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

[Damned Registrations]

Going to start spoiling a bunch of random stuff now, with things like the tech viewer, debug mode, and the wiki. Obviously this isn't going to be exhaustive by any means, but consider yourself warned from here on.

Quickbattle shennanigans.

Spoiling the map layout with quickbattle to find secrets and avoid digging to find the exit tiles for 70 turns was mentioned earlier, so I thought I'd test the idea out. As you can imagine, the mission list is LOOOOONG.

I don't get to pick my team, but it sure gives me some nice toys to play with.

Man, that would have been a cool item to have.

This one too. Daze bypasses blue shields and would have been an interesting way to take out certain lategame targets if we had a strong source of it like this.

Some of the things it spawned us with are more of the dwarf fortress variety of 'fun' It even started armed. I recall the game mentioning that mysterious boxes could contain anything, including bad stuff. Perhaps this was a possible result? Would certainly have sucked to have this in the base. Or maybe the demon summoning circle can spawn this on occasion, there was also a 'demonic horde' item. Though maybe that item was what spawned the shit on the demon level we did of the final mission. I couldn't read it's description.

Huh, this isn't the mars base we did... is this the vanilla final mission? I actually couldn't find the missions I was looking for in the list. Maybe I overlooked it, but it's a huge list, I'm not going to carefully pore over it.

For some reason, there's like 12 versions of this one in particular.

One that piqued my interest was the silver towers. We never did manage to catch up to one to fight it a second time, and the first one ran away. Very strange design, and smaller than I expected.

It's also hovering above the ground, and has no ramps or even elevators. My quickbattle squad has no fliers, so I couldn't get in! The inside wouldn't be terribly interesting anyways, it's the crew I'd be most interested in, and the game substitutes a faction in for the mission's defaults.

 

[Jaedar]

Going from 3rd to 4th difficulty isn't a big bump. And 5th is.... more of a troll than anything else. I guess it could be fun as a "see how long you can go before game overing" type of deal.

As long as you spam half your base full of defenses against missiles and base assaults you should be close to immune to losing. Once your bases are untouchable the only way to lose is either points or failing the final mission, both of which should be pretty avoidable. It's gonna be an economic/tech rush to base defenses but it doesn't seem quite impossible.

It takes quite a lot of research to get spammable base defense iirc. You do also lose if you don't have enough cash for upkeep (which seems like something that might happen if your bases are 50% defenses).

There are many problems with 5th difficulty. First is the sale price reduction on items. On 3rd difficulty, each runt making x-grog gets you 8500 in profit (not counting facility upkeep). On 5th, you get 4000 in profit. Naturally, this also holds for all the loot, hostages (I guess this might be compensated by larger enemy counts?), etc. Enemies also have about +50% reactions, +35% TUs compared to 3rd (as well as bonuses to all the other stats, but those two are the worst). But that's just standard superhuman stuff. The real terror are the events.

The game slaps you with -666 infamy first month. This is just a love tap though. The ninja war starts month 2, which means they'll start building bases. Each base is -150 monthly score, and if your airbus runs into one it will get shot down (this is very doable to savescum at least).. If you survive that, you also start getting missile strikes in july. I'm not sure if it gets worse after that, if it does, I can't find the events.

I'm sure it's not literally impossible, but it does seem like you would need nigh perfect play and rng. Fighting against lategame enemies would also be... interesting, as they'd probably all have more reactions than possible for your units to get. Shit, even basic nurses have the reactions of a stat-capped peasant.

It's also hovering above the ground, and has no ramps or even elevators. My quickbattle squad has no fliers, so I couldn't get in! The inside wouldn't be terribly interesting anyways, it's the crew I'd be most interested in, and the game substitutes a faction in for the mission's defaults.

You can pick the faction you want to fight. Also, if you press the "..." you can hit q to search. Although there are two star god factions, so I don't know which one is correct.

For some reason, there's like 12 versions of this one in particular.

There's one for every country it can spawn in, since each country spawns its own army unit as reinforcements.

 

[Average Manatee]

This one too. Daze bypasses blue shields and would have been an interesting way to take out certain lategame targets if we had a strong source of it like this.

