The search for a decent fucking aircraft continues. You know, the start without the drill gives you access to one almost immediately. I used to think it was pretty shit but I'm really longing for it now.
Well, that doesn't seem useful. Air musket is weird enough it might be related to something, but we've still got other parts of the barrel to scrape.
I've decided to work on some more interrogations. The results of them are so random, I feel like there's a good chance they're where I'm missing some key bit of tech- some type of food or weapon or treasure that a captive might give info on could be the key to unlocking stuff. Also, I fucking love Canada's role in the game.
I recall these being very useful in a previous run. We haven't found any 14mm turrets though, which seems weird because I often had them early before...
The spike rockets themselves might not be helpful here, but researching them might lead to something. Also...
We get the Gecko SAM unlocked as part of this prize. It's basically a handheld SAM with no use in ground combat. That means we can mount it on things like trucks, and with a bit more research make a craft version too. It's actually pretty decent damage, so I suspect this + trucks is an intended strategy for taking down bandit zeppelins early on.
As mentioned before, some details on the training system. Basically, once you unlock these, they have several aspects. First is the cost and required facilities. The cost can be money, items, glamour, whatever. It's generally not a big deal, althrough nepotism costs a cool 100k and is unlocked at a point where that isn't trivial. The second aspect is eligibility. You can't give sargeant training to a catgirl or uber, it's only for the men. Likewise, MMA training is only for mutants. Gnomes can take it, or ubers or a bunch of other types, but not slave soldiers or peasants. The last aspect...
Is the time it takes. Listed here is a recovery time of 21 days. MMA training has one of the harshest recovery times. I'm not sure if medical facilities speed this up but I think it does. It's certainly one of the best transformations I've seen; it gives hefty bonuses to reactions, bravery and melee, which can all be difficult to raise. It won't raise these beyond the racial caps though, which is why we're only listing +7 TUs here. Also, the 'Bonus stats' listed underneath are the result of a title recieved for doing this, which means it can exceed caps. If I had half a dozen ubers to spare I'd be cycling everyone through this, or at least the ones with bravery over 70, which seems to be where it gets harder to train in combat.
Personal Attention doesn't cause wounds like the MMA training, but instead just vanishes the soldier for 6 days. They'll arrive afterwards in perfect health, but won't be around to defend the base in the meantime. This is one of the stranger training options, but certainly has it's uses for races with really low caps in some areas, like our catgirl here. Some extra hp, str and frs will go a long way. We send her off.
I've been having our two perfect gals train to be melee experts, since their innate armour will go a long way to keeping them alive on the front line. To that end, I've given them poison daggers to acquire this trait. The HP recovery isn't massive, but it will stack with their innate HP recovery and can be a lifesaver if they end up with a lot of wounds. or really low hp and start taking overstun damage. Knives aren't the only way to get this of course, there are lots of poison weapons available. Poisoned arrows on hunting bows is probably one of the easiest in the early game with rogue outfits and soft targets like bandit camps and brothels. Later on, you get access to quite a few types of gas grenades, which deal choking damage. You can even get this accidentally by killing people with overstun damage if you run around knocking people out with whips and ninja sticks a lot, which was how I first discovered the title.
Another stab at the techtree. I know this will unlock some cool shit.
Hmm, I didn't realize it was linked to the *stop targeting civilian traffic* option. I feel like we shouldn't take that yet, given we can't fight worth shit in the air. It's certainly nice later though when you don't want to be hassled by the popups for pointless targets all the time. The Satellie network might be fruitful, but it's a long research.
This one popped up after researching various mushrooms. Never seen it before, probably linked to the green codex.
Stuff like this is why I keep interrogating weak bandit scum. Saved me from potentially losing a 500k treasure by researching it later on.
Time for a new mission!
