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

[Jaedar]

After we take over Mars and find another set of legs, I'll turn Lenneth into one and see what she can do. I'm curious what other special titles I could stack on there. Can I make a zombie Chort? Weirdgal was an option. Zombies have like, freshness recovery or something I think? Haven't checked them in forever, I can't remember if I even bothered to make one. I think I zombified one of the gnomes? An assault clone or theban catgirl might also be amazing, since it's just overwriting the racial stats and those both get some awesome titles. Actually, the herbalist/magicienne catgirl might be a good one too, that's a ton of extra freshness and voodoo stats...

I'm surprised you can make a chort weirdgal, I don't think that's supposed to work. I don't think any of the "unit type" transformations should work.
Here's a mostly full list of missions that can spawn simulacrum parts: demon shrines, underwater missions (of the sunken 'X' variety), mysterious tower.
Pretty rare missions, and pretty rare drops.

I think chort could actually be quite strong for solo blacksun hq. Warp damage won't touch you, laser won't do well either, and 40 hp regen per turn is a lot. Maybe cyberhounds could do some damage if they get a lot of attacks in? Only dangerous part would be reaching the escape elevator.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's definitely a decent chance. The first part would be trivial for sure. The second part with all the cyber hounds would be a problem I think. If you could keep enough TUs to reaction kill them in melee it might be fine. Probably go with a force blade/skull for weapons, you could drop the sword for the red shield enemies, and use it for unshielded/purple shields. Hitler ghosts might be a problem too- I assume they do warp damage, but if it's something else, well... they fly so they're going to pile up pretty fast and we can't easily mow them down. Sense would help a ton for finding good hidey holes to end the turn in and avoid ambushes. Getting back out would indeed be a pain; we'd need to hold the item in our hand, which means leaving the sword behind and juggling it to use warp claws. Still, probably doable knowing where the item is to begin with. If I had to search the whole base with a single unit we'd be fucked.

 

[Jaedar]

Hitler ghosts might be a problem too- I assume they do warp damage, but if it's something else, well... they fly so they're going to pile up pretty fast and we can't easily mow them down.

Eh, just stick to the tunnels and other areas where you can't easily get mobbed. When I say "solo blacksun hq" I mean to mostly ignore the enemies, dodge from cover to cover until you find the database and then gtfo.

Still, probably doable knowing where the item is to begin with. If I had to search the whole base with a single unit we'd be fucked.

The layout is random I'm pretty sure, so there's no way to know where it will spawn.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I bet he kicked a puppy too.

I was right, these things do restore TUs via Mind effect. 150% effective on the base Chort form. This is gonna be great.

Why am I fighting an obnoxious giant battleship mission again? Because this one is from the trade guild.

And the trade guild has the best toys.

I also wanted to try massacre their guys with iron wind but... turns out the range on it sucks. Since I don't want to walk our new super unit into the line of fire of 4 guys with 200 damage plasma autoguns, we'll have to test that idea some other time.

Thankfully, death rays already solve this situation effortlessly. Orcinator alone must have had like 15 kills vs power armour dudes by the end of this mission.

Look! A friend!

Eventually I got some guys to get close to the ramp without a huge team overwatching them, but I couldn't get Iron Wind to work for some reason, it seemed to hit, but didn't cause a big smoke cloud like it did vs the ninjas, and did no damage. Clearly it's got some strange way of working I don't understand.

Sending the catgirls over to tickle our friend sounded annoying, so I convinced him to come over to us instead.

Sadly, we lost a few toys when one of their last troops decided firing a blaster bomb inside the bridge of the ship would scare us off. Ah well. Ce la morte.

Partial inventory of toys acquired. 6 elite plasma, 3 nukes and a launcher for them, 17 more blaster bombs. We got a bunch of craft weapons too, but I don't think either gatling lascannons or implosion bombs are useful to us at this point. It's telling that the 3 N-Lascannons we got don't even matter to me at this point, when they used to be an amazing tank killing weapon.

And we get a new mission! I've actually got the conqueror outfitted and moved to the Peak base at this point, so it's a bit of a shame this mission forces us to arrive on foot.

Well, this is what 36 units on foot look like, if you were curious. Here's hoping the enemy doesn't have a nuke.

That's a castle alright. Should be some good clean fun.

Initially visible units are low tier jokes, like the last A level bounty. Armored cars? Really? Our new demon friend finally got a chance to try out the skull/shredder combo, and it works like a charm. Basically free attacks vs targets with enough health to not die.

Masochist Slut takes the laziest possible approach to her first day back on the job and lobs a nuke at the castle. Unlike the ninja base, this is made of mere stone, so it melts a giant hole in the roof and kills a bunch of dudes. If we do this again I'm totally bringing the bombard and giving it a proper carpet bombing.

Echidna's built in rocket salvo manages to score a few kills as well. It's a target rich environment.

To my great surprise, the enemy did, in fact, have some rather dangerous units waiting for us in here. Of course it'd be the humanist mission that's way overtuned compared to the other missions of the same tier. Thankfully I brought 3 XECs, and our Chort and lone blitz cat are also both essentially warp immune. Everyone else falls back to avoid getting melted with a single lucky shot.

Discovered something weird about the Chort on this mission- it can't kneel. Kind of annoying, but to be honest, most weapons that require kneeling go through ammo to quickly to be relevant for someone with no inventory. Would have been nice just for the smaller hitbox though.

