Why are you wasting those tokens on gambling?
You can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, sometimes you get shit that is fucking rad.
And we've researched the last of the three ships. Interesting. While I don't think I want to use the worm as a dropship since it's got a decent chance of gassing our own team on a lot of maps, this one is just a non-starter as a dropship, only carrying 4 crew. It would, however, make for an excellent gunship, being more than twice the speed of the turtle, having 6 armour and a third more toughness, and most importantly, 2 HV weapon mounts, which means we can load it up with our infinite ammo bioplasma projector and just explode some nerds. We can get some guns in the other slots too, maybe a gauss cannon and carronade for targets we actually want to find wreckage of. Pricetag is 850k dollaros though, and even 240 toughness doesn't last long against missiles, so we'd be in danger of losing it if we didn't pick our targets carefully. Losing the ship isn't a big deal; we'd recover the crew and can just buy a new ship. Losing our fancy infinite ammo plasma cannon would really suck though.
Finally got around to researching the main reward item from that peasant mission. 50k monthly income is nothing to sneeze at for sure. Thought it does feel like a bit of a let down, was hoping for something to expand our base options. Makes me wonder if it can be hacked, or used as a component in a higher level workshop.
Another kick at the catgirl can!
Jaedar has earned the honour of wearing our shiny new duds. So how good are they?
,,, Pretty damned good! About 20 more side armor and 16 more frontal armour. Still not in chinmail territory, but not far behind the shieldless version. And holding bigass two handed guns is certainly a nice perk! +20 bravery too, not that Jaedar needs it.
Oh man... these poor catgirls are fucked. No way we're saving any of them.
I passed up missions earlier because we might have run into 5 of these guys in a tangled jungle where we could pick them off by ones and twos. More than a dozen in an open field is going to be a bloodbath.
For everyone but us. They do slashing, which our armour laughs at, and their melee skill isn't up to the task of overwhelming our evasion reliably.
After being swung at over a dozen times from the sides, the managed to land a single hit for maybe ~15 damage? Lots of morale damage too, but these guys just aren't a threat as long as we can keep our gals between them and the squishy boys.
It's a tad tricky since the craft has 3 entrances, we've only got 2 gals, the bastards keep regerating and getting back up, and the map is large enough we eventually need to move out across it to get the stragglers.
But aside from losing all the poor catgirls yet again, it's a glorious massacre. Just over 30 werewolves defeated.
Turns out defeating 30 werewolves, some of them multiple times, earns quite a lot of xp. We even got some bravery!
The loot was nice too. Ninja sickles are excellent weapons, basically like spears but requiring two hands and having 5 tiles of range instead of 2. They also have a proper melee attack. Nekomimi swords for tough targets, and best of all, all those werewolf bodies. Trust me, I've got big plans for those.
Finally got around to finishing this tech. It's functionally the equivalent of 5 crew quarters and 1 vault, making it perfect for any base we want to load up with runts to make us money. Despite the hefty price tag, we start construction of one in the secondary base immediately. We want one in our main base too, but that'll require a lot of very expensive juggling of existing rooms, unfortunately. Or risking opening up more infiltration routes, which we might do now that we have a decently sized army. Need more money though.
Not listed here: Something around 10 health/turn regeneration and ~130 health. Bastards do NOT go down easily.
These bastards, on the other hand, go down very easily indeed. Mohawks are wimpy ass bandits basically on par with highwaymen. They raid in large numbers and fall down very quickly to our chainmail gals forming a killbox right outside the access point. Whole things lasts about 4 turns.
No worker casualties this time!
Didn't take the time and effort to give everyone a potshot this time, so the xp gains were much less.
However, titles like defender and cavalier are applied to everyone present, regardless of firing a shot or not. One of the perks of letting enemies raid you, especially with such a large standing garrison.
Luckily at this point -500 infamy is a drop in the bucket. Improving our space capacity is certainly still on the list though. I think we'd have gotten a mission instead if this fired and we had the right tech.
Another level C bounty hunt. For the goblin again, unfortunately. Though I am a fan of this mission.
Like the tribal hunters, we're tasked with rescuing this exterminator, and we get to control his actions and starting loadout. So just how good is that big clunky suit of his?
It's uh, pretty fucking good. Basically invulnerable to a lot of attacks. He'll still get one shot by a chryssalid though.
Luckily, this map doesn't seem to have any chryssalids. His starting position is a bit ass though, quite far from us and without a good spot to put his back to a corner.
These bastards are making up the brunt of the enemy troops. They have shitty primitive weapons, almost exclusively melee. Literally none of these guys can even hurt our new friend and unlike on water, they've got no special advantages on land.
These fuckers are the real threat. They're armored just as well as the exterminator, and those claws will tear that armour apart if they can get close enough.
Luckily, they are suceptible to poison (choking) damage, and has gas rounds tend to put them down after one or two shots, sometimes even on a miss.
Amusingly, he'd be perfectly safe if I left him like this and unloaded his cannon arm. But that'd be a bad idea...
We can't kill the lobsters on our own. I have forgotten, yet again, to properly load the spare equipment onto the turtle. So we don't have things like the wyvern plasma gun, the AP sniper rifles, a big pile of gas grenades or any weapons suited for piercing armour aside from a couple poison daggers. And I don't want our gals running into melee with these guys if it can be helped.
