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

[Damned Registrations]

Worth it! Kind of. Maybe?

So we spawn in a box surrounded by entrances on all four sides, from 2 different z levels, and an elevator in the middle. Wonderful.

Also, most of the team is so fucked I spend the first round chain smoking to get freshness back and avoid having people go berserk.

No first round attacks, thankfully. Judging by the thinking progress, there are way fewer enemies, but a shitload of doors.

Yeah, we've seen this kind of layout before. Maze of tunnels with little alcoves for enemies to spawn in.

A couple turns go by with no enemies sighted. I'm expecting something robotic, which sucks, because we're missing a lot of weapons that would be good against them.

First enemy to appear pops up through the elevator. I was expecting that, so 3 different people were watching it.

The aurorabot dies before it can kill anyone. Unfortunately, it kills someone after it dies by fucking exploding, even more strongly than the maids did. Our sleeping catgirl's body (I didn't bother to wake her since she'd just become a vulnerable target) got fucking vaporized in the explosion, along with all our gear. All those jewels we just looted? The books? Fucking gone. Utter bullshit.

Next round we get 3 at a time. Thankfully now that I know what to expect, everyone is equipped with laser weapons to avoid explosions. Forceblades actually take them out pretty trivially, and laser stars do a good job as well. The magic hammer even works in a pinch.

Some more pop out from the southeast opening but waste their attacks on the tank.

Slow exploration reveals some fancy rooms but no more enemies or apparent loot.

Not even sure why he passed out. Just low freshness I think, I probably didn't make him smoke because he's already missing over 100 health.

Orb room? Orbs are good. Probably not as good as 2 of each gem and 5 saphires and 3 libers and a bunch more shit, but it's something.

This was actually the most boring part of the mission by far. Realistically I should have just stayed in the starting room and let them come to me, as all this exploration is fairly dangerous.

Tank falling asleep, don't see that every day.

The top level is a grid of corridors with doors sectioning them off, much like our own base but without the little rooms between. It's actually infuriating to explore because you can't spot enemies at a safe distance, and keeping your back covered requires a lot of bodies, AND there's elevators everywhere. Bah.

Lenneth actually runs into the last enemy, but with only 5 TU's left. Major failure on my part. Fortunately, Maria hadn't taken a turn yet and was able to sprint over and finish it off.

All those RCF troops and government agents and soldiers caused major infamy penalties. All told, only 2 hands lost is probably a fucking bargain for this death march of a mission.

And yeah, we lost nearly all the loot. Chests of coins are worthless. Hopefully the doll corpses will probe useful. We did get a couple new items as well.

War Machines is a new enemy category AFAIK. Must be for the droids. Also, Dioxine got a betrayer title for triggering the explosion that killed our catgirl.

Slut, ironically, will be back on her feet before the ogres. The revival process says 50 days, but that's before sickbay bonuses kick in. Our hero cat, OTOH, is dead forever. She was given a stasis pod, but that doesn't help without a body, and hers got atomized by the suicide doll. RIP another unique unit with awesome stats. Never even got to train her up to be really good.

Well, I guess that explains why it was such a cunt of a mission if it's the current end of a route. Probably wanted it to function like a final boss battle. It was pretty nasty for sure, though I could definite go deathless through it easily now that I know about the vault room's half dozen hounds and the dolls in the third part. A lot of the game is like that, but I don't really begrudge it the cheapshots considering how strong we are otherwise. Even taking those losses, we're still able to keep steamrolling forward.

In retrospect, I should have expected a horde of robots after the connection with the technocracy missile strikes. For some reason I had it in my head that because she's a witch we'd be facing some voodo crap.

One of the new items we got. Is this a reference to something? I feel like I'm missing a reference. Nice hat at any rate, freshness recovery is kinda bonkers, though a little underwhelming at this stage with all the health recovery and cigars.

Heh, nice to see they thought of this.

Ironically, we went on a date right after, and got another bit of ninja info. Pretty sure this is the ninja ship we lost a craft to a while back.

Busy day in the workshop.

Nothing much revealed here stat wise; they're pretty fragile once you get through the shield, provided you aren't using something dumb like bio weapons. I wonder if I could have taken some alive? I didn't really have the tools to do so in the third mission, sadly. I could have tried to EMP one with Belle but it was tight quarters and we're mostly in EMP vulnerable gear.

The tech revealed by studying the blood orb we got, which was apparently also new to us. Meh. Why would I want 25% more damage instead of a whole extra weapon? These really don't shine until the last tier, which requires like, 4 orbs or something.

Hmm, seems the craft dossier got us some new ninja lore to research? I wonder if it'll progress that thread?

Well, fuck me sideways, we got some good loot after all. 11 magischen motors will let us make a lot of cool toys.

Obviously, LP is going to continue, since that ending wasn't even a proper ending. Feels kinda nice at least having finally tied up a loose end though.

 

[Jaedar]

I actually struggled a bit with second part, because I kept trying to neural whip fake aurora before realizing she was a droid.

The final part was one of my least favorite in the entire game. I think I ended up enabling cheats to get it over with.
The freshness mechanic really sucks for long multipart missions. I have a feeling this is not the first time this will become relevant.

Also these guys, who are actually scary. That cannon is no joke.

Eh, 120 piercing is nothing against blue shields. You did bring blue shields right?

