Underrail: The Incline Awakens

[ST'Ranger]

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You're completely wrong on this point. First of all, the nature of the mission demands more options for resolution. As it is there seem to be two courses of action: a) commit atrocity and b) walk away entirely, abandoning your previous commitment to the Protectorate (and allowing a bunch of psychopaths to call the shots). Those are both plausible choices, but they're simply not enough under the circumstances. Of course there is an endless list of things that could and should be added to the game, but this particular mission really demands some expansion. It's pivotal.

Second, the GAU being in constant contact with Fort Apogee (or someone from the Protectorate) from the under tunnels in Lower Underrail contradicts facts presented elsewhere. The Tchortists have an experimental long-range audio communication device which is considered to be revolutionary, and its range is far too limited to work at that distance. Now, maybe the Protectorate has something better, but the Tchortists seem to me to be at least as technologically advanced as the Protectorate, if not more advanced. They don't have the same level of manufacturing capability, but they have the tech. Also the GAU aren't carrying anything better with them or I would have found it. Besides, the GAU are arrogant enough to consider themselves invulnerable, especially when dealing with a lone southerner.

Finally, I'm not returning to Fort Apogee with their heads. I'm returning to Fort Apogee to inform command that the GAU were all killed fighting the Drones. The GAU's corpses will be found next to a heaping pile of dead enemies of the Protectorate. And who at Fort Apogee is going to miss them? A few people, but the majority (the doctor, the mechanics, the cook, the renegades, the Colonel, the United Stations rep) seem to hate them and won't be shedding any tears. It shouldn't take much to Persuade the Colonel to drop the matter, at least. It makes sense for everyone. A lot of sense. The Drones are wiped out, so what is there to complain about? Mission accomplished.

The bottom line is, the options for resolving this situation are frustratingly constricting, so much so that I plan to completely ignore it in the future unless something is done to expand it. This is the only quest I've encountered so far that makes me feel that way.

Spoiler

If you dislike the CAU so much don't accept their mission. Really, it's a very straightforward C&C thing. If you can't stomach gassing a few libruls, then join the libruls next time.

The issue here is personal - you've got it into your head that you can be loyal to Protectorate while also plotting the destruction of a part of the Protectorate. Maybe if things were different, you could have your way - but that's just not a realistic presentation of the relationship between Fort Apogee and the CAU.

Your counterpoint regarding the Tchortist scanning device is entirely false. It is not in any way a communication technology - it's much more like a long range x-ray device. It's a remote scanning/viewing tech. It is explicitly stated that there is a line of communication between North Underrail and Core City - and that's implied to be a farther distance away than almost the entire span of the game. And let's not forget the entire reason Core City exists as it does - because it literally broadcasts live shows all across Underrail. Somehow I don't think it's even improbable that CAU can contact, at the very least, Rail Crossing from where they are in this mission.

If you're going to reject the premise of the possibility of CAU communicating about you becoming a traitor, then there's really nothing to talk about. But your language indicates to me that you think Fort Apogee would be more or less OK with you killing the CAU. That just isn't how groups of people work, especially not military organizations. People will grumble and vent their disagreements, but there isn't going to be an active spirit of mutiny in a military organization - they're all on the same side and have disagreements about how to best support that side. Having "the majority" of Fort Apogee dislike them means nothing in the context of this organization - they're not going to go around voting on who's OK to kill or not.

 

[Nines]

It's strange how unknown serbian dude managed to outdo most of the Kickstarter titles with big names behind them. Yes, I'm talking about

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you know

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I think you do

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Pillars of Mediocrity, Fargo's Wastes and Shallowrun.

It's also surprising how many good titles came from Eastern Europe recently, but this is for a different time and for a different thread.

I think everyone already said everything about good and bad sides in this game. However, I really enjoyed attention to creatures. They have their own habitat, unique abilities and unique behavior pattern. I haven't seen that kind of attention probably since the Gothic series.

