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LORD ROCKET'S THREAD OF KPOP, JARPUGS, AND DANMAKU SHMUPS

Man up or woman out?

  • Man up

    Votes: 2 66.7%
  • Woman out

    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • Total voters
    3

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
Jan 27, 2010
Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
ISS BLOBERT sounds swell.

Intelligence and Esper for me, please. As the only Esper on the team, I think I should specialize and have additional esper powers unlocked eventually.

Edit: ISS BROBERT also sounds nice.
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
Lord Rocket said:
Welcome aboard, Ghostdog. I assume you want two each of the listed skills?
Yup.

stats/skills improved : Speed and Survival School.



Destroid said:
STR medic? big guns? nfi areally
I'm that big guy that shredders your legs with a minigun, then patches you up and gives you a crutch. :smug:
 

Orgasm

Barely Literate
Joined
May 4, 2010
Messages
1,360
What part of space MARINE did you not understand?
:rpgcodex:

Anyway, ready to kill!
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
OK it might be worthwhile looking a little more closely at the mechanics now.
Firstly, your attributes are not as important as you might think. The only direct relationship they have to your skills is in combat (you can see the to-hit and defensive bonuses there in the second screen of your 'character sheets') and even then it's not that much; under the hood, Star Command is a percentile system - well, probably, the manual alludes to it pretty strongly. As you can see our highest bonus for anything is Destroid's Defence bonus, which is +10% - hardly insignificant, of course. As a general rule, one level in any given skill is equal to a 5% bonus so even a couple levels is enough to eclipse a character with high atts.
What attributes are really for is derived statistics, like carrying capacity, movement, and HP. From the manual:

Code:
Strength - this affects hit points, movement rate, and the amount the character may carry.

Speed-this affects movement rate more directly than strength.

Accuracy - this affects the character's ability to hit in combat.

Courage - this affects the character's ability to hit in combat.

Willpower - this affects hit points.

Esper - this affects the character's ability to learn the skill Esper.

Intelligence- this affects training rate in various skills.

Speed also seems to have a big effect on a character's Defence bonus (which probably makes it the best att overall as there's no personal-scale equipment that makes it harder for enemies to hit you - armour only mollifies the effect of their weapons). Esper att also affects how powerful your ESP abilities are - check the equipment list pastebin which I linked to in the last post for details.
If you check the character sheets again now you know that, you'll almost certainly see the relationships between the atts and the derived stats - note Yeesh's gay-arse Willpower and low HP, for example.

Of course, since there's no levels in this game, your derived stats won't increase by themselves, and they can be deceptively important. Some of you are probably not that stressed about carrying capacity, for example, but here's the thing: equipment is by far the fastest way to increase survivability and, well, everything else really. For example, the best gun sights (the Compusight Aiming Assistant) will boost your to-hit by 35%, equivalent to 7 skill levels, just like that. Naturally, better equipment tends to weigh a lot more, as well, and that slows you down.
So what if I'm slow, you might say? I've got a 7.62mm 'Puff Pack' Minigun and Stabilized Neutronium Plated Armour! Well, here's the deal: if you're slow, everyone's slow. Since the group can't be split in combat, one slow bastard drags everyone down, and that can be bad if you're not really in a position to fight (ie. low HP, no ammo, broken weapons, etc.).

Well, tl;dr: atts are important but they don't affect your skill rolls.

Anyway let's play the damn game, this LP has enough reading already. Today we're looking at exploration and human-scale combat.

rQ6Do.png


WHOA shit what's this? Everything's big this time! (Hopefully the larger size clears up the fighting/brofisting question once and for all as well)
Thank fuck for 'mogrify -scale 200% ./.dosbox/capture/*png' at the terminal.

Anyway, let's get our first mission.

KNqLE.png


Cool story bro

vUZGv.png

T54TI.png


The missions are randomised so you won't necessarily be given the same ones between games. However, you'll tend to be given the same quests in the same order within a game (not sure how to phrase that clearly, sorry. Hopefully you get what I mean) so presumably the mishes are pseudo-randomly genned when you start a new game. Fascinating.

Anyway this one's pretty simple. Go to that subsector and steal some shit. Before we can leave, though, we'd better refuel:

Wyxe4.png


You can't see it there, but that bar totally FILLS UP! You also get treated to a PC Speaker 'rising' bloop as well - this game was truly the sensory feast of it's day.

I also go do a little extra shopping. Destroid gets an Automag like Torsten's in case he runs out of ammo for the flamethrower, and Bee and Torsten are each given 3 Incendiary 'Gernades' (yes, the game spells it like that) for extra group killing power. These use the Light Arms skill rather than the Explosives skill, which is presumably why it's spelled wrong. We're left with 260 creds.

Press L to leave and

MnQKA.png


Er OK. I'd live in ignomity forever if the LP ended on this note, so I press enter and hope for the best:

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Success! False tension dispersed.
Alright, as you can see this is what the galaxy looks like. The bit within the half triangle is the safe, civilised area I was talking about before. The celtic cross things are space stations. Each of those dots are a sun. The box is the subsector your ship currently occupies - currently we're at the spacestation there. Up the top you've got your galactic hyper-coordinates or whatever.
What else? Well, it's mostly self explanatory I think. Fuel, Armour, Status (which goes: green if there's no other ships around, yellow if there are, and red if there's another ship in the sector somewhere. Reminds me of a game called... er... E something? It'll come to me). Handy little diagram of your firing arcs. Weapons status screen. The commands down the bottom are easily worked out I think. Load reloads your guns. Dunno what switch does, presumably moves your guys around. We'll discuss time delay in a little while. Same with computer. Up and Down Scan allow us to explore the various subsectors and whatnot. In fact, I'll illustrate.