The catgirls and other assorted troops are so far back their accuracy is balls, but with so many of them, anyone moving to the front and revealing themselves by a nearby fire gets torn apart in a fancy light show. We're also turning the walls to swiss cheese.

Average Manatee finally gets up close and personal. These guys don't really have enough health to properly refund the 35 TUs of a shredder throw though. We'll resort to warp claws.

It think that was about 10 kills in a single turn. Very impressive. And unlike when Maria does it, we'll regen to full health in a single turn, and recover most of our energy too. While Syn's have a weird energy recovery rate, the Chort has a more normal one- approx. 40% of her current health. That's... a lot of fucking energy per turn.

While certainly bulky, our new Chort is by no means invincible. A lowly cyber hound took out over 50 health and completely shredded one of our armour facings. To be fair, they're pretty good at shredding armour, but they'd fail to even injure a gal in power armour until they'd worn them down for a few turns.

And while trying to kill another so it couldn't get a full turn on us, we lost a bunch more health and armour to it's counterattacks. Warp claws don't seem to handle them very well.

Still, in the end it was yet another milk run. No special loot, but we did get a ton of score from all the kills and bounty tokens.

And it was more good training for the catgirl army. Average Manatee seems to be slowing down the stat gains sooner than I expected. Not a big deal, our stats are already sky high.

Also, title-wise, it seems she never did much in the way of melee. So we've lots of room for improvement on melee and reactions from those. Still torn on whether or not to stuff her in a XEC. The defenses will be obscene, but it feels like a waste to not use her innate regen, warp immunity and synergy with the crystal skull.

Oh, and I think this is a new title. Luka got it, suprisingly enough. You'd think it'd be someone else.

While in search of more milk runs, we got the city raid to pop up. Lots of soft targets, and our hulking metal demon apparently passes as a perfectly normal human. Seems legit.

Andjnord got to come along for the ride too, and beat up a bunch of women with his bare hands, as a true hero would. Also got to make use of the holosuit on Lenneth.

Lo and behold, that somehow unlocked a new research project! I've done this mission before, right? I was sure I did. Maybe it didn't count because we retreated? The only other thing of note I did was bring back a clerk in case he could be interrogated, since I'm certain we only had his dossier via Socializing and it might have given us some random crap.

Seems it was related to the clerk, but not his interrogation. Christ, how many more things are like this? There's got to be at least a dozen noteworthy enemies I've never captured because they've been revealed with socializing already. Also, the Technocracy is Aurora's faction, isn't it? I doubt this will lead to much, but maybe we'll get a cool mission out of it.

 

[lightbane]

Also, title-wise, it seems she never did much in the way of melee. So we've lots of room for improvement on melee and reactions from those. Still torn on whether or not to stuff her in a XEC. The defenses will be obscene, but it feels like a waste to not use her innate regen, warp immunity and synergy with the crystal skull.

Soo, was there a new enemy or something in that bigass castle? I expect at least one not-Nazi officer. Gotta love how the neo-neo Nazis get so much love and toys compared to everyone else, and they are a "minor faction" in the same league compared to Mad Max bandits.

I doubt this will lead to much, but maybe we'll get a cool mission out of it.

Not sure if it will work for you at this point as your tech advancement seems to be a bit borked.

 

[Jaedar]

Of course it'd be the humanist mission that's way overtuned compared to the other missions of the same tier.

It's an A rank mission, it would be weird if the highest rank wasn't hard.

While certainly bulky, our new Chort is by no means invincible. A lowly cyber hound took out over 50 health and completely shredded one of our armour facings.

Damn, probably can't solo blacksun hq then. Rip.

Still, in the end it was yet another milk run. No special loot, but we did get a ton of score from all the kills and bounty tokens.

This mission is the only way to capture a humanist mage if you miss the one in dr. X's house.

While in search of more milk runs, we got the city raid to pop up. Lots of soft targets, and our hulking metal demon apparently passes as a perfectly normal human. Seems legit.

The chort is canonically a shapeshifter, so it can go on any mission, because it just shapeshifts to look like an allowed unit and then shifts back for combat.

I've done this mission before, right? I was sure I did. Maybe it didn't count because we retreated?

Indeed, you have to win for it to count. The mission should have unlocked waaaaaaaaaay earlier, it's requirements are Shadow Trade · City Mission Done · Activities: Political · Megapol · Any Leader or VIP. It's a pretty cool quest chain, but each part in it has a rather low chance to spawn, so I guess you'll beat the game before you see the end of it.

Christ, how many more things are like this?

This isn't the last thing you have missed
I can think of the skellie shadowlands as well (behind red mage progression, don't know what is blocking you), void shadowlands (dr.x progression, no idea why you don't have this already). You also haven't done all the patron trials, obviously. There's some solo gnome missions as well, but I don't remember what the requirements are. That might be it, unless there's something I missed or forgot.

Xpiratez never ends. Sometimes when I want to go to sleep I try to count all the factions.

 

[Andnjord]

Andjnord got to come along for the ride too, and beat up a bunch of women with his bare hands, as a true hero would.

Hey, that little icon at the bottom right makes it abundantly clear I am kicking women with my bare FEET. Much more cultured, that's what the zany zines told me.

Also, I got a photonic blade from one of those smuggler ships and holy crap. Gave it to a cat girl with 177 melee skill, it does up to 300 damage per hit for 8 TU, insanity. And she barely has any melee titles yet (not sure how she got melee that high without titles).

 

[Average Manatee]

Does the HP regen work while in an XEC?

 

[Damned Registrations]

I knew that! Obviously. >_>

Turns out we got our new mission right away, which is cool.

