Luka-boy renames the Minerva to something more fitting of his strong naval personality.
Meanwhile in Alpha, despite all the toaster killing more Cylons keep coming there. This time there is a nearly 8k point fleet handing around. Shit looks terrifying.
In order to make
Luka-boy more likely to survive against increasing Cylon forces, he gets a quick promotion burning through our RP reserves.
Picon Fleet will get some reinforcements in the form of a Minotaur, Leonis Fleet will go defend Leonis.
Onboard the Anubis we have Bravely, time to remove toasters.
Our fleet is small but heavy, two Artemises supported by a Ranger and an Adamant.
The toaster strikecraft composition seems to focus on wardrivers, so we need to have our vipers shoot them down before we fire any guided missiles. Those jamming fields are obnoxious.
Missiles fly towards our Artemis, flaks are fired in response.
Besides missiles the toasters also send 2 Heavy Raider wings at us, eager to board something.
Lots of centurions aboard, without switching to defensive posture we will lose the ship.
The toaster force is overall another light fleet, so if we get rid off the boarders it should go down easily. We have 5 viper squadrons while they had mostly support strikecraft so fighter space superiority will be ours.
Going on the defensive helped, the toaster boarders are getting crushed by our marines.
The Anubis seems to be mostly safe now, only it is also getting hacked.
We can go full offside again with our flagship, Bravely is at no risk of getting shot by the chrome domes in his own CIC.
Easy.
This close to a new level...
More fodder is ordered at Daidalos.
Alpha turns into an appliance megastore once again, toasters everywhere.
Reinforcements are dispatched.
Saggitarron and Aquaria are on our liberation agenda this turn.
Four battles this run.
lightbane is up first for toaster disposal.
These toasters are fairly well armed.
Too well armed for our Minotaur.
Its out of armour.
But not out of firepower
Unfortunately they hack the firing control of our Ranger!
Another victory over the mechanical menace.
Scorpia Fleet v2 is ready to scrap the toasters.
Luka-boy commands a small fleet of three heavy ships and one Manticore. This will also be our first proper battle with a Janus deployed.
Commanding from the Parrot,
Luka-boy orders his ships to strike!
The manticore is sent in full defensive posture towards the Cylons. Defensive posture boosts DRADIS range and the Manticore has the highest base DRADIS range out of Colonial ships.
Our Janus is loaded with torpedoes. It may fire once every four turns but 3 salvos of torpedoes is terrifying to anything in this game...
...unless they miss the target. I wonder if this is what was meant by outdated firing controls.
At the very least they have no Raiders so we can go in all aggressive with out four wings of vipers.
Our Artemis eats a lot of torpedoes and slugs.
But our Janus finally makes them pay. Eat shit and die toaster!
Insta-gibbed it.
Our Janus is acting as a damage sponge. Also as a hacking sponge.
The damage and hax are piling up.
The toaster heavy ships are down, so the mop up phase begins now.
So close to a level-up. Our Minerva dealt over 400 damage with cannons, 165 with vipers and 89 with missiles. Its accuracy was an impressive 89 percent.
The Artemis dealt two times less. Accuracy is only 20 percentage points lower.
The Janus did hardly impress in this area, but its armour is great.
Manticores are not damage dealers obviously.
Picon Fleet is up now, the dirteaters will be toaster free soon.
It opens the fight by torpedoing a Cylon Revenant.
Flaks aimed...
...and firing.
A Nemesis charges at our Ranger, the damage is quite noticable.
That doesn't stop our fleet from stomping the other toasters.
That Ranger received a lot of damage but it survived.
Lastly
tindrli is up for toaster stomping.
The toaster are many and supposedly they have a plan.
What they definitely do not have are enough Raiders to be a threat to our strikecraft.
But they have Scorpions, so far these do not impress me, we'll just swarm them with vipers.
The toasters are supposed to be the missile and fighter spamming side...
This Cylon light fleet is not enough to challenge us.
And it is down.
tindrli has reached the maximum level.
The doomstack is laying siege to Picon. Another one is hiding somewhere in interstellar space.
Our priority however is the BA mission at Hera.
BROKEN ALLIANCE 6 - HERA
Is Cain sucking off Royalty now?
*sigh* this is what you get when you jump on the cloud bandwagon.... How is a space station safer for data storage than a bunker deep underground in bumfrak nowhere on Virgon?
Maybe we will learn some state secrets after this.
We need to protect this tiny ship, probably our best bet is to murder the toasters first and dock later.
Bleeding-heart Cottle is getting chummy with royalty.
