The brilliant fractactical genius of our enemies is no match for our superior 'hide in a small room' strategy, leading to another easy kill. Luckily they didn't arrive with enough TUs to drop a grenade on us.
As the fight drags on, Pierre ends up taking another hit. We're on the clock now.
Fortunately, it seems our enemies have finally started getting aggressive and stopped playing popamole from a block away. Honestly not sure why this dude was standing here though. A three round burst from above takes him down easily.
Eventually, bug hunt mode engages with only 2 enemies remaining. I try to send cleve back to our supplies to bring back another bandage, but this bastard pops out of the building he was cowering in. With our low TUs it's actually quite difficult to retrive the supplies sitting in the open, so I decide to gamble Pierre's life on an aimed shot that will use up the last of his TUs and leave him exposed to reaction fire. If this misses or low rolls it's likely at least one of our heroes is going down.
He makes the shot! And despite the scary sounding message, we actually don't take wound damage when ending the battle (though potential prisoners do) so the only reason to not end the battle is if you've got someone in position to do a bit of healing before the turn ends.
17 god damned enemies, including an armored car. This was a very rough fight.
Honestly kind of disappointing xp for a battle like this, but I think more than half those kills went to Optimist.
Frankly, this is terrible loot. The only thing of value is the car parts, which could concievably lead to us developing our own vehicles, but it's certainly not worth it. There are much easier ways to get these. The only other loot of note was the fruit. Again, for a mission where we can't use ubers, our craft, or vehicles of our own and start in such a bad situation, I'd expect much better rewards. A shame we didn't manage to capture one of them either, maybe that might have unlocked something cool, like a good gun runner contact or something.
Cleve's legend grows.
12 kills in this mission before going down. God damn.
One of the books we picked up gives us this juicy bit of lore, which I suspect is a prereq for some great tech later.
And we get lucky with some of our expedition reports. The nations we're looking for are Romanica and Fuso. The former will lead us to some anti-zombie tech, while the later has awesome ninja weapons and, bizarrely, a prerequisite for air filtration. However, simply getting this part won't be enough to unlock the contact. We'll have to research more items related to them, and possibly some other logistics type stuff.
There are a lot of gods, since there are both Lokknar and Narlock pantheons, as well as some other myths and such. They're generally pretty cool stories but I've never gotten an unlock from them, sadly. Might be voodoo related though.
And it was at this point I remember to try changing the resolution. God damn thats a way better screenshot. It's not native to my monitor so it actually clips off the freshness and morale bars in the battlescape, but I think I'll put up with that if it makes this much of a difference.
Remember the rat slaying mission? This is not like the rat slaying mission.
We start the mission with 6 of these dudes added to our team. We get to control them fortunately, so they won't run off and get themselves killed. Sadly, they only get primitive equipment and no armour. They do, however, have spears, which are ideal for this mission, and their healing gel and canteen o' wisdom is actually better than our own medical supplies. Recieving some after the mission ends is actually a big incentive to do this mission.
The other disadvantage is that they start out here, in the top left of the map...
While we start in the opposite corner. In case it wasn't obvious, the map is fucking huge.
It's very tempting to try and have the two teams rush towards eachother and form a big group to better defend themselves, but that's a huge mistake I made on my first attempts with this mission. Instead, we're going to form defensive lines and rely on our spears and reaction fire to kill the spiders as they approach.
That goes for both parties. On our end we actually only have the one opening to defend, making things simple. I also decided to show off some of the weapon stats here. First up are ninja stars. Oasis789 has 72 throwing I believe? 126% accuracy with 19-58 damage is pretty damneed nice, out to a 10 tile range for a cost of 16 TU per shot.
Masochist Slut is our only fighter in here with a proper melee weapon. That hatchet is also about 120% accurate and hits quite a bit harder for only 11 TUs. However, it also has to contend with melee evasion, meaning it can still miss even with 120% accuracy.
One of our two starter gals here with a spear. I believe she has only about 65 in both throwing and melee, the relevant stats for spear accuracy. 76% accuracy seems kinda lame, but remember that if we're 2 tiles away, we don't have to deal with evasion. We're also suffering a 33% accuracy penalty for using the spear in one hand because of the shield. For 18 TUs and with the ability to drain enemy TUs on hit, leading to even more reaction shots, the spear is an excellent weapon in 'melee', easily my favourite for a long, long time.
The plan goes off without a hitch. Each team gets swarmed by about half a dozen spiders on the first round, killing them all without suffering a hit.