It's another stealth mission, and it reuses the bar/hotel we normally have parties in, along with a bit of the surroundings that get cut out from that mission. It's actually pretty cool that doing the stealthy city mission leads you into a mission chain of more stealthy missions, and is presumably an alternate route to getting a lot of unlocks.

I've kept sending our friendly neighbourhood demon on missions, and while I can't seem to get TUs, reactions, throwing or firing up any more, the other stats continue to climb, and at a decent pace at that.

Found we captured the detective, but apparently this was what we really needed.

Sounds like a cool idea for a mission, kidnapping someone and escaping. I'm curious if that's actually a more viable plan than just murderizing everyone.

Another mission Average Manatee can utterly dominate. She has full stats in the shadowrealm which is... insane. Though I realized after getting there, she's also weak to the fear beams, which bypass the hefty armour for the most part. Well, most people take full damage from them anyways. Also, warp claws are garbage here, but there's weapons lying around. I thought about doing the necropolis mission too, but that'd take much longer, and doesn't reward the dream echoes I'm actually after, which are needed for the ogre destructor promotion.

We picked up a funny title after sending her on a mission with a shovel. I was actually after the Joker title, which awards throwing. This one is... fairly crap.

Stats after the milk runs so far.

Stats before. In 14 battles, she's gotten 105 kills, gained 14 TU, 96HP, 161 STA, 4 Reactions, 13 Firing, 5 Throwing, 42 Melee and 39 Strength (!) and 53 max freshness and 2 voodoo power. Considering she's not even done with base stat gains yet and has plenty of potential titles to exploit, she's looking to be even more overpowered than I thought.

What I thought was a milk run (a shot down academy escort) actually had a ton of pioneers with some hefty firepower. Apparently I could have got some of these from them as well.

Thought this was the super quick mission where they're all holed up in a single building, but it was another good milk run with lots of kills. Luka has advanced from clubbing things with a rock to using a bit of pointy scrap metal. I'm running out of weapons to embarrass our foes with. Maybe a coconut?

Apparently the shiv qualifies as a 'frontier-era weapon' Another fairly weak title, but the drawback is honestly trivial so it'd be worth getting if I were trying to minmax a unit.

Finally encountered and caught one of these guys along with some smuggler catgirls. No interrogations though. Still no idea how to acquire those photon lances I researched before.

You know, as much as this is a pain in the ass, it'll have a ton of bodies for Luka and Average Manatee to train up on, so fuck it, lets do it. It'll go a lot faster with a Chort with Sense 3 to find everyone holding out on the various floors. Also, can I use the conqueror? It's space worthy right?

I can! But it's not outfitted with the crew I'd want for this yet. Let me just send it back and... oh. That's why we didn't get the final mission yet. It works this way.

 

[Average Manatee]

FWIW the stap cap of Chorts before armor and titles is:

    statCaps:
      tu: 100
      stamina: 500
      health: 500
      bravery: 110
      reactions: 80
      firing: 120
      throwing: 90
      strength: 150
      psiStrength: 65
      psiSkill: 20
      melee: 150
      mana: 200

Also I'm pretty sure xPiratez still works with normal X-COM rules when it comes to skill improvement. Around 10 successful actions (reacting for reactions, hitting for firing/throwing/melee, successfully not panicking under 50 morale for bravery, not sure on psi) will max those stat gains, and I believe just doing one of any successful action qualifies you for the maximum possible gain for other stats like strength/health/TUs. So there's no training benefit to actually getting 50 kills in a single mission. If you want to optimize your time spent then you're better off spreading the training around on multiple characters or doing a bunch of much shorter missions. Of course there's also titles for getting multiple kills in a turn or lots of kills in a single mission.

Seeing a fully fledged summary of titles would be nice. They are the one major thing that you can't peak ahead at by simply looking at the bootypedia in a quick battle game. I know there's also at least a few weapons that qualify for multiple titles which is probably optimal to use from a min-max perspective.


Edit: It's 11 actions for max gain on those stats. And you can use Ctrl-E to get a list of which characters haven't yet done anything, and Shift-Ctrl-E to get a table of who has performed how many of each training activity.

 

[lightbane]

Maybe a coconut?

I say a fan and playing cards, these give you fun titles IIRC.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Done in time for Xmas.

I finally noticed I actually had a photonic blade kicking around. I think I assumed it got eaten by the research? It's so tiny it's hard to notice in the equipment, it gets shoved in with the ammo clips. It's actually awesome for Maria, since it means she can have a really powerful laser melee option without having to drop it on the ground to use a ranged attack.

Locked and loaded.

22 hours and change. Should be enough time.

As some of you may have realized, I've never actually done the vanilla cydonia mission. I know it's a two parter, there's pyramids on the surface, and you kill a brain thing underground. That's about it. I'm guessing that much will have carried over. Well, the brain thing is probably something else now.

So uh, turns out Mars requires exo suits after all. Whoops. That's a shame, really wanted to use that hellerium bombard cannon to melt the surface.

Oh, cool, we can just leave and come back with a proper loadout. I'll be able to bring 2 more XECs I think, by kicking out some of the unsuitable tagalongs.

Or, uh... that could happen.

Damn, I gotta update my will. Having my corpse preseved in a huge crystal sounds awesome.

Welp, that was a cool LP guys. Maybe red codex next time?

Bonus: found this title in the logs. Not sure what trigged it, maybe making the Chort? I'm certain Manatee wasn't a zombie though...

