Decided to research these in anticipation of some heist missions we might do in the future. Apparently these actually have great burn resist too. Maybe a viable option for the burning city missions? We'll have to see.
These are both exciting and underwhelming. Basically, this is our new underwater gear for gals for the foreseeable future. The sea version has slightly different stats, but is essentially the same. Nomad crossbows do stabbing, rather than piercing damage, so the shields fully apply there. There are other decent underwater options like the brainer and sea chiller outfits, but I like these the most for now. On the surface, these are basically useless, as almost all missions will involve piercing or concussion damage. They might be decent vs zombies too? I'm not sure what the damage numbers on zombie bites actually are or how they interact with armour. I just know they've killed a lot of people I thought could survive in the past.
And probably the biggest bombshell tech we've gotten since chainmail. These guys are, frankly, completely busted for this stage of the game. 144 health is almost impossible to deplete without causing a decent chunk of stun, so they pretty much always fall asleep before dying. And while for most units, like the hyena riders, that'd be near a death sentence anyways from multiple wounds, these bastards recover 8 hp per turn! 15 armour isn't a ton but it's plenty for shrugging off shotguns and small arms fire when you can just sprint away with 110 TUs and heal back to full. On top of that, these don't count as actual soldiers. Meaning, while their stats can't be improved, they also instantly recover after each battle.
They are a tad expensive to recruit, but we've got plenty of sectoweed being produced at our secondary base. Mutant meat is actually our bottleneck, and it's easy to get mountains of that from a monster hunt. And obviously, the biggest problem is capturing the rare bastards to begin with. But after that catgirl mission where we raked in a ton of them, we're set for life on that front.
Depicted here is the natural enemy of the ogre: Literally any enemy with LoS on them and a full TU bar. Also commanders who tell them to exit on the first turn when they have no armour.
Fortunately, even though Gumsmith got chewed up pretty bad, his massive hp pool is more than enough to stay on his feet, and Echidna makes an excellent nurse. Honestly, I should prep the ship with her holding the surgery kit for exactly these circumstances.
I don't think I've mentioned it before, but you can actually walk machinegun fire between multiple targets. It didn't work out here due to a lack of bullet spray I think, but I do like the concept. Also, Slut has steadily been building up strength through heavy weapon titles. If I can get some more I can probably try move her back to melee. Though that seems suboptimal with her freak gal stat spread.
Also, all our fully trained gals are actually so good at melee now that shield bashes are pretty much guaranteed deathblows to normal humans. If we want to capture researchers and the like, we need to punch them. Which is fun in it's own right.
Echidna displaying wihy catgirls are fucking bananas, moving from our ship into the third floor of theirs to stun a drone for capture with over 50% TUs to spare. Crazy. She doesn't even have many titles yet!
My clearly flawless business acumen has been called into question, so I'm going to walk through my thought process here in some detail. First up, Canteen production. When taking the runt upkeep into account, you're getting 19,820 profit per month here. Well, minus a bit more for item creation costs but those are fairly low.
Producing X-Grog nets use 9264$ a month per runt. Both require a still, but you want a still and three extractors anyways for the workshop space.