This is the Gold codex weapon, you hit your own side with it to restore their TUs.

Huh, this isn't the mars base we did... is this the vanilla final mission? I actually couldn't find the missions I was looking for in the list. Maybe I overlooked it, but it's a huge list, I'm not going to carefully pore over it.

Hit the ... to go to a bigger list and then you can hit Q to search for it. The final mission chain is all mars missions.

It takes quite a lot of research to get spammable base defense iirc. You do also lose if you don't have enough cash for upkeep (which seems like something that might happen if your bases are 50% defenses).

Not really, flak is obtainable by 6 months or so playing casually and not beelining. And the maintenance for these facilities is like 10-25k apiece, so 10 costs as much as 2 brainers in upkeep. Not nothing but as long as you literally can't die then progressing slightly slower in research should be OK. Look at how much DR lost in his game when $1M invested in flak before missiles hit would have saved $1M in facilities not being destroyed almost immediately. So its mostly a timing question, whether you know when the scripted missiles start or ramp up in deadliness.

There are many problems with 5th difficulty. First is the sale price reduction on items. On 3rd difficulty, each runt making x-grog gets you 8500 in profit (not counting facility upkeep). On 5th, you get 4000 in profit. Naturally, this also holds for all the loot, hostages (I guess this might be compensated by larger enemy counts?), etc. Enemies also have about +50% reactions, +35% TUs compared to 3rd (as well as bonuses to all the other stats, but those two are the worst). But that's just standard superhuman stuff. The real terror are the events.

Yeah, the difficulty decrease in loot value is basically countered by increased numbers of enemies (more loot), more hostages (and winning by panicking the remainder of the map is more common since you kill more but their bravery/morale is the same, so you often get free hostages), and from more infamy from kills/loot found. The passive income generation being worse is a big thing though.

As a bonus though, all of the income penalty items that you have to pay to sell are also cheaper to sell. E.g. the starting Cali penalty is -40% weaker.

The game slaps you with -666 infamy first month. This is just a love tap though. The ninja war starts month 2, which means they'll start building bases. Each base is -150 monthly score, and if your airbus runs into one it will get shot down (this is very doable to savescum at least).. If you survive that, you also start getting missile strikes in july. I'm not sure if it gets worse after that, if it does, I can't find the events.

Yeah, its bad, but it also means free shootdowns, and I don't think losing by infamy is ever gonna happen if you're actually intensively farming civilian traffic. Getting Flak before July is definitely possible, though I'm not sure on what the missile stats are or how many flaks you need.

I'm sure it's not literally impossible, but it does seem like you would need nigh perfect play and rng. Fighting against lategame enemies would also be... interesting, as they'd probably all have more reactions than possible for your units to get. Shit, even basic nurses have the reactions of a stat-capped peasant.

DR could have been much, much better equipped for the final battle. Granted a lot of it comes down to RNG farming but he could have gone in with stuff like UAC BFGs with much more ammo available.

 

[Andnjord]

One that piqued my interest was the silver towers. We never did manage to catch up to one to fight it a second time, and the first one ran away. Very strange design, and smaller than I expected.

I managed to catch one and it was nothing terribly exciting, some novices, coordinators and operatives (no guardians). About 10-12 from what I remember, no special loot either.

 

[Jaedar]

Not really, flak is obtainable by 6 months or so playing casually and not beelining.

Yeah but... flak tower requires flak tower kits, which requires 25 necroplane parts or 8 25mm cannons + 12 rounds (x50). You're not going to be able to spam that early, unless I'm missing something? (flak deals 225*0,65 damage on average, missile swarms have 500 hp, so you'd need quite a lot of them to defend against missile strikes). Maintenance isn't a huge issue in itself, but 8 tiles of turrets is a pretty big opportunity cost. The real issue is the item requirements. This is why I specified 'spammable' base defense.

I managed to catch one and it was nothing terribly exciting, some novices, coordinators and operatives (no guardians). About 10-12 from what I remember, no special loot either.

Sounds like a really good haul of interrogations for a single ufo though.

Yeah, its bad, but it also means free shootdowns, and I don't think losing by infamy is ever gonna happen if you're actually intensively farming civilian traffic.

