Damned Registrations
Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2007
- Messages
- 15,053
So, new LP time. Still running Brigandine as well, but I felt like playing this and figured I may as well LP it while I'm at it. If you don't know much/anything about the game, it's a sort of real time tactical roguelike. Death is permanent, encounters and loot is random, and there's a lot of freedom in playstyle. I'm going to be using the stealth cruiser for the first run (I'll probably do at least one more, maybe more than that depending on how quickly these go) which most people consider to be a bit of a challenge for reasons that will become quickly apparent. Anyways, fuck title screens, lets get into this shit.
This is the ship we're using. Like every ship except the default starter one, I had to unlock this fucker by playing and accomplishing a specific task. It has a shitty human crew, some halfassed weaponry, and no shields. But we do have pretty good engines.
We also have Cloaking, which normally costs as much to install as shields. And we have an excellent name for our ship.
This is what most of the game looks like. We can order our crew about the ship to man various stations, or repair shit or fight boarders. Or, if lightbane doesn't reply to this quickly enough, we can move him into an airlock room and suck the oxygen out to watch him die a slow agonizing death. Just sayin'
As you can see at the tooltip, crew can gain experience at manning the 4 stations that can be manned, as well as repairs and boarding. All crew start with no skill, though some races get inherent bonuses.
This is another important screen, where we plot our course through the sector, one jump at a time. We have long ranged scanners, so we have the luxury of noticing if a ship (not necessarily an enemy ship) or dangerous local event like a plasma storm is at an adjacent star.
Over here is some purple nebula shit, which makes sensors nonfunctional and delays enemy pursuit if we spend time there.
And finally over here we have the exit beacon. We need to reach this to progress to the next sector.
In the top left we have the hud for our resources. Hull is self explanatory, shields I'll explain a bit when we start to fight, and to the right of that we have fuel (need 1 per jump) missiles and drone parts. Missiles and drone parts are consumables used by certain weapons or drone systems, but we have none of the consumables or the means to use them right now. To the right of the hull bar is our scrap total, the currency for the game. It can be exchanged for damned near anything, as well as used to upgrade our ship.
In the bottom left, we have the energy hud. The bars in the very corner represent our reactor capacity and spare energy, which we funnel into various systems. Systems need at least 1 energy to function at all, and if they're upgraded, need more energy to make use of their upgraded functions.
As an example, our engines here are just minimally powered. Putting our spare energy in will pump our evasion up 10%.
Like so.
In the bottom right are subsystems, which require no energy to function. They can, however, be damaged or disabled like any of the other systems.
But enough of that shit, lets get going. I opt for the star without a guaranteed ship. We're at our weakest right now, and might get some free stuff before we have to fight.
Well, instead we come across a ship fighting pirates. We could just leave, but if we fight we can get not just the scrap from the dead ship, but a reward from the civilians.
Obviously.
So, this is what combat looks like. We can pause whenever we want. Our weapons are shown next to the other systems at the bottom there, and as long as they're powered, they'll begin to charge while we're in abttle against an enemy ship (unless the enemy is cloaked, which stops our weapons from charging for some reason.)
Before anything else I depower our medbay and cap out or engines for the extra bit of evasion. No reason not to.
Then the enemy fires his heavy laser cannon and htis our weapons before ours finish charging. Having not played the stealth ship in a long while, I'd forgotten how to actually fight with this thing. Oops. The laser did 2 damage, which means we take 2 hull damage, and the system takes 2 damage as well, leaving it completely disabled. This means our weapons lose any charge they'd had built up and can't charge again until we repair the weapons and repower them.
Of course, the enemy also has a missile launcher, which hits our piloting controls while we're all moving to repair the weapons. Probably should have left Azira there to keep our evasion around. (I forgot to mention, Azira is our pilot, Procrastinator our engines guy, and lightbane our weapons guy.)