First, let's go to the relevant sector:

hhVzm.png


Down scan:

lN6lR.png


If you look closely at the last two screens you can see that the positions of the suns remains reasonably consistent across them. I think that's a nice touch. Anyway we move over to one of the suns and downscan again:

aZVH5.png

EDIT: image fixed (oops)

Cool eh? I love up scanning and down scanning. I always say stupid things like, Corporal Oscar, narrow band scanner on the red sun at microsector alpha whenever I push the button. Bring up planet X on the main screen. Increase scanner granulity, Corporal.
OK I'm finished outing myself as a LARPing homo now. Let's get on with things. There's one last layer in the scanning onion, and that's when you scan an individual planet. It looks like this:

f4Jva.png

aZVH5.png


Now, some of that information there is simply colour and some of it is important game stuff. Specifically:
Atmosphere can be very important. If your characters don't have oxygen masks, oxygen cylinders and environment suits (all misc equipment we currently lack) and you're somewhere with an unbreathable atmosphere then one of two things might happen. Best case, you'll suffer increased fatigue in combat (we're getting to combat so hold your horses). This will happen if you're planet hopping. However, if you're dungeoneering and the base you're storming has an unbreathable atmosphere then anyone without the requisite equipment quite simply drops dead.
Less utterly vital is the gravity rating. Basically, this affects fatigue lost in combat again.
Life determines what you're likely to find on any given planet, both in terms of money grubbing and the sorts of guys you're likely to encounter. You can't run espionage missions on planets that are no- or low-tech, for instance.
Surface probably does something as well, but at this stage I don't care what it is. Will check the manual later.

Anyway, this planet is no good to us. We can't run any espionage missions here. We could send a scientific expedition to plunder the planet's surface (essentially, doing an investigation will put some shit into your cargo hold that you can sell at a space station. The locals may not appreciate this, though) but meh. Let's check out some of the other planets in the around this sun instead.

iiK6a.png


Alright, this is what we're looking for. We run an espionage mission and...

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oops. Good stealth skills guys. Ah well fuck it, let's get stuck in.

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When you get into a fight then you'll get a screen like this, which provides you with some helpful information. Inaccessible areas are precisely how they sound, while Offensive and Defensive areas provide a +25% bonus to one and a -25% penalty to the other, depending on what area it is.
There's also a fatigue factor, which is affected by gravity (and atmosphere, potentially). Essentially, every round your guys lose some fatigue points - this happens no matter what they do - and when they run out they have to sit there like morons while the points recharge. The manual reckons that they recharge fully after one round but I found the game to be a little harsher than that when I played - characters seemed to succumb to fatigue much faster after the first rest period.
Also, yes, taking cover and recharging points, this game is highly popamole.

Two last bits of info: surprise = one free round to hammer someone, and although there's a few of them pirate trainees are weak as fuck. We'll dispatch these goons no worries. We press enter confidently:

dbDD7.png


In combat, you have three phases - communin', movin', and shootin'. You get one chance to communicate (based on the Code Breaking skill, so this is currently Torsten's job. In space combat the Co-Pilot assumes responsibility), so if you choose not to or fuck it up then you'll be fighting in silence for the rest of the battle. This time Torsten makes a hash of it so I'll leave it there, but we get in a fight later where he doesn't do it completely wrong so more on the subject then.

hdx7I.png


In the movement phase, you can change weapons, move or wait. Changing weapons is a free action so you can do that and move, but once this phase finishes you're stuck with whatever weapons you selected beforehand. In any case, we approach group C to ensure Destroid's flamethrower is in range.
Why group C? Well, there's a couple reasons. First, weapons like the rocket launcher and the flamethrower (as well as bombs, nerve gas, etc.) attack groups rather than individuals so using them on girly little one man squads is pointless. Secondly, you see that yellow thing in the grid up top, next to the picture? That means one of the members of group C has a flamethrower. Flamethrowers and rocket launchers can fuck you up by virtue of their 'attack the whole group' thing so naturally we're going to use our surprise round to shut him down as fast as we can. While we're on the subject, intelligent Codexers will have noted that the largest number of enemies you can fight at once is 20 (four groups of five).
Anyway after our free movement phase this is how we look:

Ry57n.png


And this is what the shootin' phase commands look like. Commands seem easy to decode to me; although I haven't used Rapid yet, if I remember correctly you fire more shots in exchange for lessened accuracy.
Maggot is going to open up with his Ingram on flamethrower boy - the party can pick individual targets but your enemies will attack someone from your group at random, unless they're RL or FT capable, of course - and although I didn't take screenshots, everyone else concentrates their fire on him, or group C in general, as well. CHUDDA CHUDDA CHUDDA BOOM. Here's what we end up with:

mTAzc.png


Not bad. The inverted colours mean we took out C2, C3 and C5. Good riddance to you, friends. We did waste a little ammo as you always fire as many shots as your weapon has Rate Of Fire, and if a target goes down faster than expected, any further attacks on him will still be made - this is a good incentive to spread the love around a little and let bombers/rocketeers/etc. finish off weakened targets. On the other hand, if someone's gotta go down, they gotta go down and hang the costs. Note that Yeesh needs to reload his elephant gun, as well.