Regarding DC

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I think I shouldn't have visited Mushroom Forest and Labyrinth so soon. After I restored power to Caerus and HE Complex, most of my complaints have gone away, and it felt like good old Underrail again. And after I encountered Tchort, it became clear to me why Six said that thing has to die. I'm still not sure why Eldein lied about its origin though, trying to pose it as a primordial creature, while in truth it was some unnatural piece of bad experiment.

And here goes my small list of complaints:

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As it was said many times before, social skills are mostly useless, and probably should be separated into 3 different perks rather than 3 different skills. I put 130 points in Persuasion just to see what will happen, and now I know that I would rather put these points into Dodge or Evasion.

Many chests and lockers that require high Lockpicking/Hacking skills contain nothing but junk, and sometimes nothing at all.

Weapons should probably wear out a little bit slowly, while leather armors - faster. I was constantly repairing my crossbow, but almost never used any of my patching kits.
I also think that the Degraded debuff threshold should scale with durability (the more durability, the less the threshold). It's just strange to see how a weapon with 2000+ durability became useless after it goes down to 600. 400 seems more realistic to me.

I encountered several locations where fps drops to zero with no visible problems: the hopper graveyard, the Forge prison, the Leo's shack and the Arke power plant. The Gauntlet room with lots of burrower spawns also have crazy fps drops, but that was rather a bad decision to fill a room with so many obstacles with burrowers. Also, major fps drops when an enemy patrol getting entangled in Acid Blob Trap.

Zero reaction to the fall of Fort Apogee / RSO embassy. I burned everything related to Protectorate in South Underrail, and yet, I cannot report about my accomplishments to my fellow Free Drones, neither it affects the ending screens (SGS joins United Stations, Protectorate is still strong in Upper Underrail, RSO embassy evacuates via water ways.).

Would have been nice if this menu was a bit bigger for Large fonts.

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Also, I hope someone could tell me something about these three missing odditiies with a question mark.

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[hell bovine]

Has this been patched yet?

I lost about 12 hours of game time due to this bug, luckily I still had a save before aggroing the Tchorts. I was doing a quest deep inside the west-end, simple exploratoin, and they started shooting at me a few areas before the elevator. I had no idea, or warning, that I'd be stuck there the rest of the game. It's a good game but there are some serious design flaws. Almost all of them having to do with quest breaking triggers and inadequate contingencies.

Which area do you mean? The basement east of the elevator is forbidden to you (guards at the entrance inform you of this) and if you go there, the tchortists will turn hostile.

As for the locked outside of the institute bug, I don't think it has been patched yet.

 

[hell bovine]

I've got a question and some comments about the CAU...

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This Gas The Drones mission needs more options - unless I missed some, which is my question.

I chose to follow a very reasonable course of action, and it didn't work. I was never going to gas the Drones, but I simply played along until the CAU buffoons led me to the entrance of the Drones' lair and popped open the gate. It was a tribute to their ignorance and arrogance that they decided to go out alone with the Invictus, because I promptly wiped the floor with them.

Then I entered the Drones' lair and took them out the old fashioned way.

When I got back to Fort Apogee, all the Protectorate soldiers were hostile. This is unacceptable. The CAU were killed in a heroic battle with the Drones, and no one can prove otherwise. And why would they want to prove that the CAU died at the hands of a lone southerner instead of in battle?

Not only is this a reasonable (or reasonably violent) way to finish the quest, it's arguably the most pro-Protectorate way to do it. The CAU psychopaths are gone. The Drones are gone. Victory.

Anyway, I was disappointed and hoped there was some other way to bring the quest to a positive conclusion. Otherwise I'm just going to reload to an earlier save and never finish it.

Spoiler

You know, I saw this same kind of thing again and again with AoD. A certain kind of literalism seems to be in abundance on the Codex. If Styg doesn't program a message to come up flashing "OH MY GOSH YOU TRAITOR I'VE JUST RADIO'D THE BASE AND NOW THEY KNOW EVERYTHING" there's just no room for it to have happened. Seriously, though, there is a certain variety of abstraction throughout the game - not everything is literally parsed out in front of the player.