The missile also started a fire, which luckily can't do any more damage to the already totally destroyed piloting system. It could, however, spread to the O2 system next door and destroy that, which would be bad. The smart thing to do would be to open the nearby doors and vent those far 3 rooms to spaces, suffocating the fire. Except the enemies hit our door control subsystem, so we can't control the doors any more. At least weapons are back online.
The dual laser fires a pair of 1 damage shots. The first is cancelled out by the shield the enemy has (note how the blue square went dark) and the second should hit the weapons system we aimed at, before the shields recharge.
However, we paused in between the two shots landing, so we can fire our beam weapon. Firing is instant after the weapon is charged and we set the target. Beam weapons are targetted as lines (you can see the short red line on the enemy ship, which is now dark like ours because our fucking sensors got hit) and hit every room the line touches. Ours is a shitty low level beam, so it does only 1 damage, and the line is quite short. On top of that, beams do nothing to shields. They can pierce through shields, but they do 1 less damage for each shield they pass through. Ours would do nothing if the enemy has any shields up at all.
Beams also never miss, which is rather nice.
I either fucked up the targetting here or the enemy somehow resisted the system damage, because their weapons are unharmed. I think the former since this ship type can only resist hull damage, not system damage. We did manage 4 points of hull damage though, leaving them with 4 remaining.
We're at about half of our 30 points ourselves. I've finally managed to fix doors and partially fix sensors. Of course now engines our down, but engines without piloting don't do much anyways. Also, I finally remembered we had a cloaking system and used it completely ineffectively. Weee. And the enemy shields are back up.
But our next attack wipes them out. We now have a fire in the engine room. Not that it matters, since the engines are already destroyed, and the adjacent room has a hull breach, venting all the air.
We got 15 scrap, 2 missiles and 2 fuel from the ship's remains, and even more stuff from the science vessel we rescued. Altogether, it's barely enoguh to cover our repair expenses. I totally fucked up this battle.
We go ahead and vent the engines more quickly by opening a path to the enarest airlock, and close up the other side to start making repairs possible.
You can see which rooms have breathable atmosphere by the borders. Yellow borders mean it is unsafe to be there, unless you're a drone.
Of course, even with the doors closed, the room with the breach isn't going to have any atmosphere until we repair the breach.
We lose a substansial chunk of health repairing it, but it's done.
After fixing the engines too we turn the medbay back on and patch everyone up.
Shit. I wanted to explore the nebula but one spot has a ship and the other a plasma storm (which usually also implies a hostile ship.)
We bite the bullet and head to the ship. Plasma storms are pretty awful to deal with. Any environmental hazard is honestly.
No option to just leave like we did with the last encounter. However, this time I remember what ship we're using.
Before much of anything happens, I activate the cloaking system. This gives our weapons a headstart on theirs to charge for 5 seconds.
Which means we get to fire before them, even though our weapons are slower.
Same as with the other ship, the dual laser takes out the shields then we use the beam to slice them up.
Their weapons are completely down before they fire a shot. Complete opposite of the last battle.
By the time they've repaired a weapon, we can fire the dual lasers again and knock it back out.
And then the beam to finish them.
Flawless victory.
Rewards in the first sector are pretty small, but fights are also pretty easy. As long as I play competently and don't encounter anything crazy we'll do fine.
We have enough scrap to upgrade some systems now, but nothing is really worth upgrading. I'd rather hang on in case we can buy another weapon or useful addon.
So, lets continue exploring the little nebula.
An automated ship near a space station. You can see one of our options here is blue. This denotes an option we only have because of something we have that not every ship would. In this case, our cloaking system gives us the option to board the station without fighting the ship first.
I go ahead and do that. Would still like some sort of combat upgrade before I engage in combat just for the reward of the scrapped enemy ship.
And here is where we're most likely to find it. Anyone can detect stores when they are adjacent to your position.
We head there immediately. There are many differently fluffed stores, but they're all pretty much following the same rules.
They'll have fuel, missiles and drones for sale, as well as repair facilities. Repairs get more expensive later on. They'll also sell 2 of the following sets of things: Systems, Weapons, Drones, Addons, and Crew. We got systems and weapons available here.
