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

[Damned Registrations]

Going to need another platemail...

Running some random salvage mission I realize this craft does, in fact, have suicide lights. It didn't seem to on an earlier map, but sometimes the various terrain tiles can hide lighting effects pretty well.

I also realized I didn't bring any fucking canteens with me, and my platemail users are fucking melting. Hard to remember all the little details I need to set up again after losing a craft.

Speaking of craft, I researched the mining ship. As a ship, it's a mediocre transport craft; slow but with decent space and moon access. More interestingly, it makes us 400k each month! Not a bad deal...

Except we can't build the fucking things. Aside from the ship engine and mining laser, we'd need a rail driver too. No idea how to make those.

I've finally caught up on all the tips (or just about, there's a few voodoo related ones left I think) so I've been spamming disks and pillow books like crazy. Sadly, pillow books are just giving me stuff like this. Not terribly useful. I guess it's nice to know our stats if we end up raided in our sleep?

Lots of scary merc ships on these 'secret base' missions. I even found this one landing, not that we stand a shot of fucking with a large ship full of mercs.

Ooh, more codex goodies!

Nice! These are rare and expensive. And useful, at least for now.

Was running what I expected to be a milk run against a comm tower of church dudes. 3 gals in plate cover the door to their tower. One of them died.

This motherfucker, opened the door, shot a CANNON, at point blank, and rolled high enough for a kill shot. Absolute bullshit. To be fair, she was slightly injured from a grenade earlier, but even so, he had to have rolled insanely high to get through all that armour and piercing resistance.

At least it wasn't one of the real elites, but I had been working on her for a while. This is why I haven't gone after the church base yet. We don't HAVE a solid squad yet. Plate mail users will get annihilated by a lightning tome (and they'll have some I'm sure) and others will likely get cut down by their fucking jedi wannabes we haven't met yet. I want to go in with a squad of, perhaps 12, including 4 gals in plate, some werewolves, at least 1 highly trained catgirl and an ogre. We've got like... 3 gals I'd consider trained enough to go.

Grabbing this more out of curiosity than an expectation it'll be worthwhile. It was foreshadowed a long time ago, so maybe it's super important and or useful. But I'd put money on 'dangerous bullshit that won't pay off for 6 months.'

Not quite the outfit I was hoping for. Nice voodoo defense at least.

It's an interesting power, and you could in theory use it to let a sniper take many shots in a single turn or somehting to that effect. But you'd be tanking their freshness and morale to do it. Why not just bring more snipers?

It's not even that great a ratio; to get back 50 TUs you'd be losing 5 freshness and basically all your morale? Fuck that.

Interesting bit of lore.

Apparently this WP stuff ignores normal fire damage rules. That would make these mines... pretty fucking scary.

Getting a lot of ship dossiers from the data disks. Most are ones I've never seen before that will blast me to bits, but once in a while I get a juicy tidbit that could be worth shooting down if I get the chance.

Got our infamy back above zero again. That's really all I'm after at the moment.

Starting to wonder what the hell I could possibly be missing for that school project. I did the medical stuff. We got superconductors ages ago. Hell, I did fucking quantum mechanics. It must be some early tech I'm passing up because it's useless. This one is... interesting. If we had a steady supply of ship engines I'd definitely build one in case it unlocks some cool crafting options.

This sounds really cool, but also insanely expensive in all likeliehood. Something to aspire to at least.

Now that we have a sickbay again, we can finally research this thing. These are a mixed bag. They are hard to get in any great number, and the data reels they include are.. pretty crap.

But we can get mad gnomes. Mad gnomes are the best gnomes. I'm so stoked for where this is going to lead.

I forget what silly thing unlocked this, but laser fists sounds too cool to pass up. Top priority!

Yeah, this is why the reels are kind of crap. There are a lot of UAC weapons, and they're pretty much all janky shit like this. Yeah, 80 laser damage snipers are nice, but 4 shots? Fuck that.

Not sure how expensive upgrading our slaves will be, but I'm guessing way too much to be worthwhile.

Huh, so that's what that ranomed 'jammed' thing I encountered before was. I'm surprised I caught it if they can go this fast. Maybe a shittier version?

And for some reason I never realized I can check the ANAL page for enemy ships. Good info here, particularly the score shooting them down is worth, and the time before they try to escape (or let you escape? I dunno.)

Long overdue. I never bothered with these because the risk/reward for these places is out of whack. It's a lot of spotters and field guns and shit and the loot can barely shoot down a blimp iirc.

Super magnum isn't quite as good as I'd oped, but it is a decent upgrade. What I really want are the smart bullets it can supposedly load.

Drop from a data disk. Makes me inclined to try researching our armored cars and expand that part of the tree. If we can make an actual tank it'd be quite useful.

Another month gone by... and we made a sizable profit this time! Now that we're actually making money instead of just staying afloat, I think it's time to build another ship again. Not sure if I should go for the kraken or predator though. Kraken would make missions much easier, predator would help me get more engines perhaps if I can find the right medium sized ship to shoot down. Still can't believe how our Kraken died. Stupid shit. Thank god we've got the hyperwave thing now. I think I'm leaning towards Kraken. It'll unlock space missions for us again, and should be safer now that we have access to large weapons to tack onto it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Oh, that wasn't even the bad part.

I'd rather prefer to keep blowing up civillians to get some free exp, but that school project continues to elude me somehow, so here goes another old tech:

Huh. At least it gave some contacts. Those might be cool.