I can understand if you wanted more options to complete the quests - that could hardly ever be presented as a bad thing. But is it really reasonable to not allow for the possibility that these CAU guys are in constant communication with an external party? Even if we say that's unlikely, what's the likelihood that they have no contact with external parties whatsoever? They go off to some mission without any Plan B for extraction? That just seems monumentally unlikely to me.

And your reading of the relationship between the Protectorate in the South and the CAU is a bit fanciful. The FBI and the CIA despise each other but if one were attacked, the other would come right up to their aid and flood their full resources into a resolution. I can hardly imagine you walking into Fort Apogee with the heads of the CAU and being greeted with anything but lead.

I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the game literally not acknowledging that my character turned on them. I've got the "ally of protectorate" ending even after destroying the entire protectorate base. So they will attack my character on sight, because she dispatched of the CAU, but then go back to being great friends at the end?

When I have the time to play again, I'll try the same with drones, because I have a suspicion that it will be the same problem.

 

[ST'Ranger]

That's an entirely separate issue on which we are in agreement. There are a few variances I can think of which happen in game but are not represented or are misrepresented in the ending. I think when it comes down to it, Styg just did not make endings to exhaust every possibility in the game - which is at the same time an obvious oversight and somewhat understandable.

 

[hell bovine]

This doesn't require a separate ending, however. It would be enough if the game acknowledged that your alliance with that faction is broken, considering it's possible to go through the game without joining either the drones or the protectorate.

 

[Gregz]

Has this been patched yet?

I lost about 12 hours of game time due to this bug, luckily I still had a save before aggroing the Tchorts. I was doing a quest deep inside the west-end, simple exploratoin, and they started shooting at me a few areas before the elevator. I had no idea, or warning, that I'd be stuck there the rest of the game. It's a good game but there are some serious design flaws. Almost all of them having to do with quest breaking triggers and inadequate contingencies.

Which area do you mean? The basement east of the elevator is forbidden to you (guards at the entrance inform you of this) and if you go there, the tchortists will turn hostile.

As for the locked outside of the institute bug, I don't think it has been patched yet.

Nope, I was starting the quest looking for a missing investigator. The very first quest that allows you access to the west wing, spoke to the guards, they let me through after warning me about the west wing etc. Unfortunately for me I'm too good at exploring, and ended up in the cryogenic area via ventilation shafts, they attacked me so I just went with it, worked my way to the elevator to DC wtf'ed for about...3 hours...before googling to find out where I was...then worked my way back into the institute, only to find I'd been locked inside like a tomb. Never to have access to my crafting cache, resources, ammo, etc. ever again.

Nice design.

 

[hell bovine]

[

Nope, I was starting the quest looking for a missing investigator. The very first quest that allows you access to the west wing, spoke to the guards, they let me through after warning me about the west wing etc. Unfortunately for me I'm too good at exploring, and ended up in the cryogenic area via ventilation shafts, they attacked me so I just went with it, worked my way to the elevator to DC wtf'ed for about...3 hours...before googling to find out where I was...then worked my way back into the institute, only to find I'd been locked inside like a tomb. Never to have access to my crafting cache, resources, ammo, etc. ever again.

Nice design.

If by cryogenic area you mean the one with things floating in tanks, then it's not a bug that they attack you - this is where you were forbidden to go, after all. The institute going into lockdown during an alarm is intended too, and in my opinion quite logical, considering the secret research going on there. The bug is that you can still leave the institute

Spoiler

(west wing or the hidden vent)

and then you will be locked out of it forever, breaking the main quest.

 

[Gregz]

then you will be locked out of it forever, breaking the main quest.

Sounds like a bug to me.

 

[hell bovine]

then you will be locked out of it forever, breaking the main quest.

Sounds like an unfixed bug to me.

And I have already reported that. But that's not what you were complaining about:

I lost about 12 hours of game time due to this bug, luckily I still had a save before aggroing the Tchorts. I was doing a quest deep inside the west-end, simple exploratoin, and they started shooting at me a few areas before the elevator. I had no idea, or warning, that I'd be stuck there the rest of the game.

