Underrail: The Incline Awakens

[Blaine]

Gotta love the Lemurians for being the ultra based ultimate supporters of Skeumorphic UI. Next playthrough I'm using their armour and gun ASAP in their honour.

Lemurian marine armor's pretty great, except that it has 30% armor penalty as a fuck-you to characters invested in Dodge and Evasion. Nimble and that one veteran feat combined only reach -25% armor penalty, so you can't get the Dodge and Evasion bonuses from Nimble while wearing the armor.

Of course, Dodge and Evasion are a fuck-you in general.

Speaking of which, bio resistance is now by far the superior elemental resistance type due both to the amount of bio damage spammed by expansion enemies and the potential for immunity from environmental toxic clouds and one's own toxic gas grenades.

 

[Blaine]

I could only see autists that force themselves to use one weapon type (sniper,hammer) get pissed off.

The number of weapon categories utilized by the player has little to no bearing on how cancerous and obnoxious locusts are. Lumping melee into that is doubly retarded. The way base abilities and feats work in this game, you must specialize into melee as a general category, which rules out guns and crossbows almost entirely. Melee as a category sucks balls versus locusts. Actually, I put my spears away and just used my fists against the little fuckers, in combination with grenades.

There are only two ways to make locusts suck less: sneak by (or sneak up and plant explosives), or destroy the nests before they can deploy more than one wave of locusts. There are builds that can do either but there are also plenty that can't no matter what they do, and there's nothing wrong with those builds.

 

[Tigranes]

Is pure psi build easy to play?

Yeah, you're an overpowered wizard. You can ask us for build feedback but doing what you fancy should be just fine on Normal.

Play Oddity.

 

[Blaine]

I've played Oddity-only a few times, but just lately it involves far too much metagaming for my tastes, especially now with veteran levels that require MMO-like quantities of XP (in either system) to attain.

Yeah, I see you guys swapping tips on where to find this or that unique Oddity, checking every single trash can and rock, and raising Pickpocketing like a bunch of weirdos.

It's a good system in terms of alternative XP gain, but Classic is fine too.

 

[Damianus_NT]

Quick questions before entering Deep Caverns:

Spoiler

1. The Faceless warned me about their invasion on the Institute and they adviced that I should stay out of it. I escaped the University, but the Invasion does not trigger. Are we actually forced to report back to Eidein about it, in order to move plot forwards? Does one really have to fight Faceless near the elevator? Are there any alternatives? Can't hack the elevator without guard noticing... and can't pickpocket Eidein (insufitient skill).

2. Does entering DC lock player from going back entirely? Are there no rifts in the DC? There is this whole elevator with the Rift nearby in the Lower Underrail... and another elevator close to the Oculus. It has to mean something.

EDIT 1:
Ok, so I entered the Deep Caverns and something a bit unexpected and annoying has happened:

Spoiler

The Faceless Comander scanns the character's mind and concludes that "for your actions against us, the penalty is death".
Here are my actions:
- helped group of Faceless near the Foundry,
- saved the Faceless in the Core City,
- did not kill any Faceless in CC, DC, Institute etc.
- always were polite, honest and willing to help,
- the ONLY exception was not allowing to scan my mind in the Rail Crossing shop, and defending myself (who would let some weird, hostile alien you know nothing about to scan your brain?)
Aren't they supposed to be at least neutral? Attacking their ally? What a bunch of pricks :<

EDIT 2:
Just noticed I've posted in a wrong thread. I will delete this post, and re-post it in "The Incline Awakens" thread. Sorry for that.
I feel dirty for doing so, but I think it's time for the second small save edit (to trick game to think that certain character is still alive). After 200h of gameplay I feel entitled to at least neutral relations with (((them))). And this whole DC area seems to be exactly like you guys describe it. The less you have to fight with respawning enemies, the better.

 

[Wunderbar]

Damianus_NT weird, faceless should be neutral/friendly. In fact, if there was a reason for them to be hostile, they wouldn't have warned you about their attack on the Institute.

