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

[Damned Registrations]

Semi-phenomenal, nearly cosmic power.

Extreme range gauss cannons sound pretty nice, honestly.

Automatic double tap for each shot, and accuracy is a bit lacking for the snapshots. Still, should be plenty for say, blowing up enemy hovertanks.

Seems tractor beams are cheap enough to produce if we want to try that. I mean, engines are expensive, but they're very easy to get, all sorts of missions and craft drop them now.

These suits on the other hand... fuck. 3 motors a piece? I bet the ogre ones need even more. The Termicator needs them too. The Xec needed FIVE! Feeling real glad we got so many from that aurora mission.

Eww, lowers dodge? I suppose it wouldn't matter if they're just being used as support craft while our battleship tanks the hits. Assuming these lower speed by ~500 instead of 800, and we slap a pair on a fighter, bringing down a big enemy ship with 5000 speed would require.... 20 fighters? Ugh. Even assuming the battleship can pull the equivalent of 4 fighters, that's just not viable. What am I going to do, field 5 battleships at once? And like Jaedar said, there's little reason to bring down small craft intact. Maybe if it works on the bogeymen? We could capture them for demon essence or maybe glamour? Meh.

Enhanced energy regen here is a neat perk, but... I could just use the gauss cannons instead, which cost like less than half the energy to fire.

It's not even accurate. I suppose you could spend 60% of your TUs to walk right up to a target and pump 1800 laser damage into it from close range. But yeah, having two types of attacks seems way more practical.

Now this seems promising. 250 extra max shields and doubled regen rate. Shields regen twice per round, so that's a lot of long term damage sponging. I wouldn't mind bringing one of these along just to draw enemy fire to make things safer for catgirls and such.

This is actually pretty nice, 25 wealth is half a deed, which is 100 storage space. We're still running out of that shit on a regular basis. That Xec suit uses up 75 for example, and the components for the Conqueror (our giant flagship in progress) are piling up as well. We're getting close to doing the Hab section on that actually, but we need ~70 grav units to make the space suits it demands.

These have been flying around this month, very annoying. Not sure why they gave them a visible speed, there's no way to intercept something that fast.

Considering we have a bunch of defense systems built into our crew quarters now, this would be pretty powerful. Requiring that fusion spot too though is a bitch, it'll take months to set these up. And the circuitry is fucking pricey.

Some 'sludge raider' ships have been flying around. I shot a few down and finally bothered to run a mission at one. Wasn't even worth covering, they're raiders with gas/chem weapons, utterly harmless to us as long as I don't stupidly dump a catgirl in front of one (chems bypass blue shields.)

This one looks cool at least. Seems like a dead end though, didn't get any tech and can't even enslave them. Bah.

Yep, that's about what I expected. Pretty much all the broadside weapons are just a pair of heavy weapons duct taped together. Weirdly, it doesn't even give entries for 2 of them we can make.

Dragon is finished. It's... kinda ugly. Only entrances are the two yellow/red doors. No tanks on this thing makes it inferior as a crew vessel imo. It's kind of similar to the kraken but less defensible.

The little wing things aren't even space we can use and it just looks kinda weird with the way the walls look.

Well, we didn't build it for crew transport anyway. Broadside weapons! I have no idea what the stats on this thing are. Should be decent though. I'll slap a pair of basilisk cannons on as well, those punch through armour real well. That auxilliart slot is frustratingly useless. Most stuff that can go there adds like, 30 armour or a bit of radar. Our best option is a targetter to raise accuracy, but we already have plenty from our awesome pilots, and we're not going to miss anything this would want to fight.

Well, here it is. Did we do this already? I feel like we did this already. It says we need to approach on foot. We've got a couple more zortium suits at least, but this still feels sketchy.

 

[Jaedar]

Maybe if it works on the bogeymen? We could capture them for demon essence or maybe glamour? Meh.

For lp/fun purposes I would like to strongly recommend you make a ship with global range and a tractor beam to ground some bogeymen. Assuming you can find any.

Well, here it is. Did we do this already? I feel like we did this already. It says we need to approach on foot. We've got a couple more zortium suits at least, but this still feels sketchy.

You did not. This is a one time mission (if beaten), and iirc it stops the normal moon glitterdust missions from spawning(for some unexplained reason). It's also one of the hardest missions in the game. No nukes, but soooo many nazis.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The glowing eyes are a nice touch.

Short update. Things are very much veering towards a lot of playtime (and especially in game time, the months are flying by) compared to noteworthy update stuff. Which is fine. At this rate I might actually have that billion in a few more updates if I just go ahead and cruise control through a year ingame to rack up the cash.


Well, since I still want to try a few glitterdust items out, I guess we'll put the black sun HQ off for now. It doesn't seem nearly as rare as a lot of other missions (like the one that has a damaged Syn ) We'll settle for wiping out this merc base at the south pole. We don't really need to do this, but their supply missions make skipping time annoying whenever it interrupts me, and they're annoying to intercept as well because of where they're headed.