Another old, probably useless tech. It was indeed useless; pretty much anyone you could make into a courtesan could instead be made into a higher tier slave. If we had brothel missions, we could use the hoes, but we don't get those and basically never find hoes elsewhere.

We've interrogated the mad gnome. Unlike normal gnomes that give a ton of info, this one only has one thing to reveal to us. We're not going to be calming her down though.

Ogre/Gnome Resonance!

I'd have loved to shoot this down. Surely a large ship would contain a full sized engine, right? It got away though.

I lost count of the gods a while ago, but we've got at least a half dozen by now, probably more. I think there are 16 in total?

So, this is the HK-116 or whatever that launches missile strikes. I figured maybe the scarab could take it out now that I've got a full weapons loadout on it.

LOL NOPE. Maybe we were close, I don't know. No dossier on those fucking things.

RIP yet another ship. The good news is, we ran out of valuable unique cargo to lose by doing this shit. Mostly. Probably lost that scourge smg.

And this would be why I took such a huge risk to try shoot that thing down. Fucking flak cannons man.

And this is what I've been dreading since the very first missile strike.

Aside from the loss of the sickbay YET AGAIN, we just lost our large crew quarters. Rebuilding it will be insanely expensive and time consuming. More importantly... we've got nowhere to put all those people. I can ship the crew around, but I'm going to need to sell off basically all the runts that were working here. Which also means our income is totally fucked again. And judging by previous experiences, this base is about to get struck at least once more. NOW we're in a death spiral for sure. I don't even know how to get out of this.

 

[Jaedar]

RIP yet another ship. The good news is, we ran out of valuable unique cargo to lose by doing this shit. Mostly. Probably lost that scourge smg.

I think you should unload all the gear from your ships when sending them out to do unknown interceptions like that (also keep more notes? you've gotten wrecked by ships with this image before). You can save/load craft equipment loadouts with F5 and F9, so it's really easy to swap. It does mean you need to go back to base after downing something, but that is a small price to pay.

but that school project continues to elude me somehow

What school project is that?

Some really bad luck on that missile strike. Base defences seem to suck a bit in general. You don't get infamy or any loot for the things they kill and the damage a craft takes in the air doesn't seem to carry over. And it's very rng, so you need to overcommit. There's still a pretty good chance you'll shoot down the next few strikes I think.

In case anyone wants to know, here's how to delay missile strikes from spawning (can't be done retroactively, so no use for current lp run):

Spoiler

Don't do the 'disruptive transmissions' mission.

It's kinda weird how the game will warn you about attracting ninja attention, but not missile swarm attention. Especially since the former seems way weaker?

 

[lightbane]

There's a new update for the game that improves the early game. You should try it as clearly you're going to need it. It gives even more options to the catgirls, as the catgirl path wasn't finished at that time.

 

[turkishronin]

Seven new missions too but
- Gal salaries raised to $40k (Young Ubers, Warriors, Veterans) and $20k (Freaks). Bugeyes' to $25k.
So it wouldn't be very good since he's struggling financially.

 

[Average Manatee]

Fuck missiles. You had a good amount of air defenses too. 400*.65*3 + 250*.7 = 955 avg damage against an enemy with 400 HP. Horrible luck both on shooting them down AND in what they hit.

 

[std::namespace]

we've got nowhere to put all those people

why? does the game block building building when you are over-crew?

against an enemy with 400 HP

there is a flak hit in the screen? shouldnt they have died?

 

[Average Manatee]

Not sure how base defense damage work, might be randomized like 50%-150%?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Shocking results

I think you should unload all the gear from your ships when sending them out to do unknown interceptions like that (also keep more notes? you've gotten wrecked by ships with this image before). You can save/load craft equipment loadouts with F5 and F9, so it's really easy to swap. It does mean you need to go back to base after downing something, but that is a small price to pay.

I definitely should have in this case. Generally speaking though, the issue is with re-equiping individual soldiers, which is a huge pain in the ass. And if I forget something, then I'll find out when someone is on fire and we have no extinguisher, or my catgiirl is freezing to death, etc.

While I have died to this ship before, that was before I had the decoder. I didn't realize the missile ships were the ones with the funky shape. I also figured 'wow, missiles are such bullshit, surely the intended method to avoid them must be shooting down these missile ships, so they must be easy pickings'. Apparently not. Apparently missiles are just massively overtuned bullshit.

What school project is that?

This thing. I think it's the 'chemistry' part I'm missing. Guess I should look into flamethrowers and the like, that's probably the easiest stuff I've skipped.

It's kinda weird how the game will warn you about attracting ninja attention, but not missile swarm attention. Especially since the former seems way weaker?

To be fair, the ninja jetbikes can be crippling if they show up before you get your codex ships. They're way faster than your airbus, and will easily shoot it down. They're also super evasive and can tank a missile, so they can also kill some craft you'd expect to handle them easily enough.

Seven new missions too but
- Gal salaries raised to $40k (Young Ubers, Warriors, Veterans) and $20k (Freaks). Bugeyes' to $25k.
So it wouldn't be very good since he's struggling financially.

Interesting. Anyways, I don't think I'll do any updates right now regardless. I'm curious what's meant by 'early game.' I know the game is insanely long so maybe I'm still there, but I remember the phase of having like, flintlocks and shit was very easy and very short. Honestly hunting bows can carry you all the way until enemies have sniper rifles to loot.

Fuck missiles. You had a good amount of air defenses too. 400*.65*3 + 250*.7 = 955 avg damage against an enemy with 400 HP. Horrible luck both on shooting them down AND in what they hit.

If 400 hp is right, I think 3 irradiator towers should guarantee shooting them down each time. That's a brutal threshold to meet though.

