We have a small ship landed nearby, in the perfect spot to land a night ambush!
It turns out to be some academy scrubs. It's a total massacre with our new night ops suits. None of the 4 enemies sighted here would be visible from this position without it. We can take them out from so far they wouldn't even be able to fire if they walked directly towards us.
There is a slight complication- this isn't just a normal desert, but one with random heat bursts, which inflict massive stun damage, enough to knock a healthy gal out in one go. It can hit enemies too, or even hit the same spot twice in one turn. I believe heat resistance still applies to this damage, so we're not too bad off at least, but it does knock gals out a few times before we're done.
One of the savy girls we were researching turns out to be a recruit! This is a thing that can happen when interrogating people, especially after you've gotten all their intel.
The result is a freak gal- an uber gal with stats on par with a castaway, but no other special bonuses AFAICT. They do count as their own sort of subspecies though (they have a unique icon in the top right of the stat screens) so maybe there is some stuff only they can receive, in terms of armour or training or something.
The Green Codex is someting we can (and should) research repeatedly. It'll give us a bunch of different tech.
Our first reward is healing gel. This is pretty nice, as you can't research the gel itself, at least not with our current buildings. Healing gel is a nice item to have since it lets soldiers patch their own wounds, which is pretty rare. It's pretty good at it too, with 4hp recovered and 3 charges.
Alas, it requires boomfruit and sectoweed to make. Boom fruit can be farmed much like sectoweed, but we'll need to find some first, and, well, it shows up in jungle maps as effectively landmines. Definitely a pain.
Aside from the apples, we need smelly rags to recruit these gals too, which can be farmed most easily from necropirates. We already have some from the slot machines though.
Apparently we're a honry, cunning captain.
And we just acquired a slave without having researched slavery yet. Slave maids are basically the lowest tier of slave, but hey, free income is free income.
We launch into another landed craft ambush, this time finding an especially well armed altar boy after sticking our head out.
Ah, this makes sense now. It's a church warparty. These warmaidens have some decent armour, 12? NV with those goggles of theirs and tend to carry some very nice weaponry. In this case, a light cannon. I don't really want one of those, and I REALLY don't want to get hit by one.
Slut manages to rush one down only to reveal another one right behind her. Shit. This is what is known as 'fucking terrible luck.' All we can do is crouch and hope they miss.
Miraculously, even better than that, the second warmaiden wanders away without firing at us. Nice! Our snipers pick off a few more altar boys as well. One of the awkward things about using the night ops gear is you can't really pair it with other stuff that well. There's not much point being stealthy if your bulky ally is drawing inaccurate fire in your general direction anyways.
I can't display the name of the weapon due to my hotkey setup for the screenshots, but you can see here the ammo it used does up to 120 damage. That wouldn't quite one shot us with this armour, but it'd get uncomfortably close.
Another warmaiden is carrying a sniper rifle. Jackpot!
Slut is our only melee gal on this run, which makes this a bit sketchy. Fortunately, she's fucking awesome at it.
Another new enemy. Matrons are on par with the priests, perhaps a bit better in melee. or something.
Slut single handedly takes out everyone inside the ship by abusing doors and her superior TU pool. Well done!
Not a bad chunk of xp, 5 reactions is nothig to sneeze at.
And the loot is excellent! 3 sniper rifles! Assault Machinegun! Poison grenades!
And a lot of prisoners. More than we can handle, in fact. We really need to set up that second base and make a prison.
The chitin shield isn't a great melee weapon, but the fact that it's always there means we put it to a lot of use, to the point we got the master title for it.
Not sure if I showed this off before. One of the rare ones for sure.
Yet another landed craft! I've encountered a reticulan base this way before. They're dangerous, but the potential gain in tech is too good to ignore.
We bring some big guns this time.
Huh, that's not so bad.
These little dickheads are no real threat. Maybe this will be easy after all.
Ah, that's more like what I remember.
A bunch of assholes over here too, including 2 I'm not familiar with.
