In Progress X-Piratez! Ironman! No spoilers! Oldschool X-COM Total Conversion with mutant amazon pirates. Death to the star gods!

[Luka-boy]

Good Touch in a nutshell.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Short but sweet.

Last update before my workweek begins again. Will try do some short updates like this but no promises.

So, I went and counted the tips; we've got ~84 of these things out of what looks like 160. Which means we're way further off our target than I expected. Definitely going to be burning through those alliance files to catch up here, because giving up on those data disc reveals would be really dumb.

I also remembered that we have this options. 10k per token is a steep damned price, but we've got two bases in full on money making mode now, as well as a big pile of apples and other shit we could sell. Converting several million dollars into several hundred tokens isn't as crazy as it seems. Though I should probably build more bases first. Once we're raking in 10 million a month this option will really shine.

Finished this one up.

Hmm, heavy power couplings might be good. Rip 'er apart gals!

This finished up too.

God I feel like such an idiot. I forgot that this is how you get Sci Books. This is how we get libraries! And more brainers! I kept thinking we had to get lucky and find school books. Also, Bugeyes were here like I thought. Both go to the top of the priority list.

We can also just buy this shit now, which makes our whole green codex fungus nonsense pretty pointless. Hopefully both mushrooms and the codex reveal other uses to us soon.

Another seemingly big tech done with no direct result. Feels like we've built 90% of a car but the parts we're still missing prevent us from driving it.

Finally, something worth shooting down!

Which we fail to do. It ate all our remaining 50mm ammo.

Results from 'recycling' 4 necroplane parts. Dunno how that works, but we don't need cash and have gals to spare, so we're going to do this some more. It's labour intensive but we need the scrap metal too, and possibly the ammo.

Well, the good news is the ship we fired at landed anyways. The bad news is we didn't get there until daytime.

But the REALLY good news is that it's a skeleton crew with a bunch of academy drones. We may only have 2 werewolves left (need more sectoweed to train more... fuck I missed the planting cycle at month start. Fuck it we need the weed more than money, I'll start it ASAP) but they're sufficient to capture all these drones. Neither the drones nor the security can really hurt the werewolves.

I'd feel guilty about abusing this, except the game is bullshit anyways. These fucking drones wake back up! What the hell?

Also, spotted this fucker. No catgirl assasination through our windows this time. Eat mingun!

There was even one of these and a nurse on board the ship. Good stuff.

XP gains are slow on these easy runs, especially with the wolves doing a lot of work to capture stuff instead of just being spotters. Still, +3 str on a catgirl for applying a bandaid to a werewolf is not too shabby.

We actually got something nice here: 30mm cannon parts and ammo. If I'm not mistaken, taping two of these together lets us build defensive turrets or something. At least I vaguely remember the 30mm guns being really good. At the very least we've got more than enough ammo to shoot down more stuff for a while.

Also snagged 6 intact drones. That's a lot of grav units.

We don't have enough room in our animal cages for these apparently regenerating drones that can't simply be turned off. Well, spiders are easy to get too, we'll sell the ratman and a couple spiders.

Good stuff!

A medium ship landed nearby. Definitely a harder target. Probably. We'll check it out, maybe it's a bunch of labourers on a mining ship. We could use the target practice, slaves and the ore.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well what the fuck, it only has 16 snapshot range. Alien bastards are straight up cheating- no way that reaction fire that killed a peasant in the last update was within 16 tiles. Good to know that's not safe I suppose.

Accuracy drops off by 2 or 3% per tile for most weapons past their range, but reticulans have such great stats for that weapon to offset the drop so they can effectively use it a lot further. Plus enemies are happy to spam 10% shots at you from 30 tiles away and just get lucky.

Also default snap shot range is 15, so 16 is an improvement.

 

[lightbane]

Accuracy drops off by 2 or 3% per tile for most weapons past their range, but reticulans have such great stats for that weapon to offset the drop so they can effectively use it a lot further. Plus enemies are happy to spam 10% shots at you from 30 tiles away and just get lucky.

Enemies also always have more units than your side, so they can and will happily spam shots until they get a lucky hit.
I recommend patching ASAP, lest you get stuck in a bug that was fixed in a recent patch, but I can understand not wanting to update immediately, as new updates usually mess with the balance as stats are tinkered with and new items are introduced.

 

[turkishronin]

The recent update is stable. The previous ones ruined my game with bugs after bugs.

 

[Jaedar]

Accuracy drops off by 2 or 3% per tile for most weapons past their range, but reticulans have such great stats for that weapon to offset the drop so they can effectively use it a lot further. Plus enemies are happy to spam 10% shots at you from 30 tiles away and just get lucky.

Enemies also always have more units than your side, so they can and will happily spam shots until they get a lucky hit.
I recommend patching ASAP, lest you get stuck in a bug that was fixed in a recent patch, but I can understand not wanting to update immediately, as new updates usually mess with the balance as stats are tinkered with and new items are introduced.

Don't you also need to edit your savegame to upgrade to latest version?

 

[lightbane]

Accuracy drops off by 2 or 3% per tile for most weapons past their range, but reticulans have such great stats for that weapon to offset the drop so they can effectively use it a lot further. Plus enemies are happy to spam 10% shots at you from 30 tiles away and just get lucky.

Enemies also always have more units than your side, so they can and will happily spam shots until they get a lucky hit.
I recommend patching ASAP, lest you get stuck in a bug that was fixed in a recent patch, but I can understand not wanting to update immediately, as new updates usually mess with the balance as stats are tinkered with and new items are introduced.