Whatever. The show continues!

I'd accidentally disabled the radar circles at some point and forgot they were a thing. They're pretty useful for meta-IDing craft. If I wanted to be anal about it I'd keep some extensive notes there, maybe somehting like a spreadsheet listing craft radar ranges and sizes. Anyways, these are both missile ships, and seem to be converging on my base. Why the technocracy has a giant hate-boner for me I have no idea.

Phew. We've been passed over, it seems.

A bit underwhelming, I was hoping for some awesome melee laser damage. It's just kind of a shitty laser pistol though.

Huh, this sounds cool. I was expecting something lame like the ability to buy coins or something.

Oh? That also seems interesting.

Aha! See? SEE?! Hoarding ancient pottery ISN'T crazy and autistic, its totally rational and has paid off just like I knew it would.

Bahahaha! Fear my immense cultural wealth!

Man, those old earth books are also worth a ton. Not really tempted there though; pretty sure they have more important uses.

So, the situation with our crew quarters being blown to bits is... weird. I had enough spare room in the other two bases to take over the crew and most of the runts if need be.

But apparently we don't need to, and can just keep going with more people than quarters? And the shattered ruins are still providing ~120 crew space? Whatever, don't ask questions.

Theban magic you say?

You can actually start a run with access to these (and the slaves that wear them) if you start in thebes. They're not actually that great for land battles though, since bullets go right through them.

Still, having the suits available for space or water missions would be very cool. We had a dress already from the slot machines... the fuck is a cobra staff?!

Rail Pod could be cool too. Seems like a ship?

Huh, thought I had these already. Forgot what gave me this, something like a book or interrogation. Interesting that gauss weapons have minimum damage. I want them even more now.

Damn, that's a cool weapon. That's a rough casting time though.

And it has a weird effect where it raises your morale when fired but costs morale when swung in melee. Nice range too for a spell weapon. I could see this being useful for taking down the mercenaries; the soldier at least had a noticeable bio weakness... though we have other bio options too, like the daggers or the harpoon gun. Or the blowdarts, but those kinda suck.

Aquasuit specs. Might be another good option for ghoul town raid actually, with that high burn resistance and near immunity to chems, plus the shields. Could even work for the burning town mission maybe? I didn't take a pic, but the electro glove it comes with is a servicable melee weapon for a peasant.

This doesn't seem to have much use beyond it's healing ankh and an impressive charm resistance. I suppose it grants some voodoo power as well, but nothing that good.

Alright, here's hoping we can pull another uac stasis pod out of here.

Well, this isn't the layout I was hoping for. Fuck.

I try to set out so I can melee deflect the imps and just find yet another further down. What a cursed starting position.

And there's another one to the south I didn't even spot yet. Jesus. And they have like 40 NV or whatever.

Yeah fuck this mission. Not even remotely viable. I wonder if it has special awesome loot because of the imps? Maybe we'll find out if I get a team of like 6 in avenger armour.

Hmm, more interesting missions. I'd like another crack at that reef mission, but our water crew is still fucked up.

We run the dig site instead, and manage to win another advanced medipack. Really wish I could build or buy these. Maybe chemsitry will get me that as well. Or we could run into some academy medics again, which haven't been around in ages for some reason.

If you get this early enough, they're basically invisible to human troops at night. At this point though, with enemies that have 30 or more nightvision, or large spotter stats with the spotter trait, it's basically suicide gear. It does have that cool TU restoring effect though. I actually used this once, but didn't get a good test of that property, as it was on the city raid and they didn't have good targets to attack in all that lighting.

Figured I'd show this off- it's actually an insanely powerful melee weapon for a goblin. ~90 damage, and electrical at that.

Really getting sick of these craft 'defenses'.

Step one, complete!

Damn, is this some super ground vehicle we can loot? That'd be fucking epic. I bet it's a total deathtrap somehow.

Well, since I can't repair the damaged crew quarters (because they'e being used to hold crew?) I need to instead convert this hangar to crew quarters. Of course, this fucks the layout, because now a hound running into the crew quarters could trigger the cannons to go apeshit and kill everyone. Lovely.

Seems their base in siberia is finished building now. Lovely. Why can't I get a secret base full of like, hoes?

Working our missions out of the base with the irradiator tower really sucks for wound recovery. There's a sickbay here too, thankfully, but it's still painfully slow. Fucking week of bedrest because we went on a mission in the cold.

Well, was nice knowing you boys.

Alright, time for a proper crack at this mission. I really want the smelly rags from those necro pirates. And also the laser swords.

For the first time ever, our gas traps actually got triggered by enemies. Huzzah!

The enemy in question, however, takes 1/8th the normal amount of choking damage though. So it was basically pointless.

Fortunately, they're not very resistance to FIREBOLT!

Enemy werwolves charging in too. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Female vamp chilling over here. Dunno why she's holding back, but half a dozen turns of popamole with the trusty gyro gun eventually put her down. I still love these things. The Linux SMG with the electro rounds has been insanely effective as a snapshot weapon too.

I'm terrified of having someone get ambushed and eaten by the other vampire I'm sure is here somewhere, so we just huddle in the ship and peek out the doors over and over. Luckily, it's a target rich environment.

Lenneth has the most kills I think, and she's just been gutting people with the knife. The smoke has finally started to clear up too. Thank god the weather for this mission was temperate.

She eventually gets hit with one of their boarding guns, but platemail plus her naturally insane armour lets her shrug it off.

It takes a long ass time, but eventually we clear the enemies out.

Even managed to capture the other vampire. Nice!