Well, I guess that explains why it was such a cunt of a mission if it's the current end of a route

Feels kinda like a kick in the balls though. -3000 infamy and a brutal mission can set you back a lot if you do it before you hit endgame stall, and there is no real reward that justifies doing it. I guess the hat? freshness regen is quite strong, but it's also in irreplaceable one off.

One of the new items we got. Is this a reference to something? I feel like I'm missing a reference.

Apparently it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomakh's_Cap

 

[Damned Registrations]

You did bring blue shields right?

I think the only things we have with those right now are the catgirls (who would have frozen) and one or two other sketchy outfits that lack armour (like the gal blitz armour and a gnome outfit, maybe?) They're definitely a powerful option if you know what you're going to run up against, but I wouldn't want to bring a gal in blitz armour just to have her get taken out by something lame like a guy with a trench gun or a dog shredding the shield. Also, purple shields shrug off piercing extremely well too iirc. We did have some of that with a zortium suit. That thing is awesome.

and there is no real reward that justifies doing it.

I think the doll bodies made it worthwhile. Only other way I know of to get motors are sectopods, which are also quite dangerous to fuck around with. It's certainly a gruelling mission though, and doing it early I can imagine taking way, way more losses. Though to be fair, that first phase could be rendered fairly trivial by just liberally applying mortars and the like. If this mission popped up again I'd probably take it and just nuke the back half of the map. Ditto for the second part actually; a flight suit could reach the roof pretty fast and then rain hell on the mansion. Once you know there's nothing to preserve except in one key location you can go crazy. Honestly that's always been the smart play even going blind, but I'm too curious to not try and see all the loot. The third part was the most bullshit imo; you've got no way to prepare for that, the best you can do is aim various weapons around at random entry points and hope for the best, which I did, and got blown the fuck up for it. Praise the red shields, which were are clearly the best shields.

 

[Jaedar]

I think the only things we have with those right now are the catgirls (who would have frozen)

Just gotta go fast on part 1
Cold damage is only a few hp per turn, with advanced healing tech they won't be out much longer than they would anyway due to losing freshness.

The third part was the most bullshit imo; you've got no way to prepare for that, the best you can do is aim various weapons around at random entry points and hope for the best, which I did, and got blown the fuck up for it. Praise the red shields, which were are clearly the best shields.

Yeah, these kinds of maps with infinite labyrinth corridors always suck a lot, ever since tftd introduced them.

I think the doll bodies made it worthwhile. Only other way I know of to get motors are sectopods, which are also quite dangerous to fuck around with.

I don't know why marsec ships haven't started appearing for you en masse yet. Those were my primary source of motors. Or I built them in the workshop, I can't remember.

 

[lightbane]

The freshness mechanic really sucks for long multipart missions. I have a feeling this is not the first time this will become relevant.

This seems to be an annoying artificial limitation, yes.

 

[Jaedar]

The freshness mechanic really sucks for long multipart missions. I have a feeling this is not the first time this will become relevant.

This seems to be an annoying artificial limitation, yes.

I think it is a good mechanic early on, when missions can reasonably be expected to be beaten in 10-20 turns (and frequently less). I assume it's there as part of the whole "don't just stand there playing super passively" package. But lategame you get these multipart and hard missions, and then it just feels bad. You just can't get through it fast enough to save your freshness. Mad blitzes can be fun, but not when it's every mission. And when you add in that good armors drain extra freshness per turn it becomes even more annoying.

This mission isn't even that bad all things considered, the first layout is simple and the second you will have seen before. And the enemies have pretty weak weapons all things considered.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Please come back later, I'm busy.

But lategame you get these multipart and hard missions, and then it just feels bad.

To be fair, the game does give you tools to recover freshness by then. The herbalists actually show up fairly early, I just didn't want them to get squished in the open there or freeze (though I think they have room for furs at least.) And I've had pillow books for a while too, but I always forget about them, and again, left them behind here because I didn't want my gear blown up. Peasants and SS are an option too, they basically never run out of freshness. I think the problem is more just these missions not being telegraphed properly. 'Get the princess hiding in the castle before she escapes' doesn't sound like a 60 turn seige to me, and on the contrary, stuff like the deep one siege where you defend a fort is over fairly quickly because it's a small map and the enemies can't hide forever in little tunnels.


Let me add 'collection of artwork' to the Xpiratez things on my wishlist. This would make a cool desktop, especially the (presumably) higher rez original.

I was expecting WIP stuff, but still frustrating. Especially for a Tome that seems so related to our codex. Feels like that's the part that needs the most fleshing out imo; the voodoo stuff. We've got guns for days.

Heh, I was wondering when he'd get pissy about us bring people back from the dead. Though we actually just use the stasis pods mostly.

You know, considering we murdered 13 body doubles of their monarch in a single night, I think them merely reducing payments is acceptable.

Oh, they can explode can they? Good to know. Thanks. Helpful.

Cool secondary bonus, not that 10 gold bars means anything at this point.

Finally got one of these built. I think we had one before and it got summarily annihilated on the moon. It's a damned good suit though, we'll give it to Jaedar and start bringing him along again, he's King rank already and has great stats.

At least we get some benefit from the book.

Kinda underwhelming considering what we went through, but honestly a very nice set of bonuses. Reactions in particular are very hard to come by.

...and we can't use it on most of our gals. It works fine on the newbies, but it seems the ones in biosuits aren't elligible, and neither is Lenneth. Lame, as the items required are trivial and recovery isn't that bad for the stats. I'd have totally used this on the entire crew. Will have to check on a few more people to work out the exact requirements.

Very nice, extra hp on peasants, and the str/rea/tus are all good for them as well.