Don't you also need to edit your savegame to upgrade to latest version?

I don't think so, unless specified in the patch itself. Usually, you might find research options suddenly appearing or disappearing (or items), minor stuff. At worst, you might not be able to use the new missions/fight new enemies (if applicable) until the next ingame month. Of course, that works best if there's not too much difference between your version and the update. If there are too many changes, then it is better to start over, of course.

The issue is when your current strategy no longer works because Dio messed with the parameters again.

 

[Luka-boy]

The only immediately wrong thing I noticed updating to the latest version compared to the one from a month or two ago and using the same save is that I can now research the catgirl path even though I already chose the gals path.

I had a playthough where I updated versions for two years with no real issues nor actions required on my end.
EDIT: I just loaded said old playthough and I see no errors. Tons of new stuff to research, though.

 

[Jaedar]

Yeah, seems going from any "N" release to latest is safe without edits. Although I do still worry that the changes to commendations, weapons, etc will cause issues. Although there's also
"- Warning: delete old rulesets when updating"
which I don't know what it means.

 

[std::namespace]

With our windfall of lingerie, wench outfits can be contructed.

there is no point since you killed the freak without even knowing her voodoo pwr

which I don't know what it means.

probably people extracting the new version over the old one, instead of just transfering the savefile to the new_version_folder like a normal human been

 

[oasis789]

Accuracy drops off by 2 or 3% per tile for most weapons past their range, but reticulans have such great stats for that weapon to offset the drop so they can effectively use it a lot further. Plus enemies are happy to spam 10% shots at you from 30 tiles away and just get lucky.

Enemies also always have more units than your side, so they can and will happily spam shots until they get a lucky hit.
I recommend patching ASAP, lest you get stuck in a bug that was fixed in a recent patch, but I can understand not wanting to update immediately, as new updates usually mess with the balance as stats are tinkered with and new items are introduced.

Don't you also need to edit your savegame to upgrade to latest version?

Not necessary unless you want to add or remove things that were changed before your progress level. Everything else should kick in normally as you play and pass the next month, like the new missions, new commends etc.

 

[BrotherFrank]

For what it’s worth can second Luka-boy in that switching from the version 2 months ago (so should be the one the lp is using) didnt break my save and just added cat path along with other new techs despite already having gone down another recruitment path.

Even the renamed items (such as mutant porn becoming crazy zines) didnt seem to break anything.
As for titles… well its not like you have many elite troops with stacks of titles by this point anyways, silver lining!

 

[Damned Registrations]

It blew up.

Alright fine, I'll update if everyone is convinced it's such a good idea. If our run explodes in a buggy mess though it's on you guys. I am generally loathe to update things unless needed. Better the bugs that are known than the ones yet to be discovered.

Not a lot of new techs in here, but there are a few. Not going to take the cats one, that seems cheaty given it's presumably exclusive with the other options. Hyena Bite is weird, I guess it'll give us an entry so we can see it's stats? I never cared much when you can have a gal stabbing things instead. Tiger Tours sounds interesting though.

There's also this weird highwaymen org thing down here. Strange name. Will grab this too.

I obviously don't have all the stats memorized, but a cursory glance didn't reveal any big flaws in our equipment, so hopefully whatever balance changes existed were minor. I'd look them up but I don't want to be spoiled because lightsabers got +5% accuracy or whatever.

That medium landed craft? Reticulan. And not so medium, honestly. This thing is more like a small craft. No way 20+ dudes are coming out of there.

Looks like we get another crack at these boys.

The technician is way off on his own, which is good. But he's also in an open area where getting near him means eating a ton of reaction fire. Which is pretty bad.

Also, while the mechtoid is just chilling on the roof of the ship, we can't howl at him from this far away. Annoying.

Welp, nothing to do but thin their numbers and wait for them to get closer.

Medkits get grabbed in anticipation of injuries. Actually, I need to set up loadouts for a bunch of our newer members. I hate having to do that shit, especially when it'll change after a few missions as their strength grows.

We end each turn in more or less this formation- everyone away from windows, craft providing cover.

Gumsmith manages to get a clean line of sight on an unfortunate wretch through the door and window. Easy kill. Landing in daylight actually helps us quite a bit here; our men have much better accuracy since they can actually see shit, and the alien scum can generally see us first in night conditions anyways.

After a while I stick one of the werewolves out a bit at the south side of the craft, since the enemy seem to be circling around to flank us, and if they do, I want them to see and fire at this guy rather than a squishy human.

Works like a charm.

Their lasers are accurate, but not all that deadly. It's the plasma guns we really need to worry about. And spore launchers.

Plasma guns like this!

Down she goes. We're collecting quite a pile of corpses out here.

We've also spotted a second technician. Since the second one has a flimsy laser gun instead of a spore launcher, I opt to just kill off the more dangerous one. Light sniper rifles seem to be in a sweet spot where a single shot can break the shields without doing enough damage to kill, depending on the roll. Which would be great for captures, if they weren't huddled hunder their fucking ship with no cover to be had. Argh. I suppose I should have tried stun bolts or grenades or something.

We manage to snipe a couple through their craft windows too. YEAH! How do you like a taste of your own medicine?

I can get a single, weak howl off on this mechtoid if I run forward a bit and then back to cover, but I don't think that'll do the trick. Howl is effective on these guys, but not THAT effective.

Several turns go by. No losses so far.

We spy a second mechtoid as well. They're easier to capture and less dangerous, so I'll try for both I think.