Not a bad score.

Some nice training too for just a bit of popamole.

We looted... the entire place? Cool!

Sadly, our 22 smelly rags won't fit in the tavern. I have to sell some crap off. Goodbye boozeosaur.

Huh, we still can't research the live vampires, but the corpse works? Maybe we're missing some generic vampire info?

Another game changer I was reluctant to pull the trigger on. Not sure what exactly this entails, but fuck it, they already raided a base. How much worse can they get?

Huh. Didn't expect to get an unlock from that right away. Will be nice to get those out of the way. Need. Moar. Brainers.

This didn't even require research, it just auto identified. Not a lot of profit, but maybe it also unlocks a cool event or something hidden? I wonder if the mission is gone until we sell the deed? Getting multiples of these would be cool, or even just being able to farm the mission for vampires and werewolves.

Mad scribblings arrived again. And we got another payout!

Man, this thing carried one of my earlier runs so hard. It's basically perfectly accurate, fires as fast as a pistol, can be fired on reaction, and does enough to capture all sorts of shit. Did I mention it's one handed, fairly lightweight and has infinite ammo?

And we can build more!

The force circuitry is admittedly a rare commodity, I should really start robbing priests instead of ransoming them. Or just kill the cannon wielding fuckers...

Oh yeah, this thing is a thing. I'm honestly not sure why you'd want this. It only crews a single person? I suppose it's faster than taking trucks or whatever, but there are not a lot of missions I'd feel safe sending a single person on alone.

Maiden voyage of our new hermit outfits! The shields are indeed a spooky green.

Time to test those shields!

Welp, they're not daze immune.

Though the gal herself practically is.

I try again with a weaker daze weapon, an amateurly wielded whipe. The shields actually stop a hit entirely! The second goes through though. Might have just been a low roll? Expected damage was 0-40.

I also, uh 'tested' bio damage when a spider got a chomp in. Also broke the shield. So did a bullet. So... pretty underwhelming? Really confused what the point of these are aside from looking cool.

Anyways, it was a catacombs mission, and we saved all 6 idiots. Nice rewards! Another sivalinga stone is good news, and we got another shadow orb.

Now that the new quarters are bult, we can repair the old ones. Fuck that pricetag though.

Hmm, this is certainly more useful than the default shroud. Still, that's very expensive. I think I'd rather have 3 flak cannons.

It's here! I fucking love this suit. The armour values are actually kinda shit, especially from the rear (only 25) but the stat boosts this gives are insane. Ogres sorely need both time units and reactions, and having more of both makes reactions easier to train as well. Not to mention those voodoo bonuses, or the armour's excellent vision. Energy recovery is shit, but you can't have it all I suppose. Now to find a worth spell weapon... maybe that cobra staff...

You know, once this is repaired I'm probably going to rebuild that fucking hangar in the top left. Ugh. I guess it could have been worse. Fuck, maybe I should build the spa there instead, if that's an option. Just make the base insanely good for recovery on my misison runners. But I suspect I'll need the room for more science related buildings soon enough. And we're not building a spa before I get a 4th base up and running to make even more cash.

Nice to see such an easy mission pop up even this late in the game.

I probably should have used this chance to farm skills on catgirls or something, but just curbstomping these guys with platemail and rifles sure felt good. Oh, and I did anothe test of the green shield. Knives destroy them too. I should test a stun baton. If that goes right through it basically confirms these are just reskinned purple shields with no real function.

Not the orb I'd have chosen, but an orb is an orb.

Might put that off until we get newer shadowtech craft. I'm thinking the scarab and worm are just about obsolete at this point.

Courtesy of a tomb runner. Pretty cool. 50% conversion seems very high, I wonder if that's standard for the effect or this is a powerful version. I could see a catgirl getting a LOT of melee kills in one turn this way. Also, it keeps mentioning it being a bio or mind effect... would being weak to bio mean I get even more recovery?

Got THIS out of a Matron, which surprised the hell out of me. Didn't think it'd work like this. I wonder if this counts for the rank upgrade or we need an actual capture. Or a cardinal.

I don't know what this is, but if it came from having a reverend researched, I bet it's awesome. Can't wait.

Oh damn, that's even more exciting!

Well shit. I guess we're going shopping in the enemy base next update... I'm thinking magnums. They do lots of stun and go through yellow shields. Either that or a melee takedown. Note to self: build some grounded boots for everyone.

 

[Gumsmith]

You already got vampire research from an interrogation I'm pretty sure. If you have a sickbay you can chop them up

 

[std::namespace]

Seems their base in siberia

does it have a radar?

 

[Jaedar]

Fuck missiles. You had a good amount of air defenses too. 400*.65*3 + 250*.7 = 955 avg damage against an enemy with 400 HP. Horrible luck both on shooting them down AND in what they hit.

Average damage is not that helpful in this case. With 3 flaks you have about 71% chance to take down a missile swarm. Haven't done the math for the armored vault, but yeah some bad luck.

I definitely should have in this case. Generally speaking though, the issue is with re-equiping individual soldiers, which is a huge pain in the ass. And if I forget something, then I'll find out when someone is on fire and we have no extinguisher, or my catgiirl is freezing to death, etc.

As long as you don't go on a mission, I think the loadouts are saved even if you remove all equipment from the craft.

urely the intended method to avoid them must be shooting down these missile ships, so they must be easy pickings'. Apparently not. Apparently missiles are just massively overtuned bullshit.

Yeah, they are strong ships. You can take out the missiles though, with sufficient radar coverage and fast interceptors. Being missiles, they don't fight back, the only hard part is spotting them and catching up to them before they reach the base.

