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

[Damned Registrations]

I don't think Scotty survived that one.

Well, no point being shy, lets get these pants off.

Uh, I didn't order this kaboom. Turns out, giant mobile fortresses contain fuel and engines. Knowing is half the battle!

Well, 1 turret and a fuck ton of ninjas gone for one bomb so far. Looking good.

I didn't notice at the time, but it seems our aim was off pretty badly here. I didn't pay much attention to the shot accuracy because of how the gun works, but in retrospect, I should have set a closer penultimate waypoint to really make the shots pinpoint accurate.

At any rate, that one didn't take out the turret. Boo.

Well we've got... 4 left? That we can fire this turn, anyways. I got a few reloads as well.

Well, these close ones don't need bombs, lets take them out first. XECs can unload ~1800 laser damage on average by going full auto, in a pair of six shot 0-300 damage lasers.

Accuracy leaves something to be desired, but the target is close and very large. Easy pickings.

Two more turrets on the other side fall the same way.

Bomb to the rear turret fails to take it out.

Turret on the opposite rear side goes down though.

Getting a little desperate here, I try some potshots with a catgirl's gauss pistol. We land a few hits, but don't get through the armour significantly.

Thankfully, elite plasma does the trick. Ogre Destructor paying off. Gotta get me some more of those dream echoes.

We've even got enough spare TU's to get everyone away from the gear pile and somewhat spread out.

And plenty of overwatch from the catgirls. There's actually a secondary benefit here- the AI knows whether or not a shot is possible through windows and shit, while for me it's basically impossible to tell if I have a clear shot or just line of sight tricking me. We get several kills this way.

Cyclops are again, very helpful here. Aside from the smoke and darkness...

Even the basic gals have 15 camo. We can cut that down to 5 by lighting everything up with fires, but even that's fairly obnoxious. Spotters don't get us direct line of sight so we still suffer a 50% hit chance, but frankly we've got the ammo to spare.

Now that the turrets are dealt with, turn 2 is mostly just positioning everyone forward a bit more and getting better angles for reaction fire.

Their turn 2 invols a lot of grenades. Including this choking grenade thrown at a mech.

Nice to know they can flub a throw too.

All told, even having thrown a half dozen grenades, we're totally unscathed.

These exorcists are perfect for the ninjas- death beams handle the unshielded troops, while lasers bypass the ones with purple shields.

They're very vulnerable to electric attacks too, but Tits whiffs a pair of attacks at these ninjas. Being out in the open with 2 ninjas already looking right at you isn't great...

Thankfully, Maria was kept in reserve to fix situations like this. Robo-Sailor-Laser-Star-Attack!

Now they're in full on panic mode, berserk ninjas are like half their turns.

They do manage to get some shots in on Tits, inflicting some trivial wounds.

Gandalf actually got it much worse, must have been one of their bigger guns. Still, no big deal.

Nice being able to shove mechs forward to light the way and eat up reaction fire.

At this point we're just mopping up. I even brought Lightbane forward to use his SENSE to scan for the last holdout.

And here we are, part three. I'd say last, but I don't want to tempt the fates, I wouldn't put it past the game to be lying and have some 4th phase after this.

In retrospect, I should have topped off our freshness instead of hunting down the stragglers ASAP. Ah well, we're still in decent condition mostly. The gnome is mostly out of freshness after all the death beams, but she can't smoke cigars anyways.

Only 4 turrets to deal with this time, at least that we can see. Trouble is, we've only got 2 bombs left.

The game was also very weird about our positioning. The vast bulk of our troops are at the north end of the field, with the remainder at the south and a big gap in the middle where the fighter jet is at. Going to make the middle two turrets a pain.

 

[Average Manatee]

Even the basic gals have 15 camo. We can cut that down to 5 by lighting everything up with fires, but even that's fairly obnoxious. Spotters don't get us direct line of sight so we still suffer a 50% hit chance, but frankly we've got the ammo to spare.

Isn't it the other way around? If your gals vision is 40 at day / 15 at night then 15/5 camo turns that to 25/10. I don't think there's anything you can do with lighting to spot them better in that level, it all looks well lit.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It only looks well lit because I've adjusted the display settings to make the screenshots more readable. The difference between dark and light tiles is very minor on most terrain that way. You might be right about the order of the day/night camo though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You have 15 seconds to COMPLY.

Well, first target is an easy decision. Laser swords ahoy! Honestly, we could probably get the second with Maria as well, but I'd rather not leave her exposed.

Blue shields cut piercing damage down to 25%. However, this gun deals 5x10x25 = 1250 damage per auto fire. Eat shit, shields.

Lascannon to finish the job.

Also, fuck that chunk of wall in particular, I suppose. It got hit 3 times.

More shotgun heroics.

Rare chance to use a warp cannon. Sadly, it didn't magically one shot the turret like I was hoping for.

Don't have elite plasmas for everyone, but heavy plasma is pretty gud as well.

And some more lascannon spam. Turrets: dealt with.

