Hoo boy. This session was a doozy.
So, we start off with a mission. A medium sized craft landed nearby, and we were just barely able to snag it after night fell but before it took off. I was actually fairly worried it'd get back up just as we reached it and blow our airbus out of the sky. Our first enemies sighted are the familiar altar boy, a church warmaiden, and... a thing.
The thing is a Fartbag. Technically they're Celatids, I believe, but Fartbag is easier to type anyways. These things are incredibly dangerous. They're tanky as fuck, have some crazy resistances, and that attack of theirs? It can melt a gal in chainmail into a puddle with a single turn. Oh, and they have like 20 NV and range to match. Fun! So why the fuck did I chase this ship down when it was risky to even reach? Because I was sure of what it was. And I was right.
This, boys and girls, is a goldship. It's way, way out of our league to shoot down, but they have a tendency to land and be vulnerable to ambushes like this. Although 'vulnerable' is a bit of a stretch. These things can have incredibly scary crew compliments we are NOT ready for. Frankly, I shouldn't have risked it, I should have waited for a larger landing vessel to jbe available. But fuck it, I really want what they have.
While the Fartbags are tanky, a pair of sniper rifle shots seems to do the trick. So we can handle those at least.
We can also handle these. With a massive volley of rockets if need be, but actually a single sniper shot can probably do the trick. What the fuck is this thing?
This is the zookeeper for the farbags. What is she in blue armour and not gold? Because that gold colour in the above screenshot is a pulsing golden aura that indicates these bitches have SHIELDS. Which is one of the reasons I want them. Alive. Which is difficult because their shields can absorb about 250 daze damage, they've got hefty armour beneath that, and the shields regenerate over time.
There are also these guys. I'd like to take him alive too, but that has problems of it's own, and we're already playing with fire here.
I opt to execute him with extreme prejudice. The golden shields have a pretty severe flaw: Bullets pass right through them. That makes them pretty shit vs us, as long as we use bullets and not lasers or plasma weapons like I did the first time I encountered them, expecting their vulnerabilities to be the exact opposite.
Also, while fire doesn't penetrate the shield, it does inflict 400% damage to it. The secondary ammo type our quad launcher arrived with courtesy of that initial gambling spree is a 16 shot napalm rocket cartridge. Ideally, I'd like to burn off the shields, and then run in and knock her out with Beatrix. Sadly, beatrix doesn't have chainmail (none was finished yet, unfortunately) so it'll be a significant risk. Also, I'm not even certain knocking her out this way is a real option. I've tried it before and failed. They have yet ANOTHER obnoxious mechanic I haven't quite figured out yet. But if I can catch one alive like that, I suspect it'd be a huge boon to research.
Oh yeah, remember the fartbag? There's more than one. And the shots can arc over cover. Luckily these two shots missed, and the trees actually provide pretty good cover here, as they take up more space in the branches than they do on the ground.
Another major concern is that these warmaidens aren't armed with wimpy sniper rifles, but high powered laser weapons. The equivalents of machineguns and cannons can be found here. Chainmail would shrug those off mostly, but chitin and especial night ops gear will provide little protection, and the lasers can start fires that will ruin our nightvision advantage.
Given the importance of this mission, I deploy out secret weapon: A (soon to be) dead parrot. It can't see anything, but it can eat an attack from something that might otherwise be aimed at a gal.
And this right here is why capturing these the way I wanted to is so fucking tricky. They can't fall down and be bleeding to death, their armour simply explodes after taking enough damage. I suspect it explodes even if they only take stun damage and capturing one with armour intact is outright impossible, but I'd still inclined to try. I want that fucking armour! Anyways, it does make capturing them AFTER their armour explodes fairly easy; they are basically naked gals at that point. Still resistant to really small arms fire and with crazy physical stats, but no weapons, no shields, and no heavy armour.
Kiddo proves up to the task, tossing in a grenade then making a run to pick up the body and bring it back before it gets burned up by napalm. Or, you know, in case we need to flee in terror.
We have another problem. Masochist Slut has gone insane. Luckily, she didn't go berserk and unload her rocket launcher on our crew instead. I'm kind of surprised her morale is this low considering how many kills we got at this point, but that low freshness really does a number on morale. Arguably one of the only weaknesses the gals have is their low freshness stats.
I decide to go back for the reverend's corpse as well. We can't interrogate it, but it might drop nice armour parts or something, and I want his fancy gun too.
This, as it turns out, was a BAD IDEA. A warmaiden opens the door, walks out, and promptly dies to sniper covering fire. But then ANOTHER one follows and unloads one of their heavy laser weapons into kiddo's back, many times.
Fuck. That was our only melee gal on this mission. At least it wasn't fatal.
We didn't even get a chance to try heal her. To be fair, it might have been hopeless even if we got a turn, as she probably died from fire damage, and the extinguisher isnt't something you can pick up, run around and fire in a single turn, and it causes enough stun to maybe cause overstun death too.