RPGJt.png


Alright, we take up a defensive position in case B is in range with that flamethrower. The screenshot doesn't show it but we concentrate our fire on group B this time. Group C made things a little easier on us as well by fleeing in this rounds movement phase, which your enemies will sometimes do (it's like they want to live, or something). Also, see that diminishing number by Maggot's name there? Unless I'm very much mistaken those are your fatigue points.

UKsYZ.png


Not the best effort last round, as you can see - clearly the offensive penalty took it's toll on our efforts. Torsten took a minor (2hp) hit, and we only took out B2 and... what's this? B3 has a flamethrower now? Combat in this game is reasonably granular, despite using a generalised HP system, as equipment also takes damage. He flopped out the 'thrower after Orgasm broke his laser gun (shot bro) by means of a 10mm rocket.
Actually this is a good chance to talk a little about our enemy's arsenal. They have, as far as I'm aware, three kinds of guns: lasers, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers, as well as melee weapons but those barely count. None of these seem to correspond to what's on your equipment list so presumably each enemy has it's own individual weapon stats. Trainee lasers certainly seem a lot weaker than full-fledged pirate lasers, for example. Lasers target individuals but fire multiple times per round. Flamethrowers have short ranges but are really very nasty things. Rocket launchers are long range group-targeters although I'm less scared of them than of flamethrowers.
By the way, it helps if you don't think of these weapons as lasers, flamers etc. but as equivalent weapons because at some point we're likely to encounter some angry no-tech locals with laser guns. On the other hand, surely interplanetary arms smugglers exist as well so who knows?

BX5FN.png


Here's what we look like after round 3. We took a few hits (notably a nasty one on Yeesh, who doesn't have HP to spare, you know?) but we fought back bravely nevertheless, obliterating the remnants of group B, as well as picking off the loner in D1. Note Yeesh swapped his .600 Nitro Express for a frag grenade (spelled correctly this time) last round, which helped weaken group B significantly.
Group A fights on bravely despite the odds but unsurprisingly is obliterated in the next round. It seemed ghoulish to take a screenshot of that brave man's last moments, so I didn't (also I forgot).

Combat ends automatically and we are presented with a screen that describes the spoils of war. For a split second, I mean. A lot of the text in the game goes away by itself after a short period, which fortunately can be adjusted using the 'Time Delay' command I mentioned earlier. I've got it set so everything disappears after about a second, but the loot screen doesn't seem to be affected by this variable. Which sucks, I wanted to know what I got.

Well, anyway, I'm going to end this here since I'm a fairly slow typist and I was hoping to go for another walk today, rather than being cooped up inside masturbating and writing about this game (I've seriously been typing for like 3 hours now, which is long enough for one sitting). When I get back we'll finish up the mission and get trained.

PS. ISS BLOBFIST is the current frontrunner for the ship's name. Keep the suggestions coming though.
PPS. Poll will remain open till I get back.
 

Pussycat669

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 13, 2006
Messages
667
Location
In a fine suit
Yeah, first blood!
Is there any kind of story in the game that connects the missions or is it just shooting everything until you reach the end credits?
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Well bros I don't mind admitting that I was a bit worried there for a little while. But systems are back online and we're ready to ROLL.
I'll make an honest effort to post the right screenshots in the right place this time as well (I started an account with imgur to make that a little easier, anyway).
Again, q&a down the bottom.

So - we left our team mildly perturbed that they were unable to identify what totally sweet gear they took from the corpses of their foemen. Heads bowed, we make our way back to the planet scan screen:

ISUfp.png


We should be able to run an espionage mission without interference this time, so we do. Unfotrunately the game informs us that we don't find anything, which you'd think I'd take a shot of, but I didn't. I've been listening to a lot of KPop over the last few days, so perhaps my brain has melted a little? I'll try to get back on the death metal sharpish, that should fix it.

Anyway, here's a couple of examples of the things you get when you run Scientific Investigations on a world. I had to go through a few more worlds before we found the next Hi-Tech one so I resolved to get some plunder to make it worth our while. First I tried to loot the world we were on:

MCWyi.png


But as you can see the locals were having none of it. We slink away this time, given that most sci inv loot isn't worth all that much and we just got through with a battle anyway. Anyway we've basically exhausted the possibilities inherent in this system so we move on to the next (and yeah, I forgot to make a screenshot of this system as well. Here's a link to another KPop song), where we find a lo-tech insectoid world:

gzgp7.png


We nab a few insect-y articles of frankly dubious value - for example these Fossilised Egg Sacs. I think I said that what you find on a given world tends to coincide with what lives there? Lo-tech civilisations tend to produce artifacts of these kinds, for example, while no life worlds tend to produce raw materials of various sorts (no, there isn't a crafting interface, so you can't do anything with these). On no-tech mammalian worlds, however:

I8Dc7.png


You'll tend to collect examples of the local lifeforms. Personally I think all this is a very nice touch - although I wouldn't have complained about a Starflight-style exploration minigame, either. Maybe in the remake I've been fondly hypothesising about since I decided to start playing this again.