Free shootdowns and civilian traffic... in februrary? You'll be lucky to have the little bird at that point.

DR could have been much, much better equipped for the final battle. Granted a lot of it comes down to RNG farming but he could have gone in with stuff like UAC BFGs with much more ammo available.

Sure, but you're still going to be taking a lot of return fire, which is pretty bad.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Final mission secrets revealed.

I had a couple backup saves along the way in case the game crashed. So after looking up how to enable debug mode, I loaded up the one from the second level of the mission (I don't imagine the first one is very interesting) and commenced cheating!

Well, first secret revealed- the weird rock formation I dug through turned out to be pixel art.

I may be too pure and innocent to parse what I'm looking at here. I'm going to hope that's a cape and she's facing left.

Seems we missed 2 secret stashes in the underground maze.

The big fancy one in the middle here has a 'destroid beacon.' No dossier, but we can activate it...

Summoned one of these as an ally.

It has okay stats, nothing amazing. No inventory either. I didn't think to check if it was built in weapons. That 3000 energy could be real useful if you gave it something really energy hungry though, like a big axe or something. Pretty sure it can equip normal weapons, inventory did have hand slots at least.

The other secret was a 'rage bomb' in the bottom right. Again, no dossier. Doesn't seem that powerful, but who knows what it scales off.

Hey, remember those turrets that fell into the ship? I'd assumed they got destroyed while I couldn't see them in the chaos, but no, they fucking phased inside the indestructable metal hull.

I even tried warping Luka around and she couldn't see them or slash them from any angle. I accidentally made this mission literally impossible to complete via killing all enemies. Even with debug mode- there's a 'kill everything' command, but it kills your team too so you can't win that way. And the 'stun everything' command won't work on big turrets.

More pixel art. This one reveals the meaning of life.

One last stash we missed, and it was right under our noses. I thought I explored this cave section properly for exits, but apparently not. I blame the fucking view and lighting.

This was a significant stash of freshness potions, which we didn't really need at this point, but would have been nice. Also a pair of... whatever these were. Some kind of wand presumably, haven't researched it.

Next level!

Seeing the whole enemy forces laid out like this without stealth and casualties obscuring most of them is impressive. Really drives home just how much shit we killed. Well, not on this level, we skipped 90% of these fuckers.

In a move I can only describe as 'appropriately dickish' there is a battle droid completely encased in invincible tiles in this corner. Even knowing it's here, I don't think you could harm this thing without cheating. Maybe there's some kind of EMP weapon that doesn't need LoS, or explosion mechanics that leak through walls I don't know about.

There's also a couple Rockies down here, to keep bughunt mode from kicking in one supposes. Last map had a couple too iirc. Definitely a dick move.

One thing I didn't notice when we went through here is each of these rooms has an item on the table. Most is boring crap, like ore and such, or common weapons. There's a couple vibro axes. These two in the top left have a future bow and a photon sword though, which are fairly nice.

This level also had a secret we missed- the left armoury has a door at the bottom obscured by the terrain. It leads to these three items over here. It's the voodoo resonator amulet that trades health and morale for freshness each turn (would have solved freshness issue for several units, though it'd kill the ones that can't regen, you can just take it off and vamp back the health, so incredibly useful regardless) and the other two are a chaos dagger (perfect to pair with the amulet) and a blacksun warp cannon (more of a novelty at this point.)

Doom level next!

If this is pixel art of something, it's illegible to me.

Glad we skipped the maze section. That looks like hell, and there's no items in there.

Amusingly, doomguy starts the level alive. He had a weird name like STR_SOMETHING and started with a rocketlauncher in one hand and the BFG in the other. Clearly not meant to be found by the player, though I think you could certainly manage it with the right tools, like the Crystal skull and a ninja. I'm assuming he's the cause of the giant explosion that happened off to the side. There might have been two of them, or I might have accidentally warped the first one I found around by accident, but I saw one here )overlapping his corpse) and another in the other room we found the BFG in.

Found out you can, in fact, destroy these altars. Took a LOT of swings from Lenneth though, who has way above average melee, near 200. I'll have to check a table of terrain health numbers later, I'm curious how they measure up against eachother. There were items on the ritual circle thing, but just lore fluff stuff, like a godly brain and giant bone.