Things were going pretty smoothly considering the potential dangers, and then towards the end Maria got blown the fuck up. I think it must have been a blaster bomb, because nobody with a viable weapon was anywhere close by (I had lookouts and even a drone using radar) and it did a fuckton of damage. Thankfully it only knocked her out. She really is damned near indestructible.

I was actually planning to do several more hideouts this month and shoot for the next ranking, which asks for 25k infamy. Lenneth also got beat up pretty good though, so I think I'll put it off another month. We might not even have the other prerequisites, as they're rather vague. The infamy target should be easy enough to hit though, we could knock over 4-5 bases like this easily, and shipping handles the rest even if we ignore the crash sites. Nothing special here, but we can make use of the life supports and steel. Even 1000 of that shit disappears real damned fast when you really focus on the conqueror parts, which I'm starting to do.

Catgirls got some nice xp out of the deal as well. They knifed a LOT of mercenaries. Shame I forgot to bring the vampire sword, it would have put Lenneth back to full health easily. I'm going to make another actually, we've had the option for a while and I kept forgetting. This is more or less the era of 'spend tons of cash to buy parts and build anything you want.' About the only things we strictly need to loot right now are magichen motors, lost souls, dream echoes and orbs. Though at 300k a pop, those 50 life support units saved us 15 million in cash.

We'll knock over some more bases soon, once we're not terribly busy fighting off the earth gods, otherwise known as ratmen. Knocking bases over for loot (or just doing missions in general) feels kinda weird at this point, because for the same amount of IRL time, I can just skip through a month and rack up more money than the base rewards us with. It basically comes down to whether I want to spend the time on the strategic map or the tactical. Nice to have the option I suppose.

They make good target practice at least. So do the ninja hideout defense squads, which our new battleship gobbled up like candy even with some very halfassed pilots. The broadside beam lasers are fucking awesome. It's a shame we have no way to speed up the ship, it'd be amazing if it could intercept more stuff.

Got another demon shrine. I think we're up to like 8 avenger suits now, still missing a simulacrum... torso? Legs? I forget. We've got heads, I know that much, and bunch of useless teachings.

Ooh, new teachings! And these ones actually unlocked something...

This thing looks so damned cool. It's a real shame we unlocked it this late, those demon shrine missions are easy enough to do with stone age weapons, and aside from the synthmuscle (which I think we could have looted from megapol?) it's components were all very basic and cheap. I'd have totally fielded a god damned army of these things if we had them before red shields showed up.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The game knows who she is.

Decided to loot a supply ship we shot down. This is one of those mission that we auto lose after 10 turns because the ship explodes. We finished in 3 though. Also, I don't think I shoved the Xec's battle sprite yet, it's pretty cool. Turkish Ronin has been piloting the hell out of this thing, murdering cyberdiscs and generally getting several kills each deployment. Good shit.

Noticed this thing has a 0-G entry while looking up something else. Because of course it does. And it works on a limited fuel supply. So fucking awesome, I'm legit mad we didn't get to use this when it mattered. I might make some just for space missions anyways.

Definitely haven't done this one yet. Goblins vs nazis in a dark catacomb actually sounds kinda fun, so I load it up. Advice suggested to use the dark to our advantage, and warned they would have a supersoldier, which is kind of brutal for a goblin to try punch through that armour.

Starting location seems pretty defensible. Stairwell is a dead end, we could hole up in there if we wanted, but I think we can cover 4 corners.

Supersoldier was a lot closer than I expected. Thankfully, we can spam rats in here and they won't pass out from heat exhaustion. I'm a little concerned about our durability; we've got 60 purple shields, but lasers bypass them, and these guys do have some laser weapons. We'll prioritize.

Fuck, flamethrowers too, those will overload shields quickly I think.

Fortunately, our rats have wall hax, and also basically cripple ranged attacks of anyone they stand next to. Which is important, because even if they can't see for shit in the dark, flamethrowers provide light, and they've got that spotter/sniper shit going on. They've got some guard dogs too, which are annoyingly good at killing rats.

We have another advantage I mostly forgot about though: These avenger suits provide a small TU stealing effect. It's normally not too relevant, but Orcinator with a forceblade and enemies packed in super tight quarters turned this into an absolute bloodbath. They actually had 2 supersoldiers here and they both went down in one turn.

Rats honestly made this mission so much easier. I need to go back to abusing them.

There was also a cat down here for some reason? Luckily for us, it likes rats apparently.

And luckily for it, it never got spotted by enemies so it survived.

8 goblins vs 50 nazis, goblins win, flawless victory. That was fun, I liked being able to exploit their low nightvision, the rats seeing through walls, while at the same time being aware of spotter effects forcing me to rotate attackers.

Sadly, it was kind of a waste of time. Only thing we got of value was a single emerald. Was that our 'shadow gift'? Lame if so, certainly not worth the risk/reward the mission entails. These witch quests seem like a scam. Didn't one offer a beauty serum? That thing was worthwhile.

Having 3 fighters is pretty awesome. I should outfit a sabre with 2 shields and use it as a dodge tank.