Ultimately though this system ain't no good, so we move on to the next one (joke worn thin). Well well, what's this?

ChOZt.png


Excellent. We'll be in and out before anyone...

JoGcN.png


Shit, Maggot (MAGGOT!!!) failed to spot these guys approaching, but, um, two pirate trainees. This won't be hard. Now, again, I forgot to get screens but considering we flattened these guys in the first damn round it hardly matters anyway (so no links this time either). Unless you count the ammo we used, I guess. We complete our mission when combat is over, and find three items.

tz9bN.png


When you retrieve items after running espionage you need to return to a space station to get them ID'd. The station will then automatically take them off your hands. They generally pay a reasonable stipend for whatever you've pinched as well, which can make this sort of skullduggery quite profitable. Flushed with success, we decide to mount a scientific expedition:

rztF1.png


Oh. Well. Pirates are a rather better class of opponent than their apprentices but we're well armed and given that there's only the one group I think we can take 'em. Still, this is a good opportunity to demonstrate the communications interface, since Torsten managed to patch into their comms band this time:

i20sC.png

9GXvO.png


So basically what you need to do is gauge your relative strength against your opponents and then select the appropriate approach. Obviously pleading is the tack you'll want to take with much stronger opposition, while impersonating a deity is the correct approach when you've got your 12.5mm Long Barrels pointed at a couple trainees. If you've got the resources, bargaining will allow you to bribe your way out of trouble, and so can be even more effective than pleading.
I decided to Ask, which seemed appropriately neutral given we're a similarly sized party, and reasonably well armed. Next I go for a truce, which will allow both parties to go on their merry way without loss of face (or money). Sadly, they're having none of this. We can't quite reach the offensive area there so fire is exchanged with both parties in a neutral position, and quite honestly we get the best of it.

7SLWs.png


Destroid takes a hit for 7hp which is all very upsetting, but he's a big boy and shrugs it off. For their part, two of the pirates are downed and the will of the rest is broken, although we don't know that just yet (prolly should've put that in spoiler tags but sod that). You'll note as well that C3 swapped his laser for a rocket launcher before we iced him - and now we've seen all the major enemy weapon types.
In this comms phase we ask for them to surrender but are rebuffed again, which was a very silly thing for them to do, as it doomed poor old C2 to a muddy grave (OK yeah, the combat screen told us we're fighting on 'plains' but the blue wavy bg makes me think of water and the trees make me think of swamps, so... war in the wetlands).

XjfZq.png


As you can see the pirates retreated to an offensive position - no, the AI doesn't seem to seek these out, unfortunately - so we moved into a defensive one to counter it. No sense taking any more injuries before we finish these guys off. In the combat phase, we don't come off quite as well as we did before - the pirates smash Destroid for 11hp, which is a fairly nasty hit, and ping Bee for 4hp as well. If there were more of them to deal with, we'd be in trouble now, since our return fire swallowed a fair whack of our ammunition - a whole round with three of our most effective fighters out of action, ugh. Luckily however it was just the one group and they're not interested in fighting anymore. When the third comms phase comes around (ie. that screenshot), we demand their surrender, without effect. However, they are within range of the battle map's edge, which means that they're out of here come the movement phase. Fight over.
We did well there, but really if they'd had a second group - even if it was just a couple guys with lasers - we might have been in trouble. We weren't particularly efficent with our ammo use either so I'll make sure to tighten that up next time.

OK. We're out of this system. Now, here's a useful function: the computer screen.

7EYHi.png


There you can see a bunch of handy stats. I decide to review our mission status:

HbKUk.png


Oh neat. We probably don't want to be fighting any more anyway since we'll still have to manually reload the next combat encounter, so we head to the nearest space station:

Ouk4v.png

nnR2v.png


OK some of you may have noticed that the fuel indicator is a little lower than you might think there. I'm afraid I started headed back to station Luna but then realised that you guys are probably craving visual stimulation. Well, this isn't really the LP for you if you are, but anyway I got halfway to Luna before I remembered that all the stations have different graphical representation! Here's what station Earth looks like.
And yeah, presumably the space stations are named after features of the solar system, and are not supposed to be orbiting around them. The third station is named after the sun.

Anyway when we get in:

NJJxA.png

FbVCB.png

0PrOF.png


We score some dosh for the gear we nicked...

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... Get a mission bonus...

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Te3uZ.png

zisNa.png

ss7U8.png

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... And it's payday! Not sure what I did to deserve a promotion to 2nd Lieu. but wicka-wicka-whatever. Congratulations to Maggot too. After we flog off everything left over in the hold we're left with 19438 creds, which is a fairly nice sum. I think at this stage I'll be acquiring a 11mm Lead Hose SMG and a decent gunsight for Torsten since he wasn't especially effective with the Automag, and environment suits et cetera for everyone else (I haven't done that yet so feel free to object, by the way). After that we spend eight days healing up in the medical bay, which costs nothing, and now we're ready to train.