RIP Kiddo. We're down to just 2 perfect gals remaining, and only one of them we've woken up. I really hope we can get more in the future.
Eventually, we get the bug hunt reveal and find 3 enemies left, with 2 on the second floor of the ship. Which is terrifying, because entering the ship with night ops gear is a recipe for disaster. Luckily, we're able to just wait them out and after one more kill the other two surrender.
So, was the mission worth the insane price of losing a perfect gal? Arguably... yes. We're getting access to a plethora of new tech here, as well as a fuckton of wealth. 30 gold bars is nothing to sneeze at, not to mention all those ship parts.
Ship parts that include gauss cannon parts (another awesome ship weapon that is a pain to reload without wasting ammo) and a fuckton of really nice laser weapons and clips. Even simple laspistols are quite nice, and the Lasguns and heavy lasers are truly deadly.
We also get long range flamers, which have their own niche, and a bunch o other great stuff. The fartbag corpses can be turned into Celatid essence iirc, which I've never used but I suspect is a potent thrown bio weapon. We'll give it a try when I get the chance. The life support systems and stasis pods are really high value here as well.
God damn though, I'm really pissed we lost Kiddo. I invested a lot of time into training her into a melee killing machine, and we were so close to getting the chainmail that would have made her nearly unkillable.
Back to business. Heat Vision gets researched, revealing sniper and smoke ops gear. Sniper gear is basically daytime camo gear for snipers, which has some uses against nocturnal enemies but is generally inferior to night ops. Smoke-Ops, aside from obviously working well with smoke cover, has some very good chem and choking resistances. We'll want a full crew compliment of it for the organ harvester mission, which is full of chem weapons. Chem is different than bio, mind. Bio is poison, like spiders. Chem is acid.
This is shaping up to be an incredible month infamy wise. We get another huge haul from a farm mission.
Less lucrative is this assassination attempt. The 50k is no big deal but...
The pile of big rocks is annoying. We already had to sell a bunch of crap to make room for all those ship parts from the goldship. And we really don't have the labour to spare for smashing the big rocks into gems right now.
Finally, we finish establishing the prickly Nekomimi contact. However, it grants us no immediate benefit. We need a further research to recruit catgirls, and IIRC that won't be a proper recruitment, but an uber for catgirls exchange program, which requires a batch of 5 young ubers. Yeah. Good luck with that. Give me your space towels you stingy bastards!
Beastmaster interrogation goes off without a hitch.
Why yes, I WOULD like to have personal shields! Sadly, they'll be the shitty golden shields that do nothing vs bullets, but they are incredibly useful in certain situations, like underwater or the catacombs.
Monthly rating GET. The game won't skip ranks when we blow pasts our requirements like this, so it's actually a really good idea to do so and reap the big cash bonus whenever you do want to rank up, if it's an option.
Another first time interrogation.
Sadly, he gives us specs on a gun instead of telling us how to build a god damned ship, but at least it's a cool gun.
Another mad scribbling event! My gambling fetish is sated for another day.
This is definitely pretty late in the calendar to be hitting this rank, I'd have like to have done it about 4-5 months ago at least. OTOH, we've had enough struggles that it might be for the best we still had all those easy missions to do for so long. Also, from now on ranks have special requirements too. We've already got the bounty trophy mentioned here though, I'm pretty sure. Unless they want us to get a race trophy, in which case we're fucked.
And what does our improved rank get us? Contacts!
Boo! Lame result from the mad scribblings. Conjure me a gnome instead next time please.
Huh, I've never seen this before. Interesting to see it laid out like that. I've encoutered most of these before, but never seen Counselors, Provosts, or Pioneers. Maybe scientists either, not sure there.
God damn it. Whatever is landing we can definitely handle it, but I hate doing base defenses. Shuffling 30 units around every turn for a dozen turns or more is a huge pain in the ass, doubly so during a LP.
These fuckers again? Ugh. Piss off! I never even attacked you guys!
Aww fuck, it's one of their bigger parties too. These guys are annoying. And fireproof, which I learned one game when I thought my fire trap room would easily handle my base defenses for me.
Bastards are real triggerhappy wth those fireballs too. Thankfully the blast isn't extremely deadly, but fire damage does tend to linger and cause a lot of morale damage.
Pierre does some crazy work here, hosing the hallway down with that chain gun several rounds in a row. Must have gotten like 10 kills in 4 turns.
Oh yeah, another base defense mechanic that pisses me off. Any auxiliarries kept there will wake up over time during the base defense, and take one of their shitty, basically useless weapons and run directly into the line of fire to get themselves killed. Yay!
The imps are damned speedy too, able to get all the way from the access lift to a room 2 tiles over in a single go. Luckily we have good covering fire here to take it down before it eats someone or sets anyone else on fire.
Another reason to hate these fuckers: Pinkies. Like in Doom, they're really fast and tanky. Unlike in Doom, we'll almost certainly die to a single bite if they reach us. We've got some chainmail now but even with its crazy armour and cut resist, I don't really trust it here. It might hold off a bite or two but can it stop 4 or 5? Not something I want to test.