Got sick of not finding the recipe I knew I used before so I used the tech tree viewer thing. Apparently these lead to a sorceress outfit? Well, that would have been a cool surprise. I guess it's not a big deal, that's a vague description and I've no idea what else is required to get that. But this is why I don't like using this thing. Anyways, 'SG Robe to Glamour' is what I was after...

Spa?! I need a Spa to do that? Ugh, whatever, at least we don't need to rebuild anything. Glamour incoming. I might run more missions against them for that glamour, the novices and operatives give bonus glamour when butchered as well.

Was hoping we'd go directly to orbs, or at least outside, but this sounds like a cool mission at least. And there's not much risk if we can retreat.

We've only got 3 of these left, but I'm bringing all of them. I'm expecting a lot of enemies and this is our only ranged option besides the meridian. It was pretty underwhelming last time we used them, but I've since realized these scale with voodoo power. Since they also have shit acuracy, putting these on the right characters instead of slapping them on random goblins will make a big difference.

I put 2 on Lenneth to start just to help avoid wasting shots with reaction fire. Storage is actually a big problem for us, everyone's outfits are so skimpy they can't store a spare gun or even ammo pack. Enemies are all those wraith variants, lots of armour and lots of red shields, which will shut our cursed guns right down.

On the bright side, the level is small and simple. There's basically a big corridor down the middle and some open rooms on either side. There's also a wall of bars we can shoot through between us and them, so we won't get swarmed.

Side paths seem empty at the start, another thing in our favour. We hole up mostly on one side, the other we send a few people over to use as a killbox, it's one of those weird rooms with stairs leading up to a balcony.

Optimisto can see all the way to the far end of the map. There's a cool looking gate thing back here with a sort of pulsing/strobing effect.

Shockingly, we're under attack already on turn one. This guy might have been in a bit of a blindspot, but even so, he fucking booked it to get over here.

Yeah, that's a fairly large number of TUs for an enemy. We'll need to be careful. He goes down easily enough to our huge fuck-off axe though.

But we run out of energy in the process. I brought this axe because it goes through armour better than the cleaver, but failed to notice the obscene energy cost. Oof.

We had a guy run into here too, but he got taken down by cursed spraygun fire from above.

After killing a few more enemies, I get impatient and carve a hole in the wall over here with our magic hammer. Should make a great chokepoint to murder dudes with reaction fire, in theory. In practice, they mostly avoided it. Maybe AI doesn't like moving through destroyed terrain?

As we try press forward a bit, I realize I underestimated the level. There's big towers in the far corners, with arrow slits. This is going to be a pain.

I tried sending Optimisto up to fire the spraygun at close range, but apparently the arrow slits are one way.

My favourite gun to the rescue yet again- I sent 3 people in here to take this big armored bitch down and they couldn't get the job down, now all standing waiting to get chopped to bits. Lenneth makes the shot from the other side of the map, through the arrow slits to finish her off. Fuck yeah!

There's some smaller towers flanking the gate too, but nothing we can't handle after taking out their ground forces and stealing their superior melee weapons.

That's a surprisingly simple report!

And a surprisingly boring loot pile. None of this matters at all. Maybe I was supposed to capture one of the higher tier wraiths? Are the tormentors real people I can capture? I suspect this was a one time mission so it probably didn't matter, like those fancy zombies I captured ages ago and keep in my menagerie.

We're free! Now we can look forward to shadowrealm beasties instead of just wraiths.

Fortunately, the latest demon shrine paid out big time, and we finally have a herder staff again! To be fair, this is more important for knocking out high priority targets, especially shielded ones (it bypasses all shields and armour) but having another weapon in the shadow realms is always welcome. And we can use it to mind control them too!

I didn't grab the screenshot of the event, but some girl showed up thinking we were Hogwartz apparently, and turned out to be an actual witch!

It's a cool idea, but sadly she doesn't seem very useful. The outfit is just the same old nun outfit we already had access to, and the damsel doesn't have great stats or special perks. Seems kind of odd to show up this late, maybe it was added in the last patch and intended to arrive much sooner.

Why the random picture of the globe? Because I skipped over another random event. You know the one where the ninjas hack us and we lose like 10 million? Well, it was that, but TWO HUNDRED A FIFTY MILLION. We just lost a quarter of a billion dollars, 60% of our savings, to a random event. What a crock of shit. How the hell am I supposed to reach a billion this way? Do I need to stockpile money as gold bars and resell them at a loss or something? At least our income continues to grow as time goes on, so it's not like it'll take years to replace.

Yeah, this event. We got the normal version a few days later.

Joined an awesome party event and we seem to have gotten a cool variant where we get weaponry?! I want this outfit, that's 207 melee!

Slut got a somewhat less prestigious outfit. Also one we have no info on.

Ah, the enemies are bogeymen. I think we had this before actually? Seems familiar now.

Masochist outfit has 'blood magic' which seems to be a ranged attack that costs health to use.

Also seems to have terrible vision stats, as there's a bogeyman on this tile we can't see. At the time I tought it was some special invisible monster, but actually it's just that the diagonal counts as 2 tiles away, and she can only spot them from 1 (adjacent.)

