Sadly our intrepid colonists on Mars encountered a hideous turd, happily bobbing along in the stream of time, and in order to not soil themselves unduly they backpedalled.
This in turn caused reality to back on itself in unexpected ways until it finally straightened out. As a result, not everything is as it was, but nearly enough so as to not upset the Auditors of Reality who have refrained from taking action so far.
In other words, welcome back to this LP, where we left off. Sort of.
Some things have changed. People still have the same names though, and follow their paths of self-improvement set down by you readers, but we'll now visit them at a slightly different point on that path.
First off, I'd like to more properly introduce you to the main antagonists in this LP. The Beastmen. They come in different varieties that have the decency to also sport different colour schemes, to make distinguishing between targets easier.
First off is our ordinary beastman soldier.
The threat this one poses is negligible. He is armed with the beastman pistol, short range, low damage.
Of a different threat caliber entirely, we have the Shaman.
This gaily coloured beastman is also armed with a pistol, but he loves sticking acid-damage causing ammo into the loading chamber, which makes him a much bigger nuisance. Paired with this, he also runs around healing beastmen you've knocked down but not entirely killed. A high-priority target. Take him down before he inflicts too many Damage over Time (DoT) wounds on your team, or you'll regret it.
Then we have the captain.
He wields a rifle, and he will continue fighting even when his health is in all red. You need to put him down for good. A larger threat than the ordinary beastmen, but I still target shamans before captains.
Not captured in a screenshot yet is the Alchemist. Quite annoying, as he wields a grenade launcher which lobs grenades in a trajectory towards your people, meaning he can fire on you from behind walls. Fortunately, grenades travel quite slowly through the air, allowing you to move people out of harms way, if the attack is made from a sufficiently far away.
Then we have the Chief.
An upgrade to the Captain. Also likes fighting on when his health is all red. He sports an even bigger rifle and can be a really painful opponent, as the AP ammo in his gun has a tendency to puncture spacesuits, also causing DoT, though not as much as the acid ammo will. Here's what the Big Rifle looks like.
Later on we'll meet other beastmen types, but these are what we've seen so far.
In this new reality, the expansion has been more agressive, which in turn has led to a larger reserve of resources for production, but also more territories to protect. This is a look at the current Geospace.
The Reticulans occupy the yellow territories to the south. They've not had much of an impact so far and can be safely ignored due to our alliance with them.
The red territories are occupied by beastmen, who are altogether much more aggressive. I've even let a few territories fall to them, to save our troops from some fights early on when our gear wasn't too impressive yet. White territories are neutral, often occupied by robots who seem annoyingly bullet-proof. Take plenty of ammo if you wish to seize robot territory. Or build some lasers, as they penetrate the robotic hides more easily.
If we take a look inside the base we also see some alterations.
It has been expanded. We've added three warehouses, to store excess fuel, metal and chemicals. We've also had to build a new dome, to house the different smaller buildings that facilitate the more advanced research and production. On the left hand side, we have the sattelite with the data-uplink. Below that we have our aqueduct ending with a water-tank addition. Below that, our solar panels have been upgraded to a fossil fuel power station.
Inside the domes, we've built quite a few buildings aside from what we start with: an additional hospital ward and additional lab. A shooting range, pyrotechnics range, tactical range, Mars simulation, pathology department, drone assembly and a chemical plant. All these buildings enable more advanced research, training and production, and space is at a premium, so you have to consider what you need the most. A new lab, or more hospital wards? So far, it seems to be working for me with just the two hospital wards, but we currently have room for quite a few more, should the need arise.
If we take a look at the overview tab, we can see just how different this timeline is with regards to resources.
The only thing amongst what we've currently researched, which we cannot build yet due to a lack of resources, is the laser cannon. All else is within our reach!
Of course, as our research progresses, we'll invent even more destructive toys, that will require more resources, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. M:
Speaking of research, I decided to take screenshots of the "completed" tab in our research screen. If you're curious as to what a specific research topic has of practical implications, feel free to ask. There are still many more research topics to explore, and we're still in the early part of the game.
At this point in the game, the spaceship from earth has just arrived, carrying the warp-cannons and extra resources. In the other leg of the trousers of time, our resources did not permit us to produce sniper rifles. Now though, we're already hard at work.
Of course, to fully take advantage of these weapons, we need to also manufacture sniper scopes, and issue the customized rifles to people with major sniper training.
So, let's take a look at how the roster looks after our temporal hiccup.
T'Brow has finished Major Sniper training and is almost ready to start major beastman anatomy training. I decided to go for sniper training before anatomy this time, as the resources permitted me to produce sniper rifles sooner than anticipated.