Off screen: LRocket's training (I'd post another link now but it wasn't funny in the first place). I boost INT in order to ensure good training results, but this doesn't pay off, and my Pilot skill only goes up by half a point. I'm not precisely sure how training works but the amount your skills increase by, while influenced by your INT score, is randomised and can go up by half points as well (I'm pretty sure the best result I ever got was 1.5 points). As best as I can tell, a half point isn't worth diddly squit so yar boo sucks. Hopefully we'll have better luck with everyone else.
We'll do Oscar first.

n4pOW.png


(This not-very exciting screen is the training menu. Of most interest is the fact you can buy training as well as earn it. I may talk about that a little in a later update but I guarantee it will be boring)

sOrDr.png

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Oscar offered me a choice. I've opted for INT and Code Breaking since that's his main duty as Co-Pilot and we want him to get good at it quickly. Again, it was only boosted by a half point, but never mind.

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Azira wants STR and Hand Weaponry. Ask and ye shall receive. He's lucky enough to get a full point in his skill of choice.

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Accuracy and Astro Gunner. Torsten also puts in a good effort at the range.

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Crooked Bee likes the idea of rapid skill growth, and also mind powers. Level three unlocks a new power, by the way: Communication. We don't need to rely on Torsten's Code Breaking skill anymore (however it doesn't work in space combat so Oscar still needs to focus on his studies). The chance of success is equivalent to Bee's ESP attribute, which is 51 at the moment so Torsten is still better at it and will remain so for at least a little while. However, due to the speed at which atts increase in training (5-9 points when the stat in question is <100) if Bee trains up her ESP a couple more times she should overtake him.

paThx.png

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Destroid wants STR and medical or heavy arms. Since Bee and Orgasm are already better medics than him, and that he could use a little compensation for his rather low to-hit bonus, I think we should probably just concentrate on the killing arts. And we get two whole points! Congratulations dude, you're a monster.

Alright, neither Orgasm nor Yeesh have specified what they want, so I'm going to choose.

BRhcm.png

NQyxp.png


Right. Yeesh has weak HP so something needs to be done about that, and additionally as a heavy weapons specialist he'll need meat on his bones to lift the damn things. STR seems an obvious choice to rectify both issues, so, yeah. My first thought was actually to boost his WILL which was pretty low and would do something about the HP issue faster, but STR's multi-purpose nature changed my mind.
Also, since we're kind of lacking in ability with thrown weapons, I choose to boost up his Explosives skill, which as you can see went swimmingly. Another 2 whole points and Yeesh just got that much more dangerous.

sC5mt.png

Xj8sm.png


Hmm, kind of a tough choice here. Orgasm's already quite decent at the whole killing thing and he's got pretty good stats as well. He could probably use a bit of a boost to COU but that's not vital and the points would probably be better invested into boosting ACC since that does the same thing, only more so. So, ACC. As for skills, we can probably put off beefing up the weapons skills for now (although at some stage I'd like to provide him with either Chemical Weaponry or Explosives ability), but we could probably use a more distinguished medic, so... congrats Orgasm, 1 new Medical skill point for you.

Ghostdog: dude no-one's died yet, so you can't train. You're still at the recruitment office, bro (but Command appreciates your patriot's spirit and willingness to endanger yourself in this way etc.)

Now, spending money. Here's my plan, in order of importance:
  • 1) Torsten gets a lead hose and a +15% gunsight
    2) Maggot gets a +10% gunsight.
    3) Everyone gets a environment suit, oxygen mask, and oxygen tank so we can plunder inhospitable worlds at will
    4) Yeesh trades in his elephant gun for a 1.5MW Laser AR
    5) Orgasm upgrades to a Zero-G Assault Rocket Launcher
This should increase our killing power nicely while still remaining economical (and maybe reducing weight as well), although I dunno if we'll be able to afford everything given that environment suits are very expensive. I mean, sure, I could sit down and work it out but ha ha ha oh god that's the funniest shit I've heard in years, just the fucking thought of me doing sums ever again. Shit.
Although, again, I'm open to suggestions from the team, it's your money too.

ALRIGHT that's it for today's update. Next time I want to christen the ship (I still like BLOBFIST the best), talk a little more about some of the interesting stuff you can grab on station and hopefully debut the space combat system. I promise I won't write another fucking essay next time either.
Actually on that note, Woman Out won the poll so here's our next mission:

fbwCr.png


Do we take it, or just chill for a while? There's no reason not to - this one will be cake, freighters don't even have guns.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now for questions.

Need some alpha channel in there.

Destroid, tell me the truth bro: is there any real benefit to doing that? The thing is I don't really know how to add alpha to things, or really even what it does besides making stuff transparent. The images are already miniscule, bytes wise, and I'd have to spend time learning how to apply it so you'll need to give me a good reason to do so.

EDIT: It occured to me all of a sudden that I am very stupid.

Is there any kind of story in the game that connects the missions or is it just shooting everything until you reach the end credits?

Well you can talk people into surrendering but yeah, it's mostly killing. The storyline is largely providing an excuse to do so (kick the pirates out of civilised space etc.). There are a few minor exploration elements as well - for example I recall getting co-ordinates to the pirate's favourite space pub but I never got around to checking it out. The manual implies that there are some text-adventurey encounters as well - I assume the pub was one but as I said, I never ended up going there.
 

Azira

Arcane
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Copenhagen, Denmark
Codex 2012
A promotion and hand weaponry skill of 4? Very nice!

But seeing as Maggot failed to spot those trainees, maybe he should focus on scout/recon for the next training session..
Focusing on strength for ability increase still seems like a good idea. :thumbsup:
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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Training successful, great! :salute:
Although, truth be told, I'm kinda at a loss as to which attribute I should train next. Is it worth it to invest some more points in Intelligence? Or should I go for Strength, to raise my HP and carrying capacity? Or Esper, since I'm an esper after all?