I do think they're overtuned, especially since the game doesn't really tell you you're about to trigger them.

Phew. We've been passed over, it seems.

It functions a bit like base assaults, the ships scan and if they spot your base it spawns a missile.

But apparently we don't need to, and can just keep going with more people than quarters? And the shattered ruins are still providing ~120 crew space? Whatever, don't ask questions.

I'm very surprised the game isn't forcing you to get rid of some people. If you overrun your prison/storage space you pretty much instantly get forced to sell stuff.

If you get this early enough, they're basically invisible to human troops at night. At this point though, with enemies that have 30 or more nightvision,

With 28 day camo, they're pretty close to invisible in the day too.

Oh yeah, this thing is a thing. I'm honestly not sure why you'd want this. It only crews a single person?

Some missions only allow a single person. And it is fast.

It's here! I fucking love this suit. The armour values are actually kinda shit, especially from the rear (only 25) but the stat boosts this gives are insane. Ogres sorely need both time units and reactions, and having more of both makes reactions easier to train as well. Not to mention those voodoo bonuses, or the armour's excellent vision. Energy recovery is shit, but you can't have it all I suppose. Now to find a worth spell weapon... maybe that cobra staff...

Hello police? This man is turning gnomes into ogre fashion accessories.
If you want a mage just use the gnome!

y. Also, it keeps mentioning it being a bio or mind effect... would being weak to bio mean I get even more recovery?

Yes.

 

[turkishronin]

I wonder what happens if you get camo over 9. Do humans view you from negative number of tiles?

 

[Average Manatee]

Average damage is not that helpful in this case. With 3 flaks you have about 71% chance to take down a missile swarm. Haven't done the math for the armored vault, but yeah some bad luck.

I calculate about a 10% chance of the missile making it through all those defenses. So bad luck but not terrifically bad. But losing the large quarters is awful, it has a really low priority to be hit too.

I wonder what happens if you get camo over 9. Do humans view you from negative number of tiles?

I think you're supposed to always see things you are touching. But I've been in situations where that isn't true (while in heavy smoke), so...

 

[Damned Registrations]

I can't even be mad.

Whatever, we killed one god, what's a few more?

These are surprsingly good. Large AoE, elec damage, higher stun than a standard cannonball, which is already high stun.

Was hoping for something to fill the missile slot on our predator besides the seagulls.

Ah, well that will probably do it. Sentry Gun? Is that a base room? Interesting.

Ah good, we could use some relaxation.

Yep, I figured this one would be full of ninjas.

Like, a LOT of ninjas.

The gals I've brought are actually mostly useless. Especially with the psychedelics draining morale.

That's fine though. Lenneth, provided she doesn't go crazy, can solo this whole map. Others are just here for xp and titles. 31 armour while naked. Jesus christ.

We can't bring any items, but the map has some booze laying around we can use to keep morale going.

And the ninjas helpfully brought some happy pills!

It took a long time, but in the end, Lenneth reigns supreme. I think she took out like 20 of them herself.

Studied the vampire corpse. Result was... nothing. Not even a dossier we already had.

Hmm, but this is here now. Maybe it was a matter of missing facilities?

Ugh, still can't dissect the corpses though.

That gnomedisc has me excited. I want a plasma tank. Or something.

Ooh, we got a tank we can make?

The armored cars are... decent. Same kind of armour as platemail. But you're also too big to miss and take quad damage from explosives. And the last problem- if you lose consciousness, you can't be healed. Kinda risky at this stage of the game.

Found a landed Ordinator. Apparently they're these things. Didn't bother fighting them, I just wanted a visual of the craft.

Finally got a 5th fungus. Now we can harvest them and sell the remainder to end this drain on my income.

Got from the gnome, I think? No results though.

Swiftsuit is apparently just the grav harness and refractors mashed together. Which isn't terribly useful, but it is a strict improvement over the refractors and works underwater, so I guess this is our new water outfit for gals. Would have been awesome vs the ghost island- we could have flown up to stab them!

Heavy flamer did indeed unlock advanced chemistry.

I'd prefer guns honestly, but predator has 2 missile slots and I intend to fill them.

Alas, it's immediate unlock is only rattlesnakes, which are crap.

So long, mushrooms!

Now the academy is making a secret base too. Jesus. Maybe I can stop this one before it gets going?

This isn't terribly helpful. I still have no idea if intercepting the ships during construction will let me avoid it appearing to begin with, or fight some halfassed version of it.

Fucking hell. I don't think this is even the academy one. I think there's 2 for the church and 2 for the mercs now. Plus the rimriders.

Stupid city mission. We can bring whatever weapons we want... but the level is filled with a bunch of weaklings that will die to a stiff breeze and enemies that have shit like magnums. So if I bring good weapons I'll kill the civillians and lose rep, if I bring crap I'll take losses.

Amusingly we could bring a quad in here. Or various other decent equipment.

A very large ship? And it's landed? I kind of want to take a look...

They're not landed where the new arctic base is. Confusing behaviour.

And another one landed over here right by the base. Some fighter or somehting is near the cruiser, so I shift targets to the lonely one.

... and it doens't matter, we get fucked like 3 pixels away from our target. So fucking sick of everything being vastly faster and more powerful than my ships.

This thing doesn't stand a chance. And I wasn't expevting an air battle, so we're totally fucked.

Oh, cool, fungus from the infestation we no longer have.

Well, at least this is cool. The weapon on this thing is insane, it has like 24 AoE. I want it pretty bad.