 

[Andnjord]

Welp, had to happen eventually. T’was a good run, I vote for no Codex on the next one.

 

[lightbane]

Yeah, let's hope this is not the true end after 2 years of LP...

 

[Andnjord]

Yeah, let's hope this is not the true end after 2 years of LP...

I find your lack of faith disturbing, of course DR is going to reroll a new start.

 

[Average Manatee]

Shame on you for trying to get DR to abandon the holy vow of ironman.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Casually nuking our own team.

Lets perhaps at least see the enemies first this time, shall we?

Layout is more or less what I was expecting, except... no horde of enemies surrounding the ship on landing. No enemies at all, actually.

While I reloaded the backup I made (and I totally would have fallen for that bullshit bad ending) I decided not to change the loadouts. Which includes another mistake: I didn't place everyone in good spots to spawn on the ship, like having the nuke launchers near the upper exits. I figured there was a chance we wouldn't be able to bring stuff like the Crystal Singers and Bombard to mars, though I thought the game would at least warn me before hand if that was the case, and held out a bit of hope we might deploy directly underground, or Mars has since been terraformed or something.

Might have been nice if we didn't land right on the edge of the map. At least there's a one tile gap, so we can actually use these spots to play popamole.

And the first enemy sighted is... a Merc? A weak merc?

They've got a hovertank as well at least but... huh. Was expecting Sectopods at the very least.

They've even got these guys. How the fuck is this guy allowed on the surface? That is NOT an exosuit.

Well, these pyramids will be handy for cover as we spread out and search for the elevator. Given the light resistance, I'm expecting a ton of reinforcements or some other nasty tricks. There aren't even any gun turrets here.

Maria makes good use of the photonic blade. It makes a cool sound too.

Actually, before we go further, lets do a little roster listing, since this is the final mission, presumably.

In case you want to skip to the fighting.

Turkish Ronin gets the only XEC. I actually built 3 more for the mission, but it turns out we've got no room for the damned things. 36 slots is less than I thought, and we had a LOT of named soldiers I wanted to bring along for sentimental reasons. Between than and what felt like a necessary half a dozen catgirls, no room for the XEC army, sadly.

Strange Fellow and DemoGryph both in power armour with blaster launchers. While it's a shame to not make use of his generally high stats (at least, high for a zone stalker) the power armour available for humans just doesn't have the mobility to make it good for run and gun tactics. So, backline artillery support it is.

Aziri's stats aren't really good enough to warrant a spot on the mission, but hey, fuck it, I want all the Codexers possible on board. And she is at least pretty accurate, so she'll still be quite useful with an elite plasma.

The bugeye pair were supposed to be in crystalsinger outfits and mind rape everyone. So much for that plan. The future bow is just being carried in case someone else needs it later, for it's bullshit LoS ignoring properties and infinite ammo.

And Lightbane has the refresher for similar reasons. At least they can still use psi attacks in space suits, though not nearly as well. Should have at least had cybermage armour.

Slut, like the humans, is too slow to be good playing popamole. But I definitely wanted the bio suits along for the ride in case the health regen became super relevant. She might end up using that refresher later on. I wanted to carry more nukes but her strength is actually tapped out, the suit is heavy. Should have given her a blaster instead, in retrospect, and let the humans hold the nukes.

Not going to list all 3 ogres, but suffice to say, they earned their seats via overwhelmingly high stats. They've got the best accuracy of anyone besides Lenneth, the most health of anyone besides our demon friend, and still tons of other stats besides, along with the thickest armour. It's a shame their suits don't have room to carry an axe around.

Gandalf was supposed to carry along a Tome of course but... not space books in space, apparently. Too bad. I'll probably pass the skull along to someone else when we go underground.

Belle's medisuit doesn't work in zero-G, but it's good enough for mars, at least. Extra nukes if we need them, but mostly she's here for healing and moving items around if we need them. Actually, she originally had a Tome as well, she's got the voodoo for it, but again, not allowed.

Yet another plodding power suit with blaster bombs.

Seemed appropriate to bring along one of our original crew. She was supposed to be in the slimegal outfit though. Well, this one has it's perks too.

Might not have room for the XEC, but Orcinator's got enough stats to still be a force to be reckoned with even in the Skullstrider. Also, it gives me a chance to use that stupid zortrium jacket that won't fit on any other power armour.

Echidna's mostly here for moral support, to be honest. But I gave her some odd toys in case we encounter something with weird resistances.

I debated what melee weapon to bring for her and settled on the vibro axe. It makes use of her strength to do massive, and reliable (50%-200% range) damage, and it'll both pierce armour and do full damage to blue shields, which I expect to see a fair bit of.

Here lies a gnome. She was supposed to ride an awesome artillery tank into battle and nuke mars. Fun was not allowed. RIP.

Uni Puma is the catgirl hero twin that didn't get turned into plasma vapour right away. I've trained her up a fair bit and she's better than the generic theban cats at this point. Chaos dagger might come in handy.

This one was supposed to be a blitz cat, in case we wanted the extra speed and blue shields. No dice. Herder staff and wacky waypoint throwing slicer are niche weapons we brought along in case of special targets, again.

Andjnord was supposed to have the blood dragon outfit, and make use of both the health regen and the weird magic attacks it had. No dice. At least he gets a free space suit, unlike the gnome.

Always hard to decide what to give Lenneth, as she's got high stats for everything. Settled on the hammer; it's hungry for just about every stat besides firing, and once she burns through her freshness with it, she can grab a plasma gun and snipe with that without moving too much. couple warp grenades I didn't trust to anyone else, in case they died and they went off in a crowd or something.