Heh, game calling us out. Though ironically, there's nothing stopping you from digging your way into that and finding it through sheer autism. The best part: those are exit tiles. We could have bypassed the whole fucking level by digging our way into these rooms.

And again, fucking rocky buried in the corner. Though there's nothing stopping you from digging him up, so I think this is the first level we could have technically won by massacre without debug commands. Though with the random enemy spawns, that doesn't seem remotely viable.

Final stage!

It says 'I see dead aliens.'

Aliens before they're made dead. God damn that was quite the army. Probably 30-40 in that screenshot aline.

When I got here this time (I've just been warping units to the exit tiles to progress through this after the initial save load) the real brain was in the top left. We'd have been boned if it had happened in the real run.

It seems the 3 rooms each have their own special guardian. The chancellor and purifier we already saw (sadly I couldn't mind orb examine them, debug mode disabled it for some reason) and the third is this SPESS marine knockoff. The gun is basically an auto shotgun on steroids, probably would have been able to kill Manatee via accidental overkill.

Another rocky buried in the walls, not that it matters much for this level. But more interesting are these shafts above the spots the brain can spawn. The red dots are floor tiles, but the black ones are gaps you can fly up through. Or I got that reversed. The point is, if you're lucky and autistic enough to realize you can get up here (or cheated and looked at the map) then after killing a fake brain, you can fly up through them.

And they lead up here, into this otherwise inaccessible room. These elevators don't lead anywhere. There's a handful of enemies up here, nothing special. I guess they help torment your team with psi attacks from an unreachable position while you're down below. Maybe this is also meant to be some kind of lore thing, like this elevator leads to the rest of the base in theory, so this isn't actually a sealed in cave with no entrance. Which still wouldn't explain why there was a huge army deployed in that cave, including chryssalids of all things. Whatever, it made for a cool last fight with the big guns and lots of space.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah but... flak tower requires flak tower kits, which requires 25 necroplane parts or 8 25mm cannons + 12 rounds (x50). You're not going to be able to spam that early, unless I'm missing something? (flak deals 225*0,65 damage on average, missile swarms have 500 hp, so you'd need quite a lot of them to defend against missile strikes). Maintenance isn't a huge issue in itself, but 8 tiles of turrets is a pretty big opportunity cost. The real issue is the item requirements. This is why I specified 'spammable' base defense.

You're right, I was mixing up the facilities. Thought it was the higher level flak defenses that required a lot of stuff.

25 Necroplane parts isn't that tough once you can shoot down necroplanes though. 3 flak towers should be possible in that timeframe if you're willing to savescum so they all hit, then get a few more in later months and upgrade to flak cannons when your tech is ready. Have no idea how much longer it takes to get the flak cannons if you beeline, they are clearly a much better deal between not needing parts and having almost 2x the power. Question though is at what dates you need to be able to shoot down stronger missile strikes.

Free shootdowns and civilian traffic... in februrary? You'll be lucky to have the little bird at that point.

Not shooting down ninjas in february, but eventually. Farming civilian/bandit traffic should keep you easily score positive from march onwards if you actually do all the missions. It's more of an endurance test because it means dozens of absolutely trivial missions that give little beyond score (well it does often give necroplane parts for your defenses I guess). Especially if you start doing that on secondary bases. If you actually farm the entire world's traffic, even just the low level traffic reachable by shitty helicopters/planes, your score is gonna be immense and that means big monthly payouts as well.

 

[Jaedar]

25 Necroplane parts isn't that tough once you can shoot down necroplanes though.

Maybe? Necropirates are pretty tough enemies though. Also can't remember how many parts you get per shootdown.

If you actually farm the entire world's traffic, even just the low level traffic reachable by shitty helicopters/planes, your score is gonna be immense and that means big monthly payouts as well.

Sure, but getting that much radar coverage seems nontrivial. Quite a lot of things have to go right to reach a stable point. But I do see your point about how not losing is a pretty low bar. But you do also have to increase your score/month faster than enemies set up bases to drain it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Gaze into the abyss that is the tech tree.