Well, that plan went out the window when this one flanked so far around he started putting our people in danger. Down it goes.

Gumsmith makes some more hamburger. Weird that they keep ending their turns in this narrow band where he can hit them from the doorway.

I fuck up and leave a werewolf exposed, forgetting to pull it back. The enemies whiff their shots though.

The werewolf that took the hits earlier is back to full health already, only missing a bit of armour.

The technician we shot earlier is bleeding out. If we're lucky, he might just pass out and we can capture him that way. I'm not sure if enemies suffer locational damage too, but if they do, torso wounds tend to inflict stun on units over time as well I think.

Turns are racking up. Thankfully the weather isn't bad, but I still don't want to burn all our freshness here. We didn't arrive in top shape either.

Because the enemies keep pulling back further away instead of approaching, I get a little desperate and have the werewolves get closer instead. At least we can use the ship for cover since they're not under it any more.

The other one comes around from the top, using the trees as cover. Not very good cover, but should be enough given his bulk, and it'll split their attention.

Well, that was the idea anyways.

RIP Werewolf. Fucking laser weapons hit them so hard, and do so little stun.

The other one does well at least. The ship only has some peons aboard, and we are very good in close quarters.

A technician runs under the ship, and I decide to try pop his shield again so the werewolf can howl at him. Sadly, he dies from this shot. Shields probably hadn't recovered enough yet.

The enemy ship has a hatch on the second floor that leads to the roof (what a nice feature!) which we use to howl at this Mechtoid from close enough to actually deal some stun damage.

Turns keep dragging on as the bastard keep spreading out and being obnoxious.

The mechtoid got some good hits in before we knocked it out. Given how far we are from medical attention, this is kind of rough.

We're on fire too, and to make matters worse a sectogre showed up, climbing those chains to get up here quickly. And like an idiot, I howl at it, which does nothing because theyre basically immune to daze, I think. I forgot we studied them and could have checked that now.

Thankfully, we manage to snipe the ogre from the ground, and it triggers a victory!

I'm surprised Pierre keeps getting stat gains, he's been around for a long time and gone on many missions. I'd have thought he be capped by now.

We get a nice haul, including 2 more charger parts, both a technician and a mechtoid alive, and several other prisoners. Not a bad trade for one werewolf, but we really need them to sub in for our elites until our team builds up again. I'll have to focus on training more werewolves pretty hard.

Finally got this done. Does nothing on it's own, but now we can research the library, which is the next major tech tree tier after the workshop.

Fuck. They aren't supposed to survive that.

Huh, apparently it was a missile swarm. Also, apparently it bloew up the fucking base defenses! And then blew up the rubble where the defenses used to be for good measure.

Annoying. We'll need to clear the rubble before we can rebuild on those spots. Thankfully I do have some peasants and bloodhounds stationed here, with some simple weapons and landmines, so we'll at least be safe from getting the base picked off by fucking ratmen or something until we repair the defenses. But if a nastier crew, like demons show up, it's probably lost.

Still, it makes more sense to rebuild the defenses here than start a whole new base. Fuck though, that cost about 4 million. Good thing we're sitting on a nice nest egg. Extra defense tower this time for good measure, hopefully that'll be enough to stop a missile swarm. Also, hopefully they don't missile swarm our main base, which has shittier AA guns.

Wow, they really did not like that fucking base. At least plantations are cheap, and it didn't even leave rubble to clean.

I sent our sharkbike over to check in case there's like a ship here firing the missiles or somehting, but didn't find anything, and the attacks stopped with that second one.

Refresher on how missile attacks work for anyone who needed it. I know I did. Good thing that library is on the way, because we're going to need proper defenses now it seems.

P.S. You guys suck at trolling. Rate a post like this with despair or something so everyone thinks the update destroyed the save file. You totally wasted the chance on the mansion run, I set that up so well.

 

[Luka-boy]

Welp, now I feel bad.

At least you got to see some of the new cool New Turn pictures and menu backgrounds.

 

[Jaedar]

Huh, apparently it was a missile swarm. Also, apparently it bloew up the fucking base defenses! And then blew up the rubble where the defenses used to be for good measure.

Welcome to my life of the last 2 in game months. Thankfully, I have good enough interceptors to stop most of the swarms. It sure taught me to not skimp on radars however.

The cause of the missiles is those "ninja jetbikes" you showed a few updates back. They fly around to try and spot your base, and if they find it missiles appear.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Grinding.

Now that we're actually dealing with aliens, we'll start to see a lot more lore and high tech stuff. We're getting close to the limits of what I've seen before. I've gotten a little further than this, but not by much. I think we're well positioned though. Despite my lag on getting libraries set up and somehow being stuck on this awful ship for so long, our arsenal is better than anything I've had before by a wide margin, and we can't even fire half of it yet. As long as the production bases can stay online (note to self: build more defenses at Avalon to handle missile swarms) we'll be rolling in money. My big regret right now is actually that I didn't set up more bases earlier. It's going to be even harder if they're going to missile strike them as they set up. Well, we got kinda screwed with repeated invasions on foundling bases there.

Another landed ship engagement. I wish you could get a visual on landed ships before fighting, it'd be very helpful to get an idea of who flies what. At any rate, even without seeing the enemies, this cross shaped ship makes me happy- these tend to be used by the three main factions, which tend to be relatively easy and lucrative compared to raiders or aliens.

Sure enough, it's another academy hunting party. Sadly, we've only got one werewolf this time, so taking all these drones out isn't trivial this time.