Comm towers are intimidating, but the AI tends to bungle things badly enough to make them pretty easy given the strength of the defenders. These twits built their tower next to a lightsource, so even the boys without nightvision can take potshots every time one of these idiots climbs onto their roof. We gain access to a nearby roof as well for even more sniping angles, and on an open map we could fire through the windows. Sniping is OP.
I made a fuckup here: I got next to this fucker to ruin his chance of firing at me, but I have only 1 energy left. It consumes a tiny bit of energy (like 4?) every time you deflect a gun, so all I've actually dune here is put a gal at point blank range to get shot a bunch. Luckily, the little shit just runs away. Possibly because he didn't even see her. The AI doesn't seem to cheat with it's awareness, unlike fucking Xenonauts and it's bullshit omniscient soldiers.
Also, can I just take a second here to praise the fucking leather whip. I didn't get a chance to go really crazy with the throwing training on this LP before we had to switch to guns, but hitting 100 throwing with glas is very easy, and bow + whip makes for an amazing combo. With 100 throwing, the whip hits for fucking 35, which is better than a hunting rifle. Sure, it's less useful vs armour, but it's also a measely 14 TUs to fire, perfectly accurate with that much throwing, does TU damage and a massive 1500% morale damage. Whips are amazing for captures, and even if they get back up their morale is probably so fucked they won't pick up their gun. Oh, and they train throwing instead of melee, so they're a great way to do that on melee characters if that's a thing you want to do.
The towers provide better weapons to their troops than the warehouses, so even lowly security can be found toting things like this grenade launcher or a sniper rifle. The bonus being, of course, that means we can still those excellent weapons!
Towers also tend to contain at least one engineer. Again, a high priority capture target that could reveal some great tech. Unfortunately, this one elected to unalive himself by climbing onto the roof in full view of 3 snipers with full TUs.
The tower itself is 5 stories tall and the rooms vary a bit. They all have that little elevator room stuffed in the corner though, which makes melee fighters invaluable here. Just be careful not to stand in the elevator hoping to kill someone opening the door and then eat a point blank SMG burst in the top of your head through the elevator shaft itself.
A perfect mission. I've been racking up a ton of missions lately, most not even worthy of mention.
The xp for them has been pretty awful, to be honest. It's not a complete waste of time but it's sure no zombie hunt.
And of course, the titles are always nice to pick up. I was especially happy to see gal of steel on the Bride. MOAR ARMOUR.
Speaking of more armour, I'm also still trying to unlock chainmail. I suspect I'll need to unlock that from one of the better armored soldiers like osiron security. Still, these middle ranking officer types are decent too. This one gave me details on rubies though. Ugh. Probably could have got that info from a hoe.
I bite the bullet and research this thing, since we're not likely to unlock it by chance any time soon. To my pleasant surprise, it didn't eat the gun! We can actualy use this thing! 80 plasma damage is brutal, and could probably burn a hole even in some really nasty stuff.
Does researching undersea operations reveal technology related to making supersonic aircraft airtight? No. No it does not. Good tips for water though. We still can't do those missions either. Ugh.
Not sure when I picked up a piece of this, but if we can get 5 more we could reconstruct this armour. Which would probably be a total waste tbh; it's realy not even that good since the 200% multipliers apply before the flat reduction. A 100 damage sniper round hitting this from the front would dish out 85 damage to the bearer. Chitin does better than that.
I'd honestly forgotten these even exist, despite them normally being way more common than zone stalkers. Anyone want to sign up to be a flimsy whore? We can recruit her.
Turns out the mushroom medicine was indeed relate to the green codex. Interesting.
Not actually useful though. At least, not right now. I could see a scenario where we'd use this, if I had a lot of mushrooms and wanted to use the supplies to make advanced medkits or something.
Well fuck it. I promised we'd unlock aircraft, and if we can't do it through research, we'll do it this way. I dump 1.5 million dollaros on Jack to get a measely 150 bounty tokens, briding the gap we needed to get this sexy prize.
