Despite the late hour, I'm still running demon shrines in the hopes of finding goodies. And sure enough:
Now for the real question: Is it done, or do I need a fucking head?
It's done! I could have easily missed it too- I wasn't able to research this tech and the legs themselves in the same base. The legs had to be shipped back to Codexia for god only knows what reason, and then after they were researched, Codexia couldn't research this, but the Peak (which contains the red tower) could. The tech tree is the real final boss of Xpiratez.
Well then, lets get some profane rituals going!
Right, we'll need to build it first. That part is insultingly easy, now that we've gotten all the parts. Parts which could have been acquired with like, pre-laser tech, I'm fairly certain.
Let the deadly ritual commence!
Well shit, that sounds promising. Was kinda hoping for a stat sheet though.
Well, we get their base form in the bootypedia at least. Cliff notes: Sense 3 is amazing, good resistances except 150% damage from mind (thankfully insanely rare) good vision and camo that doesn't really matter at this point of the game, and 50 armour won't go very far either. But! 40 health/turn regen is insanely good. Like, on par with the Bio Suit levels of good. Arguably better, since those don't regen so well at extremely low health. Also, warp claws? Yes please! Susceptible to voodoo sounds nasty though. Hopefully it just means the mind thing, but even that... star gods do use death beams.
And they get a weird alternate form? Half the armour, Sense NINE (Jesus christ) massive evasion, and the same 40 health regen per turn. That's uh... pretty good.
Ah, but this form also has... massive stat penalties, except for voodoo. -200 health is probably prohibitive, unless we just want to use it as a scout.
Warp Claws are... decent. I mean, they're good just purely for being warp damage, which is insanely rare.
Turns out 'exhausting' merely means high TU/Energy cost, no freshness cost. So that's actually pretty good.
And the dispersed form gets this thing... could be insane, voodoo stats permitting.
Holy shitballs, it costs 75 health and 15 freshness to fire on top of the TUs. Is this a nuke or something?
Well... kinda? It seems that it doesn't do direct damage, but has the special burn effect. 600% hp multi makes that... respectable. At least insofar as it bypsses armour, melts it, and causes wounds, stun, and TU draining. Since it's warp type, it might actually be great vs some red shielded targets.
Behold, the bearer of the Termicator armour I dusted off and pulled out of storage. We've definitely got better potential candidates, but Echidna has pulled us through a ton of missions and served well as a healer for a long time after that, so I felt like she deserved a seat on the final run.
And speaking of dusting things off... it turns out the 'Make a Chort' thing is a training regimen. Like making a weirdgal or zombie. Except... it'll completely replace their race. It can be used on any females- goblins, gnomes, catgirls, gals, peasants. Even a ghost. You know what else only works on females? Shade Summoning. We can bring someone back from the dead and turn them into a demonic liquid metal creature. We've got a lot of good candidates for that. Oasis whom we lost on the moon has a ton of titles due to lots of lategame mission participation. There's a perfect gal we could bring back as a ghost, and they get +5 armour from that title. Or, we could double down on making it the most badass thing possible, and use Lenneth as the vessel, or another of our well trained heroes, like Gandalf for the voodoo stats.
While we're busy molesting the dead, we get a present!
It is time. Open the vault, and prepare the House atomics.
Is this enough nukes? This doesn't feel like enough nukes.
ARISE!
Average Manatee doesn't have quite the stats Oasis did, but they're still damned good, and she's been out of commission for a long time without a replacement. Behold, our first Ghost Monarch:
And now to spend another 2 days getting suited up. Having negative hundreds of HP sounds like it might be a problem, but I'm sure it's fine. (It's a display glitch, most of the + is hidden behind the number to the left.)
And now, for a brief interlude of a catgirl herbalist in power armour punching the shit out of an imp. I thought these had a cool 'gravity cascade' weapon, but apparently not, just the peacemaker mini rockets from the other catgirl power armour. They... suck pretty bad, honestly. But the armour itself is still a major upgrade, having 150/30 blue shields instead of 120/20 red.
Luka continues training up, along with some others. The way titles work is bizarre sometimes. Because they're a thrown weapon category, rocks are eligible for ranged weapon titles, even while being used in melee. Because they're concussive, they qualify for the 'Bomber' title, which is clearly meant for, well, bombs. Whatever, more throwing number is all I care about.