They kinda fucked her up pretty bad. Which is annoying, as she normally gets to recover for free with the bio suit. This actually put a timer on the mission, she was losing a lot of health each turn and we had no med kits.

After a while I realize I can give the gun away and we mop up the rest of the demons pretty quickly.

24 of them is pretty nasty for unarmed troops to handle, this could end very badly if it happened early in the run.

The sludge raiders have a fucking battleship? The hell? I might need to take them on some more, maybe they have some unique tech squirreled away somehow.

Income continues to go crazy.

Fuel capsules at 103 of the 250 we require.

Glamour getting close to that 1600 mark.

Hab section coming along nicely. We can easily make the remaining parts, expect this to be finished in the next update.

 

[lightbane]

You're supposed to defeat the ninjas before the endgame as they keep getting worse, as you've seen. Shame you're going for the standard path. You also can change the tech tree in options so that it doesn't spoiler you.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You're supposed to defeat the ninjas before the endgame as they keep getting worse, as you've seen. Shame you're going for the standard path. You also can change the tech tree in options so that it doesn't spoiler you.

I'm not sure how I could have defeated the ninjas before they put up that megabase though, let alone taken that base down earlier. They don't seem to have been getting worse really, I think that event is just scaled to your cash pile. I'll try take the base out if we run out of other shit to focus on. It's going to be a pain in the ass with the nuke bullshit.

Hat trick incoming.

Now that we have a stupidly fast fighter, I was finally able to catch one of those hotrod ships that occasionally zips around.

Had this guy onboard with a few marsec bodyguards. Unfortunately, he suffered a stabbing related accident and didn't make it back home. (We didnb't have the catgirls with the capturing weapons with us because they took like 2 damage from cold and got kicked off the ship without me noticing)

New achievement! Haven't seen one of those in a while. Armour is always nice, but it's kind of laughably small as a reward for 250 missions without a single death.

Hab section is done! The other half is way more of a pain in the ass, honestly, but I'll keep chipping away at it. Unless we find cooler shit to do.

Got a new toy from a demon shrine! Aside from the mini lifesteal effect (which honestly doesn't matter because goblins have such low health... unless I had that mecha suit, which wouldn't work with this) it's just a fucking awesome weapon. Because they tend to have a huge gap between strength and reactions, it dishes out ~120 damage a swing in their hands, which is quite impressive. It'd be crazy accurate too, and the fact that it does warp damage... I'm actually tempted to bring a goblin along on missions just to use this for melting armored shit. Oh, and we can bring it to the shadowrealm, where it'd be perfect for taking out armored guards.

Got a glitterdust outpost mission, but I fucked up. Not getting Tits shot, that was just the mission being dangerous as fuck. Rather, I didn't realize the moon counted as space for the purpose of what healing items we can bring. As such, we had literally no healing items, so we had to retreat so she didn't bleed out.

I went back and checked that Red Dawn nun, and she actually DOES have an awesome perk. She had indestructible too, which gives 30 more hp. So she's actually really awesome for an untrained damsel. I'll try train her up and give her something more useful than the nun outfit.

Ran a rimrider outpost mission as well and spotted an unfamiliar gun on this guy. Annoyingly, we couldn't research it...

We also captured a cat boy, and apparently they have more intel for us? I generally keep piles of extra prisoners around so we don't miss stuff, but I must have overlooked this guy. Sadly all we got from him was a lame laser rifle, and not the one the clickor had.

Also finally got something good out of a star god operative!

Finally something to put in the LSX slots of our ships, though it's a little late to the party. Still, slapping it on our battle ship instead of the targeter will be a massive boost to our defenses. 1 shield per 2 seconds sounds like crap, until you remember how fast the clock moves in combat. If we could put these on the fighters or a ship with shadowtech dodge bonuses they'd probably live forever. As it stands, it's still an amazing buff that will let our battleship last both in combat and on the field between multiple engagements without going home.

Something has triggered our pile of leaflets to be eligible for research again!

Each one we research reveals some kind of bootleg plasma weapon, including the one that clickor had. They're not awful, but also not good enough to use compared to the stuff we have.

Also found a busted version of this kicking around in a base and researched it. Clearly obsolete already, but neat.

Oh. Shit. That was a whole ass cruiser.

Well, it's not THAT bad. There's a few things working in our favour. First, even though this isn't the base I send missions from any more, I do keep a garrison here to defend it. Not top tier stuff, but people that can at least hold a gun and hit something within it's range. And they've got some weapons that aren't total dogshit, mostly whatever I can buy or had left over after upgrades on the main crew. Second, apparently I had a fucking tank here? And we can use it for base defense? Since when was this an option! I'd have built way more if I knew that was a thing. Note to self: make fleet of bio tanks for base defense.

Third, we've got the 'Tree of Life' support unit because of the 'Metagarden' we built a while ago. What does it do? Well, it seems to have a sense range of like, 40 tiles. And it's built near the hangar and access lift. So we've got wallhax. Pretty cool seeing them all as they're deployed.