Cassidy knows how to handle the heavy weapons and wear heavy suits. He's a tank. I just need to give him major anatomy knowledge and minor toughness, and he'll steamroll through the beasties.
Juggernaut is already training for major beastman anatomy. Together with the warpcannon, I expect him to be able to bring down almost any opponent in a single shot.
Bee has her major sniper training, but like T'Brow, she does not quite qualify for major anatomy yet. I expect her to rather quickly gain the experience needed though, once she gets a sniper rifle.
Kenshiro has been kept in the labs this time around, maybe not as honourable an occupation as making mush out of beasties, but his contribution to our research has been quite frankly indispensible.
eklektyk has been dividing his time between killing and researching and spending time in the sick-bay. The AI likes targetting whichever soldier/scientist that has medicine training.
eklektyk doesn't have heavy equipment training yet, as his training time has been sparse, but once we're joined by some aliens, he'll have fewer shifts in the lab. He's quite deadly with the shotgun as it is.
Kz3r0 is another of our soldier/scientists that have been kept in the lab. She's doing a terrific job there, which is why she hasn't been in the field to be shot at yet. Haven't decided if she's going to be taken for a few fights or not yet.
Shepard, ever designing new ways of dealing death.
He's specialized in the grays' technology, quite handy at this early part of the game. He'll get to collar-grab later.
Shagwell is training to be one of our snipers. She's also a very proficient technician and has been taking shifts in the workshop when our other technicians were learning how to better construct armour and weapons and whatnot.
SoupNazi is out in the field building mines and missile-stations, to defend our territories from attack. While this might not seem very glamorous, it is vital for our effort.
Storyfag is fully trained to equip both heavy armour and heavy weapons, plus he knows a few tricks of how to hurt the beasties. Like Shagwell, he's also been helping out in the workshop now and then.
Paccette rides with SoupNazi, building mines and missile batteries. Having technical abilities, you're just too much of an asset to be risked in the field. That might change once we have consolidated our grip on the planet though.
Drakron. When he isn't in the lab tending his research, he's bettering himself in the university. For now, he has focused on earth technologies and planetology, two major research areas.
SMA, Kuroneko, Diggler and Kaiserin do their time in the lab and workshop respectively. Their efforts are appreciated.
Happy, is happy. He's a major weapon smith, which drastically increases the speed at which he produces new weapons and ammo.
Yours truly. Spending most of my time in the science buggy, expanding our territory by building geo-sondes. Any spare time is spent in the lab.
Korenzel, our civil engineer. Really, you only need one technician specializing in civil engineering, but having that one specialist is definitely worth it! He's also found time to become an expert weapons and armour crafter.
chzr. Taking full advantage of her innate skill to learn quickly, she's soon becoming the machine of death we expected her to be. Armed with a shotgun, she can kill most enemies before they even know she's there.
It's always prudent to have allies closeby though, in case she surprises a larger group she cannot down in a few shots.
Finally Blondie, who has done her leadership training. This affords protection from psionic attacks, which I expect will be very useful indeed shortly, once we start popping grays. :twisted: She can also almost start her sniper training. She's a little machine of death.
Once you get to the point where you can produce your own shotguns, do so! They are ever so useful, not only due to their damage output, but also because you can often knock down enemies with the blast. This doesn't seem to work very well on beastmen, maybe due to the hard tactical difficulty, but the damage output still means that if you have three characters concentrating fire on a target, said target soon drops.
250 damage potential, compared to 38 from the FN2000 rifle that you can produce as your first weapon. The rifle has longer range and burst mode, but once you get your speed trained, possibly coupled with athletics skill, the lower range of the shotgun quickly becomes less of an issue. Use them. You won't regret it.
Ah, and the warp cannons...
In this screenshot, Cassidy is wearing the life support heavy armour. It has the highest environmental protection score available, but slightly poorer damage protection.
I have yet to produce a heavy battle suit, but we won't have to wait long.
There are so many entries here in the weapons and devices section, I decided to take screenshots of most of them. Let's start with the robots.
Yep, we can now produce robots. I made a promise, and the first one will be named Bob. Due to the production line being filled with rifles and ammo presently, we'll have to wait a couple of days game time, before Bob rolls off the assembly line. He'll be worth the wait though.
The rest of the screenshots I will give you is of the remaining equipment. You cannot directly see the stats of the weapons, as you need to equip them individually for that to display. Quite a hassle. But I thought this'd give you an overview of what is currently available for manufacture in our base.
Any requests? If so, I'll try to fulfill them. In the next update, I hope to show you some more enemy types, advance a bit in the storyline and show you some of our alien allies.