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

[Gumsmith]

Building more hangers/bases for interceptors would be a gud idea, especially since multiple interceptors can attack simultaneously.

 

[Damned Registrations]

why are you not flying the white worm? it has gunz

Three reasons:

It seats 9 instead of 12.
It has most of the same problems as the turtle AFAICT, like suicide lights and too many doors and windows.
I'm worried about having a dog/zombie/whatever walk into a door to open it, then a second dog walking into the same door, hitting my crew with our own hallucination gas and having people go berserk and kill eachother.

so why bother

I mean, the power armour with it's giant drill arm looked pretty fucking rad. And it would be an easy 1200 tokens, which I could exchange for databases to make analytics rooms, or slave taskmasters or other goodies.

 

[Jaedar]

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.

It's really good against all low/med tier enemies.

and u already have a gnome so why bother

Can never have too many gnomes to put in your gnomediscs

 

[Average Manatee]

Btw remember to use the hotkey to see whether you are hitting and bypassing armor. It's possible she just had a ton of hp

 

[Damned Registrations]

Btw remember to use the hotkey to see whether you are hitting and bypassing armor. It's possible she just had a ton of hp

What are you referring to? Is there a combat log or something I missed or forgot about?

I've been judging the results of my attacks from the coloured flashes of the enemies sprites when they get hit. Which seems to mostly work but there are weird exceptions like the turrets flash different parts with locational damage. So maybe she was getting hit and I couldn't see it? But I think it was just stun immunity. She went down to only 3 hits from the mace, one of which only damaged armour, and all 3 of which were hitting the front, where the chems hadn't melted armour yet.

 

[Average Manatee]

Ctrl H I think.

I believe the color of the flash only tells you what the majority of damage hit while the hit log is binary did damage/didn't damage. I know you sometimes take some damage from shots that don't flash red

 

[Optimist]

Ctrl H I think.

I believe the color of the flash only tells you what the majority of damage hit while the hit log is binary did damage/didn't damage. I know you sometimes take some damage from shots that don't flash red

Doesn't it operate on the scale of [miss - 0 (hit, but no damage) - hit - HIT! ] ?

 

[lightbane]

Ctrl H I think.

I believe the color of the flash only tells you what the majority of damage hit while the hit log is binary did damage/didn't damage. I know you sometimes take some damage from shots that don't flash red

Doesn't it operate on the scale of [miss - 0 (hit, but no damage) - hit - HIT! ] ?

It does, with also including "Hit..." to indicate minimal damage IIRC. There was a way by editing the config files to display the exact number, but I don't remember how, and asking this in the forums annoys Dioxine.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Rotogun go brrr.

Hmm. Just an infamy bonus?

Weirdly, this researched Gnomes for us, even though we'd already done that. This happens once in a while.

Ah, the mission reward gave us these options. If we HAD captured the armored gnome, we could have either extracted her and gotten the 1 power armour part and a gnome, or turned her over to the bak for 1200 tokens and given up the armor parts. Not sure which I'd have done given the chance, but having the parts for killing her wasn't as terrible a result as I thought.

Yeah, not falling for it this time buddy.

Interesting that the bravery powered weapons are also considered magitech. Makes sense I suppose.

Autogun? Autogun! Though that cap might give us a use for the gems... I ended up forgetting about it but now I'm thinking that's a high priority actually.

Our score is in the dumpster. We're not doing many missions, and just letting Megapol patrol all over the place this month.

This was actually less effort than I expected.

Not useful though, sadly. We can already buy the craft charger lasers, and while a laser tommy sounds cool, there's no way it's on par with our rimrider guns.

One of the cooler myths imo.

I bit the bullet and did this one. I think it disables some of the easier mission types from now on- but it's also key to getting better ships.

Some interesting options.

Intel from a captured raider- wait. Are these the fucking things that shot down my base?

Cat can now into space. Armour is decent for a cat, and it's got better stats than most space suits, but still cumbersome compared to on ground, and 20 armor won't go far vs laser weapons.

!?

Ah. I think perhaps researching gnomes has unlocked events that will bring them to us. Either that or we just randomly got one for free shortly after ding the cinderella project, which would be annoying. Well, gnomes are rare and have their uses, we'll hold on to her for now.