Also a bit depressing, that's a ton of dudes, and they've got a lot of blue shields. At least it's the academy, even their best units are still kinda crap.

Speaking of their best units... hello there! We haven't met yet! Keeping her alive will be a bit tricky, but will make any losses we sustain here more than worth the trouble.

I immediately fuck up by trying to fire a rocket at a cyberdisk, missing wildly and blasting a hole in the floor leading to the tree of life in the basement. Fuck.

After a few turns, it's an utter warzone, especially around the hangar where I'm firing rockets and exploding cyberdisks.

The tree got the ever living shit kicked out of it too. Good thing it spawns with 999 life.

Also, despite being called a tree, it's this gross egg looking thing.

Jim was actually helpful this time too. I mean, not very helpful, but he didn't fuck us over either. And he could have, after picking up that fucking lightning tome. Jesus.

All told, the fight was quick and fairly boring. We had a few elites to do the heavy lifting; the tank, Slut was there (I think the fight actually healed her early because it let her fight in the bio suit) Tits was there, and Gudrun as well. Also, apparently you can equip Gudrun in the deployment screen. Interesting. Maybe we should try send her on some missions for funsies.

Got a LOT of training in by the end.

Didn't lose anyone terribly important. Though I am pissed the catgirl that took the provost down got murdered by a worker a turn later firing at the provost because she woke up.

This option has been sitting in the research list for ages, and I decided to try it out in case it was the intended end of that tech line and it was blocking something important. I wasn't sure if that was the case or if it's doubling up like the cat girl path thing, which I still leaving alone. Regardless, this late in the game, whatever benefits having two personalities might give are likely utterly trivial.

At any rate, the class thing did unlock a new tech; but it's a lame one that seems like an unimportant dead end.

This, on the other hand, seems more promising!

Oh hell yes, that's what I wanted to see!

 

[Jaedar]

8 goblins vs 50 nazis, goblins win, flawless victory.

Damn. nice job. I did this mission once, and I lost all but a single goblin. The second to last goblin had to do a suicide bombing to kill the supersoldier. Fun enough, but a one time thing. I think all witch quests are kinda like that.

Sadly, it was kind of a waste of time. Only thing we got of value was a single emerald. Was that our 'shadow gift'?

Iirc I got a shadow orb. Maybe it's random? Or maybe yours got blown up?

Apparently these lead to a sorceress outfit?

Gray codex only bub

Why the random picture of the globe? Because I skipped over another random event. You know the one where the ninjas hack us and we lose like 10 million? Well, it was that, but TWO HUNDRED A FIFTY MILLION.

Welcome to xpiratez. The actual mechanics of this event are: There's several different tiers of it, and only one is active at a time. Each tier activates when it would take like 90% of your money. This is the highest tier, it becomes active whenever you have more than 300 million.
It also stops happening if you take out the ninja HQ.

Do I need to stockpile money as gold bars and resell them at a loss or something?

Or something yes. I think you have it already, so you have read the hint, but you might have forgotten: Alenium description specifically mentions that it should be used as a bank.

Provost pickup is nice. What access codes are you missing now?

 

[lightbane]

I'm not sure how I could have defeated the ninjas before they put up that megabase though, let alone taken that base down earlier.

You should have. A new mechanic that's not explained anywhere in XCF and Pir is that some enemy bases level up until max danger rating. I dunno how it works with HQs though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

A new mechanic that's not explained anywhere in XCF and Pir is that some enemy bases level up until max danger rating.

That was mentioned in some tip about the ninjas specifically, actually. The HQ didn't level up, it just appeared, and it was that massive open field battle thing when I first looked at it and ran away years ago. There was a ship that spawned it, but I tried killing that ship and got my ass handed to me.

Or maybe yours got blown up?

One of my main gripes with the game is that this is an engine limitation of it. I mean, it's not technically because they can tie events to missions and give items through events but... it feels annoying that you have to worry about blowing up the mission rewards while playing the mission, even if they shouldn't really be at risk.

I think you have it already, so you have read the hint, but you might have forgotten: Alenium description specifically mentions that it should be used as a bank.

I totally forgot about that. I'll go for the HQ kill anyways, that was my original plan, and it'll make for a better story.

 

[Jaedar]

One of my main gripes with the game is that this is an engine limitation of it. I mean, it's not technically because they can tie events to missions and give items through events but... it feels annoying that you have to worry about blowing up the mission rewards while playing the mission, even if they shouldn't really be at risk.

I like that items of all types can be blown up. It does annoy me a how fragile they are though. Even things made out of plastasteel will get wrecked by a single HE grenade.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I mean, enemy gear and stuff being blown up I'm fine with. But when it's something you're supposed to be given as a reward after the job is done like the witch quests, it's really dumb. Why are my clients paying me by giving my reward to my enemies? And often it's not even your fault, enemies go insane and cause explosions all the time, and having all your backup gear just sitting in a vulnerable pile out in the open is dumb too. At least put it in a room where it can't be destroyed turn one if an enemy throws a grenade at you. That's happened to me at least half a dozen times by now I think.

