher, as both our werewolf and the cockpit are on fire. Now it's all smokey in here making it harder to fire though. Urgh.
We finally get a scan on the sentinel. It's close to dead, but not at all stunned. It's probably stun immune?
We manage to kill it and...
It also turns into a healthy one armed zombie trooper. This is going to be quite the slog.
Werewolves might have kind of shit accuracy, but they're more than capable of chopping up regular zombies.
Katt tries out some flaming arrows, to either burn some zombies over time or at least provide some light and vision. No dice though.
Appropriate screen transition though.
The Bugeye we brought along is able to see through the smoke much better, showing his worth as a spotter already. His stats are still crap though.
Jaedar has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting with the Fatty. Unfortunately, that has turned the area near the craft into a smokey burning hellscape.
Another one of these bastards kind of requires it's application though. I don't want to see how effective that thing is up close.
Well the good news is we blew it's arm off. The bad news is, the damaged trooper got inside the craft and started attacking Azira.
Thankfully, he dodged the attacks by some miracle, and like an idiot, I had him back up and try using the shotgun. I figured an auto shotgun at point blank should do the trick... but the amrour was way too thick.
Next I bring in one of the catgirls with the pike. This scores plenty of solid hits... and then it occurs to me I should have left her on standby to drain it's TU's as it approaches.
She dealt a good chunk of damage and drained it's TUs, but it's still got a lot of health remaining.
Relm comes to the rescue, however. The Painbringer is very effective and puts it down with a volley or two. It even dealt enough stun to leave it asleep, and I would like this thing captured.
Starting to scout out further from the landing zone.
I remembered that zombies got stunned and downed very quickly by the electric rounds from the rifles. I also forgot to bring those rounds and rifles, but we DO have electric rounds for this giant cannon. Seems worth a shot.
Found a busted up corner of the ship. Kind of annoying, I'm worried they're jump down from here while we try to get to the doors.
Err, those were not the electrical rounds. Whatever.
Pushing out over here too. Kind of worried about zombies waking up and ambushing, but we've got some leeway with a werewolf I think.
I contemplate throwing in some dynamite to blast the zombies on the ledge by the hole in the hull, but decide not to. Might be valuable loot in there.
I do realize I can just fly a catgirl over onto the roof, however.
She'll need a couple turns to recover stamina, but this is a great spot. We've got the ship surrounded now, she can pop down to stab people and get back to cover in one turn.
Fuckers have more ranged shit!
Ah, well these are easy to put down at least. And I did want another, dead or 'alive'.
I try to make with the pike stabby stabby but she actually misses a bunch and doesn't deal much damage. SHAME.
And our werewolf on the east flank eats a shotgun slug for improbably large amounts of damage. Definitely an AP round.
12 turns so far. It's a grind, but we're steadily killing shit.
I manage to notice our 'prisoner' woke back up. A few more painbringer rounds but him back to sleep.
Ran out of boarding gun ammo and had to switch to an advanced lasgun. More smokey firey clusterfuck. At least this is way more accurate.
Well shit, one of them shot up our werewolf.
He gets right back up. That was a big chunk of stun. I'm glad we've got 3 again, so I can rotate them out for healing and regeneration as needed.
Fifteen turns gone by now. Starting to be a freshness concern on the weaker members, but we're mostly okay thanks to the mild weather.
I finally get eye inside the ship. Bottom is a huge cargo room with another sentinel zombie inside.
And the second floor has another singer, visible thanks to the giant hole in the floor, it's basically a catwalk around the hull.
Most of the crew makes their way over to provide covering fire as we try to get inside to finish this.
Those electric rounds got picked up and loaded. Weirdly, it seems to behave like some kind of shotgun? It's not very good with these stats at this range. Not enough pellets.
We keep chipping away at the trooper with all available weapons and eventually take him out.
Well, took his gun out anyways. I'm impatient to get inside, not wanting to be surprised by their ranged attacks, so I pull Gandalfia forward and swivel around. Not enough TUs to kill whatever approaches, but we can at least deflect attacks. We should be okay.
Turns out it's the other side we needed to worry about.
Fucker took her down with one shot from like 20 tiles away.
She's even on fire. Not dead, but not looking good. He's covering the body too.
Claws might not be great vs armour, but we've got a lot of TUs to burn and our base power is like 110. This should do the trick, especially from behind.
...and it doesn't. Cutting resistance perhaps? Would make sense with that kind of gear.
We've got kitty ready to go from the roof. But... we kind of need her to be the medic. Everyone is on the east side of the map.
I send in Gandalfia to finish the job.
I don't know what the elvish words for 'zombie slayer' are, but that sword deserves a name.
Of course, that still leaves us with a very healthy melee zombie to deal with.
And we've got no energy left to move. I think our melee evasion still works vs melee though, and energy is only needed for gun deflection? Bad situation regardless.
But then I recall, we have TWO hot catgirl babes. And this one can sprint all the way from across the map to provide healing.
Good thing too, Ceres had seven wounds. Damn that weapon does a lot of damage over time.
Well, she's near death, but we can definitely save her.
Jaedar ended up throwing the fire extinguisher all the way back to the ship, and Relm (who was babysitting the trooper body) ran out to pick it up and bring it over to Ceres.
We'll be able to extinguish her next turn.
Which frees our other girl up for some stabbing!
And once again, she fails to finish the job, and once again I realize I am an idiot and should have let her overwatch them and just steal his TUs when he tried to move.
Thankfully, the zombie goes for the werewolf over the gal.
He knocked our good boy out, but he got back up and is still kicking.
Our werewolf over here got bit as well and also survived, but isn't conscious. Robroy brings down the axe.
Jaedar sprints over to provide first aid, and someone tosses over an extra healing gel we'll be needing for it.
Another scary moment- a zombie woke up and went after Relm. Luckily she knocked it back out with the fucking extinguisher. I guess it was lucky I forgot to use it on the fire; it meant we had enough to spare for reaction attacks!
Last enemy is the singer, and it gets ambushed walking through a doorway and scratched to bits.
Whew. That was quite the fucking encounter. No deaths though!
We took some wounds, but most weren't serious and we got plenty of stats. +6 ACC gains is where it's at! A shame Jaedar stole so many kills, we could have gotten even more I bet.
Loot isn't great, apparently it was a booze shipment. Some new zombie parts to study though.
Titles continue to build back up. Relm apparently has quite the stat total, as does Robroy.
Research time!
Ooh, a nice mission for farming kills. If only we had a good ship it'd be perfect for building up weak members safely, but we can't really do much with catgirls on this without getting mobbed from spotters.
We're also still a bit tired... Manatee is healed now, but Ceres is going to be off duty for over a month. Gah.
Christ it's only been like two days! I even managed to build an outpost (one day build time on top of a burrow) and saw nothing before it got blown up. Infuriating.
At least it hasn't killed the crew quarters yet. That would really suck.
At long last!
LOL, and also some intel from a prisoner. We haven't fought these babes yet, but they use fancy laser lajatangs and fly. And we can't loot the weapons because they're bullshit.
Not as many new projects as I'd hoped, but school will probably unlock even more. That'll be our next big target. I've got some hopes for the crusader armour and sentinel remains too.
But before we can get there, we need to at least take a peek at this base. If it's a nightmare we'll bail, but on the off chance it's doable and might stop the missile spam, we have to try.