...and it won't work on the enhanced peasants we get from crazy egypt lady. Bah. Will send over belle and test francesca when she wakes up.

Bonaventura is done! As you can see, it's got a big ol' open front door, and instead of an elevator, it's got a hole in the floor. The hole in the floor I actually like early on; it means stuff like zombies and chrysallids can only approach from the ramp where you can make it a killbox. OTOH, on missions against enemies with guns or rockets, that front door is a huge liability.

Second floor is tiny, but it does keep our gear safe in the back behind a door. There's also a staircase leading to the roof. Again, nice early game for having a high vantage to shoot from and retreat to safety.

Belle is elligible! Signed right up. Actual recovery is only 2 weeks.

And the male version. The weakest of the bunch by far, but more hp and str is always nice. Which reminds me, Dioxine is elligible for a special hero award now. He's going to have a bajillion hp if this also works on him.

Result from the skyforge engineer we caught. Bleh.

Now THIS is a worthy reward. Combined with a bio suit or a Syn, this thing is unbelievably good for recovering freshness. The 30 freshness is just the baseline, our biosuit gals have at least 60 voodoo power, so it's more like 50.

The '1% lost per armour' is a lie too, it's just shorthand for the 10% armour effectiveness vs 30 damage. I'd have to do some napkin math, but I'd say this should do ~40 freshness recovery vs our normal gals or catgirls in power armour, and probably only like ~10-15 for gals in biosuits. But even that is plenty given that the cost is going to be recovered in a single turn. The morale, energy and stun recovery would be useful too in some cases, could probably set up some insane spellcasters this way. Blasting Lightbane while he mind rapes the whole map for example, should work great. I think it's biggest drawback is going to be shields, but we can work around that. It'll bypass blue ones at least, so it's fine with blitz armour.

Of note is that it needs the same kind of orb magic hammers (and probably some ship parts) use. Also of note though, we can dissassemble personal equipment made with orbs to get the orb back. So I've got no problem investing the orb in the refresher. Provided we don't get it blown up.

Star gods? This is going to be a good month for us!

Also got a demon shrine mission! Still missing that one simulacrum part, but we got a new teaching finally, not that it seems to do anything.

Stargod mission has those annoying invisible guys. Pretty sure they deal mind damage, which bypasses our red shields. OTOH, it does next to nothing vs purple or gold, and I think even blue handles it well enough.

Took a guardian alive, but we seem to be lacking enough TUs to get back. Did blitz armour get nerfed? I remember being way more mobile than this. Maybe it's just that I'm using baseline assault clone cats, instead of veterans. Because our veterans all died ages ago. Urgh.

This is how close I had to get to spot this fucker. Pretty sure Lenneth has bonus spot ability too from training or something. At least they lack shields. I wanted to take him alive so I tried whipping him, but this turned out to be a dumb idea and I had to resort to killing him. In retrospect, I could have just punched the shit out of him. I always forget Lenneth is a fucking gorilla.

Still, I think we'll be okay, barring a sectopod unloading on us.

Not sure what the enemies were doing here, seemed to be firing at nothing on their turn.

Turns out the drone can spot the invisible fuckers way more easily. I can't check it's spot stat, but I'm guessing it's pretty good. Very handy!

Alas, the grey robe we DID catch alive was just a novice. The first one was an operative, which we've still never caught.

Nothing special here, but the novice will give us a godly brain and some glamour. I think we can turn the robes into glamour too, but I can't seem to find the recipe...

And holy fuck, do we ever need some glamour. I wonder if we've already met the other requirements? I feel like we have if building this is an option.

Did I mention there were two messenger craft? Shot both down successfully. Second site has these guys. Their stats are very weird, they're practically turrets.

We've seen them before but I've never caught one to research and don't think I probed one yet either. They seem to have a warp damage attack that shreds armour really well, which sucks because it makes most of our crew a liability.

Well, not if we can snipe him from inside our ship.

Damn though, 2 arrows only did 30 damage combined. Either I got terrible rolls or he's nigh immune to plasma. Will need to try other elements. I want him alive too if possible. Also, after some further testing, I've noted that their weapon apparently can't hurt drones. Either they're warp immune, or the weapon does stun or no health damage. Another win for drones!

Did this always cost 60 TUs? I feel like it used to be cheaper.

Anyways, second battle was a stomp as well, we took most of them alive even. No operatives of sectopods, sadly.

Sent most of the elites back to Codexia for special training/enhancements. Sadly, a bunch weren't elegible, but surprisingly, Lenneth was. OP Gal gets to become even more OP.

Of course this is when the game would give me a moon mission. Sad to say, but we'll have to pass on this. Honestly these missions are kind of a bitch, I'm not sure how to handle them. We need exo suits to survive the moon, but all the good ones are power armour that get fried by warp guns. Triarius is the best shot but even that got taken down last time.

Apples? ASSEMBLE THE TEAM.

Face the fury of the true gods of earth, rat-fiends!

This ammo probably costs significantly more than the combined loot of the entire mission.

Glorious victory! Hundreds of infamy! Cavalier titles for like 20 people!

Captured and interrogated from the star gods. I'm dead certain we had a 'destroyer of gods' trophy to make out of their cloaks but can't find it now. Was it just for the Nekomimi? There's got to be something better to do with the guardians than turn them into hellerium.

Oh, cool, more awful shit.

Same cost to remove as JIM. Who is also still kicking around. Should probably get rid of both. But what if there's a cool slime event?