Damn, that's pretty afforable too.

So this is what we needed for the school graduation project right? Wrong! Still no fucking idea what that needs. Fucking hell. I don't remember it being this difficult.

At least it unlocked some interesting stuff.

I checked, and we can just buy the tank parts. Not even that expensive.

Despite the loss of the worm, this was a great month. We made a ton of money while recovering our base.

Crackdown missions are the base invasions, I'm pretty sure? They seems to be failing to find us though.

I love how backwards this is. We want to stop the ninja bullshit so we research for that... and it causes more ninja patrols. Great!

At least they're apparently slow as fuck. Seems like this was the intended way for me to climb the aircraft tech tree.

Dang, feels like it was longer than 2 years.

Perhaps this will help unlock those family ties? Or something else?

VooDoo school?! Not what I expected, but sounds good to me!

Not gonna lie, I thought this would be a craft. A stupid assumption, in retrospect. At any rate, these would be a great weapon for our predator. Like the seaguls but better and craftable.

Unlocked some more shit too. Surely one of those is an advanced craft?

Fuck. The launcher requires shit we don't have. I'll have to disassemble some weapons. We hardly have any, enemies just went straight from homefront rifles to plasma and gauss weapons we can't take apart or use. Very irritating.

Weird, thought we were supposed to be done with the civillian traffic?

Hmm, seems potentially interesting, but not any time soon.

Ugh, I hope I don't need this to unlock even more chemistry to get the school project.

Eat a dick, boarding torpedo!

Since we unlocked the city mission without this, I figured this must unlock something else entirely, maybe some gear or craft? No dice though.

Apparently I never researched these? I thought for sure I'd gotten these already!

Cool, this just keeps showing up. If I had a dropship I'd probably do it.

Our surgery room finished up, and it unlocked some cool shit!

This has me most interested. I bet this thing is fucking awesome.

I know it hinted at it, but this mission really is exclusively for gnomes. We have... one. With fuckall gear. We're not doing this mission.

Our infamry is in the shitter again. I'm mostly just passing time, vainly hoping to unlock another dropship so I don't need to go bankrupt building the kraken.

Well shit. This could be really awesome for all sorts of things.

Another god damned missile

The Syn used an illustration of the Major, who is clearly too sexy to be allowed on the internet.

The TSCR (Too Sexy Can't Read) is that they are apparently very durable. Sounds great!

And we sitll have the body! All ahead on that recruitment research!

And now enemies have ships over 5k speed. Fucking hell. What does shit look like in year 5, everything has 30k speed?

Fuck it. If we're doing a base raid anyways, we don't need to get there fast, we just need to bring a fuckton of firepower. I bought a convoy and am going to load it up with an arsenal to take the church base. Hopefully the loot from that will let us snowball forward. I'm not bringing anyone with under 60 bravery though. Sorry Gandalf.

Apparently I could have just bought these fucking weapon parts I needed to make the stinger launcher. Seems like the way to go; build 2 launchers and craft 30 missiles. Should be enough to fuck up even reasonable strong craft.

And now the church is 'swaying local governemnt'. That sounds pretty bad.

All these fucking ship dossiers and I still never know anything about the ones I might actually want to intercept.

The fucker landed nearby. I bet it's some fucking diplomat with a light bodyguard. Lenneth should be enough to fuck them up.

Welp, that's not exactly a light bodyguard. But they're not terrifying either.

They landed in a scorching zone, which sucks. But it's got enough shacks to duck in and out of that this should be trivial even though it seems to be all zealots. They go down in 2 swings each, and we sure as fuck aren't going to miss.

Well fuck me. THAT could carve through our armour, I bet. The autogun manages to take her down though. She's actually still alive too! I'd like to capture her and maybe steal the weapon...

Fucking hell.

Fortunately, Lenneth laughs in the face of HE light cannon rounds.

The booze we brought helps too. Kind of a waste of rum to use it to fight heatstroke, but whatever.

Fuck, Angel was already near collapse and got hit with a CAWS shot.

Lenneth is running close to collapse as well. We've already cleared the ship and couldn't find a leader. Are these guys just fucking unbreakable? Do I need to kill every last one?

GET OFF MY FUCKING LAWN.

Easy. Not even a challenge. And we got a proper ship engine for our troubles. Just saved us 1.25 million towards our next craft. And we certainly no longer have a shortage of force circuitry.

Not now voodoo mommy, I'm busy!

Oh cool, to get the armour this makes we just need to steal a fucking MERC ENGINEER. I'm sure that'll be easy.

Well, I can't be mad if we get to craft robo-parrots. I love those guys.

 

[Jaedar]

Ugh, still can't dissect the corpses though.

If you middle click it you can see what facilities you are missing. I think it's even guaranteed to be spoiler free?

So long, mushrooms!

This seems like a total waste. Didn't you unlock a thing to convert them into something that doesn't require paying half a million to get rid of it.

So this is what we needed for the school graduation project right?

School graduation is pretty high tech. I would guess you're missing academy medic interrogations, and lots of them.

Can't wait for the church base assault. Do or Die?

 

[turkishronin]

Church assault is going to be fun

 

[Luka-boy]

Syn time soon, finally?

