We've finally researched the overcharged radar. This bad boy not only has a higher range, but has a 100% hit chance attack on base assaults. The firepower, sadly, is low enough that it won't shoot down everything, but it's capable of knocking some stuff out on it's own, and most things if the flak gun on our armoured vaults lands a hit too.
We've also started researching the hull and drill set, now that we're getting closer to workshops.
And we run that freezing warehouse mission. Luckily for us, it takes place in this nice city with a fucking sniper outpost right next to us.
The streetlights are a bit of a problem, but nothing a light machinegun can't solve. Although we're running out of ammo for that thing.
Easy!
I should get more heavy weapons for our boys, they could use the extra strength. Access is a problem right now though.
We've also started getting these. One for the autogun, which is just insanely accurate and deadly, and another for scoped carbines, which is surprising. One of us is apparently a kickas sniper.
Finally the game is cutting us some slack. We should have done like 5 of these by now. The bounty missions don't display the 'sea' estimate, which makes them a bit scary at first, but they're all actually quite easy compared to their rewards.
Unfortunately, most of our roster is fucking exhausted after the warehouse seige. So we're only sending in one gal and some soldiers, not even the zone walkers, just some slaves.
To compensate for this shortfall, I have a plan:
Pro tip: If you see an opened door in the fog of war, some sneaky little fucker is nearby.
These missions only ever have about half a dozen of these fuckers. They've got terrible stats, terrible weapons, and are basically at the level of the drunken ruffians standing around the campfire. Pure target practice.
In exchange for our legendary battle, we get like 500 infamy, because that's how bounty missions that drop tokens work. Where were you last month??!
A bit more frivolous research as I decide to ramp up the number of brainers. We've got plenty of apples still and our missions are at least pulling in loot if nothing else. Heroes' Blessings are actually pretty hard to get, but they give us income and storage just like slaves or culture does. Additional they can be used to make some ribbons that give a nice passive morale regen in battle. Or if we gather the funny number of them we can combine them into a super blessing that gives a decent chunk of income. and maybe unlocks awesome voodoo shit or something who knows.
Fuck it. We've gotten this far without the pirahna, we may as well spend the tokens and get our gunships elsewhere.
Roll them bones!
We cash in our copper and iron coupons first. Nothing too special here, although that advanced medipack is nice. I'd like a dozen of those please. But the real prizes are going to be the zortrium and tritanium coupons, the highest value types we can even use right now.
Well shit, that's disappointing as fuck.
That's even fucking worse! What the fuck RNG!?
However, our 3rd tier titanium tickets make up for it. Aside from some nifty anti chem stuff and a lousy chaingun, we get the moth of all weapons: The quad launcher. With this fucking things we can handle pretty much anything. Remember that crazy uber zombie with the plasma shot-chaingun? Yeah this thing would vapourize him in a single shot. With this in our back pocket, we can even take on the likes of shrine ships carrying cardinals and bishops for the church, if we find one landed. Unlocking some tougher missions may be in order.
Well, soon anyways. First we need to overhaul our armour. This is a big step.
I also get around to researching primitve weapons, which leads to tools (and poisons, which can be fun) which in turn leads to workshops, eventually. Big tech tree is big.
I also get this unlocked, which is a step towrds dojos, and maybe onsens? Honestly baffled why we have no onsens. I know it's available super early. Must be something silly like a bit of food or monster parts or something. We'll figure it out eventually.
I research one of these too, just incase it unlocks some kind of gun catalogue contact for us. No dice.
At least the gun it ID'd for us isn't a common one we could have done ourselves.
I start turning in stuff for goblin tokens as well. Unlike the other two factions, he gives us a fair bit of coinage with our tokens instead of just rep.
We also research a pile of old earth books, vainly hoping to unlock schools. Nope, just some lore.
But at long last, we've got enough for this. Aside from the unnecessary tip about how to unlock dojos, we get access to one of the best stun weapons in the early game.
Interrogations continue too. He just gives me the specs of one of their skorpian smgs I could have done myself, but whatever. I mostly did it for the extra infamy the next time we catch one.
Welp, better than nothing. We've been on the raggedy edge for months now, but I think things are starting to tip in our favour.
Another tech I research just because it's quick. Not sure if this really unlocks anything or not, but I've gotten tech unlocks from sillier stuff before.
And finally we research the specs for our uber gals. Just for comparison, I capped the pages for the boys and peasants as well:
And now, at long fucking last, we can research martial arts, which will unlock dojos.
I also bought about 9 of these. Accuracy over 100% might seem redundant, but it's actually crucial for taking out enemies with good melee stats. In the hands of a trained soldier, these things can knock out even heavily armoured troops quite reliably.
Another low level bounty we should have done like 5 times by now. Things are looking up if we keep getting these.
I also pull out a new toy to play with: the brainer outfit.
It's basically a discount mind probe, recquiring line of sight to use. Aside from being great for gauging new potential threats, it's the only ingame way of getting a lot of info about targets, like reactions, morale and hp totals. Combined with the research to understand their armour values and traits like nightvision, camo, and spotter/sniper traits, it gives us more or less the whole picture. As we can see here, highwaymen have shit accuracy and reactions, but pretty solid bravery and hp.
Aside from including the scanner, the brainer outfit itself has some nice perks, including a hefty 5 point reduction in enemy camo, 4 extra nightvision, and some fancy resistances to things like chems, electricity and fire.