The hybrid fighter. It's kind of like the scarab, but 2 light 1 heavy instead of the other way around. And no shadowtech slot, and not battery powered... meh. We're on the right track though!

This will be hilariously accurate in the hands of soldiers like Belle or Gumsmith. Apparently it can also fire 'arcane autogun ammo' which I now really want.

Ah, this is still a little underwhelming, but it's good enough as a replacement fighter. It'll burn through hellerium but we have plenty, and with 2 light guns it can cheaply handle weak targets, with a pair of seagull launchers to handle nasty surprises. It's a lot faster than the pirahna, though still not hitting that important 5k mark that a lot of enemy vessels more at.

Apparently it's also a wide craft, not that I'd want to use it for landing, it seats only 2.

MOAR ship options! Warship might provide a big landing craft? Lets try that. Improved fighter sounds awesome, but I need to get interception online ASAP, not wait another week for more research.

Ah, and here we have a potential troop transport. It's even decently armed and can do water missions. However, it's slow. I don't want a repeat of us losing our troop ship because it got caught by some stupid patrol vessel.

Also, it uses our spacious hull we started with. I'm not certain, but I strongly suspect if we do more research we can find a better variant to make with that hull. I'll hold off for now. I have used this thing before though, and while it's no Shadowbat, it is a respectable craft in terms of doorways, cover, lighting and so forth.

We'll start with the hunter killer. It's going to take a while to build anyways.

Not a lot of missions this month, hence all the big researches happening at once. We do get this warehouse mission where Gumsmith tries out the wand of airlessness. It's much better than I gave it credit for- I wasn't taking into account the quad damage most enemies take from choking damage.

No skill gains for using it though. Maybe just bad luck.

Huh, apparently these guys are a bigger deal than I thought. All he gave us for intel was another ancient log though. Lame. I should have held off.

Hrmmm. Sounds like this is our ticket to 5000+ speed ships. We've got pastasteel and SC wire, so we can probably build whatever this is leading to.

I want it! It's another terribly long research though, and we've got so much other stuff I badly want too. Really need to get more brainers online.

Ah; this is the ninja counter attack I was expecting. Every time I'd done village defenses previously, I got this response within minutes. Not sure why that didn't happen in this game, but whatever. Time to fight some ninjas!

Quick refresher on ninja gals. They're basically like us, but with good camo and sniper/spotter.

I actually hide the first turn after seeing a weird explosion go off from reaction fire. Later realized it was just gas cloud flintlock balls, but it had me shook since it sounded high tech.

More lady choking from Gumsmith. These take an extra hit or two to put down, but still easier than a lot of other methods.

Some of the militia were in this building. I have Azira stand in the doorway to keep them from getting out and zerg rushing the ninjas.

I've got several of the gyro-autoguns now and they made the mission a breeze. Reliable damage from overwatches is a godsend. Light snipers can fill a similar role, but this requires far less skill and is a lot more useful in close quarters.

Nothing earth shattering here, but we get a few prisoners and the badges are worth 15 tokens a piece.

Ah, and we unlocked this! If memory serves, this is a repeatable way to get freak gals. I think we need to provide a young uber to convert into a spy though? We'll see.

Damn, been a while since I saw this screen. Time to sell a bit of our treasure hoard.

We get a tribals mission too. Note to self: I forgot to exchange the tribals for tokens and hero blessings.

Some nice xp for the spider massacre, as usual.

Lots of these 5000 speed ships flying around. Our hunter killer is ready to go, but nothing in sight to shoot down.

Actually didn't get enough rating for our next promotion, which is fine by me. We've got a ton of research to do at our current level still.

Huh. That was underwhelming. Dang. What are these shadow ships? I want one!

Spoiler

(I've had them before, they're nice! Shadowbat is one.)

Yep, the feud is on. If we hadn't lost the turtle to that bullshit megapol getting back up in the air, these would have done the trick sooner or later anyway. They're very fast, very evasive, and can shrug off a single hit. The hunter killer can probably take them out, if they're dumb enough to attack it. But what we really need is a speedy warship that can chase them down.

 

[Jaedar]

Huh. That was underwhelming. Dang. What are these shadow ships? I want one!

I'm pretty sure that the bonaventura also counts, since it has an STC slot. 18 crew is really nice as well, even if it is kinda slow. Can put two large units in there and still have enough room for a big squad of footsoldiers.