Various catgirls I won't list all of here. The hero got another warp dagger, and most of them have the elite plasma and a poison dagger. One has another mortar and nukes though.

Luka's got a smattering of damage types, but will hopefully be put to use just cutting people down with the force sword.

Maria's the same, but more focused on laser damage.

And that's the squad!

Shades don't offer the greatest vision, and I don't trust that INVIS 10 to keep her alive if a high level merc approaches, but she makes a safer forward scout than anyone else I could put up there.

The mercs end up not getting very close regardless. There's no real cover out there, and their numbers are too few to overwhelm us.

On their turn they launch a hail of grenades, about half a dozen. They don't amount to anything though.

Well, they managed to make the inside of our ship smokey, somehow.

It's kinda hard to see past these densely packed pyramids. Lets toss a flare to help us see better.

There we go. Ah, 'Flare' was a liberty taken with the translation, apparently. In the original game, the spell was called 'Nuke.'

Much brighter! And we have some new windows. Remodeling is fun.

I'm not sure how Strange Fellow missed the shot vs the hovertank THIS badly, but I'm impressed.

The tank was less impressed, and retaliated. I'm impressed again, that gauss cannon punched through some hefty armour.

Thankfully Aziri is nearby with a space medipack. I actually crafted about 6 of these for this mission, but I think we only brought like, 2 somehow. In retrospect, the others are probably on the other catgirls I ditched to make room for more named characters.

Still no reinforcements. We've been getting this message each turn though. The morale loss is irrelevant with the stream of kills bring it back up. No idea what 'raising our powers' means, but I'll take what I can get.

Well, may as well push forward, I doubt waiting it out will bring a good result, and we've got plenty of cover to use. The poison daggers the catgirls brought turned out to be a lucky choice- the mercs are weak to them.

They're also weak to warcrimes, apparently. Much screaming.

They managed to survive this one, surprisingly. I guess the damage falls off quickly towards the edge.

Managed to posses a merc, using the herder staff with the catgirl of all things. I sent him forward to scout and I'm still not seeing the expected horde of enemies. This is way, WAY easier than either the ninja HQ or the Moon HQ. No nukes, no warp cannons, just a bunch of wimpy mercs out in the open. Maybe Dioxine made it easier to be merciful since losing it is apparently a game over. Which is hilarious because it won't matter to anyone except if they're doing an ironman run blind, and then they'll get got by the game over for fleeing gimmick.

Anyways, our latest round of nukes revealed the coveted green tiles! Let the game of twister commence!

Not wanting to leave her behind, Belle has been gently whipping the boxed gnome with an alien torture device so she'll fall unconscious and we can carry her forward. The box was surprisingly resillient. It must have decent armour.

Blaster bombs aren't as good as nukes, but still quite effective, especially when dropped right onto a tank.

Perhaps as a result of being bitter over her multiple deaths in the run so far, Slut opts to fire a nuke into the tip of a pyramid with our troops inside it, instead of over it and into the enemies. Luckily, nobody died. Unluckily, our already dead ghost was near that pyramid and got exorcised. RIP Fiery Predator.

If you thought that might dissuade me from using more nukes, you've clearly been reading a different LP. Bombs away! We can't use them underground after all. At least not more than once.

Was supposed to be a normal blaster bomb, not an EMP (forgot to check which type the guns were preloaded with) but it scored the kill anyways. Very pretty.

Gandalf eats a plasma bolt on the way over to the elevator. Not sure what did this, but I'm again rather surprised. Bio Suits have a lot of plasma resist iirc. She'll heal up on her own though, we can just use some of Belle's 30 healing charges to fix the wounds without needing the better health restoration of the space packs.

Some enemies too close to nuke, but the blaster bombs are great for this situation.

Manatee is having an absolute field day here. A single attack is restoring like 70 TUs. I noticed while doing milk runs you can't leech them from zombies. Now I'm wondering the the 'mind effect' part of the skull's leeching description applies to the enemy armour type, rather than your own. Mercs are probably weak to mind after all. Will be easy to verify. Probably just a special zombie resistance and the axe hitting for a ton of damage.

A mere 6 turns in. Still nobody new showing up, but I'd rather be prepared for the worst, so we're moving to the elevator ASAP.

Well, okay, not ASAP, we're stopping to nuke shit. Priorities!

This handy window we made makes it easier for the flier to get inside.

Since it'l be a few turns for the slower units like the bugeyes and humans to get to the elvator, I send the faster ones south to wipe out more mercs. Seems like everyone left is just hiding in the pyramids.

I also decide to use some of our drugs to restore freshness while it's mellow. At this point I realized what the shadows were doing to power us up: We've got full freshness still! Even on the ogres, that normally burn 4 per turn. The only unit that isn't at or near full is the XEC, which has spent a bunch on death beams.

In the end, we didn't even need the elevator, and just cleaned up every last merc. This is way too easy. Maybe the next phase has us spawn in a room with 12 sectopods.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Fried.

The loot from the first phase was underwhelming, to say the least. But they did leave us a plasma scorcher, which I meant to bring a couple of but forgot. We'll take it along.

Hmm, fairly standard base entrance room. Sounds good to me.

Aww, what the fuck is this shit? I assumed 'split up' meant two parties. We've got... 5. Bottom right:

Top right:

Top left:

Bottom left. And at different elevations. And the map is huge on all axis. Fuck.