Trying to alpha strike this guy is very tempting, but he's got a sniper rifle and full TUs, so it'd also be suicidal. I have to grit my teeth and bide my time.

More of this shit.

Still, even with one werewolf the drones go down fairly quickly.

These Osiron Security have excellent evasion for guys in heavy armour. Actually managed to dodge this 122% accuracy swing. Well, there was more where that came from. Vibro swords are very, very good melee weapons. Can't see the stats, but probably the best we have. I've used them to cut down armored cars before in a single turn from full health.

We take some fire from offscreen here (stupid window lighting!) but it should be a big deal with frontal attacks vs chainmail. The lasers are from drones and hit for kittens. I heard a sniper shot but those are weak vs heavy armour...

Yeah, it was only 20 damage. Though I'd forgotten this gal doesn't even have 100 health yet. Annoying. I want to train everyone up but there just aren't than many easy missions any more.

Gumsmith mows down the sniper, and also a drone behind him. Miniguns are fun.

Not a bad result once more. Destroyed a lot of the drones this time but whatever.

Also, this craft had the wrong type of cannon. That IS annoying.

Just realized that if there are new production options available, they'll be basically impossible for me to notice. I'd have to go through this list line by line. See that sliver on the scroll bar? Yeah. Fuck that.

New gear option finally opened up. Well, we had one of these suits for a while but it was looted from smugglers. Now we can make them, and they're not even that hard, basically slapping tactical armour together with a grav harness. The armour is only really decent from the front, but with flight you can position pretty freely, so once you've got map control you can hang out at the edges of the map. Also, playing popamole using buildings or the ship as cover is highly effective. The description as a heavy weapons platform is pretty accurate- give a gal either a machine gun, rocket launcher or sniper rifle, and they can rain death from afar and not much enemies can do about it. Evasion is TERRIBLE though, so getting caught in melee must be avoided at all costs.

Haven't seen one of these before. Cost was trivial at any rate. Completionist % GET.

There's a weird dichotomy in this game between killing and live captures. Captures tend to be more useful in terms of loot, even if you don't need interrogations you can make slaves or do pit fights for glamour. OTOH, most of the commendations are awarded for kills, and those stat gains are absolutely valuable as well.

Finally got this. I've never actually recruited one of these before, you know? I'd got this tech right before one of my games went to shit. 20NV and 80% ThV out of the box is pretty crazy. Assuming they get armour that can enhance that further, we just got a huge improvement in vision. Excited to see what our options will be. Very expensive, but we can afford it.

Interesting, wasn't expecting this. Guess we've got two angles towards voodoo now.

I wonder if the hybrid thing is a result of our reticulan research as well?

Another round of recycling done with phyics defying results.

Time to put our new plasma charger to the test. Only 18 ammo and 35% base accuracy is pretty shit, but hey, it's free ammo.

I hate fighting the crews on these but picking are slim.

At least werewolves can comfortable soak their shitty flintlock guns.

And their inbuilt motion scanners are nice too. We could build and use electronic ones, but they still impose a massive 25 morale hit on use, and werewolves can easily recover that morale by howling.

I have to admit, even if they're bullshit enemies, they've got fucking style going for them.

Minigun usage at 4 tile range is disgusting, especially against such soft target. There are better weapons to use, but this one is so satisfying I can't stop myself.

Random shots into the distance for lighting purposes. I could use E-flares, and probably should, but I dislike fiddling with the inventory. Note to self: Set up more E-Flares when doing loadouts.

It's tedious, but we get in a fair bit of safe training here.

Tits Randier is using the gyro-autogun to land kills despite shit accuracy. I really do like this thing. It's like the perfect balance between range, accuracy, and fire rate with replacable ammo.

We send our werewolf in the flush out the last of the bastards. This is the worst part of these vessels; too many fucking hidey holes spread across 3 floors. I really ought to bring a cannon and just blast the outer hull to bits next time.

Fuck, I thought everyone with a sword was dead already. Thankfully we survive.

If werewolves have a weakness, it's probably melee. Which seems ridiculous for what they are, but bladed weapons have a high damage per hit, low stun and we've got shit evasion. Relying on counter melee is no good either with their shitty 80% accuracy.

Little fucker almost ambushed us to the south here. Gotta remember to manually set firing arcs after reaction shots tweak the direction your guards are facing.

Eventually I remember the ogres have crowbars for this exact reason and bust open the front of the craft for safer entry.

Overall a lot of stats gained, but mediocre in the places it's really needed, like accuracy str and hp. Well, Robroy got a lot of accuracy at least.

Actually, apparently Gumsmith has too. Minigun is apparently amazing for getting the Lady Luck commendation, which grants extra firing accuracy every level and occasional hp boosts. I guess that minigun is going to get passed around some more.

Finally. Aside from unlocking a ton more projects, this will let us start expanding our brainer numbers. Though it gets annoying having a bunch of different research tabs to manage, because they don't combine efforts. Also, expensive as fuck. We'll start with one in the main base for now and start spamming these once I've got more bases up and running.

Current main base layout. School will be done soon since I had a burrow waiting for this. Also, I should replace a bunch of those small crew quarters. Well, a turret is slated for that spot south of the access lift.

 

[Jaedar]

Just realized that if there are new production options available, they'll be basically impossible for me to notice. I'd have to go through this list line by line. See that sliver on the scroll bar? Yeah. Fuck that.