Anything made of metal scares me. It's gun is a fairly shit reticulan laser weapon though iirc.
Clearly some sort of uber hybrid or something. I wonder if we can convert them?
At this point I realize the base has been looming over our ship the entire time. That's uh, not good. Probably.
More assholes down here. Our sniper rifle is doing good work.
I didn't catch it in a screenshot, but these little fuckers are what I'm after here. He's got some kind of energy shield. And a brutal rocket launcher thing. I want to catch him and steal his secrets, even if we can't take the entire base.
Slut has taken a few lasers so far but is still doing fairly well.
I even manage to land a knockout gas grenade right on the shielded fuck. Not sure if it worked or not though because even more guys keep arriving from the shadows.
And disaster strikes. What is that pile of stuff on the ground? That's all that's left of Masochist Slut. Not even a corpse is left after getting hit with some sort of plasma weapon from above. RIP
Yeah, this is getting too heavy after all. I was hoping they'd mostly stay in their base and let me run away with a few spoils, but they're swarming out onto us now.
We manage to grab the sleeping body of one of the peons at least. He won't give us cool shielding tech, but it's better than nothing.
This is a huge blow. Slut was probably our strongest remaining gal, and our only melee expert. It'll take a long time to train a decent replacement.
This is another semi random event that always seems to show up eventually.
I'm not sure who these various princesses are, but it seems like the last one is the red eyed brat.
Frustratingly, the novice robes are equippable by 'weird gals' which I've never acquired before. I suspect they might be recruited from the savage gals that show up in the ritual site events, as they had a similar name iirc. They're dangerous though, so I haven't done that mission yet.
Plastasteel unlocked! No immediate use, but I'm sure it's an important prereq.
We find yet another reticulan base! The round probe ships seem to lead to them, definitely something I'll keep an eye out for from now on. This time I elect to bring more of our boys. They've got the accuracy needed to use the sniper rifles. 3 sniper rifles can solve a lot of problems.
This seems pretty much ideal; the gals can spot for the snipers on this big open field. We might even take the whole base!
There's a problem though. Aside from the reticulans having excellent nightvision with the giant eyeballs, these metal fuckers seem to have the spotter trait, with one instantly returning fire after being shot. They're tanky as hell too, taking 3 sniper rounds to go down.
The plan was working pretty well, but after getting several kills the enemy lands a hefty shot on one of our gals. I really don't want to risk such a high potential soldier, so we bail without even an alien body to bring back. Lots of wounded now too, going to be a while before we can field all our gals again.
That's fine though We're doing well financially and we've still got a ton of stuff to research!
This would be more exciting if I'd done it earlier; blowdarts are kind of mediocre at this point, and the arrows aren't terribly appealing when we have sniper rifles. I'll make some arrows and blowpipes and daggers though, if only for nabbing the poisoner title, which has a very nice benefit!
Our new freak gal inherits Slut's moniker. Starting stats are quite impressive, aside from bravery and throwing. Here's hoping she's as successful as her predecessor.
Sickbay is finally researched. A flat 1 hp per 2 days isn't great, but it's not nothing either. The other big benefit is it will unlock a lot more research, like studying zombies.
We end the month just barely below the line for our next promotion. I'm fine with that; we really need a bit longer to finish upgrading ourselves. The next big step is getting a proper landing craft. The ability to send a dozen gals on a mission instead of 6 will be a total game changer. We've got all the stuff we need to make that happen, it's just a matter of research hours at this point.
I should have beelined for the firebombs in retrospect. The tech tree still feels very slippery and random to me right now. I discover things I've never seen before with seemingly less tech, and can't find things I always had before with seemingly much more advancement. But because of the way the game lets you know when new techs are available, it feels like a tractable problem in the long run. At least for the early game stuff needed to get off the ground. I know I also revealed a ton of random crap via data disks, which I havne't really dug into yet in this playthrough. We're nearing the point where I will though, and I expect glorious results.