Plus it's damned sexy. We also get a free database spawned into our inventory (the quickslot in this case) as long as we have room. Which isn't much, but lets not look a gift horse in the mouth.
A couple more enemy stat readouts:
50 bravery is actually much, much worse than 70 due to the mechanics, and these guys lose morale like crazy when teammates die (stunning doesn't trigger morale changes AFAIK though) and they have even worse accuracy, which doesn't matter much with their short range spray and pray type weapons. Also, a measely ~25 hp.
The fancy guys are more or less the same, they just tend to have pistols instead, making them even less dangeorus. Easy to capture, but also easy to accidently kill with reaction fire.
Strange fellow here somehow ended up right next to this sharp guy with no backup and all his TUs spent.
Luckily, our foe has a shitty shotgun. Between it's low damage, probably a penalty vs armour and it's crap range...
Even a shot from the side where the armour was thinner did piddly damage. Strange Fellow II simply stares down the barrel of the gun and laughs it off.
Huzzah! We got the sectoweed we needed to start our own weed farm! A month from now we'll have more than we'll ever need and be turning the excess into tons of cash. This basically means we have infinite money. Barring a base invasion that loses us that base, we're going to make insane amount of money, fast enough to start several more bases and destroy the economy. I've never actually done that before, simply hoarding 15 million dollars in my last game for over a year, but this time I'm going to do it right. More bases, more brainers, more craft. Absolute domination.
I normally get this tech much earlier, but I also normally have more hands than decent firearms, incentivizing a lot more melee and powerful bows.
Whatever. We just unlocked three more major techs. The first for our air superiority, and the latter two for workshops.
We've got some nice stuff queued up now. Labs are on the back burner again until our money explodes and we can afford to hire another 20 brainers or whatever and really get the juice out of them.
Yet another secret door. I'm begining to suspect these show up more often for cunning captains. If so, that's an excellent perk. Perhaps the mission pool or lack of wandering ubers is also being influenced though.
Who knows. I'll look it up after I've won in defiance of the unknown.
It perhaps bears mentioning; the very first tip you receive in the game is "Read or die". I quite like a game built around such a premise, and it lives up to that statement. Woe to whatever glue eating plebian tries to play through this game without paying attention to all these info dumps.
I a bout of infinite wisdom, imgur has deemed the follow image, which was a combination fo the following four images cropped and squished together, to be explicit. Fortunately, all the full sized images themselves are apparently safe for work!
I asked for suggestions on which codex to follow way back in the begining (or people offered anyways? I forget) but at any rate, we're now close to actually making that decision. Current votes are:
I wanna see the Green Codex
Salvage the ship and pick Red
Which makes for a 3 way tie. I've got one in mind myself, but won't vote unless as a tiebreaker. There's still at least a day or two before it's time to make the call. For those that are new or whatever, here are the options:
Our money problems seem kind of sorted to be honest, but I've got no idea how many riches are actually in there. And a fucking massive gun seems like a nice prize all on it's own.
I'm not sure what's going to be in the pods, but I suspect it'll either be ubers or gnomes. Either of those would be a MASSIVE boon to us. The medical facility might also allow for reviving fallen hands or something, who knows.
We can't get spike rockets right now, but they are indeed commonly available and we'll have access to them pretty soon. If the weapon can spam them out or carry more than a meagre 8 shots, it's probably one of the better options for air superiority. And, well, a fucking armory? Hell yeah! A pile of high tech weapons and armour would be a godsend for making the most of our small roster.
I've actually done this one (and only this one) before, so I've got some idea of what the rewards will be. It's certainly a strong option AFAICT, but I'd honestly rather see a new one. I'll stick with whatever the votes land on though.
The choice manifests as a manufacturing job, rather than research. However, to do the job we need 70 empty space to even begin (and maybe a proper workshop? I've never tried but it might also be possible to rush this by building a bunch of extractors instead to get the room needed.)
Another new mission we're not going to take. These guys aren't that tough, but their loot is ass and they are just dangerous enough to us right now that I don't want to risk it.
Another bit of tech. Weirdly, this unlocks nothing else. You'd think it'd do something for missions or contacts or something, but it's just a vessel accessory. Admittedly a pretty nice one.
Stats for the poor farmer whose barn we're about to explode.
Protip: There are two kinds of wheat in the game. Normal wheat, and uberwheat. Uberwheat fucking GLOWS. Do not leave your stealthy night-ops snipers in a field of uber wheat. OTOH, it makes for easy kills on certain maps, sniping idiots walking through it from dark barns.
At least! This is the answer, eventually, to our shitty roster. With this, we can start turning slave soldiers and peasants into, if not elite killing machines, at least perfectly competent grunts that can reliably land shots with carbines and carry around a medkit and bodyarmour. We're putting one in each base immediately.
Proper guns, here we come!
Well, once we get the other prerequisits. The first is just duct taping a pair of existing guns togeher, which requires no research, and the later is unlocked because we already research the 50mm cannon parts we found before.
Fuck, we need just one more part. Maybe we'll luck into it.
We got an event that gave us some cleaning billts. Before paying them (4500$ each) I research one. The 50 infamy is worth about 16k in cash, bizarrely enough.
I bit the bullet and bought enough brainers to fill our lab space. Now that we've got 13 going, it's time to shorten that list by picking up the info dumps on all these random guns. That, in turn, will give us better chances of valuable info from interrogations.
Cute pirate girl just wants to be friends. I think she's one of the voodoo masters? No spoilers please, about her and especially not about what the various codexes do. Or anything else or that matter.
RIP