Yeah, this is a major problem with the mod. I frequently miss new options appearing in production/purchase menu, and research as well but not as bad. This is despite reading the tech tree for everything I research. I guess you could filter only on new, and mark everything as seen every week, but that's a hassle.
But hey, at least you still have a scrollbar! Mine is kinda just broken and doesn't display properly. I guess once with desired width gets below 1 pixel it goes wonky.

 

[Average Manatee]

Right click till the option is purple and it will be hidden the next time you enter the manufacturing screen. It's a safe bet that you probably don't need things like shivs on there.

 

[std::namespace]

...shouldnt have updated...

 

[BrotherFrank]

Not like we could have known an update that works for literally everyone else happens to not work here. Murphys law in action i guess.

 

[Damned Registrations]

All aboard!

Interesting! Not sure what I was expecting, but I like the sound of this.

We unlock this after finding rocket launcher tech in a gun almanac. The rocket launcher itself was nothing to write home about, and honestly neither is this. We can already buy two kinds of missiles. But maybe it leads to better stuff.

We shoot down another zeppelin. If I want to spam missions for training, it's pretty much gotta be shooting down targets, and civ craft with like 3 people won't provide much. just gotta be careful to not get people killed by those turrets.

Well well well, this is new. Not sure if new because of the update or just time/rank scaling. Either way I'd love to catch her.

AP sniper rounds will do for the turret eventually, even if it takes a few shots we can popamole with the ship as cover.

Except uh... I misjudged the TU cost and now Jaedar is stuck out there. Whoops.

It's fine! Ceres will finish it off with a lasgun...

Okay so we don't get the turret down. The good news is, Jaedar has a bunch of meatshields now!

Miraculously, the turret didn't fire at us for some reason. I dunno maybe it got too fucked up by the damage to fire or something. It was sniper and a bound can spot us so it should definitely be able to fire on us.

Gumsmith takes it down with the fatty this turn, solving the problem and revealing some more enemies.

The enemies, however, have a great plan of their own. They drop a hallucination grenade on our cluster of troops, causing half to go insane.

Quite the morale hit. We're just lucky they didn't go berserk and kill eachother.

Annoyingly, I don't believe we've got anything to cure this morale damage. Canteens heal 10 per us, but only to the user. Maybe painkillers would work from the advanced kits? I'll have tot try that next time. It says it only works on morale loss from damage, but maybe this counts.

Poor Jaedar decided to go his own way while insane. Good thing that turret is down and he's at least got some smoke cover.

Yeah... this is pretty awkward right now.

Eventually we get people under control again but the damned bloodhounds keep arriving and fucking people up. A problem we wouldn't have with a good ship.

Morale recovery is happening at least, albeit slowly. Getting some kills will help a ton.

This rum might help too. Still can't make this shit, or research it (hopefully library does the trick!) but I can recall this being the premier healing item. Heals 6 per wound (Scratch that, it's been nerfed to 4 or my memory might be shit), works for stun and morale recovery too, and can target both allies AND oneself. You can even bash people with it as a clumsy stun weapon which may or may not train bravery because of it's status as a medkit? We'll see once the research is done .

At any rate, we've got Gumsmith back in fighting condition. More hospital time for him though.

Unlike the reticulans, raiders are happy to run right at us apparently. They just keep piling in. Kinda scary honestly, given their use of grenades.

One has one of these as well. Extra scary having him so close; you don't need a lot of accuracy to score a kill when you're putting out potentially 300+ damage in a turn after including damage variance. Utterly deadly at point blank.

I'd really like to snag that mistress but our stun options are limited right now (was expecting ruffians to massacre for titles) but we do have a stun grenade handy.

Bit off target but it should help!

They fall over after a few extra bullets.

New problem though: We don't have either a catgirl or elite gal with 120+ TUs that can go grab the bodies and bring them back to stitch up and keep alive. I'll have to risk Gandalfia by having her run out with the rum.

Alas, she's too late. We got the mistress to stand back up, but after knocking her back out with the bottle, she died the next turn.

Lots of carnage for only turn 9. Which is good because this desert is fucking our freshness up. It's not even an open flat desert so we don't get the usual advantage that is the tradeoff for the heat.

Anyways, we eventually wrap things up. Nice xp gains this time. Gumsmith got a beefy 5 HP and 4 Str, which is quite nice. Lots of ACC gains too on people that needed it. Robroy even got +2 THR for that single grenade toss. Didn't expect those to be so good for training throwing, nice to know!

We snagged a few potential recruits, as well as a captive wandered and a zeppelin manifest, which I also don't recall seeing in zeppelins before. I've done probably less than a dozen all time though, so my data is very spotty.

Good stuff to know. Certain armours seem to change this, or maybe just have bonus defense? I can puzzle it out a bit better by examining the armour stats I think, but there's not much point before we even know our voodoo stats.

Sadly, two of our new recruits have the bare minimum morale scores. Coupled with the -3 morale per turn from the raider 'commendation' they start with, and they're pretty much liabilities. Still better than nothing, let the training begin!

And one of them actually had a very solid 70 to start with! Welcome aboard, Slut the Third.

Stat gains from the Tiger Tours I finally remembered to check out. Looks pretty shit for actual stat gains, but repeatably bravery training is awesome. Or it would be, except only 2 of our gals are eligible (Only Castaways maybe? Or rank based?) and it takes 100 damned days. Even if we could spam this to train our new raiders, it's take about two years to get them into shape. Probably way better idea to throw them into missions naked and hope for passive gains.

Got this one finished up.