It's arguable that using either or both of these features is intended, and they certainly would have made the game a lot easier in many ways. Including straight up QoL stuff like thinning out my massive item lists by selling off useless junk. I don't regret not using them during the playthrough, as discovering stuff the hard way was satisfying to me, but now that we've won, I'm eager to crack these open and look under the hood. We'll start with the least spoilerly thing: item viewer.


Right clicking on an item brings up a very simple screen- it lists things you can manufacture with that item. If nothing is here, and you don't intend to use it for something, it's safe to sell, presumably. Maybe there's some weird exceptions where having something in the inventory triggers events like the fungus outbreaks. Anyways, by default (or maybe an option I set?) it censors out items that haven't been discovered yet. But it lets you know there's SOMETHING it could be used for. And with a click of a button-

We reveal the spoiler: Apparently there's a 'Black Tower' we could have made instead. Hell, maybe we still can, we can disassemble the red tower.

Of course, many items have way, way more uses. Look at all this cool stuff demonic essence can make which we never discovered. A bunch of it, presumably, requires a different codex. This screen doesn't distinguish. And we can't click on these to get details about them either.

And some of the spoilers are more spoilery than others, since a lot of big game events are tied to 'manufacturing' projects. Mostly bounties or big tech jumps but... apparently we can marry Gudrun. And we could have been spoiled on this before we even knew her name was Gudrun, if we were just curious what we can do with some crappy treasure we got from a church raid way back in the first couple months.

The rules for what gets spoilered are a bit odd too- all these things are actually items we've already gotten; the various 'prizes' you unlock by spending tokens in the early game. But I guess because we spent those items to research them and get the unlocks, (and maybe because we updated since then and it messed with some logic?) all this stuff counts as 'undiscovered.'

Checking a bunch of random shit, apparently there's a gambler trophy we could craft, that involves a bunch of fruit. Probably since it's a common reward for the slots.

Also, it doesn't just reveal direct results, but ones multiple steps away, to a limit of three. So you can find out about stuff WAY ahead of you on the tech tree from the same screen as direct steps.

One of the things I was most curious about was vampire stuff, since it seemed like it should lead somewhere but we unlocked very little related to it. Sure enough, apparently we can vampirize gudrun! There's also a 'shade vampire body' which sounds incredibly useful for all our dead gals.

Onward to the tech tree viewer. Middle clicking on a tech in our list brings us to this screen. I haven't researched this since it's fairly obviously a bug resulting from updating an ongoing playthrough. The colours seem to be basically like elsewhere- purple is old stuff, pink is new stuff, but the orange is new, and seems to be impossible stuff. We took male touch, so peasant and gals are disabled. This should be as well, but isn't for some reason. Dunno why. Maybe Male touch got renamed so it fucked it up and thinks we don't have it. It also shows which things this tech would disable, and what techs it would give us for free.

In this case, it gives us the generic 'Nekomimi' topic. We can click on it and see things that WILL unlock it (a bunch of catgirl prisoners or the 'peregrine cult' concept) things we'd need to research first to enable it (nothing in this case, as soon as we interrogate a catgirl we have a chance to learn this) and things we MIGHT get this from for free (a bunch of prisoners that know of catgirls, but also know a bunch of other crap we might learn instead.) This list is probably gigantic for stuff like databases or girl guides.

We can also hit 'Q' and bring up a search to find specific shit, whether we've seen it before or not. Like the black tower. I'm not sure what the version with [f] denotes, maybe it's an under the hood thing. There's a lot of tricks going on to establish dependencies and triggered events within the limitations of the engine.

Browsing some random stuff, apparently we're missing Propaganda. I think that's related to a path we didn't take- it seems items are only listed in orange if we can't research them due to disqualification. If something required for Propaganda is itself disqualified, it still treats propaganda as potentially learnable, and merely undiscovered. Also, there's a nice warning at the bottom if it affects game progression, though it won't say what exactly it does. I think Communications unlocks a bunch of events and missions, maybe new items for sale. The viewer isn't an exhaustive list of consequences for researching stuff.