Probably the most interesting spawn point. I'll definitely try breaching that wall. Doesn't seem to be any obvious exits. Better hunker down for turn one though.

The fanciest of rooms. Would rather know what's beyond these doors.

Oh. Hi. I'm not interrupting am I?

Well, we found a source of photon blades. Probably a bad idea to have run towards these guys. Oops.

Damn, I'm suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to capture these guys. I wonder if they'd have spawned in a silver tower ship?

Welp, not that overwhelming an urge apparently. Watching him swivel the chair while failing to shoot me was funny. Shuck and jive!

And the proper entrance runs immediately into turrets. Great.

Well, I'm happy there's a bunch of cool new units though. New to me anyways. I'm guessing at least half this shit is from previous games.

Damn these are tanky, that was a full auto and it didn't go down.

Took some counter fire trying to finish it off, and of all people Belle was the one with TUs to spare for using the space medipack.

Respectable stats, but nothing overwhelming. Bet they have good resists and health regen though.

Seems these mostly rely on incredibly strong shields.

The guys on the right side have these obnoxiously long corridors to go through, which make me fight between wasting turns doing one door at a time, and risking walking into a barracks with no TUs left.

Reinforcements right off the bat.

...and offscreen fighting? And death? What the flying fuck? Do we have allies? Is Saya in there fucking shit up? Sounds like melee.

Well that's not a good place for a melee merc to be. Guess I should have guarded our rear.

Oh wait, I did, but they spawned into the room with full TUs and overwhelmed us.

Well, the good news is, this difficulty is more in line with the other HQ missions.

Lost Andjnord and a Bugeye.

That's not a good teammate to allow under mind control. At least he didn't fire at us point blank.

Was almost about to take him out with the death ray, but I managed to put him to sleep with a toxi-lance I brought along mostly to bypass blue shields. Lucky.

More lasers eventually takes out a turret or two. This would have been much, much easier with 3 XECs instead of 1.

Weirdly, this guy didn't attack us on their turn. Easy pickings.

And a nice upgrade!

Really really long hallwayathon finally ends. Or rather, it changes and has an elevator now. We'll regroup in the room before it.

And behind the tempting blue panel is... a BRAND NEW SPACESHIP!!!

Featuring state of the art plasma cannons, this space ship has everything you need to repel rebel pirates and suppress Earth for thousands of years in comfort and style!

Bet that hurts. Lets try to not get hit by those.

Seems like the bridge? Can't see anyone inside though, so no sniping the governor from here, sadly.

And another new breed of star god. This time with golden shields! Again I ask myself: could I have encountered one of these earlier? Could we have arrived with even better tech?

We also get a sense of the whole map layout now. The ship takes up the vast bulk of it.

Seems lightly guarded aside from the turrets, which aren't facing us. May as well take out a guard or two before returning to our hidey hole.

That's not in the plan.

Oh shit. More well guarded than thought, apparently. At least the tank didn't see us.

And we have a problem. We dropped down 2 floors when we went through the wall. Shit.

Luckily there's a nearby door. This is fine. Everything is fine.

Luka takes some potshots without walking outside.

Golden shields are a great counter for us, honestly. I thought about bringing gauss guns to bypass some, but having never seen them on anything but the church, figured it wouldn't be necessary. The shredder does stabbing, which is halved, but it gets the job done.

The turrets have blue shields. We take some pot shots, trusting that ship turrets will have shit reactions and won't turn to face us. We can probably whittle them down over time if we need to, as long as we don't let them turn to us. Turrets never seem to turn without a target to fire on.

Seems it might be a good plan to make holes here too for a nice crossfire. Though the room is so big, we won't really be able to crossfire on much.

The command centre or whatever Lenneth's squad cut through doesn't have any obvious spot to cut it's way into the main room, sadly.

Are these going to be every turn? Could get sketchy if so.

More random fighting/death. Very baffling.

...and I forgot to move Manatee out of the room she killed the mercs in. She's now getting lit up by multiple mercs, including one with an elite plasma gun. Fuckfuckfuckfuck.

Thankfully they don't all go after her, and she survives the turn.

At least we've got that infinite freshness thing still going. Wish I'd known to expect that, could be heavily abused.

Manatee got fucked up a fair bit, but still has plenty of health. Lack of armour will suck going forward, but we're still in good shape overall.

Pressing a head a bit, we find six more turrets. Fucking hell. They definitely expected this squad to have more tanks.

Lenneth's team pops down the big elevator from the command room and finds a yellow area? Suspicious. Multiple doors too, and could fit a tank. Better be careful.

Above the corridors we find some nice sniper nests, with no enemies to be found. Would be great, except none of our blaster launchers are here. Hell, I'd take a nuke launcher; there's enough room in there to fire it, surprisingly enough.

Scientists are flimsy, as expected. Lot of voodoo power though, and more seem to be showing up.

Also spotted one of these boys. This is what I was expecting for the final mission. Gonna be rough taking these out.

These seem to be more like grunts. Still, they've got heavy plasma. Even the shitty grunts are potentially deadly.

Strangely, they don't seem interested in following Orcinator into the side room he's hiding in. The cave has a hole that drops down into it, so we can probably abuse them pretty hard.

No extra enemies this turn, thankfully. It's a real pain trying to deal with them spawning in your midst like that. At least it only seems to be in the one room. Well, probably a bunch of other places too, but nowhere else behind our teams.

Le fuck? We're nowhere near there. Our mysterious allies?

Seems to be a scripted event? Our ship attacking? Nekomimi allies?