Luckily, the exterminator picks the lobsters off easily enough, and we get one with a poison grenade. I won't say we were entirely superflous, as our vision allowed him to stay out of their claws while picking them off, but he certainly did the heavy lifting here.
Amusingly, we get to keep anything we made him drop on the floor, which includes some interesting new weaponry. The Chryssalid gas weapons are intended as anti-zombie weapons, but will fuck us up quite badly too, or anything else with a helerium based metabolism. The boys would be completely immune to such weapons though. We also managed a few live lobstermen captures and a bunch of deep ones. Not nearly as exciting as the werewolves, but those carapaces can be rendered into some extra aquaplastics.
The exterminator himself becomes our prisoner. Sadly, stealing his armor isn't an option, so we simply free him in exchange for a big pile of bank tokens. We should have over 1000 now. I don't like most of the bank rewards, but I think they've got at least one or two more of interest.
Time for another shot at this mission. This time we're bringing a real crew.
And the layout is much. much more favourable. Ramshackle fort in the woods at night? Hell yes! It's a damned shame our craft is so well lit though, we get spotted and marked for snipers constantly just trying to get into position.
Definitely don't see these guys in the bandit camps. Capturing him would be nice, and not that dificult. Dudes are very tanky but not all that well armed.
These guys, on the other hand, do tend to be pretty well armed. Or at least riskily armed; they carry large primitive weapons capable of hurting even our tanks, but they aren't terribly accurate.
Motherfuckers also seem to have some sort of long range napalm weapon, which is concerning. It's quite accurate, but the damage wasn't that impressive for a fire weapon. Though being lit up and exposed for everyone else to shoot is a problem as well.
Gandalfina, working against her nature as the HOT gal, puts out the flames so we can resume hiding under cover of darkness. And, you know, not burn to death.
They've got blood hounds too, but they're a joke when facing off against our chainmail.
Fuckers land another shot at even longer range! Very glad I decided to leave a fire extinguisher equipped on a gal from now on. It's a major threat.
We find one of these guys sniping at us from a window on top of their fort. Not much of a threat honestly; good skills but not tanky and not carrying a heavy weapon. Manstoppers are scary to lighter armour, but not chainmail.
Ah, THIS was the fucker setting us on fire. Pyrotechnic and explosive cannonballs are a thing. I think he was using the explosive type, as the pyro ones have massive radius iirc.
Oh, another fun quirk of this map: Enemies get reinforcements over time! Including this highwayman with some kind of fucking ROCKET LAUNCHER.
For someone who's been hit with explosive ordinance twice in one map and hails of bullets besides, she's holding up pretty damned well. Going to end up in sickbay for a month though.
They had so many B-Boys and hoes we actually lost score for looting them, but overall another big net infamy gain. That's about 250k just from the infamy conversion at the end of month right here.
Some decent training going on too. The injuries suck, but Bravery gains are always welcome.
Honestly I'm surprised our animal cages took this long to fill up. That beast den we built houses a lot of them. We'll sell off a werewolve even though they're arguably the most valuable thing here. A lot of these guys still need to be researched, and 17 werewolves is honestly a bit overkill.
We really need another prison set up too. I don't even want to interrogate that bandit boss yet since that might trigger a promotion later. We offload the low level bandits a sharp guy I think.
Plenty of titles gained here, especially gal of steel from all those smg bursts flying around. Good stuff!
We finally finish grilling one of the government enforcers and are rewarded for our trouble! This will unlock some excellent armour for us. It won't make the chainmail obsolete, but it's on par with it and will give us more flexibility for what kinds of weapons to deploy and environments we can handle well.
Our secondary base is coming along nicely. We've got 45 runts working here at the moment, and after this month ticks over, we can have them all cranking out cigars, for a total income of about 1.5 million per month. We can fit some more workspace in the last 4 slots too I expect, maybe a still will improve efficiency as well. I got some numbers to crunch. At any rate, ~3 million income a month from this base would be a conservative estimate. We're also building a large prison here, where we'll convert excess prisoners into slaves instead of simply ransoming them. It's got a decent garrison of about 18 people too, including 3 zone stalkers and some decent gear. The hangar is a big weakpoint but I'm holding onto it until we win at least one god damned race trophy. Fucking RNG.
Current main base setup. Ideally I'd remove the small crew quarters and replace them with a single large one, along with adding in more personal labs and some other stuff we've yet to unlock. I didn't plan things out that well for the long term, honestly. We're going to need to either open up the potential assault angles a lot or bulldoze and rebuild some expensive stuff like a personal lab. Best option to be safe might be scrapping the bottom right 4 tiles and putting the large crew there. Again though, need lots of money for that. I might just wait until we can base cannons and say fuck it and fill the empty spaces instead with a crew quarter in the top right.
Lastly, our current researches. There's a few things here to look forward to I haven't mentioned yet along with still a ton of extra fluff I'm trying to clear out of the pool to get better random rewards from decrypted disks and gun almanacs. And even more stuff in the insanely long list of things we can pick from. Exciting times!