 

[Jaedar]

I wonder if we've already met the other requirements?

The last requirement was almost assuredly teaching of honor. No idea what this has to do with "dragons". Just xpirates tech tree things.

But what if there's a cool slime event?

There's some green codex exclusive stuff behind this I'm pretty sure.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Video games are hard, okay guys?

We can have our very own pet cyclops! I was initially thinking this would be fairly lame and not worth it, but in retrospect, these guys would be quite useful as bullet sponges, and there might be some cheese you could do by finding them TUs with a rabbit or something.

They've actually got some great stats for deploying first out of the ship to look for enemies and draw fire. Plasma resistance in particular, is just as insane as I was expecting, but that's also a great spot value for finding invisible units. Shame it can barely walk, it'll be basically useless on missions after the area around the entrance is cleared. Also, their attack could be handy for niche purposes like stripping armour off something to try capture it with a weapon that can't beat the armour. The cost of recruiting them is trivial, just a bunch of sectoweed. Which I've realized isn't even remotely worth farming any more, and I should just be buying it.

Kinda funny it's 'over' but she still gets to taunt us. I'm guessing the mission is repeatable. I don't know if I'd bother, the rewards would be nice but it was gruelling, especially the 2nd part, as the giant mansion missions tend to be.

Took me a few days to realize we could research it.

Hmm, 12 essence isn't trivial, but I'm guessing we can get something better than that.

Ooh, this sounds much more fun.

And we get a bunch of Zines! Nice.

I'm generally ignoring most bounty stuff at this point since the tokens can't buy anything we want right now, but Jack's are an exception, as we can trade for rubies and such. Mostly rubies, they're used for the bio suits and the red shielded suits AND the future bows... lots of good shit. We can use saphires for hovertanks as well. I should use those more, I kinda forgot they were really good compared to the cyberdiscs.

Funnily enough, this thing starts at 0 TUs. Presumably a balancing feature?

Of course this would show up now. Mind you, after checking the gear options, I've realized we should put this off anyways. We DO have a great option for these missions: Zortrium suits. The purple shields take only 25% from warp. They're an utter bitch to make because they need rare shadowrealm crystals and have to be made by red mage (that base has few workspaces) but we do have the parts needed for 2 more already. Queing that right up. 3 of those and a Triarius should be able to handle most problems I think.

How to end this infernal game indeed? I love it, but uh, this has been a very, very long LP. Kinda ready to be done.

Only has 2 armour and is fairly weak to most energy stuff considering that, but considering we can use it with our generous stockpile of ghosts we can't do anything else with... we might see a few of these around in the future. Shame about the cold weakness, though with 9 hp regen it won't matter much. Crazy evasion too, and could be a good carrier for that refresher gun, assuming they're allowed to hold guns.

Oh hell yes. I've been dying to get some real shadowrealm shit done.

We've only got a few glitterdust suits, but they'll be quite helpful, and we've got plenty of avenger suits for the goblins. I expect they'll be the real MVPs. I brought a few elite untis along too for their innate armour bonuses, and an ogre because they get a cool training option for doing enough shadowrealm missions.

Lightbane can scan stuff with the suit, rather then the usual powers. Fairly handy, since we can't dissect these stupid things.

Couple new enemy types. These guys are predictably a lot tankier, and some have these crossbows, which seem to do fire damage? They set things on fire and punch through purple and gold shields quickly at any rate, but don't hit that hard otherwise. The ones with great clubs are more concerning.

This guy might be a problem. Except no, actually, because the retard took up position on a sniper perch above us instead of gettng into melee. To be fair, I think there wasn't an open path. Until we made one.

Goblins are indeed kicking ass and taking names. These enemies just aren't built to handle electric attacks, and these shields are balanced for real world enemies, so they're just generally quite good compared to most of our shadowrealm stuff.

Seems besides the axe he had some weird gauntlet thing? Didn't seem to have any attack options though.

Bastard woke back up a couple turns later. Was easy enough to put back down. That autogun is a lifesaver here, it's waaay better than the cursed sprayguns, which we only have a few of and not enough ammo for them. Note to self: make way more of these. We've got motors to spare now!

Alas, we have no figured out 'hit thing with big stick' technology, apparently.

The terrain here is kinda treacherous. It's not a closed in maze like so many others, but there ARE a ton of pillars and stairways and alcoves and shit to obscure line of sight. I actually like it. It's a fun sort of difficulty, where I can try to optimize our fields of vision, instead of needing to spend 20 turns opening doors and walking into and out of dead end hallways to check for enemies.

Took a nasty hit from that sword. Good thing he's got way more health in this place.

It was at this point I also realized he can FLY here. Oh hell yes. This became the new glitterdust priority. 4 of these guys with autoguns would annihilate this place. And give them some nice ranged weapons training.

Orcinator ran off down a hallway alone and bagged some bodies and captured a crossbow. It's actually fairly easy to use, even one handed. Quite accurate and uses ~40% TUs to fire a snapshot.

The big demon axes we collected on the earlier shadowrealm missions are handy here as well, but they're terrible inaccurate. Fortunately they usually one shot the wraiths, and only need 20 TUs to swing. Which is still a lot for a crappy melee attack, but it's decent here, and way better than punching or the wraith swords.

Our ogre buddy took some hits and lost a turn. This is actually terrifying, that magic hammer is 100% accurate, hits for ~150-350 damage, and he can fire it 4 times a turn. If he goes berserk in the middle of our team we'll have a very, very bad day.