That is not a bug. You are a newly arrived character that they know little about. You use vents to access a forbidden area, where they do their secret research. That looks plenty like industrial espionage, why wouldn't they attack you and go into lockdown? It's pretty clear that they are afraid of spies.

Spoiler

If I remember correctly, even admitting that you did a spy job in the past will get you attacked during the interview.

 

[Dead Guy]

So, DC... again... (I've actually enjoyed it for the most part but now I can't find something and god make it stop)

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I have all mutagen containers except Ovid-1, Echo-1, Io-1 and Helicon-1 I think. I've been in the warehouse 2 building powered up at Arke ie the no power building in the faceless territory. I've been to the residential building and got the how-to-ooze guide etc. I can't seem to find mutagen tanks A, though. Can't power up B. I'm also not sure where mutagen store is supposed to be. I've found the scanner but not the combinator. I've also found Detritus in some underground room close to Tchort's gate and cleared that out, looted everything. I think I've been everywhere... Where is the door I missed, I'm sick to my stomach walking back and forth looking for this piece of shit now. Or is it beyond the gate?

plz help thx

 

[Modron]

So, DC... again... (I've actually enjoyed it for the most part but now I can't find something and god make it stop)

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I have all mutagen containers except Ovid-1, Echo-1, Io-1 and Helicon-1 I think. I've been in the warehouse 2 building powered up at Arke ie the no power building in the faceless territory. I've been to the residential building and got the how-to-ooze guide etc. I can't seem to find mutagen tanks A, though. Can't power up B. I'm also not sure where mutagen store is supposed to be. I've found the scanner but not the combinator. I've also found Detritus in some underground room close to Tchort's gate and cleared that out, looted everything. I think I've been everywhere... Where is the door I missed, I'm sick to my stomach walking back and forth looking for this piece of shit now.

plz help thx

Spoiler

Last batch of mutagens is behind the gate to tchort in the same room with the recombinator, need to repair the gate mechanisms, power it up, get keycard from powered up residential area, and make a bio grenade to kill off the biomass holding it shut. To make the grenade need to go to the fungus area and get 30x spore infection then you'll get transported to a further area where you can find and kill a pulsating root to grab needed compound to make grenades out off. The machine that processes the fungal mass into grenades is in the same room as the scanner.

Hope that cleared up the confusion.

 

[Dead Guy]

Thanks. That's... not obvious.

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The shroom part, that is.

 

[Old One]

That's an entirely separate issue on which we are in agreement.

We are in agreement.

I'm not really complaining. I'm just explaining my experiences and reactions for future reference and highlighting some areas that could use improvement the most.

What I'd really like is...

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A way to lure the CAU into being exposed to the mutagen.

It's off to the Institute for me!

 

[Excidium II]

Anybody getting performance issues when scrolling around on some maps, like some core city areas?

 

[FeelTheRads]

It chokes sometimes for me too in Core City and I've seen other people mention it before. Can't figure out the reason, but maybe that's also why the Core City areas are so inexplicably small?

 

[Excidium II]

it only started happening to me recently which is odd.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Maybe it's somehow related to the overall increase in save file size and loading/saving times as you play then? I guess only Styg knows.

 

[Nines]

Made 25 custom portraits (12 for female, 13 for male). Link.
If someone knows good artists, concepts of which could fit Underrail setting, it will be highly appreciated (send a PM).

 

[marux]

Made 25 custom portraits (12 for female, 13 for male). Link.
If someone knows good artists, concepts of which could fit Underrail setting, it will be highly appreciated (send a PM).

nice.

also

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is this leia? :D

 

[cherry blossom]

Styg, about the Coretech ICPD quest:

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When you talk to Luben, hold back on being sent by Coretech and then let him go, he mentiones Halidorson as the one who he believes sent you. When you report to Harlan with the ICPD, however, Harlan says that they could have extracted information from him regardless of how you dealt with Luben. It seems as though you learn quite a critical piece of information when you let Luben go without any option of telling Harlan about it.

