Stuff about the highwayman house and ratmen
From what I've seen, getting a lieutenant early is pretty viable; aside from the rodeos, they tend to show up in early game base raids pretty often and hang back until the end, making them easy captures. But I'm inclined to agree the mission probably isn't worth it. If you go at night, you're risking getting spotted by ratmen with excellent nightvision, or even just react firing at one and having it spot for the cannon. If you go during the day, you could very well spawn in such a way the cannon has line of sight on you to begin with and you get shot before even leaving the craft. It's just a huge risk. I agree getting air weapons early is huge, but I think going for the pirrhana ASAP is the way to do it. Jack's early missions are easy, and the ship he sells is fast and sidesteps the need to research vessels at a time when you've got a lot of other demands on your research. I do like the idea of using camo cats if you've got them early though.
Back to the action!
Cleavage and everyone below is the batch of freaks I recruited from. There were a couple with good reactions in there but they had terrible stats pretty much everywhere else. Masochist Slut was the one with the most HP actually, but it seems to have cut it down to the normal cap when I transformed her, unfortunately. Honestly, a bit disappointed with these for the amount of money spent. Yeah, you could theoretically get some good to awesome gals if you spent like, 20 million to recruit a hundred and sifted through them, but that's a big investment when you could just hire normal gals and train them a little longer.
More fucking bomber ships floating around our HQ. I really need to get another fighter built so I can just tag team one of these thing next time it shows up.
Well, that was simple. Definitely a relief to have that off the table, even if it didn't seem to be that big of a threat anyways. Not sure how that mechanic works honestly. I'd assumed it happened if you left an enemy base alone in a country or they did certain missions and weren't interrupted, but the whole thing is fairly opaque if you don't have decoder coverage everywhere and know where all the enemy bases are.
Huh. Didn't expect that as a follow up.
Anyways, we're still recovering from the previous missile strike. I'll feel much better once the SAM is up and running, at least.
Building a reactor in the drug lab too. Not much of a drug lab at this point though; only one plantation left. Turns out I might need to make a base for that purpose too honestly; the bio suits use 500 sectoweed, which I can buy but would be very expensive. The love clinics use 600, there's just generally a high demand for the stuff. I'd like to mass produce cigars as well, they're a lot faster to use than the smokes for turning health into freshness, which will be useful for the Biosuits.
Speaking of, it took some item juggling, but production on that has started. Still going to take over 2 days to finish. Quite the investment when you consider I had to make 2 unplugged power armour as well and use a lot of other resources.
Hah! This is hilarious. I forgot to build one, but I'm totally planning on giving this to Lenneth when I get the chance, in case it can generate Traditional kills. Working underwater is actually pretty cool too, especially if I can use choking or electric damage down there, the lobsters and fishmen seem weak to it. Maybe on the next devil's reef mission? Ogres are going to be huge there too, being able to ignore the aquamen.
We've got a different party to attend right now though!
this is long overdue. The map deals constant chem damage like the Eridian culling, but on top of that has random gas clouds as well. It leaves visibility super fucked, and naturally the ghouls can see through it better than you. The map is doable if you gear for it specifically early on- smokey outfits, chem coats and so forth, with flame throwers to handle the ghouls and something for the blood hounds they have as well. But it's a nasty map for sure.
Can't see anyone on turn one because they all spawn inside the buildings, usually on the upper levels too. I really hate this map. Oh yeah, and it's a 'no wide craft' mission, so get fucked if you wanted to do this early but can only send an airbus or something.
Anyways, at this point it will be trivial. We've got shields that can effectively ignore the chem damage, exosuits and gas masks for the choking, and Syns that can punch holes in doors with giant boomerang throwing stars.
Oh yeah, and the cybermages to see through all the crap and spot for us, without getting eaten by dogs.
First dumbass to enter line of sight.
The enemies here are a bit deceptive too; he has a magnum and others often have shotguns, but they're armed with chem ammo generally. Nasty surprise if you showed up in chainmail feeling invincible. They can use flamethrowers as well.
Another enemy taks a shot from the window over here. I could have shot back, but elected to instead teach him why standing at a window on ground level is a bad idea when people with swords are nearby.
Damn, it's such a long way around. If only there were some sort of device that could make a hole in the wall.
I fucking love this gun. It's got the wall destroying powers of a fucking bomb without the collateral damage to the loot or allies.
Luka runs up ahead to scout for more targets and gets found by someone with a chem shotgun.