I spotted 'Scamming and Spoofing' as something we're not allowed to research, and tried to find out why. I'm assuming it's one of these captain type choices. I can't recall which one we even took, and I might have taken an extra one at some point as well, because it wasn't obvious after an update if some things were expansions of existing tech chains we should have had access to or not. Ironically, reading these spoilers might have cleared that up.

Poking around a bit more, we can see that the personality test actually seems to have some major consequences. Recruiting Dr. X is only an opting if we have the 'Honor' trait, for example. We can also see some cool options here we never had, like giving her to aurora or enslaving red mage. We chose Prank, hence it's in purple.

Going back a level, we can see that honor is unlocked by these various captain types. Apparently we were a 'scary captain.' These things have multiple levels; maybe it's designed in such a way that you always get honor eventually no matter which path you take, but I kinda doubt it. If it were, why bother having it be a trait at all?

One of the paths not taken has 'Aspect: Bookworm'. It didn't unlock much, but it would have let us make flak tower kits from necroplane parts, apparently. The [m] must refer to the manufacturing screen option, rather than a tech. Still no idea what the 'f' would be for. Purchasing, maybe? OH! 'Facility' would make sense, since that's what the red tower was.

One class without 'Honor' was this 'mage class captain' we also passed up. Seems we also have the 'doesn't like this game captain and 'odiousless captain.' Anyways, this seems to mostly unlock stuff we already have, but we did miss out on a 'Transfiguration Ritual.' Wasn't that how we made the Chort?

Apparently not. Instead, it seems it's a way to unlock the ability to turn slaves into demonic essence. Which sounds super useful, honestly. Especially if we had more uses for the essence. You can also see here it list 'services required.' Note to self: check if I can click on that and get a list of topics a service unlocks.

The 'Personality test finished' is unlocked by a captain type we didn't take, but also by any of these four traits. we seem to have all 4, which might be a bug/cheating.

Other things we could have done with gudrun are interesting too. I actually reached this part by seeing what our 'Male touch' path unlocked for us. Apparently it COULD have unlocked 'Sky Knight SS Armour' but we took the wrong version of Gudrun to make that work I tried looking up it's stats on the online wiki, but it seems it's out of date? If anyone can find it or direct me to an up to date wiki, please do.

Sadly, it seems we're locked out of cool vampire princess gudrun.

Astrocaster came up as a 3rd step removed result of energy weapon parts, and made me curious.

Turns out it requires gals are superior, like 6 research steps removed backwards from the astrocaster. I think this was the Omake thing, it was the guitar? Pretty sure one was in one of the secret stashes in the last mission too.

We can also look up the potential results of random manufactuing stuff, like the casino coupons. Nothing special here, though this might be the best way to get mystery boxes lategame, turning cash to jack tokens to slot pulls to coupons... it's still really, really bad.

We also could have gotten one (or a golden apple for a hero!) from breaking that golden statue we found. But we only got 6 gold. LAME.

I'm just randomly clicking around here mostly, there's still something like 1200 techs/recipes we haven't unlocked yet, so me finding all the cool shit that might be interesting is hopeless. If any of you want to post shit, feel free. This seems like something that would have been helpful, seems like a late game version of the bio suit? And it seems we were close to getting it. I looked up 'The Power of Slime' and it seems we need a recipe book from purple bloom lady. No idea how to get that.

Another cool thing we're missing but might be able to get is stealthsuits for both lokknaar and Syn. It's the last Syn armour that can be made (I always thought there should be one more at least) but we need this STC EM Jammer tech. Researching it requires finding an EM jammer. Again, no idea where to get one. Presumably shooting down specific craft and getting lucky. Maybe ninjas or related to aurora?

The mystery box is a more interesting list of possible results. Apparently we could indeed have gotten the sinster device of doom this way. The other 2 disasters we ended up getting from random events anyways, so I'm not sure we can say we were 'lucky' to have avoided them from the boxes. Also, apparently getting triple orbs was an option just as likely as the normal orbs, and that never happened even once. Scammed! There's a 'fairy dragon' in there too that seems like a cool pet thing, akin to the parrot perhaps? I'm guessing it could go to shadowrealms. It can be crafted too. There's a whole rabbit hole of tech there of course.