Also, it uses our spacious hull we started with. I'm not certain, but I strongly suspect if we do more research we can find a better variant to make with that hull.

There isn't. Each codex gets a "menace class" ship from their hull.
Secret interface trick: in the fence menu, you can right click an item. This gives you a list of all manufacturing recipes it's used in (ones you haven't discovered are shown as ******).

The hunter-killer is pretty good in my opinion. My midgame strategy for the interception game was to have one in every hideout with as many gauss cannons as I could make. The low speed isn't great, but since a lot of ships have aggro radiuses, it can still "catch" faster ships occasionally (just hope you don't die from it).

 

[lightbane]

Wow, it took you forever to get the "primary" ship. The Bona is unique to this Codex, so don't bother with hoarding. You're meant to use it ASAP until you get something better.

 

[Jaedar]

Wow, it took you forever to get the "primary" ship. The Bona is unique to this Codex, so don't bother with hoarding. You're meant to use it ASAP until you get something better.

Pirate airforce is pretty deep in the tech tree. Start of 3rd year is late imo, but it's not exactly news that the lp is not doing so hot in gameplay terms (fun read though). Bonaventura is also a cool name for a ship imo.

Also, case in point regarding my perceived gnome value: I did the same zaxx challenge mission (I had zombies instead of raiders though. Not fun in those cramped rooms), but I captured the gnome alive (thanks gray codex!). And I recruited it rather than sell it for bank tokens (cost to buy same amount of bank tokens on the market: 12 million).

 

[lightbane]

Pirate airforce is pretty deep in the tech tree. Start of 3rd year is late imo, but it's not exactly news that the lp is not doing so hot in gameplay terms (fun read though). Bonaventura is also a cool name for a ship imo.

That has been changed since last time I played then. The early part of the game is maddeningly slow for sure.

 

[turkishronin]

You got so lucky on the ninja mission every time I do it there's like 6-7 of them facing the entrance of my ship.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Dynamic Duo

Kicking off with a giant cash penalty. If you'll look to the right, you may notice this drags our current balance right into the negatives. This is bad. Luckily I was able to fence some stuff before it hit a new hour, which would have cancelled all my manufacturing projects. Including the ones making money.

The spoiler screen for items. Or, one of them anyways. There's a different one for another screen that also shows where such items drop from, which is significantly more spoilerly. At any rate, I knew these exist, but have been choosing not to use them because I get a lot of fun out of figuring out which things are worth hoarding on my own, and making decisions based on my limited information. Knowing that half my treasure will never have a purpose except to be sold would certainly make things easier, but also a bit more boring. Incidentally...

Wow, it took you forever to get the "primary" ship. The Bona is unique to this Codex, so don't bother with hoarding. You're meant to use it ASAP until you get something better.

Boo! I'm just not going to use it out of spite now. Which is a shame because it has a pretty cool layout if it's like the other variants. Though he's not wrong about this being fairly late in the game to unlock this ship, we could have had it like a year ago.

I passed up one of these warehouse bounties last month because we didn't have a ship small enough (max crew of 6.) This time we had the hunter killer. Is 2 people too few for this mission? Not when they're friggin' badasses it's not.

Speaking of badasses, the hunter killer lives up to it's name. I'm glad we haven't grabbed that research to spare civillian craft yet, as they are providing us with easy cheap ship engines we'll need soon, and some easy training as well.

For these small civ craft, I've started just landing as soon as the shootdown happens. We really don't need anything more than a couple decent people to handle these and I'm not interested in spending the time to bring newbies along to minmax a bit of xp from like 2 kills. Also, look ma! No suicide lights! We can actually end turn 1 and reaction fire on enemies instead of the other way around!

As a result of picking up some easy kills while practicing melee with his new outfit, Jaedar picked up the poisoner title.

Not sure if I showed it before, but titles also have detailed stat screens, which can be helpful when they're a bit vague about how exactly they work, as is the case here. Actually, if I'm reading this right, the title provides... negative health regen when at full health? I hope that's not right. At least he's got innate health regen anyways to cancel it out, but it'd be obnoxious if a gal ended up wounded for a day on every mission because of this.

Well, I was expecting this to let us forge credentials to use the enemy guns that are locked out from us, but a money printing operation sounds pretty rad too!

Sadly, it's not unlocked yet. This sounds interesting too though..