Getting a shield system would be nice, but it's damned expensive. Drones and teleporter wouldn't be very useful to us right now. This weapon is probably our best bet.
We can also sell stuff at stores. Not our consumables, but any of our equipment is fair game. These are our existing lasers, which charge a bit faster, use less energy, and fire 1 less shot. Both have a small chance of causing fires when they get past shields.
And our mini beam. Note that the damage per room hit doesn't depend on the size of a room. Essentially you want to pass between as many walls separating rooms as possible. Though targetting specific systems factors in as well obviously.
We also have our long range scanners...
...and this special system casing which only this ship gets AFAIK. I think it used to sell for a lot more scrap. This makes things a bit harder than I'd expected. Ah well.
We're gonna sell it to buy that burst laser.
Note that we can only mount 3 weapons at a time on this ship, regardless of their power requirements.
Also, since we currently only have level 2 weapons systems, we can only use up to 2 energy to power weapons.
We could depower the weapons we had before to use this...
Or we can spend the last bit of our scrap to upgrade our systems so we can spend 3 power on weapons.
Which is what I decide to do.
The order of the weapons in the slots matters. In the event of system damage, weapons to the left have the highest priority of staying online. If we took 1 weapon damage here, the mini beam would shut down while the burst laser kept charging.
I opt to use the 2 laser weapons together. A volley of 5 lasers should be able to take out almost any weapons system we encounter in this sector or the next.
Another store is available, but we have no scrap right now. Maybe we can come back later.
Note the warning on the left side now. The rebels (yes, we belong to the federation, and are fighting AGAINST rebels, go figure) are pursuing us. The highlighted area shows us where they'll have their scouts searching specifically for us next turn. Being in that area next turn would be very bad, especially for us right now.
Checking out the last safe nebula node, we find a weapons trader. The weapons they sell are rarely worth the price.
And since we have some firepower now, I feel like beating up random ships to take their loot is worth it.
There is an alternate way to use the cloaking device in battle besides just to buy extra time for charging weapons.
As you can see here, I've waited a while before using the cloak. Our lasers are already charged (the weaker ones anyways, the new ones are close too though.) In fact, I waited for the enemy to fire.
So when his shot would land, we have +60% evasion. This is useful if you want to dodge specific weapons rather than just get more shots than the enemy. But in our situation it wasn't really advantageous to do this. The enemy also has a beam weapon which hasn't fired yet, we could cause us some trouble.
However, it's too late for them, because our weapons are charged.
Pew-pew motherfuckers!
With their weapons down I can go after other systems as well instead of just camping on their weapons. Taking out the piloting will lower their evasion to 0.
The offer to surrender. On average, blowing up a ship tends to give better rewards than surrenders do. But if you want to end the fight ASAP it might be worth it anyways. In this case, we'll accept because it's actually a really good offer. Thats a lot of fuel and missiles. We don't need the missiles right now, but we might later on. And we'll definitely use the fuel.
Another chance to avoid combat. Like our first encounter in the system, some pirates (or something) are fucking up another ship. However, these guys notice us and offer a bribe if we just leave. These bribes tend to be especially shitty, but let you avoid the fight entirely. We can tell what their basic ship type is though, and can see their weapons too (though the weapons are harder to see when powered down, since they tuck into the ship.) We can take these guys out easily and hopefully get another double reward.
Once again, I pause just as the enemy fires (you can see the shot leaving their cannon this time) to dodge it. Even though this makes no sense.
Sure is cinematic though. Woooooooo!
I guess evading shots at least trains our pilot a bit. Anyways, lets unload.
Great success!
We'll be fighting a LOT of ships in this game. In the future, I'll probably skim over the combat if it's against a ship that isn't likely to cause us any damage.
After our next volley, they're fucked up enough to be scared, Unlike most ships though, instead of offering to surrender, they try to bribe us to leave again with a better deal. We could accept, but then we'd be abandoning whoever they attacked.
So we refuse and blast them to bits. The reward is especially lame. Ugh.