 

[Jaedar]

I mean, enemy gear and stuff being blown up I'm fine with. But when it's something you're supposed to be given as a reward after the job is done like the witch quests, it's really dumb. Why are my clients paying me by giving my reward to my enemies? And often it's not even your fault, enemies go insane and cause explosions all the time, and having all your backup gear just sitting in a vulnerable pile out in the open is dumb too. At least put it in a room where it can't be destroyed turn one if an enemy throws a grenade at you. That's happened to me at least half a dozen times by now I think.

Yeah, there needs to be a button for "deploy your units, and place any unused weapons in the void where they're safe".

But when it's something you're supposed to be given as a reward after the job is done like the witch quests, it's really dumb.

I might be misremembering. But iirc I found a shadow orb and assumed that was what was meant by either "the gift" or something that escaped from the void and why the humanists are there.

I looked at the data mined stuff, and I can't find any shadow orb in this mission, but I am also not confident I am reading the data correctly.
I think the engine actually has support for spawning an item into your postbattle inventory without putting it on the map.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Green really is the best colour, after all.

Free info is always nice, but is there even anything left that this can trigger?

Huh, apparently yes. I feel like we should have seen these already, we haven't dealt with zombies in quite a while. Maybe they're in the shadowrealms, or a witch quest?

Note to self: check damage on meridian gun now that I actually can. We can make these rounds for a couple other guns too, but shitty ones for now, like hand cannons. Still might be useful, mind damage is hard to come by.

That's 3 out of 4. Not sure where the 4th is at, I'd assume either star gods or mercs, but it'd be weird if it's the mercs because we've had their leader for a while already.

Good to finally know what those novices and operatives are hitting me with.

I've got so many of these damned things. Should be nice weapons for goblins and catgirls, the xg pistols were nice, but they really struggle against blue shields.

Power is a bit low, especially this one, but 3 shots for 32% is a nice fire rate, and plasma degrades armour.

...and these can be turned into magischen motors. We're in fucking business! I've got enough fancy pistols to make annihilator suits for everyone!

Another decent support slot item for ships, but I think I'll stick with the shield regen. Our battleship can go toe to toe with a bomber and regen faster than we lose shields, it's awesome.

... the normal plasma weapons have motors too. We've got over a hundred of these fucking things. EVERYONE is getting the top tier shit now. Annihilator armour, termicator, Xec chasis... we can have it all.

Wow, these are even shittier than I thought. Weirdly accurate too.

The OG workhorse. Not too shabby here either, I think we've got better, arguably, but this will be great for filling out garrisons.

This one is kind of neat, it's got a 4 tile radius AoE. Shame it's also terribly innaccurate. The autofire could be good for melting a sectopod though.

Since we can't keep our money, may as well spend it. Here Jack, have 30 million. (This buys us ~5 rubies. Should have done this ages ago, we could have a ton of future bows and other gem heavy shit.) In retrospect, magischen motors can be broken down into gems anyways, so this wasn't even necessary. But again, nothing useful to do with the money if we can't stockpile it to 1 billion right now.

Now this is actually interesting. That autofire... that's a metric fuckton of damage, even if it would bounce right off armour, it'll murder shields. The mammoth chaingun could do similar numbers, but this weighs WAY less.

Need to cook some combat drugs, so we're just going to buy 160k$ worth of crack. No biggie. Shame we blew up all those crack houses years ago, probably inflated the price.

Shot down a science vessel. I think we've taken one of these out before, but all their plasma weapons and shit that used to be useless now have value to me, so we're going after it. Also, a chance to try one of our newly unlocked toys. Did not expect this thing to be so accurate at this kind of range, that's actually insane. The spread makes a bunch of it miss anyways, but even so, it took this thing out.

Was tempted to fire a guided missile into the ship through the hangar it just exited, but I want the engines and shit intact if possible. It would have worked and been super cool though!

Got this again, one Lenneth this time. Maybe I should farm more of these high ranking academy missions, bravery is incredibly rare and useful.

Well, no need for the guided missiles, we got the real deal now! There's even an EMP option in case we don't want to destroy the shit out of a base or want to take some people alive. OTOH, if we DO want to destroy the shit out of a base, we can probably blow up their command centres from turn one if I learn the map layouts and bring enough of these. Would be a taste to retreat and leave the loot behind, but again, would be awesome.

Okay, now THIS is actually an upgrade. ~400 plasma damage from a 30% snapshot is crazy, and even the aimed mode has 3 shots. This is our new best gun. Sadly, we don't have dozens of these, but we've got several for sure.

hey, remember that ghost ray? It let us research this thing. Belle and Francesca are about to get serious upgrades from their bio tanks.

... we have a new best gun. 7% firing cost? for ~100 mind damage that ignores armour? It costs 7 morale a shot, but that comes back real fast when shit dies. And boy howdy, this is going to make some shit die, especially marsec with their red shielded power armour. Mercs too, though we can't bring this into their bases sadly.

