So, first thing I do is send my crew after a very small landed ship like an inch from our base. A ship which got into the air and attacked as soon as we arrived.
Welp. Fuck. We just lost the turtle. I can't even muster rage over this. It's total bullshit, but total bullshit is the new normal.
Grabbed our new contact on the off chance it has something really nice.
Well, Ramjet Cannon sounds like a large craft weapon, maybe we can get a scarab going again. Tank parts are nice too, because those are not easy to acquire.
Dang, this looks similar to a shit I thought might be an extractor before. Note to self: Windows on ship = war machine.
Rum has been researched! It's made out of coconuts, which we have a massive stockpile of. It's not as profitable to sell as the apple wine, but it's not bad either. It's also a great personal healing item if you have the room that doubles as a daze weapon.
Ramjet cannon is indeed a heavy weapon. It's a little underwhelming for accuracy and ammo, but with ammo we can simply purchase and filling large slots... we should probably put a scarab together with 2 of these and a gauss cannon. Between the three weapons most things should go down pretty easily. However, I'm going to hold out on that for a bit in case we unlock a nicer ship to buy.
Flame damage tip. Seems interesting, but it also seems like fire bombs would be basically useless if it works this way. We'll have to try flamers out some time, maybe on some ghouls.
Soulsense researched!
This actually opened some interesting new options. Novice robes only fit on a type of gal I've never managed to recruit, but the desert witch is part of the plot related to voodoo, so that seems really good. And hyper-wave stuff sounds like it might get us towards radar that tells us what the fuck is flying around.
Did this wand first hoping for a good capturing tool, but it's pretty crap. I mean, choking is pretty good on certain targets, but even so... Might stick it on ogres to give them poisoner though, that could be cool.
Got our crew back from the downed ship.
Thankfully, by some miracle, the Fatty wasn't on that ship. However, we lost a ton of other great stuff we cant replace, like half our plasma knives and various other high powered stuff I keep around in case of nasty surprises. And a ton of medical supplies. We do at least still have all the armour from those crewmembers.
Oh, perfect! Now that we can't even send in a crew of 12. Not that we have the werewolves I had planned to use for this anyways!
Fuck it, we're going anyways. God we lost the environmental gear too; I'm totally going to forget that and get fucked in a scorching mission later.
Misssion splits up our 8 crew, and clumps all the ogres together. Bah.
Directly underneath our spawn points are some empty rooms with 4 doors. Some of the doors seem to be dead ends, which makes them great cubbies to hide in!
We find a raider in an adjacent room and Lightbane lands 2 Terrify attacks in a row. Not sure if that's overkill or not, but it seemed like the thing to do.
Pretty quickly a pattern of many similar rooms appears. This is pretty nice, it gives us good control over entry points with all these false doorways.
There's a lower floor too, but it seems to just be cosmetic for the sludge, there are no tunnels down here.
Seems we're in some sort of sewer? We eventually find a doorway that isn't false and it reveals this. Another nice, abusable layout.
The group on the north side finds this room however. Lots of raider gals and buzzards in here, which makes it a little sketchy, but their weapons are mostly crap and we can use the door for cover.
The big room seems to have mostly real doors, and we find more enemies surrounding it. Seems this is where most of the fighting will happen.
Some of them do have more dangerous weapons, like this scout with a painbringer. Still not a real threat to our ogres though, provided we don't give them side armour shots.
The wall-doors look a bit flimsy, so I try blasting through with a plasma pistol and it works on the first try. It's a shame we can't get more ammo for this thing.
Echidna does the reaction ninja dance in here, trying to hit and run and hide in doorways. A tad sketchy, but it works out.
And our target shows herself. Yep, that's pretty much what I expected.
Thankfully, she's way over there and doesn't seem to have killer reaction fire, so we have time to kill her minions.
Still terrified of her weaponry, so I'm hiding behind the doors. Feels sketchy, something dumb could happen like a buzzard opening the door and the gnome gunning us down through her own ally or something.
Echidna ends up guarding this doorway. Again, this could end terribly if like, an enemy attacks her, gets knocked out and opens a path for the gnome to shoot. But I need to take some risks, and this seems like the best one.
More random enemies going down to plasma pistol. Some of these were raider bosses. I'm not even going to consider catching them while that gnome is roaming around. BURN fuckers!
The gnome gets close enough I can try have Echidna rush out and stun baton her. This... does not work. In retrospect, I don't even know if the rear armour is weaker. It often is, but that cockpit might make the front weaker, like it is on spider queens.