This is something I was particularly interested int- our red mage quest never seemed to progress at all since we finished the tower and spa. Apparently we needed a chrono prism and succubus wings. No idea how to get either. Maybe they are rare drops from missions we didn't repeat enough. Maybe they come from missions we've yet to see. Maybe we blew them to smithereens and we can never progress the quest now.

Another cool thing I stumbled on- if you pick 'Sore Ass Captain' as your personality test, you unlock 'Bulk Mining.' Probably of marginal utility, I guess it'd help make some metal armour and shit early on, and get gemstones to sell. But here's the kicked- this is a way to get that 'Demonic Incursion' item I saw in the quick battle items! It's a rather rare chance, but assuming you could fight them off, this might be an alternate route to voodoo/demon stuff early on if it triggers some kind of mission with relevant loot or the like. I'm assuming it'd be like with the slime and poltergeist, where you get an option of how to deal with it. Man, shit like this is actually making me want to start a new run, it's crazy how many unique things can happen during a run that nobody else would encounter. I LOVE this game for that. There's a decent chance nobody has ever even gotten this incursion thing this way, ever.

Another cool looking tech we SHOULD be able to get- abyssal gnomes? Sounds good, and we only need 'Abyss' researched. How do we do that? Apparently by researching Dream Echoes. But I have dream echoes on hand, in a base with voodoo service, and there's no option to research them any more. Might be bugged? I dunno. Makes me wonder what else might be bugged or not working. In a game this large and complex, there's got to be a fair amount.

 

[Average Manatee]

Maybe? Necropirates are pretty tough enemies though. Also can't remember how many parts you get per shootdown.

20. Though I think you can also randomly find small amounts of necroplane parts on any shootdown map just as randomly spawned loot on the terrain.

Sure, but getting that much radar coverage seems nontrivial. Quite a lot of things have to go right to reach a stable point. But I do see your point about how not losing is a pretty low bar. But you do also have to increase your score/month faster than enemies set up bases to drain it.

Keeping score above 0 isn't nearly a problem I think. The actual issue is that employing a decent amount of brainers requires a substantial positive score since monthly funding doesn't support them.

Spoiler

Here's me as soon as my shootdown game starts with only 1 base flying 1 little bird. It's difficulty 4, so ninja bases aren't sapping my score atm, but there's no way ninja bases would come close to draining the nearly 10k score I'm pulling off a single base shooting down everything. Keep in mind this doesn't include points from tech. Which is why I feel its more of an endurance issue, you can keep your score up if you're willing to really, really run a lot of missions. If you're willing to sacrifice a few brainers temporarily to fund more bases then your income should skyrocket sort of similar to a manufacturing snowball except with shootdowns, missions, and flak towers.

Other things we could have done with gudrun are interesting too. I actually reached this part by seeing what our 'Male touch' path unlocked for us. Apparently it COULD have unlocked 'Sky Knight SS Armour' but we took the wrong version of Gudrun to make that work I tried looking up it's stats on the online wiki, but it seems it's out of date? If anyone can find it or direct me to an up to date wiki, please do.

If you want to see a mostly fully populated pedia then go to quick battle and hit U. It's in there

Spoiler

I'm just randomly clicking around here mostly, there's still something like 1200 techs/recipes we haven't unlocked yet, so me finding all the cool shit that might be interesting is hopeless. If any of you want to post shit, feel free. This seems like something that would have been helpful, seems like a late game version of the bio suit? And it seems we were close to getting it. I looked up 'The Power of Slime' and it seems we need a recipe book from purple bloom lady. No idea how to get that.

Yep. Pestulator is a fairly mild upgrade to the biosuit with slightly better stats, armor, and resistances. Notably Warp goes from 120% to 50% though.

It's also possibly that a lot of these things were added in the updates since you started the LP and the prereqs either never got spawned in when they were supposed to or weren't connected to the right research when you researched them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

That's an interesting suit. Not tanky endgame viable, but I could see fielding one for that 8 spot, it would do a great job of finding invis units like the operatives and muton gals.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's really hard to figure out how to value anything midgame because the tech tree and RNG is all over the place. Nevermind just simply remembering what state your game was in when you got something that could be over a year old.