 

[Wunderbar]

On my first playthrough i saved wounded faceless in Core city, helped a group of faceless near the Foundry and killed faceless boss in the Buzzer's shop. DC faceless were friendly and even allowed me to take

Spoiler

a certain NPC back to South gate station

 

[Damianus_NT]

On my first playthrough i saved wounded faceless in Core city, helped a group of faceless near the Foundry and killed faceless boss in the Buzzer's shop. DC faceless were friendly and even allowed me to take

Spoiler

a certain NPC back to South gate station

Well, I did exactly the same as you. But they did end up hostile.

Spoiler

After editing the Buzzer shop "mindreader is dead" to 0, they are neutral. Good enough, but I would love to get ANY information from them and save this NPC you mentioned.

 

[jungl]

The tribal raids lot more annoying to deal with if you melee. I realized today with that heart snake skin leather armor you can hard counter the locusts. There also the bio helmet and drugs.

 

[Tigranes]

I've played Oddity-only a few times, but just lately it involves far too much metagaming for my tastes, especially now with veteran levels that require MMO-like quantities of XP (in either system) to attain.

Yeah, I see you guys swapping tips on where to find this or that unique Oddity, checking every single trash can and rock, and raising Pickpocketing like a bunch of weirdos.

It's a good system in terms of alternative XP gain, but Classic is fine too.

What? I just play normally and have never looked up where a given Oddity is. The best stuff is themed Oddities, where you know that there's more fossils to come in cavern areas and you know that you have 3 Protectorate dog tags you can pickpocket if you get your skill higher. It gives you a different set of organic objectives if you aren't googling every oddity.

You're the one that fills out a dollhouse full of jet skis and whatever and spends hours generating the maximum possible cash in a game where you are effectively a millionaire without trying.

Why play Oddity? Because finding oddities in nooks and crannies is fun. I'm sure you can squeeze tons more XP killing shit on Classic if you wanted to. I don't see why I'd bother.

 

[Spark Mandriller]

Lemurian marine armor's pretty great, except that it has 30% armor penalty as a fuck-you to characters invested in Dodge and Evasion.

You should be able to make a much better tactical vest by the time you're in the Black Sea. Unless you really want that energy resist. Energy resist is pretty hard to come by.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Made it to Core City at level 19, felt overpowered. I pretty much cleared out the lower caves, the under-caves, and the lower-under-caves. This game is stupid huge, part of the problem with the mega-dungeon design is you end up having to fill up all the caves with something, or you just get endless boring walking. But then you have so much side-content it kinda drowns out the main game. I wonder if it would have been better designed with a traditional world map with towns and dungeons, like Avernum.

Up to level 22 now, nothing really challenges anymore. The Arena was easy and the Coretech quests were a breeze. I joined the protectorate but had no desire to schlep back through the caves to find these bunkers they were talking about, nor do I need the money so I'm probably not going to finish their questline. A little peeved I missed the entire Abrams questline too. This guy just casually asks you to spy for him, after all these people made a big deal of the powerful protectorate and the delicate balance of power and how you don't want to piss them off. But there's no alternative and no real downside to the quests. I wonder if the developer just assumes everyone is going to default to being a rebel?

Overall I'm getting a little bored with the game but I've played it enough I feel obligated to finish it. Should I go to the Black Sea before Deep Caverns, or just skip the whole place?

 

[Wunderbar]

Grampy_Bone you should've played in Oddity mode, it solves overlevelling nicely.

 

[Tigranes]

Playing in a very non-completionist, "will skip battery plant quest because the robot controls are fucking annoying" way, my usual thresholds on Hard:

Start Depot A: lv7
World opens up: lv~9
All quests up to Invictus, Cornell: lv10-15
Beast, Upper Underrail, DLC, etc: lv 15+

I'd say it's entertaining, but packing couple more levels at each point woudl of course be fine too, especially if it isn't your 10th playthrough.

Most UR builds are complete by that point, so I tend to quit and roll a different build. Not only is DLC & DC nowhere as good as the rest of the game, you're also not really transforming your build anymore.