Some fun decor in this place.

So, this is what we in the industry call an 'off by one' error. Where you check the radius of a grenade, and forget to start counting from 0 where you're aiming it to see if you're inside the blast zone. And you also forget these things deal like 300 mind damage, which your naked dude is weak to. So yeah, he's dead now.

Didn't even kill the fucking wraiths though.

Are those swords? I want cool swords forged in hell by demons!

Seems we rare into the poor sods that didn't kick the shit out of the shadowrealm when they arrived. Apparently they're enemies. I'm also guessing they'll be the thing we can trade to all those gods and shit in the occult section of manufacturing.

Not exactly much of a threat. We'll try take them alive, mostly.

Found some sort of gate tile here too, but couldn't do anything with it, sadly. Also, some of the souls are stuck in cages suspended off the ground. Kind of annoying since it makes them impossible to attack in melee, but they surrendered, unlike the wraiths.

Ah yes, the perfectly logical 700 infamy for fighting demons in a shadowrealm nobody knows exists. Well, I shouldn't complain, we can always use more infamy.

Couple new items here. The padlock should be to push the storyline forward with red mage, while the souls can be traded for stuff. Giant ox is the axe I guess? If it's that cheap, my hopes it'll be decent aren't high.

Amusingly, the betrayer title is kinda useful on him, as the morale loss per turn is irrelevant for a hero, and it gives a bit of voodoo skill. Also, that's a new one...

Hah, I'll have to check and see if Slut has this at level 5 or something.

 

[Damned Registrations]

This was a bad idea.

Well... that's boring.

Star Gods escalating.

Sectopod at this one, but since it's pointed right at the ship, and could easily walk over and murder people on it's turn, this is actually pretty bad.

I try a few things to turn one kill it, including peeing on it with bagpipes, but no dice, so we flee. Next time!

Turns out this doesn't need glitterdust like the other shadowrealms gear. May as well make an extra. Turns out the meridian gun needed an orb though, and of a type we lack. Bah.

Slime girls can indeed hold weapons. Sadly, with all the stat penalties, they're not much good with guns, even with the insane titles this one has. Still, nice to have a dedicated refresher holder.

Pretty much what I expected. Pretty sure they repurposed the magma gauntlet image as a padlock, which is funny.

This was the only thing worth spending souls on, besides glamour and the 23 souls for a mystery box trade (which is what I'm saving for.) It's probably a bad idea though.

I mean, if you read the lore bits, the guy we got this from basically fucked over everyone he met, and did it by giving them things.

Huh. Wonder if we got lucky.

Lots of new dream echo reveals available now.

Decided to dump 400 tokens on gambling out of boredom and the hope it might remind me of some cool shit I forgot to replace.

Not the greatest haul, but we at least got 1 of the best coupon.

Considering we got a ruby, which would have cost like 800 tokens, we can call this a win I think.

Got this crown too, which is probably rare.

Even bigger ship to shoot down.

Definitely had a clench moment here before it went down.

Discovered this while waiting for daylight. Sadly, we can't bring these back with us.

Much better layout for fighting these guys.

Or so I think, and then lose a catgirl to fucking waspites overwatching us. Fucking bastards.

Oh yeah, we can look at the slime's innate weapon too. Probably not usually useful, but maybe in some limited armour scenario or something.

Cyclops go down easily to the tome.

Decent number of dudes in here, but less than I was expecting.

In the end, it was uneventful, no new stuff.

Got this from the gambling too, we hadn't researched one yet.

Cool lore.

This thing is the mega radar we had yet to build due to needing computer cores as a pre-req. It covers basically half the planet. A couple more and we'll finally have perfect coverage, though we're already at like 95%.

Nice rebound from last month.

More realm of fear stuff.

I've decided to go for that big ninja base at last. I don't recall bombers defending it before? Usually it's just a trio of fighters. Anyways, their defense craft go down and we move in.

I vaguely recall this being a massive open field battle, but I also recall them still having mostly lame weapons like carbines and blunderbusses and shit. I brought our extra gear and even some of the squishies, since I suspect it'll be a 2 parter at least.

We're fucking ready to go.

Fucking christ, one has a portable mortar. On the bright side, she's facing away. I bet it has a fucking nuke inside. Such cunts.

Well, nothing a vulcan blast won't fix. This is why I checked all their equipment.

They got these turrets too, but these don't even cause explosions like the field guns. Should be fine.

Some weird hatch in their main building. Hovertanks inside maybe?

More turrets in the back. Christ this place is massive.

Both southern quarters of the map for reference:

And then this happened. Was moving Maria forward to take out their closest ninjas, and a nuke came in from off screen. Maria is dead, probably vaporized so we can't recover her. Someone else died too I think. Shit like this REALLY makes me want to savescum. How the fuck can you possibly play against this without just turn one nuking the enemy base?

Gandalf hadn't even taken a turn yet, and is now totally fucked. The northern half of the troops are unscathed but... fucking hell. Do I even keep fighting this? Should I just retreat and cut out losses? What if there's like 5 more with nukes or some bullshit ninja master with 999 TUs? This feels like a mission I'm not even intended to try.

Edit: Fucking thing won't even let me save apparently?

Edit2: The Syn body survived, but if we flee turn 1 we have to leave Turkish Ronin behind, because the craft got clipped by the nuke enough to drain all the TUs and flying above the entry zone doesn't count as 'onboard' apparently.

