Time to crack open some treasure chests to make more fancy armour. We even got a bonus saphire, which is nice since blitz armour and probably other blue shield gear will use it.
We've actually got a large stockpile of saphires for some reason. I don't recall getting these. Nice!
Damn, after consulting the advice, this would be a perfect mission to send some blitz armoured catgirls on I think. We've got none of that ready yet though, and I don't want my catgirls and goblins getting blown up by explosives. Pass on this for now.
Found this kicking around in the production list. No idea where this came from or what it'd do for us, but I want it. God, we need so many fucking mutant alliance tokens. Goblin tokens we have a pile of 4k and only 1 thing left to even unlock from them, and it's the stupid mind control thingy. More mutant mission please!
Damn, this thing is even more shit than I'd expected. Can't even take it to the shadowrealms like I'd thought.
Success!
Abject failure!
Didn't expect the novice interrogation to finish before the sectopod. Chalk it up to my being rusty after not playing for over a week.
Huh, apparently they can be taken captive. Interesting.
Another daunting recipe I noticed lying around. This is going to take so, so very many life support systems if we need to craft the suits and pods. I suppose I'll need to prioritize setting up that body farm I'd more or less forgotten about. Or the game could, you know, give us some FUCKING SPACE MISSIONS.
These guys look like they have buck teeth and it's hilarious.
Another interrogation dud, though this was at least not something I could have researched separately.
Please for the love of god unlock some missions.
Welp, it's not missions, but this is interesting.
Results of these vary wildly. Half are weird shit like this. What is magical cake? Do I want it? Who knows?! We've got none of these souls anyways.
Destroyer is the only one willing to accept something besides souls, he'll take skulls too. That's a lot of skulls though, and those big ones aren't easy to come by...
Something we actually recognize to get a ballpark of the value of a soul. 3 for a sivalinga stone huh? Guessing these souls will be rare.
Though... 5 gold bars is basically sweet fuck all in terms of value, so who knows.
Another benchmark: 23 for a mystery box. I would dearly love to get more of these things.
We've also got this as an option now. However, after trying it, instead of getting demonic essence, we just got a cleanup bill. Seems we're back on the gambling treadmill. Except this time we need glamour. Fuck.
About fucking time! We unlocked this what, like 4 months ago? Ugh, it's incredibly vague too.
Well, contrary to the description, we can fly here, we just can't land the craft in the battlescape. Fair enough. Spawning in the corner is good. And we can apparently bring whatever we want.
And these things seem to make up about half our enemies. They are fucking everywhere.
Also, our troops are split up, which is a mixed blessing. We can alpha strike better if we've got them surrounded like this, but it also makes planning more difficult.
Another enemy here. I wonder if they shoot bees from their mouths when they bark? In retrospect, I should have EMP'd one of them.
And these guys, who have no armour and fairly weak guns. They do, however, have spotter and sniper, just like the pillboxes and presumably the hounds. Which adds up to us needing to basically clear most of the fucking map on turn 0 or we're going to get hit by dozens of attacks.
Can only see the sillouhette, but it seems there's a big wall over here too. Might be one of those multi-mission dealiies where we clear this are and then move forward to the palace. Or maybe Aurora is just chilling over here behind a wall. Who knows.
Our gnome got shot for trying to find out. That's going to take a while to heal.
Pillboxes seem to have terrible reactions, at least. And accuracy, but without knows the accuracy of their gun that means little. What it amounts to is that these things are incredibly tanky and will spray bullets at us on our turn.
And by incredibly tanky, I mean a triple shot from the bio tank didn't even hurt the fucking thing, aside from scratching armour. ~100 average damage, cut to 50 by resistance, vs 60 armour. Yeah, this is gonna suck.
Maria managed to cut one down, but it took like, 6 swings or something, basically half her TUs. Still, this is probably our best option unless we get a warp weapon. Note to self: check if mind or emp might work.
At any rate, we're bailing for now. We could certainly win, but it'd be dumb to get a bunch of our squishy units killed in the process, and there's no cover here to save the gnomes or catgirls from indiscriminate bullet spam. We'll come back with a heavily armoured squad instead next time.
Last of our spirit echoes or whatever. Good to know.
An interesting prospect. Not cheap to make, but I could see these being very powerful in certain missions. Note to self: check stats of holo-gal.
The real benefit of that power bat was unlocking this research. This thing is a beast. It's got a ranged attack, accuracy scales with strength, can deal plasma or electric damage, and damage scales heavily with strength too. Only really drawback is hefty TU/Energy cost, but for this much punch it's worth it.
Another month slips by. Not even going to bother recording every month end review from this point; money has basically lost all meaning, we're sitting on 50 million now. It's not useless or unlimited, I could spend that all on getting faction tokens for example... but there's no real pressure to deal with enemy or advance right now. Enemy ships are harmless, our rep is handling itself, base raids seem massively outgunned... I think at this point we can relax and farm wealth, at least for the foreseeable future. Considering how much manufacturing we seem to be looking at to make that ship, I suspect the game intends for us to sit around and build wealth at this stage or in the near future rather than doing missions constantly. I'm already skipping most of them, waiting for ones that are either new or particularly lucrative. And even those I'm skipping if the situation is a bit off. In short, we're no longer desperate. We're very stable. And for once I intend to leverage that- as much as I enjoy the nailbiting close to distaster missions, they're getting exhausting, both to actually play and to report on. Doing 30 turns with 3 dudes against the gun runners is bad enough, doing it with 16 varied units is a big time sink IRL. So, in the interests of actually finishing the LP instead of burning out, I'm going to try overgear missions as best I can, waltz in and annihilate enemies with heavy weapons and armour. It shouldn't take that long to finish gearing up honestly, we've already got quite a few power armours and infrastrucutre to build more stuff.
Some more interesting manufacturing stuff: apparently we need to snag another novice to harvest a brain.
Was expecting more from this honestly, it took a lot of research and seems very generalist.
Craftable vampiric weapons? Hell yes. Like the crystal skull, this thing is way less effective with a syn, who has 25% vs bio and mind. Unlike the skull though, this heals, rather than hurts the user. Morale loss will be irrelevant if we're getting a bunch from kills. I fully intend to slap this and the skull onto a catgirl and have her blender her way through some missions. Probably Pyrite with the beauty formula. Not sure if grav boots or blitz armour would be best, but this is frankly an insane level of potential, being able to steal health, energy and TUs all at once with melee attacks. I'd mass produce these if I could, but they require rubies and demon essence, amongst other things.