Weed Plantation is fairly complex, but it boils down to this: Done properly, you get one cycle each month. That cycle additionally makes you 15k by ending the month as a normal plantation with negative 100k maintenance, more than offsetting the weed production cycle. Out of this we get 240 sectoweed, which is enough for 50 runts to spend 10 days making canteens instead of grog. Minus like, half a day for the weed used to reset the cycle. So call it 48 runts, and cut that to a third so they can work the whole month for easy numbers. 1 farm = 16 runts making canteens and not grog. That works out to ~175k extra income. It's pretty fiddly and if you fuck up the cycle you lose 110k so it's only 65k extra income; worse than a normal farm. So why not just makie more workshop space? Well, because those buildings are limited. The ones that aren't tend to be low efficiency. Large vaults are best, giving 25 space for 10k maintenance. That works out to ~215k income instead. That is slightly better, but now you also need a bit more crew space to house the runts. If we're putting a value of ~50k income per tile, the crew space needed is about 2/3rds of that, putting the cost at ~30k. It's practically a wash, and the weed itself has a lot of important applications. Additionally, large vaults have a massive startups cost of a million dollaros. That's a huge upfront investment for such marginal gains. So for money making, I'd say prioritize setting up extractors and a still, then farms. The exact optimal setup will depend on how much leftover crew space and layout space you'll have. Large quarters are a bit more efficient than small, after all, but hangars are useful, you might want gaps for base defense, training facilities or prisons or other workshop stuff to allow for making equipment. Cigars are an option too, and I haven't done the math there but I suspect it's not as good. You can make them if you have an onsen, but the weed to income ratio is worse iirc. My ballpark estimate is instead of 160k extra from the runts, you get ~130k. It's a decent option if you just want to rapidly convert weed to cash to get rid of a stockpile.
Anyways, when we're not busying running an edibles empire, we had some time to research these giant blue lobster people. I think this is where I got the mistaken idea that swords are good for killing tanks- it's lobstermen where they have an advantage, doing full damage vs a bullet's 40%. Stabbing can be decent too, at 70%. And I think these numbers change a bit underwater, favouring concussive instead. Anyways, it's kind of moot here because what you really want are poison gas attacks, which these guys are very weak to, and bypass their armour entirely.
We spot a landed ship nearby and are met with some more raiders. Could have been better, but I'm not gonna complain.
Hey, how good are thrown weapons at this point in the game? Well, that's a raider boss we're targetting with pinpoint accuracy.
...and he's dead in one shot. Not bad for 30 TUs on a one handed weapon. Slug thrower, eat your heart out.
Echidna pulls some weight here capturing a couple extra raider girls. Not here though.
I opted to wait a turn until they got closer. The buzzards are a menance, having excellent vision, reactions, and long range snapshots with their scoped pistols. We actually drew a shot trying to make it back to the ship before making the better choice to hide behind these rocks. It's easy to forget in the moment that while ~10% of your TUs won't move you that far, going from 20% to 10% remaining makes a huge difference in how much reaction fire you're going to draw.
All said and done, we got 5 more recruitable uber gals. And these don't need any fancy materials to bring aboard.
Another bit of lore. I've seen this page before, but never met any of the other 3 clans. Speaks to how large the game is that even after meeting all these enemies and factions, we've barely scratched the surface.
I decided to research this after all, both because of begging in the comments (stop spoiling shit STD!) and because it sounds vaguely related to the concept of other large cannons and such. Turns out it's a giant version of the air musket. It's pretty much what I expected; it's got a snapshot range of only 5, ammo capacity of 4, and while it does have some decent accuracy, it doesn't fill much of a role in my books. Also, 40 weight. Oof. Maybe I'll make one for an ogre to use underwater. It would be nice to have if like, a lobster shows up underwater or something. Well, actually it's piercing so it'd suck there. But it'll be great if an armored car shows up underwater or something! Probably punches holes in buildings real nicely too.
At last, we've got a werewolf on the field. These guys make for the perfect shocktroops to run outside and check for nearby hostiles. They're tanky as fuck, have reasonably good reactions, good nightvision, and plenty of TUs. And they're more expendable than actual elite crewmembers that could boast similar properties.
One more thing not mentioned thus far, and thankfully not used by enemy werewolves: These fuckers have the berserker howl the barbarian savage outfit grants! Oh, and the sniff abilities of dogs. The sniff burns up some morale, while the howl builds it back up, not to mention knocking out capture targets from a healthy distance. And the downside of the howl, the hp cost? Total non issue for these guys with their regen.
Imagine having 10 of these fuckers pour out of a ship like a god damned furry clown car and just immediately ruin the morale of everyone in sight. It's going to be glorious. My only regret is that abusing them too much would steal titles from our crew, so we're going to mostly use them for capturing weaklings and scouting.