The toasters are scatter all around the place. The fleet is split into two battlegroups to mop them up faster. One goes "to the left", the other "to the right" near the station.
I smell Arachnes.
Yes, quite a few of them indeed. The force sent to the station is one Artemis and 2 Adamants, it should be enough. Fighter groups have also been split 50/50.
There's a gunbrick nearby as well. Meanwhile for some reason I have no screenshots of what happened to the left group, it found 2 Arachnes and some popamole Nemesis.
The opposition is crushed.
Time to start flying to the facility with the Virgon tech team. It flies there, docks and gets the da...
...explodes?
Its nucular!
What a twist! So the prince didn't care about the men as Cottle thought, he cared that the nuke gets in place and blows it up. But why nuke the facility and break the ban on nukes like that?
Cottle is butthurt now
And the prince angle in all of this is...
...to blame this nuking on the toasters. Pretty clever. Also you will very soon see that this DLC is very likely filled with cut content that originally was supposed to be in the campaign but axed possibly due to deadlines/time pressure, the prime evidence being clear in the next mission.
Boo fucking hoo Cottle.
Prince Stefan doesn't frak around. He does have a point, but nobody really knows what the Cylons want or why.
We get a new minotaur and the toasters dicking around in Alpha.
tindrli gets his final and last possible promotion.
lightbane becomes more useful as well.
Bravely sucks a cock or two to get a bit closer to promotion.
Considering his new skill of "Analyst" it might have been taking a cock or two in the ass.
Luka-boy jumps on the sodomy for promotion bandwagon.
Well worth the rectal damage.
As the Minerva seems to be quite useful I order another one. We also get another Janus and an Adamant for cannon fodder.
Gemenon Fleet is guarding Gemenon,
baud will let no chromebot pass.
His current fleet might best be described as a pile of guns floating in space. Crude but hopefully effective.
His flagship takes some internal damage.
But the brute force of more daka is effective.
On the next turn after that vuictory Gemenon Fleet jumped to Knossos to reinforce itself with new ships, toasters happened.
Joke force of 1800 points.
Four light ships are about to be scrapped.
Free exp.
Now lets move on to more interesting things. I wonder how much longer before the toasters start fielding their final three ships.
Meanwhile a non-joke Cylon Fleet is enaging our new ships, which I wanted to merge with Gemenon fleet.
Of course I jumped them away, now Gemenon Fleet needs to jump after them to Icarus in Alpha.
Our new Minerva is ready as our other ships, I order some mediums and another adamant filler.
Azira II joins the fleet. He will need to advance his career quickly to be useful.
Don't ask what he had to do for this promotion, I am pretty sure HHR would get a heart attack if he knew.
And with those extra fleet points he will command...
...The Unsinkable III, our second Minerva class Battlestar. Not that being unsinkable matters in space nor did it help the last battlestar someone named Azira commanded. Especially not when considering the Minerva is a glass cannon.
Check out those doomstacks in Alpha, we have 3 of those there and one floating around in Beta. Overall somehow there's a shitload of toasters around now.
Daidalos doesn't give a frak, its heading to the next main campaign mission. Meanwhile the new ships will reinforce Beta and Scorpia Fleet in Delta.
And the mission is about....
..you will learn much later as I still needed to do some other stuff before the end turn button was hit. More ships.
Oh great, and we get three battles.
Gemenon fleet now believes in more dakka, its a new cult now on Gemenon.
This will help it get more followers.
The doomstack wants to murder Leonis Fleet. Spool up the FTL drives and get us the frak out of here.
Time for the mission.
CHAPTER IX - PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK
"
The propaganda video that appeared spontaneously in Mesh and V-World services across the colonies, narrated by what is clearly a Cylon voice modulator, stated that the Colonies need to disarm and stop hostilities with the Cylon or face consequences. It displayed footage of what appears to be the destruction of a Virgon data facility around Hera in Helios Beta, with an explosive force that analysts confirm could only be caused by a thermonuclear warhead, the first such explosion in over 30 years since these weapons were banned by the Colonies. This blunt demonstration of force and technological advancement by the Cylons has caused the Quorum to gather in a special emergency session. Inside sources claim Admiral Lucinda Cain is also present. Meanwhile panic continues to spread across the colonies, with rice stockpiles completely sold out, despite public announcement urging the population to remain calm." - "Caprica News" reporting on the Cylon nuclear test video.
...Helena playing dumb. None of the conversations were changed for the expansion, which did change the context of this mission. I have to say the previous mission was a bit of a shock, but it also filled in some holes which you will see in a moment. Also this is that other case of lacking storytelling I talked about. Shit hits the fan and Helena only tells you it did, so much lost potential.