Another potential mission type we could research. These are annoying ones that incur an infamy loss for ignoring however, iirc. And they're starred, which implies they'll erase an old type. Hmmm. Probably wait to get this after a nice troop ship.

We snag a blood ritual mission! It's werewolves again, which is nice since we were actually starting to run out of them.

This brings our total # of feral ones to 10 I believe. And we got another castaway too!

Since we've got a bunch of castaways now and not a lot of missions to do without a proper ship, I elect to give half our crew some heavy training. I was even tempted to do some tiger tours for the free bravery but decided against it. I don't think they get their dojo training while shipped off like that, and the swabbies still need to be brought up to snuff.

Researched this one. No more free loot temples for us. These are still pretty easy missions, and we can use them for training, racking up a lot of kills and potential slaves. There will me some middle tier church units there too as instructors, which might still give us intel if we catch them.

We snagged a second queen from that catacomb mission last month, so I sacrificed one on the altar of research.

Sadly, no awesome spider riders were unlocked. They're definitely the most vauable monster to capture in terms of butcher potential though. 50 silk is a lot of cash.

Intel from a ninja. Note to self: Ninja turrets are fucking scary.

Our latest castaway bumped us over a threshold, allowing new promotions. Some cool titles to go around, and a bunch more monthly wages.

Reward for freeing the tribals I finally remembered we had. Moon flower and another stone are nice!

Got around to research our buster zombies. The second one will be butchered to get his delicious brain.

A yes, our happy quiet life of being blown up by ICBMs.

Anyways, this is a cool way to make use of any young ubers we can get our hands on. We can get valuable intel out of them, and the young ubers can be converted into freak gals having gotten experience as spies.

Curious. Does this imply we migh run into X-Com as a faction still? Maybe they've become villains?

Found a small, fairly fast ship near avalon and gave it a shot. Looks like another gunship.

Wiped us out easily. Yeah, we really need hunter killers instead of pirahanas at this point.

She looks fun. Lots of VIP cards popping up lately, wasting valuable research time. It's annoying, but also satisfying to know we're clearing them out of the pool.

This doesn't seem to promising, but it was a cheap tech. It's another way to make use of personal databases. Not optimistic about the value of humanist files though.

I believe this opens up a questline towards another potential voodoo trainer like the desert witch. Or something. At any rate, having done this, I expect an event involving some girls in the near future.

Tried chasing a ship only for it to lead me out into the ocean and then turn on me. Must be some sort of patrol car.

It went down after a single missile, which was apparently enough to blow it to bits. Not that we'd have had wreckage to recover over water anyways.

Another narlock village raid. This place actually looks kind of nice in the daylight. I like the central building surrounded by trees.

Researched this. Seems a bit underwhelming but better to have on hand than not I suppose.

Researched this hoping to unlock more ogre outfits, but no dice. However, we do finally get to see ogre stat caps.

Or theoretical caps, anyways. Gumsmith's baseline reactions are actually above and beyond his racial cap, at 64 out of 60. He's got +10 from titles (which don't count towards the cap) and -5 from armour, giving him his 69 here. Nice! Does this mean you can exceed stat caps by making people train in armour that gimps them? Interesting if true, but I feel like it doesn't work that way, having trained a lot of gals to become excellent throwers while wearing rogue outfits that give a sizable bonus to that stat. Probably just an example to the racial caps being soft caps, rather than hard caps.

Score still looking kind of shit, but we've got 2/3rds of the month to go still.

Found a landed reticulan craft with a lot more enemies aboard than I expected. Definitely won't turn my nose up at another fusion reactior.

And they even had a moon flower for some reason! Or maybe that's from the terrain. Who knows.

More gnomish antics.

If I were playing solo I'd probably ignore this, as it's kind of tedious and the rewards aren't great, but I think we'll do this for the sake of the LP. I'll have to scrape some goblins and equipment together, but it should be doable I think, you can get this mission WAY earlier than this under normal circumstances. Look forward to my misery.

 

[Jaedar]

Pirate airforce is pretty deep in the tech tree. Start of 3rd year is late imo, but it's not exactly news that the lp is not doing so hot in gameplay terms (fun read though). Bonaventura is also a cool name for a ship imo.

That has been changed since last time I played then. The early part of the game is maddeningly slow for sure.