 

[lightbane]

Load the previous save as it's clearly a glitch. See? You can't even save! And it's bullshit indeed. How are you supposed to survive against enemies with nukes? You can't kill everything in 1 turn.

 

[Arrowgrab]

Yeah, this is bullshit. I vote just load the previous save.

 

[Jaedar]

Edit: Fucking thing won't even let me save apparently?

Never seen that before. No choice but to reload last save I guess.

Shit like this REALLY makes me want to savescum. How the fuck can you possibly play against this without just turn one nuking the enemy base?

I never got nuked, but I think there is a decent component of luck in that. The answer is some combination of "extreme prejudice", "use hovertanks and high tu/reaction units to clear out enemies on turn 1" and "luck". Tanks can have hundreds of TUs and good reaction, so can basically scout with impunity, and kill stuff, even with mediocre pilots. For normal units you need veterans (of the catgirl, uber, syn and hero variety only p much).

But nothing can save you from an enemy unit spawning in the wrong place and opening a door on their turn 1 and firing a nuke.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I did manage to make a save. I'm not sure when the last backup save I have is, I'll check later.

My main issue with this is that it was fucking REACTION fire. From like 30 tiles. Why can mortars reaction fire from 30 tiles away? That's fucking insane, even most rifles can't do that.

And I did try to scout ahead with hover tanks. Two problems though; the enemies are in buildings, so LOS is blocked unless I waste a bunch of energy moving up and down and around corners.... at which point they can fire on the tank. And second, they're fucking ninjas. They have camo and invis and shit.

 

[Average Manatee]

Explosion height is forced to 2 in XpirateZ, so you should have been flying 3 tiles off the ground with everyone as soon as you were aware of nukes being in play (which you should have known through metaknowledge). Git gud scrub

I'm being sarcastic and I don't even know if this actually works. I get really annoyed by how many X-Com mods go into ludacris difficulty territory with "you could have aborted the mission on turn 1!" "Bad luck but just try again and hope it doesn't happen again!" "It's X-COM people are supposed to die!" and similar excuses. The OG-trilogy were never punitive to the player and they also never relied upon you grinding soldier stats over 50 missions to be able to handle end game threats

 

[Jaedar]

My main issue with this is that it was fucking REACTION fire. From like 30 tiles. Why can mortars reaction fire from 30 tiles away? That's fucking insane, even most rifles can't do that.

Is there actually a limit to the distance of reaction fire? I thought it was just whatever you can see. And everyone sees 40 tiles in daylight. Not that night time would help against ninjas since they all have spotter and sniper.

They have camo and invis and shit.

Yeah, they are visible 20 tiles away instead of 40 apparently. Quite a lot.

Two problems though; the enemies are in buildings, so LOS is blocked unless

If the LoS is seriously blocked they shouldn't have an arc for firing nukes.

On a more general note: ninja HQ is top5 or top3 hardest missions in the game imo.

 

[Jaedar]

Explosion height is forced to 2 in XpirateZ, so you should have been flying 3 tiles off the ground. Git gud scrub

I'm being sarcastic and I don't even know if this actually works. I get really annoyed by how many X-Com mods go into ludacris difficulty territory with "you could have aborted the mission on turn 1!" "Bad luck but just try again and hope it doesn't happen again!" "It's X-COM people are supposed to die!" and similar excuses. The OG-trilogy were never punitive to the player and they also never relied upon you grinding soldier stats over 50 missions to be able to handle end game threats

X-com did not shy from killing all of your shit on turn 1, but you could also eventually train a squad of psychics with blaster bombs and stomp the entire map without leaving the skyranger. I think this is more of a general "long game" problem. DR has hit the stage where he can't realistically lose any more I think, it's just a question of how long it will take to win. But the endgame is balanced for veterans, because if it weren't it would be trivial with veterans. So it starts becoming a grind.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is there actually a limit to the distance of reaction fire? I thought it was just whatever you can see. And everyone sees 40 tiles in daylight. Not that night time would help against ninjas since they all have spotter and sniper.

I think reaction fire is only limited by the maximum range stat. Which is not aimed shot range or anything similar, it's the limit that weapons like e.g. chainsaws and throwing weapons have to literally do nothing past a certain distance. It's particularly annoying with shotguns on zombie-esque missions because you can't rely on reaction fire to deal with close threats, if something a mile away moves in front of you first you'll blow all your buckshot doing nothing.

X-com did not shy from killing all of your shit on turn 1, but you could also eventually train a squad of psychics with blaster bombs and stomp the entire map without leaving the skyranger. I think this is more of a general "long game" problem. DR has hit the stage where he can't realistically lose any more I think, it's just a question of how long it will take to win. But the endgame is balanced for veterans, because if it weren't it would be trivial with veterans. So it starts becoming a grind.

X-Com never really killed everything on turn 1. Even blaster bombs wouldn't kill things inside the skyranger if they impacted outside it due to the explosions not spreading to different heights things. The only way to lose everything immediately was getting someone MC-ed with a rocket launcher or something, and that's kinda just funny.

 

[Jaedar]

X-Com never really killed everything on turn 1. Even blaster bombs wouldn't kill things inside the skyranger if they impacted outside it due to the explosions not spreading to different heights things. The only way to lose everything immediately was getting someone MC-ed with a rocket launcher or something, and that's kinda just funny.

I think aliens could throw grenades and blaster bombs into the skyranger, which could totally kill everyone (if you hadn't disembarked anyone). That is admittedly not on reactions though, I can't think of anything truly terrible they can do on reaction turn.