 

[Jaedar]

If anyone can find it or direct me to an up to date wiki, please do.

In the game folder there is a zip called xpedia, extract that, follow the instructions. It uses the files you have in your install.

Researching it requires finding an EM jammer. Again, no idea where to get one. Presumably shooting down specific craft and getting lucky. Maybe ninjas or related to aurora?

iirc you get this from shooting down a humanist ufo shaped like a swastika.

Another cool looking tech we SHOULD be able to get- abyssal gnomes? Sounds good, and we only need 'Abyss' researched. How do we do that? Apparently by researching Dream Echoes. But I have dream echoes on hand, in a base with voodoo service, and there's no option to research them any more. Might be bugged? I dunno. Makes me wonder what else might be bugged or not working. In a game this large and complex, there's got to be a fair amount.

Yeah, I also never got this, could just be bugged.

 

[Average Manatee]

Seems we can research demonic rituals now? I'll have to rehire some brainers in another base it seems...

It was available here, might be some kind of bug with a version update? I'd guess that if you finished everything that dream echoes could give, then a version adds another possible research result, dream echoes doesn't get re-enabled as a research option.

EDIT: You might try transporting it to another base and back and see if it appears?

 

[lightbane]

It's also hovering above the ground, and has no ramps or even elevators. My quickbattle squad has no fliers, so I couldn't get in! The inside wouldn't be terribly interesting anyways, it's the crew I'd be most interested in, and the game substitutes a faction in for the mission's defaults.

Silver Towers were the troll ship before the BRUH was made. They were meant to be unfair to defeat in battle.

ummoned one of these as an ally.

Is that a reference to Metroid?

More pixel art. This one reveals the meaning of life.

Can't get the captcha to work, damn it.

It seems the 3 rooms each have their own special guardian. The chancellor and purifier we already saw (sadly I couldn't mind orb examine them, debug mode disabled it for some reason) and the third is this SPESS marine knockoff. The gun is basically an auto shotgun on steroids, probably would have been able to kill Manatee via accidental overkill.

...That's a Starcraft space marine parodying a Primaris Marine, for twice the rip-off.

Whatever, it made for a cool last fight with the big guns and lots of space.

Redrum!

 

[Andnjord]

In the game folder there is a zip called xpedia, extract that, follow the instructions. It uses the files you have in your install.

Aaah, so that's how that thing works. Great, now I can see that the Recruit Doctor X is apparently the most dogshit one, no access to her residence, no Black Sun humanist stuff either since that relies on clearing her residence. Apparently, short of banishing her it's the option the gives the least amount of content. No, I'm not mad, why would you ask?

Sounds like a really good haul of interrogations for a single ufo though.

It is, but by the time you catch one you'll already have most of the tech unlocked. Not useless, just a bit diaspointing considering how rare they are that they have nothing unique about them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So, browsing the tech tree viewer some more, apparently Purple Bloom Lady has a recipe where you dismember a magical girl, and in the process create that magical cake we've been eating. Yay!

Also, if I can find a 'Tomb Guardian' we can get some zombie related stuff unlocked. Might be in a witch quest I never did? Or a rare enemy in an archaelogy dig? Tbh I'm not keen on doing anything that will require spending months of in game time waiting for rare missions/craft to pop up, which is a shame because some of it seems cool.

 

[Andnjord]

Also, if I can find a 'Tomb Guardian' we can get some zombie related stuff unlocked.

I believe it they’re the ones that spawn from the Zombie panic mission, the one with the plasma shooting pyramids. It’s a bit wonky in that the tomb guardian don’t immediately spawn but eventually do once you park a unit inside the pyramid before blowing it up.

I won’t spoil you what it leads to since it’s pretty cool.

Also, I caved in a edited my save to have the Doctor X residence tech researched, given that it’s been taken over by humanists it makes no sense she wouldn’t tell you about it once recruited. I’m still missing out on having her as an auxiliary unlike the prank and humiliate her, so it feels fair. Thanks Jaedar.

So, browsing the tech tree viewer some more

One pretty cool tech you're missing is the X-Plasma stuff. It's the better plasma scorcher I mentionned earlier. Also available in pistol format.