And it turns out the guys we rescued were enemies.
We opts to blast them to bits and get a bit more loot. This doesn't even put us in combat, it's just free loot.
So... we have nice weapons, are pretty fucked up hull wise and still have no shields and a shitty crew. Not the greatest start, but I've seen much worse.
Onward! Though not here. More fucking environmental hazards. We won't be seeing any of those on this run if I can possibly help it. And I probably can with our scanners.
Instead we move above us and run into these guys. Aside from the pursuing fleet, the rebels are stationed all over the place anyways, so we'll encounter them even if we avoid the fleet itself.
These fuckers actually have a teleporter and board us. Luckily they're retarded and fight us in the medbay where they can't possibly win. I stupidly moved our whole crew there even though 1 guy would have been sufficient.
But it's irrelevant since our cloak and inital volley totally fucks up their ship. Their weapons are down and on fire (and fires have to be put out before repairs can start.)
Now that I have two weapons that can overwhelm the enemy shields, I can afford to go after other systems besides weapons when we fire, which speeds things up.
Now their shields are down until they repair them, and I have lasers charged and ready to fire the instant they repair their weapons.
Rebels often try to escape. If they get away the fleet gets warned and will jump ahead a long way on the next turn.
We're not going to let that happen obviously. They give up their escape attempt and offer to surrender.
Surrender refused. We actually got a weaker reward here arguably. Kinda bad RNG in that regard so far.
But we've eeked out enough for another weapons system upgrade.
Now all 3 weapons are online, though are engines aren't close to capacity any more and the medbay is offline to power this stuff. We'll want some reactor upgrades before long, especially when we get shields too.
Next system is a simple quest opportunity. These guys want us to escort them to a nearby system. If we accept, we'll get 2 fuel immediately and a highlight on our map of where to head.
Little reason not to accept these. They can be traps, but if it's a trap it'll be at the quest location, and we could just not show up and run off with the free fuel.
We're gonna head there though. It's quite unlikely we'd be in serious trouble even if it is a trap.
First we have to fight another rebel ship. They are really underarmed, with a just a single basic laser (1 shot 1 damage laser.)
They also have a defense drone, which can shoot down incoming missiles. Of course, we don't have missiles so it's basically a free win for us.
Afterwards we get to the quest marker and get our reward. Not a big reward but better than having to fight for it or just wasting a turn.
Not that the rebel fleet is nearly covering the system now. The heavily shaded area is already occupied, and being there means we'd have to fight a bigass cruiser. Do not want. Based on their rate of expansion if we visit the store we'll have to fight our way into the exit beacon. We'll leave the store behind.
Well, here we are, sector 1 finished up.
You can have cnounters at these nodes too obviously. It's another station guarded by a drone. We'll fight this one for the extra scrap, since it looks weak.
These ships don't have crew or air on board, which makes fires irrelevant, boarding nearly pointless, and capturing them impossible. Note that there aren't even doors between adjacent rooms on this thing.
Anyways, between our 3 weapons and the cloak we can easily carve it apart before it has a chance to do anything. Also some fag is playing Dota 2 apparently.
Anyways, mission accomplished, drone destroyed.
17 scrap and nothing else from the ship is... ok. Not very good but not awful.
This is kinda lame for a storage cache though. Ugh. Whatever, it cost us nothing to open.
Time to scram.
This is the sectors map. Kinda explains itself. I'd let you guys vote on where to go but fuck you we're going to the nebula because Zoltans are fucking scary to a ship like ours. To a lot of ships in fact. Fucking Zoltans.
So we'll stop here for now.
Also, I realized I can run it in a smaller resolution and cut down a bit on screenshot size hopefully. (These are already resized and reformatted, this'll just save some bandwidth hopefully.)