Looks a bit less sexy with the in game model. However, stat wise, this thing is kind of a beast early on. It can carry 2 guns, either light (which are substatially better than 'ground' which describes weapons so shit they'd break off a ship going Mach 1) or divebomb, basically bomb bays, which a lot of low tech stuff qualifies as. The description says very limited range, but honestly 5400 isn't all that bad, well exceeding our radar bubble anyways. And with a speed of 2750, it can outrun all but the stargod ships, which we don't want to fuck with anyways. It's got lousy toughness, but that just matches the little bird. No crew space is irrelevant for a fighter, and a single pilot is actually a bonus.
Single pilot means we can crew it with the best pilot we have and get the most stats out of it, as it normally takes the average of all pilots. I elect to pop our catgirl inside. She's got pretty good stats, and can use training in all 3 areas, which she'll recive every time she blows up an enemy ship. Which she will be doing a lot. Also, if I'm right about how the dodge bonuses work, this thing is basically invincible vs the inaccurate cannons used by the pirate blimps and necroplanes. We'll put that to the test as soon as we find one. The SAM trucks are off limits though, they could easily blow us up.
Well well well, our first target can't even shoot back. Avast!
Not a ton of xp, but for something that took all of 10 seconds IRL it feels nice.
The unlucky bastards crash landed on a farm, which means the unlucky bastards who own the farm are going to be missing some apples when we leave. One of the few perks of basing in europe is the climate here is mostly temperate, so it makes the crash sites easier to handle. Going to a psionic desert and haivng your team freak out just to loot a shitty ambulance always feels rough. Though I do generally prefer the desert layouts; they make sniping at night a piece of cake.
Lets, uh, not go stand inside next to the explosive barrels while our TUs are depleted.
The ship only had 2 crew, both labourers. This bastard actually managed to hurt one of our melee gals with a shotgun blast. Only barely though. 10 health will be recovered in no time.
A pile of apples is very welcome, along with the small ship engines and even the labourers might reveal some nice base construction tech.
Research plods on. Landmines will lead us towards some more powerful types of explosive.
And Aye-Phones for some bizarre reason. I already had one from the slots I think, but the option to make more would be nice. We might grab that aerial explosive too if we can't find another light gun for the pirahna. Though the 50mm cannon it's rocking right now should be more than adequate for the foreseeable future.
Well shit, apparently I never kept one of these from the begining, must have sold it while cash was tight at the start. This could be what we need!
This probably doesn't lead to anything useful, but it spits out amusing bits of lore once in a while, which I like.
It feels like this like tip pages never end. Definitely less exciting to see these when I already know this crap from previous playthroughs.
On a lark, I decide to research some of the more useless armour types, like party dresses and wench outfits, thinking it might unlock a mission or something. Instead I unlock a very important tech! Nice! I'm doubly happy to unlock this kind of weird shit, because it's helpful both now and for any future runs I attempt.
We interrogate our damsel as well. Damsels seem to be their own race, oddly enough, not counting as peasants. I suspect they're meant to be voodoo experts, which is of little help to us at the moment.
We get offered a food piracy mission as well and I snap it up for the infamy. We also get another huge pile of applies! Very nice. This pile alone represents something like 2.5 million dollars worth of income wants the runts are through with them.
Masochist Slut joined the mission, and was outfitted in our hover armour, which I had just put on her while wounded so I could make use of the chitin armour elsewhere. However, she actually did very well as a flying death turret, picking bandits off from the sky while they ran through glowing fields. The 2H SMG she was using gives a nice title to boot:
Plenty of nice titles here. Also, Super-Size at level 8 implies some staggeringly high stat totals. Beatrix is really coming long, and Gandalfina is one of the original members who's been bouncing around between roles and is basically a jack of all trades at this point.
Nice!
These actually have pretty decent armour for standard human outfits. Of course they're incredibly bulky and fuck over all your stats.