Since the baton isn't doing the trick, she obviously doesn't have some massive electricity weakness. However, I would really like to catch her, so lets try the net. It's damage range is much higher, it can probaby get past the armour.
Trying to make sure nothing sneaks up on us reveals a raider with a chem blunderbuss. Huh. That would be great for lowering the gnome's armour...
Fuck. I transferred the net to Manatee for the higher throwing skill, but it's a strict two hand item.
I opt for another strategy: Dropping a sleep gas grenade in the 2 tile room between the doors. Should contain the blast so it won't hurt us. If that cockpit is as open as it looks, it might knock her right out!
Relm circles around behind to trap her inside the room. Hopefully the combination of melee evasion, armour and damage resists let her survive that power armour's weapons.
A stressful turn for sure, but the plan works! The gnome tries to use what is apparently a rapid fire shotgun, and all shots are deflected. The gas bomb went off but I've no idea if it did damage or not.
Echidna gets her hands on the net next... but apparently she has 50 throwing and has terrible accuracy with it. Shit.
Tits randier gets it and fires it next turn with decent accuracy. Sadly, no damage.
Oh! But it's reusable! I thought it was a consumable for some reason. That makes it WAY more useful.
We've got a chem grenade too, but that would likely only damage her under armour, which won't help the net deal damage. And it might blow up the doors.
Oh, but this should work! Modron grabs the chem blunderbuss and brings it over.
Lightbane also tries some psi attacks to no effect. Not surprising given the high voodoo stats and bravery on gnomes.
One of the raiders was a humongous type with a spiked mace. Spiked maces can strip armour! Perfect, we can shred the armour and then land the net. In theory. Also, if the mace itself does damage it also causes a lot of stun.
Gnome just keeps using the shotgun every turn. The drill did get used as a reaction attack once, but it whiffed. Maybe it's not being used due to low accuracy?
The blunderbuss has a handy option to fire all 4 shells in one volley. That should be a LOT of armour stripped.
The shells should be doing ~2 armour damage per pellet, and that was somehting like 40 pellets if I understand right? That armour should be FUCKED.
Net still does nothing. She's either electric immune or has insanely high armour AND we low rolled the net.
Mace is connecting though. The first swing to her face even dealt health damage! Maybe it really is weaker in the front, or at least weak to concussive?
Random enemy woke up, found a chem weapon and then went berserk to waste the ammo. I send Echidna to go claim the weapon.
We explore around a bit more as well, finding some interesting rooms but no enemies.
We do find a wrench though, which has 15% armour stripping instead of 10%. This is even better!
Sadly, the next mace hit that lands simply kills her. In retrospect, she was probably stun immune, and the mace doesn't bypass stun immunity. We'd have needed like... blowdarts? The howls should have done the trick too if she wasn't daze immune. A damned shame. Lots of xp at least, and in melee which is tricky to train.
We get a bunch of raiders and a couple interesting items, but I feel like the real prize was meant to be catching the gnome alive, and we failed to pull that off. Should have brought a brainer, that would have helped a ton to figure out how to handle her.
Lots of enemies flying around. I think it's mostly the police cruisers but who knows.
Ugh. Whatever, come and get shot down, on the air or in the ground.
Seems like this will be how we get the promised 1200 tokens. Hopefully it resets the challenges too, because I really want another crack at that mission. Aside from being fun, it seemed like it was a good match for our team.
Nice, free catgirl!
And free catgirl gear! We can research both of those outfits, which will be nice. The unipuma has insanely high evasion if memory serves. And a catgirl in space could be really handy.
The girl herself is no slouch either, for a fresh recruit. Speaking of which, the 4 pod girls have been recruited and are being trained. Nobody amazing in there, but being lunatics like the original 6, they have respectable starting stats and won't need a ton of training to be useful.
Hmm, I don't think I want to try this with a crew of 8 using the pachyderm. We'll have to put this off until we get a new ship. Oh, and we couldn't even use the pachyderm because it's not stealthy or ground.
The reticulan ship. Big disappointment. 15 crew space is great and could allow for some tank usage, but the craft is just too slow to be practical with all these enemies flying around. It's no combat vessel either. A shame.
Dang, was hoping for these to teach me a power armour schematic or something. Well, bonus tokens are nice.
And one last tech researched from a captive MP. No big unlocks. It's interesting as an item, potentially turning some outfits into insanely tanky versions. Maybe I'll get one and throw it on that strongman outfit for truly ridiculous resistances.