If you guys want, I could try making the screenshots bigger, but aside from the evasion/oxygen levels and the tooltips, I think everything is pretty legible. The game is kind of annoying the screenshot because although the nuts and bolts are simple as fuck and perfectly suited for an efficient PNG file, the backgrounds are high res clouds and stars with a shitton of colours that make the PNGs take over a MB each. Argh. Unless theres a lot of complaints I'm going to stick with this format, it's the same as I used for Brigandine. Not sure if I want to change the font or anything like I did there. Feel free to comment on that kind of shit as well as the game.
This is the ship we're using. Like every ship except the default starter one, I had to unlock this fucker by playing and accomplishing a specific task. It has a shitty human crew, some halfassed weaponry, and no shields. But we do have pretty good engines.
We also have Cloaking, which normally costs as much to install as shields. And we have an excellent name for our ship.
This is what most of the game looks like. We can order our crew about the ship to man various stations, or repair shit or fight boarders. Or, if lightbane doesn't reply to this quickly enough, we can move him into an airlock room and suck the oxygen out to watch him die a slow agonizing death. Just sayin'
As you can see at the tooltip, crew can gain experience at manning the 4 stations that can be manned, as well as repairs and boarding. All crew start with no skill, though some races get inherent bonuses.
This is another important screen, where we plot our course through the sector, one jump at a time. We have long ranged scanners, so we have the luxury of noticing if a ship (not necessarily an enemy ship) or dangerous local event like a plasma storm is at an adjacent star.
Over here is some purple nebula shit, which makes sensors nonfunctional and delays enemy pursuit if we spend time there.
And finally over here we have the exit beacon. We need to reach this to progress to the next sector.
In the top left we have the hud for our resources. Hull is self explanatory, shields I'll explain a bit when we start to fight, and to the right of that we have fuel (need 1 per jump) missiles and drone parts. Missiles and drone parts are consumables used by certain weapons or drone systems, but we have none of the consumables or the means to use them right now. To the right of the hull bar is our scrap total, the currency for the game. It can be exchanged for damned near anything, as well as used to upgrade our ship.
In the bottom left, we have the energy hud. The bars in the very corner represent our reactor capacity and spare energy, which we funnel into various systems. Systems need at least 1 energy to function at all, and if they're upgraded, need more energy to make use of their upgraded functions.
As an example, our engines here are just minimally powered. Putting our spare energy in will pump our evasion up 10%.
Like so.
In the bottom right are subsystems, which require no energy to function. They can, however, be damaged or disabled like any of the other systems.
But enough of that shit, lets get going. I opt for the star without a guaranteed ship. We're at our weakest right now, and might get some free stuff before we have to fight.
Well, instead we come across a ship fighting pirates. We could just leave, but if we fight we can get not just the scrap from the dead ship, but a reward from the civilians.
Obviously.
So, this is what combat looks like. We can pause whenever we want. Our weapons are shown next to the other systems at the bottom there, and as long as they're powered, they'll begin to charge while we're in abttle against an enemy ship (unless the enemy is cloaked, which stops our weapons from charging for some reason.)
Before anything else I depower our medbay and cap out or engines for the extra bit of evasion. No reason not to.
Then the enemy fires his heavy laser cannon and htis our weapons before ours finish charging. Having not played the stealth ship in a long while, I'd forgotten how to actually fight with this thing. Oops. The laser did 2 damage, which means we take 2 hull damage, and the system takes 2 damage as well, leaving it completely disabled. This means our weapons lose any charge they'd had built up and can't charge again until we repair the weapons and repower them.
Of course, the enemy also has a missile launcher, which hits our piloting controls while we're all moving to repair the weapons. Probably should have left Azira there to keep our evasion around. (I forgot to mention, Azira is our pilot, Procrastinator our engines guy, and lightbane our weapons guy.)
The missile also started a fire, which luckily can't do any more damage to the already totally destroyed piloting system. It could, however, spread to the O2 system next door and destroy that, which would be bad. The smart thing to do would be to open the nearby doors and vent those far 3 rooms to spaces, suffocating the fire. Except the enemies hit our door control subsystem, so we can't control the doors any more. At least weapons are back online.
The dual laser fires a pair of 1 damage shots. The first is cancelled out by the shield the enemy has (note how the blue square went dark) and the second should hit the weapons system we aimed at, before the shields recharge.