 

[std::namespace]

Swiftsuit is apparently just the grav harness and refractors mashed together. Which isn't terribly useful

its useful to kill tanks and stay alive while doing so

Refinery > Hmm, seems potentially interesting, but not any time soon.

why? expensive?

i will never understand why people run plate without a shield...
but second hand! who gives a fuck?!
u r throwing away free 20 armor and immortality in melee

 

[turkishronin]

Swiftsuit is apparently just the grav harness and refractors mashed together. Which isn't terribly useful

its useful to kill tanks and stay alive while doing so

Refinery > Hmm, seems potentially interesting, but not any time soon.

why? expensive?

i will never understand why people run plate without a shield...
but second hand! who gives a fuck?!
u r throwing away free 20 armor and immortality in melee

People in big armor should carry big guns

 

[std::namespace]

People in big armor should carry big guns

they will, when they actually get big armor...

 

[Damned Registrations]

Who needs aircraft anyways?

its useful to kill tanks and stay alive while doing so

How so? Golden shields do nothing to the weapons tanks have used so far. It's basically no different from a grav harness unless you're being shot by lasers. In which case 66 shields won't last long.

Didn't you unlock a thing to convert them into something that doesn't require paying half a million to get rid of it.

Kinda? I was able to covert 5 outbreaks into 3 + some mushrooms. Honestly I'm mostly worried they're going to keep coming back, in which case I should have just kept them and put up with the drain. But I'm hoping getting rid of the last one makes it exceedingly rare to get more.


Let's get on with it!


Damn, game fucking trolled us. Can't repair the damaged one with this.

Apparently the surgery room was the thing needed to dissect vampires. No exciting results, just a ton of vampire blood and an undead brain. Those both seem fairly rare though, so it's probably nice once we find a use for them.

Had this available for a while. Researched it hoping to unlock a dropship. No results, not even the option to buy or craft hoverbikes. Le fuck?

Grabbed this too. As you can see, it's utterly crap by the time we got it, and was never that good to begin with.

No earth shattering results here, but if we make a gauss cannon we can supply it with ammo at least. Still can't use the gauss firearms though.

Huh. Apparently these UAC vaults vary more than I thought. You know, we got some time while we're waiting for people to heal and stuff to research before the church raid...

The Syn: Recruit may not have let us revive the dead one, but it added their armours to the bootypedia. Very interesting. No real armour available yet, but their base armor of 40 and 50% piercing and concussive resistance makes the refractor a great fit for them.

The chiller is apparently useful for them as well; while the refractor had a large stamina penalty, the chiller gives a bonus. Completely immune to cold as well. 25 NV is insane.

I just had to show this off. Still haven't made one yet, but we definitely will. Accuracy based on voodoo power is weird. Hopefully we can slap a gnome into the tank instead, because goblins have shit power. Mind you, with this things innate accuracy and an AoE that covers an entire screen, accuracy isn't very important. Going to get some awesome multikill titles with this thing.

Apparently the hoverbike is a personal vehicle, not a craft. Still dunno how to get one. Damn though, +350 TUs. Even with the turning cost, this thing would be amazing for picking up fallen soldiers. If there's a variant that lets you fire a bow or something it'll be broken beyond belief.

That UAC vault spawned fairly close by. I'm going for it.

Damn, this would have been a cool one to run. It has some interesting rewards too.

So, I uh, may not have prepared as carefully as I thought I had for this mission. It's fine! This is the practice run for the church base. Just working out the kinks...

Although we once again spawn in a crossfire, this time packed in like sardines with catgirls on the outside, I'm actually confident this is workable. Only 3 enemies in view, and none have crazy weapons.

Toxo cuts down the one to the south and gets a peek into this room, which has a single imp? Base seems a little under-staffed.

I forgot the dark ones have these weird glowy weapons. I think it's cursed? No idea what that means, never managed to research one.

Well, we're prepared as best we can. Fingers crossed nobody pops out of a side door with a rocket launcher. The barrels are concerning as well.

Hah! That's the spot I had covered best, get fucked!

Apparently I should have covered here instead. Shit.

I also apparently didn't hide behind the door for the room down here like I though. Fuck.

Well, that hurt pretty bad, but luckily fire is relatively low damage.

Unfamiliar gun. Makes me nervous. It looks big and fancy too.

Modron tries to use the cobra staff and hits fuck all. I swear this is like the 3rd time. 95% accuracy my ass.

I ran toxo back to the centre but she didn't have the TUs to use the extinguisher. Thankfully our sidekick goblin had just enough to manage it.

After punching the imp like 6 times, I rememberd they're basically immune to daze. Stun baton did the trick though. We need them alive to extract essence for the ratmeister robes. Also, we lost the goblin to a pistol shot. Sad, but I kind of expected some losses here, and our elite in the avenger outfit is still okay.

Modron has better luck with the staff in melee. It hurts his morale when used that way... but with that gnome strapped on he has like 130 bravery. His morale is fine.

Took me until turn 3 to realize the blood hound I brought along was just sitting in the open drawing fire. Derp. In my defense, he was hidden by terrain.

Not a bad result for such a sketchy mission.

Some interesting loot too. No UAC Stasis pods, but we got some new weapons to examine, 3 old earth weapon boxes (note to self- OPEN THOSE YOU IDIOT YOU FORGOT) some of those master weapon parts and a lot of demon captives.

Interesting. Did not expect to need hypno panels to learn voodoo properly. That'll be annoying. Explains why the human mages had them.

Oooh that sounds fun. I have so much stuff I want to mess with once we have the cash to spare for recruiting a bunch of troops and filtering out the low powered ones.

Finished up the other Syn related tech. Apparently the catsuit is their default outfit. Nothing special compared to the others, but checking the ANAL page revealed some cool shit- 200 psi defense, 3 health and 25 morale regen innately! But cripplingly low energy recovery. So it seems like you'll want to use one sparingly, preferably with guns rather than melee to avoid burning all your energy? Or get a way to recover it faster...