 

[Average Manatee]

Maybe, but that is extraordinarily rare and if it happens you can recover quite quickly.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Ultimate power beckons.

You know, 2 hands lost after getting hit with a nuke is surprisingly low casualties.

Of course, our gear pile was in the blast radius. Again, some of this shit is a huge pain in the ass to replace.

Yet more variants of these fucking things. I'm honestly baffled why they have so many.

Haven't seen one of these yet, seems cool. And dangerous.

Surprise! I wasn't sure it would work, but I had a gal murder Turkish Ronin with a lascannon before we fled. Fortunately, the wreckage landed in our escape zone and qualifies as a 'corpse' for us to resurrect with. We actually escaped with no permanent deaths by some miracle.

Time for some easier marks for a while. These big freighters are like pinatas for us.

ATMG still fun to play with, though didn't quite land the shot inside the hallway here.

It's frutrasting that a mission like these with 60 enemies still only rewards like 7 glamour. We need another 800 for the next bounty hunting tier, btw.

Twenty KKKs to anyone who can figure out why the fuck I'm even raiding this ship, because it makes no god damned sense.

Hah, Red Mage also hates our pet nazi queen. I wonder if Red Mage and Saya will have a spat too, or Gudrun will bitches about them?

MOAR.

First Ogre to be elligible for the Destructor training. Sadly, it require 8 fucking dream echoes apparently, which is insane. Still might go for it, those stat bonuses are insane, and he gets regen and armour too.

Well, here's a chance for more dream echoes! Seems they've got even mroe dangerous weapons this time, though not by much.

With Lightbane providing aerial fire support this time, it's even easier than last time. Though he did go berserk at one point. We really need those mind orbs.

Nothing new here, but 4 crystals isn't too shabby.

Another cool perk from the fancy hat. Just an uber gal, but she is at least a Lunatic (same as the ones we spawn with, few bonus stats but pretty good baseline training and morale.)

Another thing on the todo list. Not quite as trivial as the freighter, considering chryssalids can still one shot us and the exalts can kill too and are fast and fly.

Won without incident though. Force blades acquired. Also a bunch of chruch dudes we don't care about.

It's funny how irrelevant the actual items/cash/etc effects of these are at this point. We're sitting on over 200 million. This gave us about one percent of one percent of our warchest. Woo.

More stargod stuff. I actually forgot they can do mind fuckery stuff, they haven't in a long time. I think they just don't bother on our trained troops, which is basically everyone now.

Operative GET.

But here's the best news: We finally finished Higher Studies. I had to research this in a base with only 20 brainers because of the facilities it required, and it took about 3 months. Did it unlock some shit? Oh yes. Yes it did.

 

[lightbane]

You know, 2 hands lost after getting hit with a nuke is surprisingly low casualties.

You should have reloaded, as that one was clearly the game being trollish. The difficulty is waay over the place.

Yet more variants of these fucking things. I'm honestly baffled why they have so many.

Modders gonna mod: The game. For how long have you been playing now? You're still at the endgame's first phase, unless you do the second route (different from the Mars stuff). The game is too bloated for its own good.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You should have reloaded, as that one was clearly the game being trollish. The difficulty is waay over the place.

I actually went back and savescummed the mission afterwards to see what the fuck killed me and if it could have been reasonably prevented. The answer: An assassin, who has INVIS 6 (Can't be seen from further than 6 tiles + spot stat, which tends to be single digits) is given a mortar and placed way in the far back corner of the enemy base. There's essentially no way to kill it round one, because even if you knew it was there, you can't even get a unit close enough to see the fucking spot it's at (which is nestled between indestructable bunkers protecting it from splash) without being within it's LOS and triggering reaction fire from a unit with insanely high reactions. And obviously it has sniper so as soon as any unit on the map spots any of your units or is shot by one, it has a target. Like, I can't even blind fire our own nuke at it, because the spot is just pure blackness with no reference points. Whoever designed this base is just a straight up asshole.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Tit for Tat.

Left on such a sour note last time, seemed like a second round was in order.

My nuke is bigger. 38 tile radius.

I've no idea what we actually hit, because to safely fire it, it needs to land beyond LOS even in daylight. And we're here at night to limit reaction fire on our big slow bombard tank. Also, we're leaving immediately. I've got a tentative plan to deal with this base, and it does not involve this awesome bombard cannon, unfortunately.

Despite the insane firepower of that weapon, it somehow only scored 4 kills. What the actual fuck? They must all be inside bunkers on turn 1 or something. Well, at least Turkish Ronin got a few kills for revenge.

Operative interrogation was a dud. Lame.

Top (?) tier fighter craft. It's better than what we have, but not by a massive degree. It's faster so it doesn't need thrusters to outspeed enemy fighters, and it's replaced a bunch of it's hull with shields, which is nice for reducing repair times but it's still going to need a shield to avoid blowing up in 2 shots. 10% more dodge should go a long way, and needing only 1 pilot means we could stretch our aces further. Sadly, weaponry remains the same, and it still has no shadowtech slots. I suppose I could outfit it with missiles instead of thrusters, at least, that would make it way more immediately deadly at the cost of a lot more upkeep.

Bugeye hero? Sounds awesome.

Sadly, was not actually awesome. The box of weapons was a prepper box, and the unit itself was underwhelming, with just a few middling perks to boost stats. We've already got 3 superior bugeyes.