 

[hell bovine]

On my first playthrough i saved wounded faceless in Core city, helped a group of faceless near the Foundry and killed faceless boss in the Buzzer's shop. DC faceless were friendly and even allowed me to take

Spoiler

a certain NPC back to South gate station

Well, I did exactly the same as you. But they did end up hostile.

Spoiler

After editing the Buzzer shop "mindreader is dead" to 0, they are neutral. Good enough, but I would love to get ANY information from them and save this NPC you mentioned.

The game now also counts the total of faceless kills. E.g. on hard you are allowed 3, before it starts subtracting "friendship" points. So it would depend on how many you've killed at Buzzer's.

 

[Richard Leaks]

The game now also counts the total of faceless kills. E.g. on hard you are allowed 3, before it starts subtracting "friendship" points. So it would depend on how many you've killed at Buzzer's.

Faceless will also be hostile if you take a quest from Tchortists at Cytosine outpost before getting mind scanned.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I also like how I have this massively expensive house but I store all my stuff in a trash can at the city entrance because it's more convenient.

 

[just]

press tab around merchants
all this stuff

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[hell bovine]

so ive delt with acorn, looks like ive finished dlc but clearly big chunk of quest/lore im missing

Spoiler

- i got a shard piece
- ferryman told me about his encounter with natives and his use of shard
- i was able to talk with npc native by raising my int. Exhausted all the options

and thats it. no further follow ups. Already killed all the named natives, there was at least 1 black stone(excluding one in submerged station) that I couldnt interact with. Also some cranks in boneyard. Anyone can point me in right direction?

also, is there a list of potential acorn buyers? Each appear to have an unique piece of info which id like to exhaust

Spoiler

Talk to Azif. Regarding the buyers, I've only tried Tanner and Azif, and they basically said the same thing. Dude gave an entertaining talk, but he doesn't want it. And there is a new guy who will accost you in the core city.

 

[ItsChon]

People are being too hard on the expansion. DC is a bit of drag after the second/third time you've done it, but I actually enjoy going through the Expansion content. As for DC, I truly feel like the reason it's such a drag is because it's basically a large dungeon crawl with no "city hub" to allieviate things a bit. I don't like long dungeon crawls, and I really feel like long periods of combat/hostility without any proper interaction with friendlies and non-combat related content illicits a negative reaction in people.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Is pure psi build easy to play?

my only mistake playing PSI build is i dont take psychokinesis skill so i am almost useless against robots and machines. especially in the DLC where there are alot of robots compared to base game. fleshies drops like flies for me. i have trouble fighting robots. temporal manipulation and running away is my only weapon against them.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[hell bovine]

so ive delt with acorn, looks like ive finished dlc but clearly big chunk of quest/lore im missing

Spoiler

- i got a shard piece
- ferryman told me about his encounter with natives and his use of shard
- i was able to talk with npc native by raising my int. Exhausted all the options

and thats it. no further follow ups. Already killed all the named natives, there was at least 1 black stone(excluding one in submerged station) that I couldnt interact with. Also some cranks in boneyard. Anyone can point me in right direction?

also, is there a list of potential acorn buyers? Each appear to have an unique piece of info which id like to exhaust

Spoiler

Talk to Azif. Regarding the buyers, I've only tried Tanner and Azif, and they basically said the same thing. Dude gave an entertaining talk, but he doesn't want it. And there is a new guy who will accost you in the core city.

Spoiler

azif got nothing to progress me. Only one that gave me something was mushroom/burrower dude in sgs

Spoiler

Quentin comments on the broken piece of monolith, that's not the shard (and is, as far as I can tell, useless). For the shard you need to go graverobbing, because it's still in the body of the guy the ferryman struck down.

 

[Egosphere]

I've played Oddity-only a few times, but just lately it involves far too much metagaming for my tastes, especially now with veteran levels that require MMO-like quantities of XP (in either system) to attain.

Yeah, I see you guys swapping tips on where to find this or that unique Oddity, checking every single trash can and rock, and raising Pickpocketing like a bunch of weirdos.

It's a good system in terms of alternative XP gain, but Classic is fine too.

It always felt like it forced you into taking lockpicking and hacking for your skills, otherwise you'd level up quite slowly