Found this guy in another elevator in the long hallways.

He's got a very nice gun. Seems we have a blaster launcher to use from a sniper nest after all. Better secure the area first though.

Dead bodies? Are our allies over here? The explosions came from up ahead...

Well fuck, that's certainly not an ally.

Something hit us with melee while walking in here. Invisible enemy? But we've got tons of spot and are right here... it's in fact the blue tiles. They're trapped and slice whatever walks on them. Good thing red shields shrug that shit off.

Big ol' pile of mercs. I decide to look through the bodies for nice weapons, but don't find much. If anything, I should grab some of our own guns from this room. Not a lot of carrying space right now though.

But blaster bombs will work a treat at these turrets, if we don't fuck up the shots.

Bullseye!

Jaedar doesn't have a launcher, but the scorcher is arguable even better at this end of the room, we're able to rain death down on the tanks here.

Turrets indeed have shit reactions, but a lot of health.

Tanks have less health but way more armour. Which is easier to kill is mostly a wash. We honestly might be better off making a run for it to get inside the ship instead. But anything could be in there, including a bunch more turrets or a firing squad.

Fuck, was worried about the sectopod walking in to kill us, but infantry showed up instead. It goes down instantly to the photon blade reaction but-

Now we're exposed.

This is quite bad though, Lenneth's team is too small to be losing members, especially with fucking sectopods in the way.

To help us out, this tank hovers up into line of sight of our cave team and eats shit for it.

And instead of us getting wiped out by the sectopod here, the enemy suicides some guys onto the blue tiles and the sectopod wanders off. Maybe it's too smart to walk onto the traps?

More mercs spawn in, but we've got a killbox on them now. Death rays tear them apart effortlessly. Turkish Ronin is going to have quite the kill count from this mission.

The sectopod apparently came back. Seems like a good chance to take it out with everyone here at full TUs.

Elite plasma takes down the shields, and Lenneth unloads with the hammer 3 times... no dice. Fuck. It even reaction fired and kill part of our cover.

I try this in a desperate bid to finish it, but no dice.

Meanwhile over here scientists seem to be popping out of thin air. Orcinator picks off the one on the right.

Some scorcher support softens the rest up, but no kills.

At the end of the north hallway, we find another long ass hallway, mercifully empty of enemies. And a strange patch of wall.

A bit further down is the room that blew up. No idea what happened here. We could have gotten close enough to watch it if we sprinted here, I think.

Belatedly, it occurs to me to mind orb the sectopod and see how fucked up it is. We came close to killing it, but it's still got a good chunk of armour.

We also spied what must have been under the explosions from before? As the sectopod leaves instead of killing us. Another lucky break.

We follow a different elevator down to the ground floor of this room and get a better picture of this side of the ship. Another sectopod here, and mercs instead of star gods.

Also this guy. I want that spear!

I'm not sure whether to complain about the reinforcements or praise the difficulty. I can't say they don't make sense.

Gandalf fails to take out a turret and pays for it. This room is rough, but we can't really spare the XEC to handle it for us. At least 2 turrets are facing away.

Another well placed blaster shot. They'd be better spent on the tanks and ship turrets though, I think.

Oh great, another, BIGGER turret. At least it's facing away.

Manatee is recovering. Not full yet, but enoguh to take a shot or two. No real way to help with the turrets though.

I managed to spot this door over here, which would have been inaccessible if not for the turrets (or maybe the XEC?) blasting a hole in the barricade. Seems like a route to bypass the turret room! Not enough room for the XEC though. Well, unless we can MAKE some room...

Gandalf nearly died from the two mini turret shots, but armour is still mostly okay. After a few turns, will be fine.

Turkish Ronin has been doing great, but freshness has run out, sadly. Holding the mercs off now will be rough. Maybe I dedicate Manatee to the task? I think she could kill the whole spawn of them each turn solo...

Orcinator got a lttile overzealous and ate a shot from the ship cannons. Managed to survive though!

We slash the wall and find a secret passage? And in the burnt out room we spot a merc captain, who dies easily to the chaos dagger bypassing his red shields.

The secret room has... whatever this is? I've no idea what this is meant to be. Maybe an alternate spawn point for the other ship or some other mission? It can't have been an enemy spawn room because it was sealed up.

A full auto from above manages to delete a hovertank. Really should have brought a scorcher or two.

Crazy that this is only turn seven. I've had base invasions where we're still at the spawn point on turn seven, and ones where we've had fewer kills by turn 30. I guess this is what you get from a 36 slot ship invasion across 5 access points.

Robroy manages to find another path to the ground. Again, hallway is empty, thankfully. Once we've got the area mostly mapped out we can spend turns dumping all our TUs instead of leaving people on overwatch all over the place.

Up above we find another connection, to the same hall from the other side. There's a 3 tile wide tunnel entering over here though... fishy. Still, if we can connect the squads, we'll be much better off. We can abandon the north side I think, pull everyone to the south, and make a push to get into the ship from there.

Our herder staff catgirl sadly hasn't found any targets yet. If we can get her into a room with mercs or even mutons or eridians, probably, she'll be incredibly valuable I think. Also, I've no idea why that one single pod is yellow.

Lenneth's team pushes ahead trying to catch the sectopod but finds this at the bottom of an elevator. Shit. I'd love to kill it while it's back is turned, but I don't want all those doors to open and have soldiers flood out while we have no TUs.

Orcinator gets rescued by the local catgirl and brought to safety to be healed. Still going to be very badly injured I think. Maybe we can give Luka's vampire sword to her so she can heal up?