In any case Cain has the quorum by the balls thanks to Prince Stefan. Approval was given for nuclear re-armament and Virgon conveniently happened to have some nuclear material the fleet can turn into bombs, that they forgot to dispose of, ready for transport to Aquaria (which the BA mission just explained, although originally this was not that suspicious).
If we win this, we get nukes and the Atlas. More on both later.
The Cylons want to blockade the colonial transports filled with tasty nuclear materials (hi Echelon/PRISM).
Yes Helena, what else is new? They invented the wheel you say?
We have two transports we need to protect.
The are the slow as frak pieces of shit that we failed to protect in that optional mission at Gemenon. So we need to move in fast and blow up toasters fast before they intercept them.
We're getting mic-spammed by the toaster again.
Either the toaster is sarcastic or the writer was really in a rut.
The bricks are charging in our direction.
You can see that there is a Nemesis already in range of one of the freighters and an Arachne not far behind. These frakers mean business. I did divert strikecraft to deal with them and they still got quite far.
Do you see how little hull is left on one of those freighters? At least the Revenant is going down.
The Luna does its best to soak damage but its out of armour.
At this point the Nemesis and cylon fighters were down, our freighter only took one more hit from the toasters so its down to 4 hull points. But the remaining toasters are far and facing our broadsides, which makes
tindrli happy. He wants those nukes.
Bah, the nemesis haxed the nav system on this brick, no wonder it got hit so badly.
Meanwhile shit gets intense as both sides exchange torpedo fire.
The Luna is not in a good shape.
RIP
another Artemis down.
But that toaster ship also got blown up so it is ok. Also
tindrli has Daidalos so it is easiest to reinforce his fleet.
This exchange was also not changed, which is why I am inclined to believe they cut some of the BA missions from the main campaign. Or they plugged a plot hole, it was very confusing why Clothos claimed the colonials insist on nuclear warfare.
Well Prince Stefan's plan really will help humanity win against the Cylons....
...oh.
The Luna was lost but rear admiral
tindrli doesn't give a frak, he wants new bigger weapons to blow up the Cylons.
Speaking of new weapons...
...the Atlas class Carrier is commonly know as His Majesty's Royal Brick. It can host two squadrons of strikecraft and nothing else but some minor guns. Ok, it got some bottom side guns in the last patch. Its the last of the mid-range specialist ships the Colonials get, with ranger being the missile boat and the minotaur being the gunship. Personally I was never convinced much by these ships, but maybe the recent buff makes them useful.
If we stick these together with only Artemises and Januses also in a fleet we can LARP an Imperial Wars navy of vintage capital ships.
At this point there is just one capital ship class we cannot unlock or build. It is of course the Jupiter class Battlestar.
And here is our most desired new acquisition, the cause of mankind's demise forty years down the road (thanks Stefan!), the nuclear warhead-armed missile a.k.a. the nuke.
The nuke acts as a nuke (duh), as in it delivers a ton of damage instantly. Smaller ships get blown up, bigger ships lose all plating and suffer hull damage in one hit. It has three major disadvantages, it costs a lot to re-arm (but the Daidalos can arm/re-arm for free), it is painfully slow and it can fire only once per munitions slot. That last one is a real kick in the balls and its main weakness.
On a missile boat like the Ranger it is a waste to load it with nukes. Because it fires two nukes and does nothing for the whole battle, torpedoes and missile are just better considering its reload times on ordnance.
But on a ship with very long reload times, that relies mostly on its guns or fighters for damage it might be better. And on a ship that has three munitions slots and mostly acts as an inaccurate damage sponge, it might also be good. The cheesy way to stomp the toasters all the way to the final mission would be a fleet full of Januses armed with Nukes flying around with Daidalos, abusing free reloads and the fact the toasters do not intercept missiles with fighters (but maybe scorpions can do that for them). But that would be boring.
Musing on nuclear space warfare aside, we have a lot of toasters to deal with with two doomstacks in gamma where the next BA mission is (ugh, more waiting for FTL spooling on Daidalos Fleet).
baud gets a new name for his flagship. Despite the toaster swarm we have a full quorum, nukes and a lot of fleets here and there. Also just two BA missions left, I wonder where that plot will go. I doubt it will top the last BA mission's twist. We're slowly approaching the end of the game.
The best battle goes to the BA mission at Hera, not much to show despite having had so many of them in this update. In the next update we should have some nuking going on and possibly Cylon endgame ships, so it will be more to show.