Sniper plasma. Cute, but ultimately pretty weak, I think our gauss snipers are better as they scale damage with our crazy firing skill. Still, might get some use out of this, the firing cost is relatively low for a sniper, and ~145 plasma is probably good enough for most purposes.

Yep, saw this coming. New guns for our new ships!

Side tangent: These are Lenneth's stats with the annihilator armour equipped. Given the way bravery works, I think she's basically unbreakable now, even with 0 freshness (it does have 4x freshness cost.) It's mostly the same as assault armour she was using, with massive buffs to bravery, strength, and armour.

Guess what scales with strength and bravery? I'll let you do the math on this one. The damage range is 50-150%.

The new craft weapon. Compared to the basilisk cannon, it's got about 25% more total damage potential and 30% more hit rate at the cost of lower armour penetration, but 100 is still plenty. And the bonus vs shields is nice. Shame about the ammo cost, but we can probably keep it fed easily enough. I think I'll stick with the beam cannon for the broadside though, at least until we get a second battleship.

New defenses too! Pretty hefty. I've got a lot of bases I should update the turrets on actually. I've ramped up the production capacity of one of them as well, we're needing a lot more runts to turn components into other components to build our cool new shit. But this seems to be it for tech windfall from the academy secrets.

...except I've got a prison full of mercenaries (and a quiran) than are suddenly viable for interrogation. Took some willpower to wait until not to do that, didn't want to waste them learning shit we could research ourselves. This is the first tidbit: new and improved force blades! It's basically got 50% more damage scaling and 50% more terrain damage as well, as a slight cost of accuracy. Considering what the force blade could already cut through, this thing will be a monster and we can probably tunnel through bases with it. Also, if it fits in a belt (sure looks like it will!) it just made outfits like the blitz cats and our Syn way, way more dangerous.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I work better alone.

I swear this is the first time in like 20 space missions we didn't get either 'sleepy spacemen' or 'fuel depot'. Is this the place to get the fucking busted Syn? Can we get another finally?!

Hammer in space is fun, make your own door. Actually, we couldn't break though the wall, had to use the floor.

Turns out, 74% accuracy is plenty when you're 2 tiles away.

Bah, no Syn. No anything really.

More tech from mercs. Sadly, we can't actually make or buy this shit, it's just enabling it's use when we find it.

This one doesn't even seem that good honestly, 22 TUs is a lot for a melee attack.

New spear would be cool, but again, we don't actually have these. Who the hell are the nubirans?

Damn, either we're in store for another tech upgrade or this fight is fucking impossible. That's ~17k damage to deal even before the shield regen and armor gets factored in. I could maybe, MAYBE pull that off with 3 battleships all using plasma weapons, assuming they live long enough, which they won't unless this thing's accuracy is balls. And they can't even catch it, so it'd need to attack them.

Ooh, demon knights on earth could be fun. Or horrible if they just warp into a base.

Crossed 50 million monthly gross income. Well, not counting manufacturing sales. With that we're over 100 million I'd think, if I focus on it.

Congrats to Strange Fellow, our first named hand to stick around for 6 years.

Found this in the bootypedia.

Hey, it's another mobile fort, like what made the ninja HQ before. Fuck this thing, I got lasers now!

We managed to win, but the fucking thing blew up. Also, despite having a speed of 75, I can't shadow this thing, which is infurating. I had to fuck around to get my 3 ships in combat at once and nearly lost one, and wasted some missiles to boot. It's really fucking dumb that it has priority for who gets to start combat.

Anyways, we've got a different base to deal with.

 

[Azira]

With enough of the newly unlocked Star Gods' blaster launchers, and an idea of where the nuke-ninja is in the HQ map, you could fire several of those rounds at the very first round to get your revenge?

 

[Damned Registrations]

That would be the sensible thing to do, yes.

 

[Damned Registrations]

For the content.

The fundamental problem with this mission is that with all our troops out in the open, it's impossible to avoid drawing fire and get a nuke landing somewhere that kills a bunch of people and melts our gear. Probably multiple nukes, I bet they have reloads.

Solution: Fit our entire army underneat a ceiling where they can't nuke us and don't bring extra gear. And by entire army, I mean just Lenneth.

In theory, with the crystal skull, she can murderize her way though a dozen ninjas each turn and then run back to safety. In practice... this isn't working nearly as well as when our glorious Syn pulled it off that way in the first rimrider base we fought.

Problem one: Lenneth doesn't regen health nearly as fast. She only gets 1 per turn, unless she's at like 30% then she can get two. Problem two, we're burning 4 freshness per turn. We can eat a cigar to trade 6 health for 20 freshness, but that's not sustainable, and we can't recover from the stun as easily as a Syn or a gal in a Bio Suit.

Another problem is just lower TUs. Lenneth still has enough to make it to the endzone on her second turn though. Touchdown!

Hey, if you didn't want me to bypass your entire level, you shouldn't have made it shit.

Oh, great. I always wanted to fight one of those.

You know, for ninjas, they sure are fond of big open spaces. I was expecting a lot more tight quarters like the mansion or caves.