We got another batch of old earth books too! Nice. If we could unlock schools that would be very helpful indeed, but I think I already read some old earth books, and the ones we need are a bit different. Pretty sure you start with the right ones on the no-drill tech path but I can't be bothered to make a run just to check that.
Oh, sure, now the asshole gives us a mission after he has all my money. Fucker. Whatever. I'll dump the 200 tokens we won here into the slot machine later.
Also, now that we've collected a prize from each of the 3 clients, we can build and then research the brass badge, which will unlock higher tier bounty missions. They aren't actually that tough and give better rewards. More importantly, they also involve new enemy types that can provide amazing intel. I won't spoil what, but I'm really looking forward to some of the stuff we can find this way.
The first person to graduate the training dojo is Gandalfina!
Honestly, one of the best parts of unlocking this is just being able to see everyone's stats (aside from brav and reactions) at a glance. Gandalf isn't fully capped in every area, but she has gotten as much as she can get from the dojo. In particular, it's kind of shit at training guns and throwing. Fiery Predator likely won't be far behind.
We've finished researching the small ship engine! I just noticed it has a weight. Can you just run into a ship, grab the engine and then flee? That'd be hilarious, if entirely impractical.
Ah, the glorious list of tech unlocked by that research. God damnit. I had fucking shadowtech ships by this point on one of my runs!
Whatever. At least our crew has hit it's stride. Our snipers can just casually annihilate dangerous enemies like this academy drone before they become a problem now.
And we've apparently finished 20 missions just in europe with 2 of our gals. Nice.
Feels a bit odd to get these pages by torturing ruffians instead of from the encounters themselves, but whatever. These are where I was getting 14mm guns before. I've avoided them because as the document states, those guns are present on the field in ground combat, and I didn't fancy getting an uber gal deleted by a ship gun from 3 screens away. Those things are scary. We'll have to hunt one down to get the plane parts though. Normally by now I'd have seen the wreckage of one in a random distress call type mission.
Another DILDO joins our prison. Maybe I should research that recruitmet option after all. If nothing else, we've got more crew space than prison space, and I don't really want to sell them.
Man we're just incredibly popular today huh?
We've been getting a lot of these mission dossiers too. Some of them are fairly helpful, giving hints on how to spot a good target like mining ships or these supply ships. Others are mostly just lore dumps, talking about how the church kills off heretics or the academy harvests test subjects.
Another one in a million shot in the dark hoping to unlock cool medieval style plate armour. No dice.
Ah, I believe this is the result of that 'bandit business' tech. These are basically the big boy versions of the shitheads around the campfire. Still mostly weak shitheads, but now with some more drifters and highwaymen with rifles to fill out the ranks. Still trivially easy to take apart from afar.
Oh, fuck. I forgot they had hounds too. I suddenly regret not bringing a melee gal with me.
Also, I didn't realize there was a city layout for these, I normally found them in wastelands. This is actually really rough. Luckily the hound runs out of TUs before it can turn Pierre into hamburger.
One of these fuckers too. We could certainly handle the retaliation squad if we kill him, but it's a pain in the ass that leaves no real loot to speak of.
You know what, fuck this mission. We're leaving. I'm not getting a bunch of people wounded in this retarded killbox we landed in for the sake of some shitty bandit loot.
Hah! The dog died inside the ship, and therefore counts as looted. Nice.
Another decent month gone by. Finances are steady again with those apples. I'd actually welcome hitting that 3k mark and seeing the next promotion at this point, so I'll probably be more eager to take stuff like monster hunts. Maybe I'll even try a pogrom defense.
I'm not sure if these unlock right away or in the following month, but we'll have access to some lucrative missions soon enough. We really need a nicer landing craft to do some of them safely though. Worst case scenario, shooting down a ton of shipping will give us a fuckton of infamy and give us the promotion we need to unlock new ships for sale from contacts. Now that we have the pirahna (I might even get a second to tag team some shit) we've got way more access to loot.