Manatee spots a merc engineer in an unexplored room below. It's got another blaster multilauncher. Getting that would be very, very helpful.

The nubiran guardians seem to have decent stats, but are fairly fragile. Definitely a high target priority. High reactions too.

Sectopod gets a plasma shower, but survives. Still, stripping the shields and taking potshots from the cave room should have left it wounded.

The bridge has been pretty well exposed by now, and no sign of the captain this whole time. Still, I'm getting mroe tempted to rush inside this thing the longer this goes on. Reinforcements don't seem to be slowing much, if at all, and we're losing people as we gain ground. I doubt whatever is in there will be worse than all the tanks and turrets outside. Might need to make some big sacrifice play with the slower members drawing fire while the faster ones run ahead. I'm also not sure if the various coloured tiles around the ship are actually relevant or just decorative.

I need a breather. Many hours of both fighting and writing have left my brain a bit fried. Best not to try finish this now, lest we risk failure.

 

[Andnjord]

Now that wasn’t in the Zany Zines, but I’ll take it. Coming to the final mission on Mars wearing nothing but my pajamas space suit and what is at this point a fancy kitchen knife, a fitting end for a lad who thought he could tag along at the end and get all the glory without the pain and suffering of the early days.

And regarding tech, it looks like you missed out on the improved plasma scorcher, shame. You would have loved it seeing your appreciation of explosives and flaming death.

Also, do you remember where you found your first photon blade? I know where I found mine, but I don’t remember seeing you ever facing those guys.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Also, do you remember where you found your first photon blade? I know where I found mine, but I don’t remember seeing you ever facing those guys.

I've got no idea. Must have been overlooked in some big loot pile. Maybe the space freighter mission? Or one of the one time missions, like Aurora's Palace? Maybe even a rimrider camp, they get all sorts of random strange weapons. I could see a Merc Commander holding one too, I've only fought a few and they seem to be good at melee and get random high tier equipment.

 

[Jaedar]

While I reloaded the backup I made (and I totally would have fallen for that bullshit bad ending) I decided not to change the loadouts.

I think there is some research (operation AAA maybe?) that mentions that retreat is death on this mission. Bit surprised dio actually made a cutscene for it.

They're also weak to warcrimes, apparently.

Can't be a Geneva convention if there's no Geneva.

And behind the tempting blue panel is... a BRAND NEW SPACESHIP!!

It's the B'ruh.

Again I ask myself: could I have encountered one of these earlier? Could we have arrived with even better tech?

Afaik, most/all of these enemies only spawn in this final mission. You can get all the weapon tech from interrogations, which lets you power up during the final mission.

Pressing a head a bit, we find six more turrets. Fucking hell. They definitely expected this squad to have more tanks.

I think the actual expectation is that this squad gets wiped out. Between the reinforcements from the back, and the infinite turret corridor, there's just not a lot of ways to stay safe.

The secret room has... whatever this is? I've no idea what this is meant to be.

Cake, iirc. The implication seems to be that the shadowgods have seeded the tunnels with a bunch of supply caches to help you. (you can eat it).

LP is very close to the end huh. Best of luck.

 

[lightbane]

Gotta love how bullshit even the vanilla mission is. At least it makes more sense than random neo-neo nazis having super-gear.

 

[Average Manatee]

Also, do you remember where you found your first photon blade? I know where I found mine, but I don’t remember seeing you ever facing those guys.

I've got no idea. Must have been overlooked in some big loot pile. Maybe the space freighter mission? Or one of the one time missions, like Aurora's Palace? Maybe even a rimrider camp, they get all sorts of random strange weapons. I could see a Merc Commander holding one too, I've only fought a few and they seem to be good at melee and get random high tier equipment.

Judicious use of explosives probably contributes to a lot of missed loot the first few times it drops.

 

[Jaedar]

Also, do you remember where you found your first photon blade? I know where I found mine, but I don’t remember seeing you ever facing those guys.

I've got no idea. Must have been overlooked in some big loot pile. Maybe the space freighter mission? Or one of the one time missions, like Aurora's Palace? Maybe even a rimrider camp, they get all sorts of random strange weapons. I could see a Merc Commander holding one too, I've only fought a few and they seem to be good at melee and get random high tier equipment.

Judicious use of explosives probably contributes to a lot of missed loot the first few times it drops.

I think I didn't find a single one before cydonia. Looking at game data suggests the only place to get it outside of cydonia is smuggler ships, which are rare as all hell.. But I suspect it can also be found from merc commanders in certain missions, since they can be interrogated for the stats.

Gotta love how bullshit even the vanilla mission is. At least it makes more sense than random neo-neo nazis having super-gear.

The "random neo-nazis" are the remnants/inheritors of x-com though, so them having super-gear is not so strange, as x-com canonically cracked pretty much all star god tech, and have had 100s of years to cook.

 

[Andnjord]

I think I didn't find a single one before cydonia. Looking at game data suggests the only place to get it outside of cydonia is smuggler ships, which are rare as all hell.. But I suspect it can also be found from merc commanders in certain missions, since they can be interrogated for the stats.

Found mine on

Spoiler

a renegade Star God on a smuggler ship. Which is pretty memorable in itself, even more so if like me your first clue of their presence is a freaking Star Wars lightsaber sound followed by one of your elite gals getting shish-kebabed out of nowhere. And given they’re really stealthy it’s unlikely you’ll see them before that happens, ever more so given that smuggler ships are supposed to be really easy at the point you meet him.