However, we paused in between the two shots landing, so we can fire our beam weapon. Firing is instant after the weapon is charged and we set the target. Beam weapons are targetted as lines (you can see the short red line on the enemy ship, which is now dark like ours because our fucking sensors got hit) and hit every room the line touches. Ours is a shitty low level beam, so it does only 1 damage, and the line is quite short. On top of that, beams do nothing to shields. They can pierce through shields, but they do 1 less damage for each shield they pass through. Ours would do nothing if the enemy has any shields up at all.
Beams also never miss, which is rather nice.
I either fucked up the targetting here or the enemy somehow resisted the system damage, because their weapons are unharmed. I think the former since this ship type can only resist hull damage, not system damage. We did manage 4 points of hull damage though, leaving them with 4 remaining.
We're at about half of our 30 points ourselves. I've finally managed to fix doors and partially fix sensors. Of course now engines our down, but engines without piloting don't do much anyways. Also, I finally remembered we had a cloaking system and used it completely ineffectively. Weee. And the enemy shields are back up.
But our next attack wipes them out. We now have a fire in the engine room. Not that it matters, since the engines are already destroyed, and the adjacent room has a hull breach, venting all the air.
We got 15 scrap, 2 missiles and 2 fuel from the ship's remains, and even more stuff from the science vessel we rescued. Altogether, it's barely enoguh to cover our repair expenses. I totally fucked up this battle.
We go ahead and vent the engines more quickly by opening a path to the enarest airlock, and close up the other side to start making repairs possible.
You can see which rooms have breathable atmosphere by the borders. Yellow borders mean it is unsafe to be there, unless you're a drone.
Of course, even with the doors closed, the room with the breach isn't going to have any atmosphere until we repair the breach.
We lose a substansial chunk of health repairing it, but it's done.
After fixing the engines too we turn the medbay back on and patch everyone up.
Shit. I wanted to explore the nebula but one spot has a ship and the other a plasma storm (which usually also implies a hostile ship.)
We bite the bullet and head to the ship. Plasma storms are pretty awful to deal with. Any environmental hazard is honestly.
No option to just leave like we did with the last encounter. However, this time I remember what ship we're using.
Before much of anything happens, I activate the cloaking system. This gives our weapons a headstart on theirs to charge for 5 seconds.
Which means we get to fire before them, even though our weapons are slower.
Same as with the other ship, the dual laser takes out the shields then we use the beam to slice them up.
Their weapons are completely down before they fire a shot. Complete opposite of the last battle.
By the time they've repaired a weapon, we can fire the dual lasers again and knock it back out.
And then the beam to finish them.
Flawless victory.
Rewards in the first sector are pretty small, but fights are also pretty easy. As long as I play competently and don't encounter anything crazy we'll do fine.
We have enough scrap to upgrade some systems now, but nothing is really worth upgrading. I'd rather hang on in case we can buy another weapon or useful addon.
So, lets continue exploring the little nebula.
An automated ship near a space station. You can see one of our options here is blue. This denotes an option we only have because of something we have that not every ship would. In this case, our cloaking system gives us the option to board the station without fighting the ship first.
I go ahead and do that. Would still like some sort of combat upgrade before I engage in combat just for the reward of the scrapped enemy ship.
And here is where we're most likely to find it. Anyone can detect stores when they are adjacent to your position.
We head there immediately. There are many differently fluffed stores, but they're all pretty much following the same rules.
They'll have fuel, missiles and drones for sale, as well as repair facilities. Repairs get more expensive later on. They'll also sell 2 of the following sets of things: Systems, Weapons, Drones, Addons, and Crew. We got systems and weapons available here.
Getting a shield system would be nice, but it's damned expensive. Drones and teleporter wouldn't be very useful to us right now. This weapon is probably our best bet.
We can also sell stuff at stores. Not our consumables, but any of our equipment is fair game. These are our existing lasers, which charge a bit faster, use less energy, and fire 1 less shot. Both have a small chance of causing fires when they get past shields.