Not everything gets chem munitions, but there is a decent variety, mostly short range stuff. Could be good if we get a stealth mission vs armored targets, or something with weird resistances. Chem rounds for magnums and slayer rounds for Govt. Pistols seems like a nice combo, and may as well make some chem clips for those excellent painbringer guns that have been racking up kills for our ogres.

Speaking of ogres, we've got a new one to replace Bowser.

And our Bugeyes have arrived! Lightbringer is the bst of them, and the stats are pretty terrible, not going to lie. I think even catgirls get better hp. Going to have to baby these guys if we want them to be rad snipers or whatever. I honestly don't even know what to build for until we research their stat caps.

Their default armour is pretty nice. Not at being armour mind you; it's shit at that. But SENSE 2 is very cool, and it's got potentially decent evasion once they gain some stats. Lots of inventory space too, and a built in medkit. Just as well, we'll be needing a safe way to give them xp and applying bandaids is the simplest option.

Tits is coming along but still has some fairly low stats for some things. Time for her turn at MMA training. Thankfully, with our bonuses, the recovery time is only 10 days, not the listed 21.

For comparison, Average Manatee is probably our best unit at the moment. Still has a bit of room for improvement in some places, but can solidly fill pretty much any role at this point, which makes training that much easier.

Another craft shot down by our plasma chargers. I'm starting to like these things. Looks reticulan.

Sure enough, it's a tiny 5 man crew easily handled. Bit of training for our new members. I forgot to try out their psi powers though!

Huh. Was kind of hoping for some kind of new mission unlock. Well, maybe it does later on or something. I'll probably hoard these instead of selling them. Who knows what random ass items might be tradable for bounty tokens in the future once we get more patrons.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Maintenance.

Mini update to kick off my weekend.


With the library incoming, I've decided to mark off all currently available research as 'old' so that when the library is done, I can see what new stuff is available. This isn't an issue when research leads to research as you get a popup window (unless you skip it by going to the manufacturing tab or something... argh) but it IS an issue when buildings finish IIRC.

Nurses are no longer providing research. Huzzah! I've started making a list, because this shit is hard to keep track of and it's important to not waste potential intel or clog my prisons. Definitely incomplete but so far:
Academy Nurse
Drifter
Guild Hostess
Savy Girl
Sharp Guy
Siren

Going through and setting production items to old or hidden status as well for the same reason, but this is a much, much, MUCH longer list. I gave up a little further than 25% of the way when my wrist started to hurt. I'm old. I'll finish it later. Probably. (Not.)

Did find somehting new while doing that, but it's not useful to us.

Also noticed that this spot with the enemy hideout is still getting these craft landings with escorts or whatever. Supply missions that make ships? I've no idea. Library will lead towards hyperwave scanners to see missions and shit, but I think that's a whole tier past library as well.

Zeppelin/Necroplane grinding continues. Really wish I could safely find and shoot down bandit gunships instead of necro pirates, but it is what it is. Remembered to test the psi powers this time. We've only got two, and neither, sadly, are mind probe.

Terror burns 10 morale, maybe 20 energy and 1 freshness. Probably pretty nice for niche circumstances.

Possession burns 25 morale, 40 energy and like 10 freshness. This seems pretty useless outside of some hail Mary attempt to not die. This isn't remotely spammable and the success rate is probably utter balls unless the target is so close my dude is already like dead or surrounded by allied corpses. Hopefully tools and or better outfits make this more viable. Note to self: Try giving these guys wands to play with, and bring a brainer outfit to check results.

Tried out the light auto cannon for busting up their hull, but it doesn't have the required oomph. Also tried an enhanced boarding gun to pretty much the same result- like 1 in 10 shots could take out a wall. Would be good for popping streetlights though.

Also, our now eldest catgirl is strong enough to carry this thing whithout losing most of her TUs.

These guys don't have sniper, so as long as she's far enough away and in the dark, she's safe to rain hellfire down on our foes. Gotta get that hover armour online to do this with more gals.

Even with our overwhelming firepower and werewolves as safe spotters, this mission is so tedious and the loot so underwhelming I seriously considered just leaving after killing the closest half dozen enemies or so. But we really do need the xp.

Even if the xp from a mission is shit, mission completions themselves, especially at night, are valuable too, albeit less so. A good incentive to bring lots of crew even if you want to concentrate kills on a few gals.

 

[Gandalf]

Last pic is:

 

[oasis789]

Huzzah! I've started making a list

imagine a pirate gal standing over an unconscious enemy asking whether "is this one on the list?" and then watching them bleed out

 

[Damned Registrations]

Avatar of Death

Finally got this corpse exam done. Looks like it's a man in a can, like I thought. Creepy. Didn't realize it had spotter and sniper, but that makes sense if it's a reticulan of some sort. Not much surprising here unfortunately. Really wish these screens revealed evasion stats.

Apparently we we can carve it up for parts. Not particularly valuable parts mind, but what else am I going to do with a canned corpse?

A ship that had landed on that base has landed nearby, I'm pretty sure. No idea why, but that sounds like a bad thing to let happen, so we're at least going to take a look see.

Lots of Osiron Security. No drones this time. And they are VERY heavily armed for such low tier troops. Concerning, but also maybe promising.

Jaedar does for one of them with the Fatty. Gotta be careful to avoid reaction fire, doesn't take great reactions from them when they're at 100% TUs.

At the same time, I don't want to spend the turn in the ship, because if this guy walks up and opens the door, who knows how many enemies might unload into the doorway. Howling will burn TUs off this guy at least, so-

Ouch. Didn't think that thing could be snap fired. I was apparently wrong. I guess most things can be, even if it's a terrible idea to reaction fire a rocket launcher for the player.