Our foes are actually pretty nasty. While they tend to disable before killing, they do have the potential to kill outright if they get a few attacks in and the stun damage rolls low. And suffering even one bite causes massive freshness damage, leaving the soldier crippled for the rest of the run. Lastly, the bio damage they deal ignores half our armour, meaning even very good armour isn't foolproof, unlike with the rats. We'll need to rely on evasion and reaction fire.
Fortunately, the tribals have pretty decent stats when it comes to using spears, and their freshness is basically unbreakable. Honestly, they could easily escape on their own if we had a way to start the mission with just them and didn't want to claim the loot.
Eventually, the momma spider shows herself. She's a bit of an oddity, actually having less frontal armour than anywhere else, making her pretty easy to take down with spears.
However, I'd really like to capture her alive. I brought several types of stunning grenades for that exact purpose.
Alas, our aim is sht. I think she still got clipped by part of the exploion? A direct hit would have actually dealt quad damage, one roll for each tile occupied.
Oh fuck me. I thought she'd move along the wall and get stopped by our gal with the spear. This is BAD.
We get lucky, and Masochist Slut survives the 2 bites that got through her evasion. Her freshness is utterly fucked though, and she'll be looking at a lot more reocovery time when we get back to base.
Gandalfina patches her up with the Theban healing dress voodoo, but it's only giving 2 health back per wound healed. Very lackluster, but I didn't expect much more for only 12 TUs on an integrated item.
She spends the rest of her TU's stabbing at the spider queen. Sadly, it dies instantly instead of falling wounded. No pet spider queen for us today.
I brougt these along just in case someone got bitten. They can't be used on allies, obviously, so they're a bit awkward to use for ficing morale, but they can let us trade som health for freshness in a pinch. Items that restore freshness are very rare and always seem to cost health in my experience. Maybe some much later game stuff will get around that limitation.
Gradually, we crawl forward, carefully revealing the map. The spiders, like many melee monsters, actually have a special trait that lets them see through walls a pretty good distance, so they're not hard to attract and clear out.
We enetually get one of the tribesman to meet up with us and Masochist Slut gets to chug down some of their magic healing juice. You can tell it's healthy because of the green glow! These canteens restore energy, morale, and stun damage. With enough of these, operating even at 0 freshness is possible.
I can't seem to find the last spiders, so I send one of the tribesman back to our starting location to retrieve a pickaxe and dig them out of wherever they're trapped. The ones being trapped, however, are us. Somehow a spider got far behind our lines and the tribesman ended up right next to it with no TUs to spare. Oasis ran back to try take it out with a throwing star but only had enough TUs for a single shot. The spider got it's turn and ravaged the poor dude.
It was, hoever, the last spider. Odd that bug hunt mode hadn't activated, must not have met some other weird criteria. Regardless, we saved 5 of them, and got a ton of infamy for doing so and slaying 35 spiders.
Some decent xp as well, particularly for reactions. Also, oasis got accuracy for firing some tranq darts at the spider queen. Damned thing must have been immune. I'll try daze weapons next time, perhaps. I'll have it's resistances logged by then anyways.
Spears don't count as 'melee' as far as titles are concerned, sadly, so we don't get much on that front. We did get a lot of this one though, which is always nice:
Hoooly shiiiit.
I've seen this event like maybe 3 times in about 6 years of in game time before this LP. The fact that we got it twice already is very lucky. Maybe it's related to that whole 'male touch' research path?
Another important tech. Sadly the armour this directly leads to is actually pretty lame, only offering 5 more points of armour and no decent special properties. We won't be using it.
Interrogations are continuing as well, mostly giving us little tips like these. This won't unlock anything, so it's basically just kind of a tax on interrogation based research.
Ah, more great advice. Lets hear it!
Hah. It's the fact that this is so extremely wrong that makes me think I'm really missing out by not using the scouting parties and charts more often.
We're researching some of the loot as well. It's really hard to tell what it worth it and what isn't without spoilers. We'll get there eventually though.
Even if it does feel like we're further than ever from finishing off our list of projects. I don't even want to try counting them any more.
We need more brainers, frankly. I'm sorely tempted to invest our funds in exactly that, but without a manufacturing base to pay for them, we'll just end up having to sell them off before long. The game has actually been pretty stingy when it comes to easy fast cash so far. We've been making a decent amount, but we've had to fight hard for it, using pretty bad weaponry until we cracked that slot machine open.
I'm not sure why I bothered researching this, you get it for free as a tip from Saya eventually. Oh well, it was quick.
Aha! Another slog of a mission with mediocre loot. We should probably do it anyways, our scale armor is basically made for fighting these things. We can get a bunch more titles if nothing else.