Brief, terrifying attack on codexia by a cruiser.
And a second one, immediately, for good measure.
Behold, the terrible Demon Queen in some of her glory. Seems she forgot her voodoo skill training, so that'll be a priority.
Damn, it wasn't kidding about binding with a vehicle for a 'truly demonic, unstoppable force.' Even a normal gal in a XEC would be a monster. Putting this thing, with it's near 400 health in there? It doesn't even need shields at that point.
But I think we need to give the other forms a test drive first. Lack of inventory is a small problem, but we've got some pretty good infinite ammo weapons by this point.
Oh, and this is an archaelogist dig mission btw, which only allows goblins and gnomes normally. Apparently we get to squish in with 400 health and 120 strength as well. Get fucked, zombies! Did I mention she can't be zombified?
And for the icing on the cake- her stats haven't been trained up yet. I assumed they were already capped after the transformation, but apparently not. I've got no idea what her new limits are, but judging by the double digit gains, they're really fucking high. That -200 hp for the dispersed form isn't looking like much of a drawback any more. And I had a bit of a brainwave while running the mission- if she's not immune or highly resistant to whatever effect the crystal skull uses to restore TUs, she could be an absolute juggernaut with it like Gandalf is. Fingers crossed it's a mind effect, that would be incredibly overpowered.
Shiny new item from the dig. I guess I should have done more of these missions, but it's a pain with only lokknarrs and no power armour. Or, it was, until we got this thing on our side.
Random production? Say no more!
Testing out that 'Iron Wind' spell as well. It instakilled the ninjas it hit, but suffers from the same problems that gas clouds do- if you hit the wrong Z level you just make a bunch of smoke over their heads without hurting them, it seems. Still, might be worth using against say, a big squad of Marsec; whom I want to take out to acquire some more elite heavy plasma guns, and are presumably going to be providing security on mars. Nice big AoE, bypasses armour and red shields... sounds like a winning combo.
Dang, the only random reward was some extra heroes blessings. I wonder if the statue could have dropped something cool, like an orb?
Another goblin focused mission we can exploit! A UAC vault is normally a giant pain in the ass, but hey, we can just have the demon with 120 strength tunnel in! Well, that was the plan. Turns out, I can't figure out where the stupid spot is, and the best tunneling item I brought was a force blade. It does the trick, but not that well.
I find it 5 tiles deep into the 4th exploraty mineshaft. Ugh. Such bullshit.
And then, after failing to bust through the metal walls of the vault for like 50 swings, I found what seemed like a vent on the side and hacked at it instead. It exploded, so I walked forward to cut into the soft wall beyond... and fell down. Shit. Thankfully, after another ~10 tiles dug out or so, we found the 2nd floor of the vault.
From here on it's just tidying the place up, easy pickings.
Yeah, these stat gains aren't slowing down much. I'm expecting ~500 health and stamina. No idea for other stat limits, but we might have hit the freshness cap already. I should probably train her on reactions and stuff her in a XEC, but there's a lot of appeal keeping her in demon form and having a humanoid with massive health regen kicking around, especially if that crystal skull strat works out. Either way, Average Manatee represents something I didn't think was going to happen again at this point: Another huge paradigm shift in the limit of our most powerful soldier. Syns are already insanely good. This is a tier beyond even that. She'll be very survivable even with armour stripped to zero. She could shrug off a nuke. And she'll have more than 3 times the health of our next best XEC if we put her in one. I'd even consider using the hovertank chasis, since it can fly and having a metric shitton of health makes it's wimpier armour and shields less of a liability. I think having her on the team, we're actually stronger than we were before the moon HQ mission.
turn based strategy games.
Such are the perils of putting the game down for a week or more at a time. AFAICT, it's basically a superior suit in pretty much every way- blue shields instead of red, no 4x freshness loss, better built in weaponry. You lose some stats here and there, but they're honestly quite minor considering the stat pools a cat has to begin with. I totally should have made a dozen of these instead. Also, could probably clear the moon HQ with them quite easily, as blue shields don't let warp strikes through. Maybe we'll go back to it for a revenge run after we win. I'm not inclined to do it right now, as I forgot about the suits entirely as my own failing. I'll bring along the one I already built though, because I'm curious about it's weaponry. It's got some sort of gravity thingy we don't have a description of.