And our mini beam. Note that the damage per room hit doesn't depend on the size of a room. Essentially you want to pass between as many walls separating rooms as possible. Though targetting specific systems factors in as well obviously.
We also have our long range scanners...
...and this special system casing which only this ship gets AFAIK. I think it used to sell for a lot more scrap. This makes things a bit harder than I'd expected. Ah well.
We're gonna sell it to buy that burst laser.
Note that we can only mount 3 weapons at a time on this ship, regardless of their power requirements.
Also, since we currently only have level 2 weapons systems, we can only use up to 2 energy to power weapons.
We could depower the weapons we had before to use this...
Or we can spend the last bit of our scrap to upgrade our systems so we can spend 3 power on weapons.
Which is what I decide to do.
The order of the weapons in the slots matters. In the event of system damage, weapons to the left have the highest priority of staying online. If we took 1 weapon damage here, the mini beam would shut down while the burst laser kept charging.
I opt to use the 2 laser weapons together. A volley of 5 lasers should be able to take out almost any weapons system we encounter in this sector or the next.
Another store is available, but we have no scrap right now. Maybe we can come back later.
Note the warning on the left side now. The rebels (yes, we belong to the federation, and are fighting AGAINST rebels, go figure) are pursuing us. The highlighted area shows us where they'll have their scouts searching specifically for us next turn. Being in that area next turn would be very bad, especially for us right now.
Checking out the last safe nebula node, we find a weapons trader. The weapons they sell are rarely worth the price.
And since we have some firepower now, I feel like beating up random ships to take their loot is worth it.
There is an alternate way to use the cloaking device in battle besides just to buy extra time for charging weapons.
As you can see here, I've waited a while before using the cloak. Our lasers are already charged (the weaker ones anyways, the new ones are close too though.) In fact, I waited for the enemy to fire.
So when his shot would land, we have +60% evasion. This is useful if you want to dodge specific weapons rather than just get more shots than the enemy. But in our situation it wasn't really advantageous to do this. The enemy also has a beam weapon which hasn't fired yet, we could cause us some trouble.
However, it's too late for them, because our weapons are charged.
Pew-pew motherfuckers!
With their weapons down I can go after other systems as well instead of just camping on their weapons. Taking out the piloting will lower their evasion to 0.
The offer to surrender. On average, blowing up a ship tends to give better rewards than surrenders do. But if you want to end the fight ASAP it might be worth it anyways. In this case, we'll accept because it's actually a really good offer. Thats a lot of fuel and missiles. We don't need the missiles right now, but we might later on. And we'll definitely use the fuel.
Another chance to avoid combat. Like our first encounter in the system, some pirates (or something) are fucking up another ship. However, these guys notice us and offer a bribe if we just leave. These bribes tend to be especially shitty, but let you avoid the fight entirely. We can tell what their basic ship type is though, and can see their weapons too (though the weapons are harder to see when powered down, since they tuck into the ship.) We can take these guys out easily and hopefully get another double reward.
Once again, I pause just as the enemy fires (you can see the shot leaving their cannon this time) to dodge it. Even though this makes no sense.
Sure is cinematic though. Woooooooo!
I guess evading shots at least trains our pilot a bit. Anyways, lets unload.
Great success!
We'll be fighting a LOT of ships in this game. In the future, I'll probably skim over the combat if it's against a ship that isn't likely to cause us any damage.
After our next volley, they're fucked up enough to be scared, Unlike most ships though, instead of offering to surrender, they try to bribe us to leave again with a better deal. We could accept, but then we'd be abandoning whoever they attacked.
So we refuse and blast them to bits. The reward is especially lame. Ugh.
And it turns out the guys we rescued were enemies.
We opts to blast them to bits and get a bit more loot. This doesn't even put us in combat, it's just free loot.
So... we have nice weapons, are pretty fucked up hull wise and still have no shields and a shitty crew. Not the greatest start, but I've seen much worse.