Oh, and you definitely should visit the pirate pub next time you get a chance to do so!

(Shit, I'm sooo glad Codexia's back up.)
:love:
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
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Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
oscar said:
Any equipment I'd benefit from?

Yeah, a repair kit. Someone needs to be able to fix the ship after all and if you don't mind I'll pass the job onto you.
Neither you nor I are likely to need armour or weapons or anything, at least at this stage.

Crooked Bee said:
Training successful, great! :salute:
Although, truth be told, I'm kinda at a loss as to which attribute I should train next. Is it worth it to invest some more points in Intelligence? Or should I go for Strength, to raise my HP and carrying capacity? Or Esper, since I'm an esper after all?

ESP determines how powerful your abilities are (details are available in the equipment list if you're interested), so I'd say train that up a few times. As a light weapons person you don't need quite as much STR as the heavy dudes so you can safely leave that for later. It's up to you though.

On that note, I encourage everyone to have a quick look through the equipment list I posted (there's a link in the first post now) to see if there's anything you like. Weapon Type 1 = Heavy, 2 = Light and so on.

Orgasm said:
Can I heal myself in combat?

Nope, skill based healing is all out of combat.
I see that Espers can use their healing power in combat though (that's always 5HP which isn't that much and they can't use it very often, but still).
Stealing everyone's jobs indeed.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Tomorrow, I promise.
I have a few lame excuses but I won't waste your time with those.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Alright bros, sorry about the delay but good news - I finally managed to crack the high score table in ESP Ra.De! Not that playing silly games was the only reason I haven't updated this LP for a while, of course. Ha ha ha.
I'm also going to skip over some of the stuff I intended to talk about - namely about some of the other services available at the space stations - because I was trying to write about it yesterday, and oh man was it a drain on my inspirado. Today I'm going to cut to the chase and write about fucking space battles, not boring bullshit.
That said, there are a couple of things I'd like to mention: first of all, cloning. Cloning is this games resurrection mechanic, and what makes it interesting is it's a good idea to get it done before you die. If you're prepared and you clone one of your buds before they get dropped, it costs 30,000 creds; afterwards and it costs 100,000. The manual also reckons a clone has slightly shittier stats than the original version.
Secondly, paid for training. You can buy a training session for 200,000 creds. That is an awful lot, yes, I agree. As a point of fact the only things more expensive than training are corvette and frigate class spaceships and the two most ludicrously powerful spaceship weapons. I do like the idea of paid for training, by the way - it seems pleasantly old-school to me, like LBB Traveller and it's no character advancement other than wealth policy. Does anyone remember how in 1e AD&D your main source of XP was wealth? 1XP for 1GP.
Yeah, I don't either. I was born in 1985 so I was well into 2e territory by the time I started RPing. Never mind. Although 2e had the same mechanic now that I think about it. Ignore me.

On a slightly related note when I was looking for a pencil sharpener I came across my old notes from 2k8, which was exciting. I can now reveal that the mission I was stuck on was the 5th, which according to the reasonably fulsome description provided on (these are barely spoilers at all but they may destroy a little of the game's mystery - to be honest I kind of thought they did - so they're going into tags anyway) Star Command's
MobyGames page, put me at about one-third of the way through. That said, it's hard to tell if they mean 17 STORY missions, ie. the ones you get to do in every game, or 17 missions in total, including the randomly generated ones. The mission we're doing in this update is assuredly a story mission, by the way.

Lastly, I also printed off the manual at work so I've given it a proper read-through now (I don't like reading .txt files off a screen). I can now tell you that the pirates aren't the only bad guys; our other adversaries include an insectoid race who thieved human technology and have used their work ethic (yes I know) to build a massive fleet and threaten terran space. Further down, apparently there are reports of ships crewed by alien-/possibly rogue human-built robots, which I'm sure we'll find out about in due course. I must admit I completely forgot about all that, since I never had many dealings with the bugs and nor did I ever meet the robots. Something to look forward to.
Oh and the Earth was blown up by aliens, apparently - has anyone read After Doomsday, by Poul Anderson? I quite liked it, but I digress.

Anyway, let's get started. Firstly, a special treat - Lemon Amiga has a nice png of the Amy title screen which is, of course, suitable for resizing, so I don't have to install another emulator and you guys get to see the better version of the title art:

JW7HO.png


You can thank me later.

Anyway, here we are at Starport Earth. First task for the day is spending all the lovely lolly we made last time. First priority is manning up Torsten, so he gets his Bullet Hose (interestingly enough the weapons of the future are quite similar to the ones we have today. I think the Hose is supposed to be a M3 Grease Gun but I prefer to imagine it as a Swedish K/S&W M76 in .45ACP, because they're much cooler looking) and his gunsight. I also grab Maggot a sight, since he's not much cop with his Ingram really.
After that we're left with a paltry 17398 creds which a very simple calculation tells us is not enough to get us those environment suits I was after - they cost 3000 creds each so 3000 x 6 = 18000 which, as you can see, is a little more than 17398c. We'll skip those, then, and grab Yeesh and Orgasm those new guns I was talking about. First we have to get rid of their old guns.
Here's a screenshot of the selling interface:

qy47J.png


It's awkward. You can't go through individual inventories so you need to flick through lots of screens in order to sell what you want, and god help you if you hit the wrong key - items are sold for roughly 80% of what they're worth, no matter the condition, so this is a good way to haemorrhage creds if you're clumsy or impetuous, or both like what I am. Anyway we have to go through this process a couple times to ensure I sold everything, but once I'm satisfied we grab Yeesh his 15MW laser and a couple reloads - which were probably unnecessary; the 1.5 has a good solid 33 combat rounds worth of ammo so chances are we'll upgrade it before we need to reload it - and Orgasm his Zero-G rocket launcher. Lastly we grab everyone a oxygen mask and cylinder so I don't have to do it later, and Oscar gets a repair kit, just in case, like. I didn't note down what that leaves us with, cash wise, and I can't check anymore, but it should be somewhere in the region of 12-13K.

Next order of business, naming the ship:

DTrz6.png

fml98.png

(At this point we get treated to a rather long PC speaker chiptune. Lovely)

Congratulations to Destroid for having the bossest idea for a name. When we gather 200,000 creds you are eligible for a bonus training session (note, however, that we will be upgrading to an escort-class ship before that happens). Assuming you're still alive by that point, of course.

No-one objected to taking the mission at the end of the last update so we do so. Here's a recap:

fbwCr.png


With that we're off to baptise the BLOBFIST in buccaneer's blood.

9g01C.png


I'll take this opportunity to show you something I forgot about last time: the galaxy map. It's self explanatory really - as you can see there are 32x32 subsectors, which is quite a lot although not all of those are going to have anything particularly interesting in them, of course.
We're up in the top left corner of the triangle, by the way.

Anyway moving on. We need to get to subsector 29,29 in order to crush our enemies. And yeah, that is not the same subsector as the one in the screenshot. It's the same shot as the one in the last update, and interestingly enough sector references in the game are generated on the fly, so to speak, which means that you can't simply go to plot-critical locations in subsequent games. I'd say that's an incline, myself.
Turns out that 29,29 is just below Starport Luna so that's convenient. There's only a couple suns here too so they don't really have anywhere to hide, which is good as well. This one's going to be easy, I can feel it in my bones.

Alright, we downscan a few times:

hTXQC.png

V37s3.png

EHtWe.png


One planet, so naturally we make our way towards it:

C8Nzw.png


Oh hey, an encounter. It probably isn't our targets as they're supposed to be orbiting one of the planets hereabouts, but the game will let us know what we're up against, right?
Wrong. Once again we encounter the split-second splash screen bug. I spot the word 'pirate', for what that's worth.

3qEFH.png


Here's what they look like. Not too imposing. We're not exceptionally well armed, though, so I figure it's probably best if we try and get away without a fight this time. We'll try Plead, Truce. Unfortunately they're having none of it, and so combat begins.By the way, combat in space proceeds in the same basic way it does on the ground. You've got your comms phase, your movement phase, and your shooting phase. If you need a recap, check the fourth update, I explain in more detail there.

axoU3.png


In the first round I try to maneuvre the ship so that we can fire on both our new friends. Bee and Torsten will be concentrating on ship A while Yeesh is going to do ship B. The idea here is that we'll bust one up and weaken the other to make our job easier when it comes time to concentrate our fire on him.
I also experiment a little with the commands down the bottom of the screen. By far the most useful is the scan sommand, which produces a screen like this:

CtS78.png


This provides a longer range view of the action and tells us which ship is which. That box we're at the centre of, by the way, indicates maximum range for all weapons. It corresponds to the visual display you saw before, so you'll never be shot at by something off screen when you're in that mode.

Anyway we open fire:

EMRRr.png

gmr78.png


(I forgot to get a Yeesh shot, sorry)

The pirates return fire, which looks like this:

s5ifl.png


And we end up like this:

S52hh.png


As you can see we gave somewhat better than we got - the pirates revealed themselves as scouts, which is the same ship class as we have, and their weapons sure are quite wussy. At a guess I'd say they're equivalent to our gauss cannons, only not as fast firing. Their shields are, unfortunately, equal to our weapons, however.
Overall, however, I'm feeling confident. Comms: Plead, Surrender, but we are refused again. These guys don't know what's good for them. Next movement phase I don't go too far, since I intend to follow through with the plan we already have. You can see in the shot above where we ended up.
Shooting phase, same deal as before, although I'm sorry to say there aren't any shots of how much damage we did because I am too stupid. I do have in my notes here that I am pleased with Torsten's attempts but not so much with Bee or Yeesh. Both of you, give yourselves a slap on the wrist and don't do it again.
Here's a couple of shots illustrating the visual feedback that we're provided with, anyway:

s6Mh9.png

LyIHl.png


We also get the usual PC Speaker beeps and shrieks, but the less said about those the better really. The top shot is what it looks like when the damage you've inflicted is wholly eaten by the other ship's shields, and the bottom explosion is what it looks like when you hit them properly. Both are animated so the bottom one does get a bit bigger and easier to see.

IM57Q.png


And here's round three. As you can see, the plan has changed this round, since we're not doing as well as I expected. We took a couple hits last round, as you can see there, and I'm starting to think that maybe this fight isn't really worth the ammo we're expending and armour we're losing. Or the fuel we're using up to power our Gauss Cannons - which are largely ineffective and use five fuel each every round we fire them, which is quite a lot really. On the positive side, we've learned that laser weapons use fuel at a rate of 1 per shot, not 1 per burst, meaning that powerful, slow firing lasers are more efficent. That's a bit of info we'll squirrel away for later.