New weaponry! Very interesting concept. Presumably making a ship land by reducing it's speed to 0 lets you fight a battle while it's fully intact for better loot? It's a cool idea, but not terribly useful as a heavy mount. Fortunately it opened up research for lighter options. Seems we'd need a whole squad fitted with nothing but these as well, which seems like a giant pain in the ass. Still, it might actually be a much easier way to take down those giant cruisers and such. Will require some napkin math.

Now this is more like it! Sadly, this is also rather underwhelming; it's basically the assault armour with more armour and less stat bonuses. But it does have a noteworthy difference: It's an exosuit. We can finally bring gals into space with real armour.

Naturally, there's a variant for each species. Cats had also been lacking a space armour, since, bizarrely, the nekomimi space power armours we can buy... can't be used in space. Wtf? Whatever, this is way better anyways.

Seems like an upgrade to our Drakkar we've been using for space missions. 2 more crew slots, better speed and shields, blah blah blah. Not likely to be useful for dogfighting, as it's too slow.

Now this is interesting. I swear we had something we needed fusion tech to build unlocked within like the first 2 years of the game. Probably some shadowtech thing that won't matter now. Anyways, fingers crossed this eventually unlocks some awesome shit.

Speaking of awesome shit...

We also got an even better power armour variant for our cats- blue shields instead of red, built in weaponry including a 'grav blaster' and some generally awesome stats, evasion notwithstanding.

At long fucking last, we have a battleship. I've been drooling over those broadside mounts forever. Double heavy slots too, and bonus accuracy to make those big guns way more efficient. It's got some built in shields and armour too. Lacking in speed a bit, but this is clearly for going up against enemy battleships. Also, the requirement of 5 pilots really sucks. Going to be difficult to train that many good ones. Also, all these new ships are a total bitch to make. This thing requires like 6 ship engines, plus a heavy shield that needs another engine and 20 force circuits, a bunch more shit, and 50000 hours of runt time. Ugh.

Now we arrive at something really special armour wise: The first flight (and space!) capable suit for ogres. This is a game changer, given their insane durability and strength. Probably a nightmare to make though, grav modules are still a pain in the ass to acquire iirc. I haven't even checked the required parts for these armours yet, I bet it's a ton of gems and shit.

Fortunately, our wealth continues to grow. It's at the point that dumping 10 million on a pile of 200 optronics parts doesn't make me bat an eye. And yes, I needed to do that to start the Dragon.

Sadly, 'each chip' was literal. Converting ore to 50k dollars isn't a terrible use of labour, but it's just not at a relevant scale, because ore, for some god forsaken reason, can't be bought at the market. Or even manufactured reliably (we can get a tiny bit by mining, but it's like 1 piece per 5000 hours.) Excavator ships drop about 50 of them, which would be a nice chunk of change for the time investment at least, but ultimately just doesn't matter compared to the money the plastic chips bring in.

Man whoever pilots this thing is going to have some fun. It's a shame it's still a 2x2 tile unit, or it could shrug off a nuke. As it is, it still might be able to survive a direct hit from one, but it'd be a dice roll I think, and the shields don't recover very quickly.

It does carry some fun weapons though. These aren't even all the flavours, there's EMP grenades as well, for instance.

And this is just an obscene amount of potential firepower that comes built in to the chassis. Excited to see the other variants.

 

[Jaedar]

You should have reloaded, as that one was clearly the game being trollish. The difficulty is waay over the place.

I actually went back and savescummed the mission afterwards to see what the fuck killed me and if it could have been reasonably prevented. The answer: An assassin, who has INVIS 6 (Can't be seen from further than 6 tiles + spot stat, which tends to be single digits) is given a mortar and placed way in the far back corner of the enemy base. There's essentially no way to kill it round one, because even if you knew it was there, you can't even get a unit close enough to see the fucking spot it's at (which is nestled between indestructable bunkers protecting it from splash) without being within it's LOS and triggering reaction fire from a unit with insanely high reactions. And obviously it has sniper so as soon as any unit on the map spots any of your units or is shot by one, it has a target. Like, I can't even blind fire our own nuke at it, because the spot is just pure blackness with no reference points. Whoever designed this base is just a straight up asshole.

Did not know assassins can even spawn with mortars. That is really assholeish, nothing you can do to prevent getting nuked.

New weaponry! Very interesting concept. Presumably making a ship land by reducing it's speed to 0 lets you fight a battle while it's fully intact for better loot? It's a cool idea, but not terribly useful as a heavy mount. Fortunately it opened up research for lighter options. Seems we'd need a whole squad fitted with nothing but these as well, which seems like a giant pain in the ass. Still, it might actually be a much easier way to take down those giant cruisers and such. Will require some napkin math.

I never really found a use for this one. There's really not a lot of small ships you care about taking down unharmed at this point, and the /2 or /4 for large ships makes it basically unworkable, or so I found.

Now this is more like it! Sadly, this is also rather underwhelming; it's basically the assault armour with more armour and less stat bonuses. But it does have a noteworthy difference: It's an exosuit. We can finally bring gals into space with real armour.

I never built this one for some reason. Maybe I decided the upgrade from assault wasn't worth x4 fresh drain?

Will be interesting to see if you find a use for the XECs, I found that walker vehicles were too hard to control compared to just fielding another hovertank.

Concerning the ships: The dragon is a good tank, but 3000 speed is actually too slow for most endgame threats. The devastator is generally better at destroying stuff, and sabres are just godlike in general.

Speaking of awesome shit...

I like the dig at firaxcom in this one.