Onward! Though not here. More fucking environmental hazards. We won't be seeing any of those on this run if I can possibly help it. And I probably can with our scanners.
Instead we move above us and run into these guys. Aside from the pursuing fleet, the rebels are stationed all over the place anyways, so we'll encounter them even if we avoid the fleet itself.
These fuckers actually have a teleporter and board us. Luckily they're retarded and fight us in the medbay where they can't possibly win. I stupidly moved our whole crew there even though 1 guy would have been sufficient.
But it's irrelevant since our cloak and inital volley totally fucks up their ship. Their weapons are down and on fire (and fires have to be put out before repairs can start.)
Now that I have two weapons that can overwhelm the enemy shields, I can afford to go after other systems besides weapons when we fire, which speeds things up.
Now their shields are down until they repair them, and I have lasers charged and ready to fire the instant they repair their weapons.
Rebels often try to escape. If they get away the fleet gets warned and will jump ahead a long way on the next turn.
We're not going to let that happen obviously. They give up their escape attempt and offer to surrender.
Surrender refused. We actually got a weaker reward here arguably. Kinda bad RNG in that regard so far.
But we've eeked out enough for another weapons system upgrade.
Now all 3 weapons are online, though are engines aren't close to capacity any more and the medbay is offline to power this stuff. We'll want some reactor upgrades before long, especially when we get shields too.
Next system is a simple quest opportunity. These guys want us to escort them to a nearby system. If we accept, we'll get 2 fuel immediately and a highlight on our map of where to head.
Little reason not to accept these. They can be traps, but if it's a trap it'll be at the quest location, and we could just not show up and run off with the free fuel.
We're gonna head there though. It's quite unlikely we'd be in serious trouble even if it is a trap.
First we have to fight another rebel ship. They are really underarmed, with a just a single basic laser (1 shot 1 damage laser.)
They also have a defense drone, which can shoot down incoming missiles. Of course, we don't have missiles so it's basically a free win for us.
Afterwards we get to the quest marker and get our reward. Not a big reward but better than having to fight for it or just wasting a turn.
Not that the rebel fleet is nearly covering the system now. The heavily shaded area is already occupied, and being there means we'd have to fight a bigass cruiser. Do not want. Based on their rate of expansion if we visit the store we'll have to fight our way into the exit beacon. We'll leave the store behind.
Well, here we are, sector 1 finished up.
You can have cnounters at these nodes too obviously. It's another station guarded by a drone. We'll fight this one for the extra scrap, since it looks weak.
These ships don't have crew or air on board, which makes fires irrelevant, boarding nearly pointless, and capturing them impossible. Note that there aren't even doors between adjacent rooms on this thing.
Anyways, between our 3 weapons and the cloak we can easily carve it apart before it has a chance to do anything. Also some fag is playing Dota 2 apparently.
Anyways, mission accomplished, drone destroyed.
17 scrap and nothing else from the ship is... ok. Not very good but not awful.
This is kinda lame for a storage cache though. Ugh. Whatever, it cost us nothing to open.
Time to scram.
This is the sectors map. Kinda explains itself. I'd let you guys vote on where to go but fuck you we're going to the nebula because Zoltans are fucking scary to a ship like ours. To a lot of ships in fact. Fucking Zoltans.
So we'll stop here for now.
Also, I realized I can run it in a smaller resolution and cut down a bit on screenshot size hopefully. (These are already resized and reformatted, this'll just save some bandwidth hopefully.)
If you guys want, I could try making the screenshots bigger, but aside from the evasion/oxygen levels and the tooltips, I think everything is pretty legible. The game is kind of annoying the screenshot because although the nuts and bolts are simple as fuck and perfectly suited for an efficient PNG file, the backgrounds are high res clouds and stars with a shitton of colours that make the PNGs take over a MB each. Argh. Unless theres a lot of complaints I'm going to stick with this format, it's the same as I used for Brigandine. Not sure if I want to change the font or anything like I did there. Feel free to comment on that kind of shit as well as the game.