Anyway we use the movement phase to get out of ship B's firing range in order to spare our armour. You can see I decided to use Yeesh and Torsten to fire on the Scout, but on reflection this was a stupid idea since you'll recall our best shield is mounted at the stern. On the other hand it did mean I didn't have to expend any tics on turning around, and the scouts aren't much slower than we are so maybe I am being too hard on myself here.
Did you see me drop a little hint just then? Well I did, and I did it so I could segue neatly into a discussion of how the movement phase functions, because I'm sure you're just dying to know.
Anyway, each movement phase is divided up into 'tics' - I think there's seven in total, but don't quote me on that. In each of these tics you can do one thing: generally speaking, this will be moving. In both starship and ground combat you can move in four directions - left, right, up and down, naturally. When you're in your ship, you also need to expend a tic in order to turn around. Obviously you need to do this to present your strongest shields towards your antagonists, and bring them within your firing arcs. In your ship, you can move in any direction regardless of facing, which I guess simulates the whole no friction in space thing.
In ground combat what tics you are allowed to move in depends on your party's SPD stats and encumbrance (at the moment we get to move in four tics - 1, 2, 4 and 6, if I recall correctly). In space combat it depends on your ship type and total tonnage. By travelling light, and the fact we have a girly little ship, we're currently allowed to move in seven tics, which means we can outrun the slower, heavier, pirate scouts.

Back to the battle. We skip the comms phase this round and once we've moved, open up on the scout in range with Yeesh and Torsten.

LQDLK.png

qgvFx.png


In the first shot you can see the Gauss Cannons Bee and Yeesh are using being completely useless. The pirate's shitty lasers are more effective, as a point of fact, and they give us another ping this round. Here's round four at the start of the shooting phase:

01zTb.png


Do you see what I should have? That pirate's out of Torsten's firing arc at the moment. On reflection, I never should have started this LP as it's exposing me for the twit and poor tactician that I am. Sigh.
Fortunately the scout misses us completely this round, although Yeesh only manages another paltry 13 damage. Torsten is nearly out of ammo at this stage as well - one more round's worth of rockets and then he needs to reload. Let's forget this ever happened and skip ahead to the next round:

bG2zY.png


Sensibly I bought our friend Ship A The Pirate Scout back into range of Torsten and his rockets as helpfully iollustrated above, although you'll note I still hadn't thought of turning around a little in order to protect ourselves better. Durr.

IzVoY.png

MWdEV.png


See that? Hull breached. We'll talk about that in a little while, but for now let's just mention that I am very irritated that last load of rockets didn't pop the fucker. New plan - retreat, reload, and then come back and vaporise him; can't be long now till his hull peels open.

I didn't take a screenshot of us on our own, but it looks a lot like this:

frNWT.png


Battle over? I suppose you're wondering, what happened? Did we win?
Let's backtrack a little (which is a literary device beloved by shitty authors). We manage to outdistance our irritating acquaintance so Torsten can load up, but although we're out of the pirate's range now we have to deal with a far more irritating adversary. I'm speaking of one of Star Command's interface quirks - in an effort to be helpful, the game will automatically skip any shooting phase when you have no enemies in range. Well, this would be fine if you could reload your guns in the movement or communications phase (actually, no it wouldn't, that would make the game a lot easier than it sould be), but you can't so it looks like we're going to have to close in again if we want to reload.
To put it frankly - I don't. I'm not interested in taking anymore hits just so I can waste even more ammo on these two pukes. Besides, we're low on fuel. Best just to head back to Luna and get our shit together before we come back to this stinkhole.
Next round I Plead, Truce in case they're interested in cutting things short. They aren't, so we make our way 'northwards.' I figure this'll take a couple rounds given that they're not much slower than we are (you need to get far enough away from all your enemies in space combat; unlike on the ground, there's no map you can just walk off of), but we manage to get away this round, which is a great timesaver. And so the text catches up with the screenshots.

OK, let's talk about the spaceship damage model. Unlike with ground combat, once you run out of Armour you don't just fall over - instead you start to suffer systems damage (actually you can suffer systems damage before you run out of armour as well, but once the armour's gone, you're definitely going to have breakdowns). A hull breach - which we managed to inflict on our piratical friends a couple shots ago - is one kind of 'injury' you can suffer. It actually sounds nastier than it is; because a ship with all holes in it looks rather silly, anyone you run into is far less likely to accept surrender terms.
There are others, of course; your shields, weapons, or other optional add-ons can be bought offline, for example, or your tow line can be taken out, which will deny you any 'captured ship' bounty you might have earned (can't tow 'em, see?) The ones you have to watch out for are Life Support, which... well, you can guess, and Engines, which will leave you stranded in space. I've got a shot of the full list which I'll put up later on, so we'll go through everything then.

Anyway I'm going to end this update here since I'd like to go outside now please - once again things have run away with me a little and I've been sitting here a lot longer than I intended. So: Why wasn't I this verbose when I was writing essays at uni, eh?
Good bloody question.

Next time: More violence. I might wax rhapsodic a little more about the equipment list, too. We shall see.
 

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