Thankfully, the mobile fort has the same design flaw and the immobile one: We hide underneath it where the turrets can't get us.

These turrets are nasty too. No stats on them, but I'm gonna guess those hurt real bad.

Good thing there's a convenient door on the roof.

Better yet, convenient bags of meat we can convert into time with our fancy skull.

Not the ideal place to take cover, but it's better than nothing. The ninjas actually have some pretty nasty unidentified guns. Our shields get overwhelmed by them pretty quickly, but most have trouble punching through our armour. The real big ones don't though.

Step in front, coming through.

Nice cluster in here too.

This seems like a good hidey hole. No direct line of sight except from 2 tiles away, and they'll probably stumble into melee instead and get diced.

There's a uh, there are a few ninjas remaining still.

The elevators are a pain, they force me to switch to throwing stars. I brought 40, and it doesn't feel like enough. Really wish this suit had a backpack.

Much turn skipping in hidey holes while enemies walk into line of sight and die. I actually had to stash the skull to avoid killing ourselves with it.

Hmm, this might be a decent spot, but I don't like the double wide corridor.

Our freshness is taking a beating for sure.

Eventually some stray shots destroy our cover here. We'll need a new spot.

I try here but our luck catches up with us and we eat a lot of bullets after they do the old 'sacrifice a unit to open a door' trick.

Yeah... this sucks. Good thing I brought rum.

Thankfully their numbers were thinned enough we can play hide and seek while our shields can keep a single stray ninja from finishing us off easily.

The motion scanner helps with that a lot, we know when it's safe to move around and when we need to hide deep in the ship.

Eventually some ninja randomly blows up outside the room we were in. Didn't even see us first. Very strange. Thankfully shields covered us.

Also the skull wasn't caught in it. I got scared I lost it a few times, picking it up and moving it around when it seemed useful.

Down to the last ninja.

Took a looot of turns, but our health is respectable again. Freshness, not so much. But even hovering around 50 morale, we only get berserk like one in 20 turns.

I can't seem to find the ninja, so I start work on the turrets. They're tanky and have blue shields, but we've got a force blade and easy cover nearby. Maria wouldn't be able to do this I think, not having flight.

Hah, the arrow is outside the ship! Gotcha, bitch.

With the last ninja out of the way, enemy turns are just a split second flicker through the turrets.

I take the time to explore the ship while our health regens one point at a time.

It's pretty cool.

Nothing left after that but to finish the turrets off and move on.

'Sporadic attacks' better not include more HQs popping up out of nowhere.

Enemy loot is utter trash. At least I can use some of these gas grenades to make a smoke screen wherever I end up turn one. Should have down that in the first area.

Map is smaller than the first one, but still quite large.

Turrets parked in spitting distance of all our spawn zones. Lovely.

Seems there's entrances to the base up here for ninjas to pour out of. This is actually the ceiling too by the way. A blessing and a curse. No cross map nukes here, but we can't use our superior flight suits to much advantage either.

There's a jet over here too, but it seems just decorative?

If we stick to the edge of the map we can have some cover, but we're still eating bullets. This isn't viable.

Nothing for it but to retreat. We'll call it a scouting mission.

Scouting mission with a body count.

We get to keep the guns we looted in the 2nd phase at least.

Also picked up some titles what with the massacre and all. Next time we'll have to brute force it with blaster bombs and a bunch of tanks and shit. It's gonna be ugly for sure.

 

[Jaedar]

Bah, no Syn. No anything really.

75 hellerium and 2 fuel capsules is an.... acceptable haul for making the engine section of the final ship.

We managed to win, but the fucking thing blew up. Also, despite having a speed of 75, I can't shadow this thing, which is infurating. I had to fuck around to get my 3 ships in combat at once and nearly lost one, and wasted some missiles to boot. It's really fucking dumb that it has priority for who gets to start combat.

I find that the best way to engage with multiple ships against enemies that can aggro is to pick your slowest ship as the primary, and direct all the others to follow that one. That way when the primary enters combat the others will as well. Against ships that don't have aggro it's better to send yours in and then order them to not shoot.

I'm surprised you made it to the final floor and then retreated. I thought the final floor was the easiest. But I also had a lot of soldiers.

 

[lightbane]

That BRUH ship is even more shameless trolling than the fucking Silver towers

 

[Damned Registrations]

I find that the best way to engage with multiple ships against enemies that can aggro is to pick your slowest ship as the primary, and direct all the others to follow that one.

That's exactly what I did. It still targeted a fast ship and the other two weren't included in the combat. Fucked if I know how that works, at the very least the dragon should have been in the fight at the same time.

 

[Jaedar]

I find that the best way to engage with multiple ships against enemies that can aggro is to pick your slowest ship as the primary, and direct all the others to follow that one.

That's exactly what I did. It still targeted a fast ship and the other two weren't included in the combat. Fucked if I know how that works, at the very least the dragon should have been in the fight at the same time.

Hmm, weird. Maybe the "primary" needs to be stationary for it to work? I never had problems, and I think that's usually what I did.