After like 20 somehting turns we find the last two enemies are these fucking pinkies that somehow got tapped down here. They can't leave that little box, which is helpful. On the other hand, half the people in the base are now going insane and berserk.
Even so, I decide to use this as a chance to capture these fuckers, which is normally incredibly difficult and dangerous to do. Here we can just toss in some grenades and choke them out. Right? We can also dance in and out of the corners to hit them with shields or ninja sticks. The sludge makes that really slow and tiring though.
God damnit Cleve, work on your aim.
Also, this has gone on so long I resort to a weird trick/bug/feature of the game; using medkits on an ally restores 10 morale to the user of the medkit. Even if the uses are completely pointless and the target has no wounds. Between that and the canteens we keep the madness under control for our melee gals until this is over.
Strange fellow ends up being really hellpful here actually. It turns out only like 3 people had any sort of gas or stun grenade on them, while strange fellow has about a dozen extra stun bolts, and the farm has this nice hole in the middle to allow shooting the demons with impunity. Still takes every stun bolt we have, these things are TANKS. Wish I had a brainer outfit.
One of the workers eventually makes their way down here and gets eaten, despite having no reason at all to get that close. Fucking idiots.
However, another proves to be actually helpful by firing a shotgun blast that knocks on of the pinkies out, owing to it's already massive stun buildup. Eventually the other goes down too after some shots from a desert eagle dropped by the idiot worker.
Another massive infamy bump. Not too shabby. Shame about the idiots, base defenses where all the workers survive is one of the easier ways to get the cavalier titles that improve fresheness.
I managed to let nearly everyone land a shot, so the total xp gains here were amazing, even if no single individual gained that much. Lots of Bravery raises too, owing to all the insanity and berserking. Everyone is so exhausted we won't be able to run a mission for several days though, maybe even a week in some cases.
The loot is... mostly crap. The UAC rocket launchers are nice actually, but not as nice as the quad launcher. The rest of their weapons are basically crappy knockoffs of the real UAC gear, so its generally pretty bad. Aside from those rifles, which can be very deadly, but also inaccurate so it's mostly the kind of thing only the AI would find useful.
Another problem is that all these demon and imp corpses stink, taking up massive amounts of vault space to store. We keep the bare minimum to get the research done.
A nice title that is fairly easy to get with weapons like SMGs and Pistols on base defeses or bandit missions with lots of soft targets. Pierre picked it up here with that chaingun in a single volley.
Speaking of titles, we earned pages of them! All these super size ones are nice too, as their requirements were met via training, so all these soldiers just needed to be let on a mission to actually trigger the check and get even more bonus stats. Also, Oasis is apparently our highest statted soldier as of this moment. Nice!
Oh, and I research a ruffian, which I had apparently not done tet, and unlocked this. Which is the ACTUAL easy milk run bandit massacre mission I thought we had already unlocked. Looking forward to running some of these to gather titles.
I finish this too, hoping maybe alien flight control tech would unlock a ship for me. Nope.
It does let me show you how utterly terrifying these are however. Basically the academy equivalent of those fartbags. Except these fly, and have large movement pools and fire like 4 times a turn and their plasma beams will instantly vapourize gals. Absolute bastards, they've killed people every time I've fought one.
Huzzah! We've got a new contact that is actually helpful!
These guys will basically sell us any mundane bullet shooty gun we can research. They also sell light sniper rifles, which don't hit quite as hard as the full size versions, but have a TU cost just low enough to let overwatching sentries fire two shots a turn, making them way more deadly vs lightly armoured targets like bandits. We'll be using a lot of those once we get a full sized ship.
Speaking of full sized ships: Car Thieves won't sell us any. Bastard. But they will at least sell us things like airbuses if we lose or sell the one we started with, and speedy aircars that can be used to win the aircar race events.
Oh, and the blowfish, which is a really shitty submarine, but submarine nonetheless. Might have to get one to do some underwater missions.
That is, if none of these are submersible. I've never seen these options before, but they resemble the researches for the shadowtech ships I unlocked in my best run, which were really, really fucking cool. One had a weird cockpit thing where someone could fire a voodoo powered ship cannon that was aimed like the blaster bomb, and my favourite had an awesome layout that had floodlights on the bottom and easy roof access that was kept dark as a perfect sniper nest. It was like arriving to every mission in a god damned fortress.
The ? symbol makes it seem like one of those diverging research choices, but they only end with it, unlike the recruitment options which had them at the beginning and end of the line. So I think we can research all 3 of these. That said, it's way more fun if I get you guys to blindly pick one of the options for our new awesome ship to replace the shitty airbus before we even see what the fuck the specs are. So vote for one and I'll research it first, and, provided we've got the parts, build it as well before researching the other 2. Remember, no spoilers!
there's no perfect demolition option though afaik. Battle axes work well against ordinary buildings with a good gal but it's hard to beat a pick or hammer if you're trying to break into a guild warehouse.