Meanwhile, in the central building we find the main reason we came here;
These guys have tech we want. Fortunately they're very easy to take alive. They're even tougher than the normal ghouls, who already regen ~8 health per turn.
Good chance for Maria to practice some kung-fu.
Luka found one too.
We even found a third in the building. I hauled them over here and was planning to make a hole in their prison and throw them in, but the bullet passed right through the wall instead and started a fire. So I figured 'fuck it, if bullets go through, I can throw them through too right?' Sure enough, it worked, though it was a little fiddly. Now they don't need a babysitter.
This ghoul keeps getting back up, giving Optimist some nice target practice each turn.
Another ghoul was over here on a walkway. I couldn't get a shot on him from underneath, but I could hit the floor he was standing on...
I'd rather kill him with the sword anyways.
The ghouls also take like triple damage from fire, and aren't unbreakable morale wise. So this'd be a good place to use flame weapons. I brought firebolt wands.
Lightbane working on that battlemage title. Voodoo skill actually seems to be the hardest stat to raise, honestly. Maybe I'm missing a good title for it, but the only ones I know of off the top of my head are battlemage (not a lot of good weapons for that) and Lawyer, which penalizes health on units that probably lack it already.
This gun is the biggest danger here for sure. It's accuracy is balls and it can't fire twice in a turn, but if they get close enough... even Luka would probably die to ~600 chem damage in one round.
Luckily this dumbass is trying to shoot our cybermages instead.
Central building has a lot of floors, and most have this annoying layout where you need to do a big loop to explore them. Burning through that energy real fast...
In the end though, it was a total victory.
The mission is a good source of chem ammo if you haven't unlocked it yet, or are too lazy to make some. Most of this is crap, but chem rounds in a super magnum might be good for fucking up star god guardians. They're quick to fire and accurate at longish ranges.
Other nice loot includes various medical junk (you can find the reteges fluid here, but we got shafted) and prisoners. Another castaway is always nice, and the smoothies are worth 100 tokens a piece for the MA. Saya is right around the corner now!
I burned all our young ubers (we had 4) on spy missions, and they didn't last long, but they did bring back a skyforge book, which is nice.
Ooh, reusable (presumably hefty) EMP damage? This is very tempting. I think I'll build this after all, though I was waiting to research tanks first. It'd be a nice way to use the peasants and soldiers like Jaedar, and an easy way to farm gal of steel on them on milk runs.
Got a few of these from the jellyfish monsters. Seems pretty nice. If we'd gotten these way back when we first encountered them they'd have been a mainstay for quite a while I'm sure.
Costs 6 morale and stun per swing, but with decent throwing it's ~60 damage and ignores a nice chunk of armour, bio damage is rare and powerful. This variant is especially good for captures. Maybe I'll throw it on one of the Syns. They can handle the morale loss and stun if I keep energy up. Though I could see this going horribly wrong if they reaction fire it like 8 times in one turn and knock themselves out.
Hmm, not what I was expecting. Isn't fusion power a think I need that they have? Anyways, seems like the project is the thing to do, because fuck the star gods!
Skyforge book was lame. I guess it doesn't matter much; I'm sure once I start that ninja war up we'll be swimming in captured engineers and ninja scrolls.
Decided to teel the ES to fuck off. The price on the guns was frankly insulting and they don't seem to have interesting stuff anyways, just boring generic weaponry.
Another high value target from socializing. No extra result from uncovering this one though, AFAICT.
Dang, Battleships now. Where's my battleship, huh? You'd think I'd just steal one of the dozens of ships I captured completely intact. I think the only game's I've played that really respected that concept were Countdown to Doomsday and New Horizons. Both excellent games of a bygone era.
Now, what goodies does this lead to? Admittedly, we already have a ton of medical tech finished thanks to other avenues, like the academy and our codex.
Ooh, this is new though, and seems potentially important.
That was actually all he had for us, at least for now. But ghoul experiments sound promising...
Our suit is done! I did a check of it's recovery stats to make sure I wasn't missing some weird weakness here. The freshness loss is indeed very high, even with high bravery. Good thing we've got the herbalist cats and smokes for that problem. Otherwise... everything seems above board.
Time to take it for a test drive. Just a shot down megapol cruiser to harvest some synthmuscle. Going to play with the vulcan cannon as well. Damned thing really is insanely heavy, even Lenneth can't actually wield it properly as an assassin after dropping her other gear. Should be close enough though. Masochist Slut has been transferred over to give the new suit it's test run, and I've consolidated a few other scattered hands as well, like the peasants and Orcinator. Time to try out all our new toys!