Luckily, it missed and our meat shield earned his keep.

Gandalfia scoring a kill already. That Smasher is damned good for such a light weapon.

Next turn rolls around without incident, and a few more crawl out. Minigun and boarding gun finishes these two off.

I also realize I can hold alt to see the accuracy of the psi attacks. Apparently it's a range (I think because it's factoring in theoretical voodoo defenses?) and doesn't show damage numbers.

I also drops off slower than I expected, only losing 1% per tile. Still not very good though, I tried to have both advisors tag team the nearest dude with terror and a final attempt at posession and didn't notice any effect. Will need to find some better info on what targets to try it on.

We made it to turn 3 without anyone blowing up. I'm a bit worried about what else might be on this ship if all these guards are packing explosive weaponry.

Well, fuck.

Did I show this off before? It's been a while since we randomly recieved wreckage of one of these. Every time I've encountered these before they killed someone, often multiple someones. They were also always guarding academy Espers, which are pretty friggin' important. Also also, the damned things are apparently fairly EMP resistant. Fuck. If I had seen one of these at the start, or even known it would be here before landing, I'd have never even attempted this fight.

Let me be clear here. This thing is a fucking avatar of death as far as I'm concerned. It's 33 tiles away, and I have a clean line of fire on it with a minigunner already crouched in position with full TUs. I'm not taking that shot because I'm certain it will return fire and accurately one shot her from over there (the fucking craft lights aren't helping!) It can fly and shoot at the same time, quite far, probably like 3 shots a turn. It's also smart enough to use cover from what I've seen. The only reasons I'm even contemplating fighting this thing are that A: We've already taken out a lot of other troops, and with such little cover, this is about as good a chance as we can get to kill or capture this thing. And B: I'm actually fairly concerned this ship's mission was like 'fuck with local government and make it turn against pirates' or something. Catching the esper would be a nice trophy, but I actually wouldn't even interrogate her right away anyways.

We've got a lot of toys to potentially kill this thing, but really only one to capture it, realistically. The EMP damage is only 65% effective and 50 base power, but even with an average damage of 32, it'll be enough to get through the armour somewhat given it's high armour bypass stat, and the AoE will mean the damage can roll 4 times. And we don't need to fill the bar ENTIRELY with stun, just balance it out. And land the last hit with something that ignores self destruction... but the EMP does that too, I think.

Rather than stand in the brightly lit doorway, we'll have our catgirl take the launcher and play popamole with the ship.

Fuck! Nearly lost her to this prick taking snapshots from the second floor. These guys are endless!

Well, we ended that one with some bullets and got into position. Thankfully, this nook takes her out of LOS from the west too.

A couple turns go by without seeing the damned thing. I'm not shitting my pants, you're shitting my pants!

More security dudes popping out over here. They're weirdly concentrated over there, rather than near the ship. I guess it's where the buildings are, so they have cover there and are far more annoying.

We got a werewolf into this little shed, which should let us reliably get a good look for the saucer before it can get close to our ship.

I also pulled out a bigger gun for Azira in case things go to shit and we need to take it down quickly. Hadn't checked yet, but this this is, unsurprisingly, fucking great. Aside from the massive (0-200) damage, it's also 125% accurate at ideal ranges, has a decently long snapshot range and can be fired 3 times per turn. No other aiming modes though, sadly.

Turn 5 rolls around and we finally spot the damned thing again.

Jaedar still picking dudes off with the Fatty. That gun probably has more kills than most of our crewmembers at this point.

Well, we're in total darkness and like 35 tiles away. This is as safe as it gets.

The hit chance is piss poor though. Then again, even a near miss could do full damage.

However, we did not get a near miss. Shit.

At least we can reload again right away and took cover as well just in case.

Hmm, it moved back. I suppose that's better than it rushing at us and killing everyone.

6% accuracy clearly won't cut it though, so we move up to the next closest piece of cover we can get.

Azira is behind our craft as well, and could launch a shot that might hit as well in a pinch. Note however, that one tile beyond here the accuracy drops off to 0%. That is why I assumed enemies couldn't return fire with snapshots from so far in an earlier update. I'm sure the theeshold is explained in a tip somewhere. It's definitely a thing.

Jaedar could probably fuck this thing's day up real fast too if it came to that. Laser damage is it's major weakness.

"Hey boss, why do all the nice places we visit turn into burning ruins?" "Well, uh... piracy works in mysterious ways."

This is legitimately nerve wracking. For all I know there's a second one, or an Esper with some bullshit super weapon, or it's suddenly going to charge over and be right on top of our ship or hide behind the shack and kill our werewolf with reaction fire.

We've got a much better shot now, kneeling on the roof of the barn or whatever. It's still outside it's sight range, we should be good.

Except we can't aim worth shit. Well, using a weapon we literally start the game with to fire these things isn't helping.

Oh, and apparently standing up takes so much effort we can't even move back to cover. Shit.

Well, here's hoping our catgirl lives long enough to recieve the extra ammo delivery. We're also nearly out of these things.

Since it clearly doesn't have snipe or spot and isn't being aggressive, I pulled Relm forward to land some minigun shots on it. No idea what it's hp is, but I doubt this will kill it in one attack with such low accuracy.

Good thing there's no bad weather here. We can afford to be careful and patient.

Another good shot lined up.

Direct hit! Nice. It didn't fall down though, even though it already took health damage from the minigun three times.