Anyways, we can rebuild her now! That's a steep cost in medical supplies, but we can manufacture them now. Won't be long now.

We need a fw days to recover from wounds anyways. Only Eisen and Toxo need more than a week. We'll launch the raid before then.

Hah, game really wants to distract me. You scared I'm gonna take your bases?

Just as well, it'll give us a chance to test drive the ratmeister outfit.

Yep, that's a rat alright. We can apparently summon them at a pretty decent distance, and can get 3 per round. Maybe more with one better trained, but 3 is plenty. Creates a bit of smoke too, but the rats can't move on the same turn, sadly.

This is honestly bonkers. Having access to expendable units to scout, distract, and draw fire that has a good chance of missing a tiny target is incredibly powerful. It costs some freshness to use but who cares, we can just swap outfits to new goblins each mission. Is this unique to the green codex? If so, this is the best reward it's given since we got the perfect gals.

I knew these guys were evasive, but god damn. No wonder I had so much trouble taking them alive with stun batons and shield bashes.

Was hoping for an immediate payoff here, but no such luck. These seem REALLY cool though.

More ancient logs from the gnome. Get to the good stuff already!

Figured these might be a good alternative to using fire extinguishers. I guess we can pre-prime them if they won't go off automatically, but this honestly isn't much better than an extinguisher. Smaller and lighter, but seems to cause more stun, and if it's not already primed it takes way too long to use.

And this is why I have so many of these irradiator towers. To be clear, if the craft gets blown up, it stops firing defenses. This thing took all 4 hits to die. I wonder if it was another ninja raid. Haha, suckers!

The lore on the possessed is pretty creepy. I wonder if one of the codices ties into them more closely the way ours does with zombies. Would add some replay value if so.

Welp, we got our Syn. I apparently forgot to actually take the screenshot of the stats after changing the name. Whoops. Anyways, my first thought was to assign a stasis pod for such a rare unit... but we can't. I guess it's not eligible for that? Maybe when it dies we'll get the damaged body back and be able to create a new one?

It is, in fact, not eligible for almost any training at all. The starting stats are pretty damned good, near a capped out gal's, with one glaring exception. Only 30 hp. Bringing a 30 hp unit along on a dangerous mission is unacceptable when I can easily bump that up with training and then further with some choice titles. Luka will have to sit this one out, sadly.

Behold, our mighty army!

So, obviously, I've prepped fairly hard for this mission. It'll presumably be easier than the rimrider base, but who knows. Maybe it's full of exalts, reverends, and units I've never even seen before. I've brought some primed stasis grenades on key units. If our healer here falls, hopefully the stasis grenade heals her enough to keep her or whoever she is tending to alive. Or at least knocks out the enemy. Stasis grenades are weird and insanely useful for this purpose, I'd have abused them earlier if I'd realized they can be used as deadman switches.

I've also given Lennth her shield. I generally don't value shields much, given the extra weight and enemies seeming to be pretty smart about shooting the sides of targets, and the lack of a free hand really sucks if you want to say, use a healing item or pull out a secondary without dropping your primary weapon. But there's a good chance we end up seeing some brutal weapons aimed our way this mission, so I want that extra 20 armour. We've got grounding boots and a gas mask as well. Lastly, I loaded her up with one of the demonic essence pots. In case ~200 mind damage seems like a good idea to use somewhere. I've no idea what the innate properties of mind damage are in terms of stun/hp ratio, armour piercing or the like. It's more of a last resort if we find something that seems invulnerable.

Modron is going to be carrying the great club as well. It scales off health, and with the +50 this armour gives, this thing averages 200 damage a swing. Insanity. And the concussive type might be useful somewhere.

Well, the good news is that it only split us into 2 groups. The bad news is it put most of us in the room with a single elevator, and only a handful of the weakest members in the room with 4.

Among this room's 8 occupants are 2 cats, a dog, and a catgirl with a healing pouch. We've got one gal in platemail and it's the weakest of the lot. These guys might be fucked.

Why even bring cats along? Because they have SENSE, and therefore can spot some enemies through the floor. Handy, that.

That's some kind of plasma gun. Seems the church keeps all the nice weapons on it's own property.

At least they're not all exalts and beastmasters.

Map layout seems a fair bit more open than other bases we've seen so far. Not spying any crazy units yet either.

Well, that gun is kinda crazy. Pretty sure that's what the waspites were using to melt us before.

Fuck, this room has enemies on all sides and there's no way we can avoid having them shoot us through the elevators. At least nobody seems to have a rocket launcher or whatever.

WANT.

 

[std::namespace]

How so?

its just flying +tu +reactions, so you dont get reacto-blasted to smithereens when you shoot your rpg
you float up behind cover which costs minimal tu and shoot and scoot
gravboots on catgirls do the same thing but i didnt have em

 

[std::namespace]

If our healer here falls, hopefully the stasis grenade heals her enough to keep her or whoever she is tending to alive.

damn thats nifty for really really green armor... but the catgirl will just get instagibbed

At least nobody seems to have a rocket launcher

including you ^^

 

[Jaedar]

I just had to show this off. Still haven't made one yet, but we definitely will.

Why use a 4-tile unit for artillery, when two peasants with mortars will do ?

Is this unique to the green codex?

Nope.

I kinda want to gush about syns but you didn't get soldier: syn researched yet so I'm worried I'll spoiler something. Fresh syn on a base assault seems like a bad idea though, so just as well.

The first turn of church base attacks seem like the make or break moment, so I guess we'll see next update.