It felt bad back when it was first introduced, but it feels quite good now imo. It's fun looting new gear.

There's a different one for another screen that also shows where such items drop from, which is significantly more spoilerly.

Where ?

Look forward to my misery.

I am. I missed this mission on my playthrough, so seeing what it is about will be fun.

 

[lightbane]

Boo! I'm just not going to use it out of spite now. Which is a shame because it has a pretty cool layout if it's like the other variants. Though he's not wrong about this being fairly late in the game to unlock this ship, we could have had it like a year ago.

Your loss, my comment wasn't even a real spoiler, as you won't do another playthrough with a different codex for this lp, unless you lose. Cool pics so far.

 

[turkishronin]

So many ships, so few hangars...

 

[Average Manatee]

The Bonaventure type ships are kind of shit considering they don't have doors. If you get them very early the capacity is great but otherwise bleh. Some of them do make good gunships though, not sure whether yours would be.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The Bonaventure type ships are kind of shit considering they don't have doors. If you get them very early the capacity is great but otherwise bleh. Some of them do make good gunships though, not sure whether yours would be.

From what I recall they have a door covering the armory at least, and a hatch leading to the roof, to avoid suicide lights. And it only has a single ramp for things like zombies to approach from, so you can very safely control it from that sort of attack at least. It's certainly not the most defensible thing ever, but it beats the crap out of the turtle or the starter craft with all their windows on the ground floor.

 

[turkishronin]

Is it better than Skyranger though

 

[Jaedar]

Is it better than Skyranger though

I think yes. One thing that makes crafts like shadowbat or codexship good is that there is room for basically your entire team to step out, take a shot and step back in to relative safety(codexship requires some fliers to really pull it off, but that's fine). Skyranger iirc can't really accomplish that, and it also has bad sight lines so an enemy might sneak up from the side. It does depend a bit on how the codexship lands, it's not as reliable as the shadowbat, but it works most of the time.

Doors would be better, but I doubt there is a single "properly good" transport ship in the mod.

So many ships, so few hangars...

Tell me about it. One thing I am starting to really dislike about this mod is how you need like 6 different transports to cover all the mission types. At least most missions are slow enough to time out that you have time to swap ships around in your hangars.

 

[lightbane]

There are some mods, for Piratez and others or even standalone, for multi-ship hangars. I'll be surprised if Piratez doesn't end up getting one of these. I dislike how Dio and XCFiles hate "safe" ships with doors so that you can't camp during turn 1, as if battle fatigue, glamour weren't pressing you enough to move ASAP.

 

[Jaedar]

There are some mods, for Piratez and others or even standalone, for multi-ship hangars. I'll be surprised if Piratez doesn't end up getting one of these. I dislike how Dio and XCFiles hate "safe" ships with doors so that you can't camp during turn 1, as if battle fatigue, glamour weren't pressing you enough to move ASAP.

I haven't really noticed a lot of difference in winning fast vs slow for glamour tbh, at least not compared to winning "properly" and getting fuel for slavery/pitfighting.

Adding higher tier hangars with more space for ships seems nice. Just wish xpiratez wasn't so stingy with letting you upgrade buildings in place.

 

[Average Manatee]

Skyranger is close to the worst craft you can design for a few reasons:

- no door. You either have to rush out turn one or risk taking a big rocket to the face huddled in there
- one exit, so when trying to get out soldiers at the back can't do much till turn 2
- the exit has a drop, which means more TUs spent shuffling around to get out
- being raised up means immediately being shootable by everything in a 360 radius when you drop to ground
- the sides of the exit form a triangle where things can see and shoot your feet without you being able to shoot back

That said, it's great for the milk run missions with it's large space you can stuff rookies into and not let them out. Not taking advantage of this to train up replacements ahead of time for this LP is really holding things back I think. Also has lots of space for missions that won't involve your craft but you don't want to run a slow expedition for, like underground missions

There are some mods, for Piratez and others or even standalone, for multi-ship hangars. I'll be surprised if Piratez doesn't end up getting one of these. I dislike how Dio and XCFiles hate "safe" ships with doors so that you can't camp during turn 1, as if battle fatigue, glamour weren't pressing you enough to move ASAP.

I dunno, freshness and glamour are usually barely relevant to me. But I also abhor being forced to move out immediately rather than strategically figure out the situation first