Again, we can't return to cover, and we're even closer this time. But I think it'd spot our werewolf and kill him first if it did approach.

A snipe and a miss with our custom boarding gun. This thing has actually been quite effective, taking out several security in this mission with aimed or auto shots, depending on the range. I'd build or buy another if I could.

Minigun is erratic, but we land a few more hits with it.

Also, we set our shack on fire, but thankfully our werewolf didn't get instantly vapourized when he stepped out into the light to spot for us. Apparently it's reactions aren't THAT overwhelming. I'd guess they're around ~100 and it's spent half it's TUs moving each turn.

It's in a new position. This is as good a shot as we're going to get, even if we overshoot it'll be a direct hit.

Jackpot! It goes down. I'm not seeing any indication it was merely stunned though. Seems we killed it. Either it simply can't be stunned or we got very unlucky and the 16% of the damage that is dealt to health finished it off. Seems unlikely though, given we already landed a hit with the EMP. Unless the thing has epic stun recovery too, which it might. Who knows.

At any rate, we can finally approach the enemy ship.

Werewolf sniffing reveals... it's empty? Bizarre. I expected at least a pilot or something.

Turns out they're all holed up in this northwest corner. And this bugger sighted on Azira behind the ship.

He got two shots off with that CAWS, but by some miracle didn't land any (potentially lethal) hits.

Azira returns the favour. A waste of the ammo maybe, but it's damned cool looking.

Robroy tries his hand at busting through the ship hull with the bardiche, but no dice after 3 swings. Doesn't mean much, given how tough ship hulls tend to be. I really want to research that thing and see the numbers. Crowbar is still our strongest tool if I'm not mistaken, at least for reliable average damage per turn.

Phew. We took out a nasty group of enemies without even taking an injury. Good stuff.

More mediocre stat gains. We need a massacre to really earn some stats.

The loot was certainly underwhelming, no high ranking prisoners, and the weaponry isn't anything special any more. We did get a gauss cannon part and some ammo for it at least.

I sent our sharkbike over to look for an enemy craft as soon as the first box came up, but no dice.

What a massive waste of money. Honestly at this point I should probably abandon the base and rebuild elsewhere. OTOH, if this shit happens to our main base and blows up... well anything really... we're going to be utterly fucked. I need to figure out what is causing this and how to stop it. Might current guess are:

A: This was just triggered by time and is going to randomly happen from now on, and I was supposed to have predicted this and had way better AA to shoot down missiles by now.
B: This is caused by a nearby base that is sending out some kind of bombardment ships I'm supposed to shoot down. But the fucking things killed my radar and have attacked again before I could even rebuild, so if that's the case we're pretty fucked.
C: This is related to the secret hideout over in africa. This would be scary because it implies it could fire at by other bases too.
D: It's a monthly even that will pass, like that horde of large ships flying around last month.
E: It's retaliation for something I've done, like killing the Rimrider or Reticulan bases.

Honestly I've got no clear ideas at all. Thank god we've got the money to keep going at least.

Oh, and now the vault is full of rocks. More expenses.

Boy, sure would be nice if we still had 3 extractors and a still so I could just mine that shit into gems and gold.

I once again considered making a zeppelin or pigeon and having it float over there to keep an eye on things, but there's a problem; apparently zeppelins and pigeons don't have sight ranges like most craft do. Which, AFAIK, means it has zero chance of spotting an enemy base. They're basically just floating radar platforms. Which would be helpful in spotting an enemy ship at least, to be fair. But I'm not about to give up any of our 4 current craft for it.

More Reticulan tech.

This thing actually has excellent stats for taking prisoners, with 90 power all the way out to 12 range, and a twenty to one stun ratio. I really want one.

We unlocked this too. Seems decent but we've got way better courtesy of the Rimriders.

Well, that tough battle did have one major upside: We've got our 3 part and can actually build this thing now. These are excellent guns and fit in light slots, so they can even be used by something like the jetbike or pirahna. We've got lots of ammo for it too, the biggest drawback is that it loads in chunks of 25 ammo, which is wasteful if you needed like 6 shots for a kill.

Was browsing some shipping stats and noticed this thing has the same speed as the escorts that keep appearing at that base. If Govt fighters are going there I'm even more concerned.

I've decided on a plan for the missile swarms. It's either brilliant or retarded. The game gave me a suitable random name for the base, which I'll take as a good omen.

This base is just going to have the radar and a hangar to intercept whatever is approaching the other base, assuming they both live that long. It's not at all safe, but it's also relatively cheap. I'm certainly not sinking another 5 million into defense towers that might just get blown up again before they finish.

Spotted a large, but slow ship near our second base. Decided to intercept with the sharkbike for a look. Hmm. Mining ship? Loot? Good?

I'm not sure if this ship can blow up our pirahna in one shot or not, but it seems like a decent possiblity. However, this thing is becoming obsolete, so losing it and it's guns wouldn't be the end of the world.

Besides, it wins! Whatever gun that thing had couldn't hit us, and we eventually took it down.

Man, we've researched so much crap that probably would have given new research or production if we had a library by now. There's is going to be an explosion of new stuff in 3 days when it finishes.

Finally chatted up the living mechtoid we captured. And...

Purple shields! Or something highly related anyways. It seems we'll need the library for further research here too.

Oh, we did get one new tech from that though. Not sure how mushroom beer is related to dimension X, but I guess we'd better find out! We certainly have the mushrooms to spare.

Enough thinky talk. Time to kill a large ship full of labourers.

Err... I guess someone beat us to it. Should have brought a nun.