Was this an oversight or intentional? Maybe you didn't know where to go with that or skipped it to keep the oligarch quests as few and short as possible? Either way, it feels sort of disappointing that you don't get to do anything with that piece of information. Easier said than done, lots of interesting outcomes could be done with that.

 

[Nines]

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is this leia?

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Almost.

 

[Nines]

Version 1.0.1.4 Release - Quality of Life Improvements

Fonts- We've replaced one of the game's fonts to improve readability and also added more size options.
Outlines- We've added character outlines which should improve visibility and make targeting somewhat easier when things are happening behind walls and other obstacles.
Inventory filters- We've replaced inventory filter combo box with icons and also regrouped item categories in a way we believe will be most practical.
Combat stats tooltips- We've added descriptions for all the different stats in the combat stats window when you mouse over them.
Combat speed settings- Combat movement and action speed can now be adjusted in the game's options.
New save system- This is strictly under the hood thing and nothing is changed regarding how and when you can save or load the game (old saves are compatible with the new version). For those advanced users - we archived the separate zone files to improve save/load performance and also got rid of the temporary current game structure on the disk and moved it to memory.

Other minor stuff

• Critical crossbow hits now also affect elemental damage (acid, shock and incendiary) from special bolts
  
• When attacking in melee from stealth, target's dodge rating will be ignored if it hasn't detected you yet
  
• Added more crafting components and ammo to Deep Caverns
  
• Added a few more hints to certain Deep Caverns dialogs
  
• Quinton's mushroom growing room is now accessible
  
• Added a number of Lower and Upper Metro areas to better connect certain places

Bug fixes

• Critical damage modifier from items will now be properly applied to fist weapons (e.g. infused ancient rathound boots)
  
• You will no longer be able to snipe down certain obstacles that were not meant to be sniped down
  
• Jawbone will now correctly be considered a crossbow for the purpose of trading
  
• Nicolas will no longer return from the dead to haunt you
  
• Cut throat attack will no longer fail if you get detected during the attack itself (the eye wasn't read when you started performing the attack but the attack itself pushed it into red state)
  
• When incendiary bombs cause a character to burn they will now properly suffer 150% of the original damage as the description says
  
• You can no longer attempt to burst or rapid fire with an empty weapon
  
• Fixed Jerre Franz not healing the player in certain instances
  
• Fixed Fort Apogee zone security settings
  
• Fixed a certain important woman not properly reacting to a player's response regarding her husband's fate
  
• Fixed certain responses not appearing when speaking to the Faceless centaur near Foundry
  
• Fixed being able to start the Find Blaine quest even after certain events took place
  
• Silas' questline will now properly continue questline after the player pays him instead of doing his initial quests
  
• Fixed a missing dialog option during Mediant Samuel's second mission
  
• Fixed the unintended failing of the Kill Rathound King quest after a certain event has taken place
  
• Crawlers and rathounds are now neutral to each other
  
• No more free repairs from Mykola
  
• Nicolas' and Olivia's quests will properly fail upon death
  
• Fixed Maura's faction id not setting correctly after you've helped her
  
• Accussing a certain person of comitting a murder and then initiating combat through dialogue will no longer cause the whole station to become hostile
  
• Fixed the interview cutscene playing even when the player is hostile to the Tchortists; that quest will also properly fail now
  
• Fixed dialogue options not appearing when asking Oskar and Lt. Stratford about a certain man
  
• Fixed Arke consoles being hackable even after the player turns off the security system
  
• Doppelgangers are now immune to Expose Weakness
  
• All elevators should now properly notify the player when they are unpowered when used
  
• Shield emitter weight will now be properly calculated when adding optional components
  
• Various typos and map fixes

That's all for now. I hope you guys like the changes. As for what we'll be doing next - we'll primarily be working on more content for Underrail so stay tuned for more info on that in the coming months.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

great to see that now we can increase the speed of the combat.

 

[Daedalos]

Lol. Wtf.

This game just got from GOTY 2015 to ??????

WHAT.

Styg, you beautiful motherfucker!

This should shut the "SLOWCOMBAT/walking?!?!" and "FONTSLOL" faggots up!

Incline