Man, this is just a beatiful spot to shoot from. If I were smart or patient I'd set up all my troops to just wait for the ninjas to waltz out and die for 20 turns.

Considering how many ninjas are probably in this level, this isn't a very scary first turn wait for enemy actions.

Pew pew!

Just like we wrote it up.

As much as I like the image/posting format (I enjoy the writing aspect) it's times like this I wish I had some video footage to insert a little montage of enemies getting wrecked.

This one section of the base doesn't fit the pattern- seems it's a factory.

Might be our last chance to get these guys, barring some rare events.

Annoyingly, they're being guarded by some ninjas in very awkward spots. We can see them through the scaffolding up there, but can't hit them.

And one has this fucking thing. Looking forward to IDing that shit.

Rare chance to perch on the wing of an aircraft to snipe from. Actually one of my gripes with Xenonauts- a lot of terrain it would be cool to land on and snipe from doesn't let you, and you can't hover and fire in that game.

Yeah, good luck with that sweetheart.

Would not have though that was a viable angle, firing over a huge mech into a tunnel.

Turns out cartoonishly large shotguns work on ninjas too.

Something about this giant mech opening the door here looking for people to shoot tickles my fancy.

Man, the ogres have insanely good vision too. If you want a single tip for the endgame that'll be relevant for any codex: train up a lot of ogres. They've got the best power armour, with insane accuracy and vision to go with massive armour and shields.

Even got a twofer with the 3rd shot that fired after the target I was reacting to died.

You know, at this point, the enemy phase is probably more of a threat to them than my turns are.

Turkish Ronin doing a great ED-209 impression as someone exits a door with a gun in hand.

These labourers are surprisingly brave. You'd think they'd have all dropped their weapons and ran around like headless chickens after the first 120 ninjas I killed.

Catgirls doing a good job too.

These little structures are kind of neat to explore, but also a giant pain in the ass, each being a 4 level mess of tiny rooms, branching paths and elevators.

The chem weapons the ninjas often use are a complete joke to our red shields, but will be quite dangerous to catgirls.

Got hit with some kind of bomb, presumably EMP. Holding up well considering.

Dioxine got fucked up a fair bit by an assassin, which I was not expecting.

The hammer bypasses the huge golden shields completely, and then does a lot more to heavy armour than a sword might have done.

Tits just got fucked up by one of their weird guns.

A slightly more open part of the top chunk of the map. I wish more of it were like this, the warren of tunnels making up the rest of it is going to be a nightmare.

At least the catgirls can find decent rooms to hide in if their TUs get low.

I like these missile silo things, it's a cool idea. Kind of a shame you can't actually see the missiles properly, at least without an insane amount of terrain destruction.

Another difficulty for this mission is that I can't just send all our troops in. We need ~4 left outside to make sure none of the ninjas fly out and steal our gear. I don't want to get shot in the back with a holy hand grenade or something.

Maria being heavily stunned is actually helpful- she's basically impossible to kill before putting her to sleep now, so it's way less risky to run around and spend all her TUs.

Reached the edge of the map. It's at least a lot smaller than the mansion, but probably the densest of any map we've seen so far.

And while all this heavy power armour is great for keeping us alive, it's not the best for running through a dozen rooms each turn.

The top floor is the worst by far. It's an absolute maze, with scattered elevators leading into the buildings below.

No more death rays from this mecha, sadly. Also, didn't notice it at the time, but her bottom armour is shredder and she even took a bit of damage. Must have been a hellerium grenade. Scary.

I actually tried using the refresher gun on her, realizing it could bypass her blue shields. Sadly, the mecha is totally immune to it's bio type damage, so there was no effect.

While I was talking up the engineers earlier, it's actually the assassins that I really want to catch. I don't think we've got any on hand and they might have some cool tech. I doubt I've got many before considering they're stealthy, dangerous, and can explode on death.

8 turns... felt a lot longer this time. So many doors to check. And while we finished the last 2 segments in about 8 turns each, we're not even close to done here.

Shit starts to go sideways eventually. I didn't catch it, but we lose 2 catgirls to chem shotguns, as I'd feared. Gandalf gets killed too, cut down by a sword.

This is what the top floor looks like once it's explored. This isn't even the worst section, honestly. The back part is worse.

At this point almost nobody is popping out on the ground floors to get shot, so I start blasting down doors to open them and give us more line of sight chances as we move around.

The one saving grace at this point is we've explored enough that we can tighten the net considerably.

Another treath to the catgirls: gas grenades. Their blitz armour isn't an exo suit.

This is after I rushed a medkit to her. Definitely would have died without it.

...and she falls back asleep right away. I think just due to low freshness and health.

I didn't actually get to see this trippy screen, but the game was freezing up on the final turn when I tried to take a screenshot of the victory message.

That's better. Over 250 enemies taken out. Only 3 hands lost. 8500 infamy.



Oh, excess items huh? You don't say!

I think it actually skipped the loot sale screen. I doubt we got anything special. I was expecting a unique enemy prisoner at least, but none of those either. Just 35 new damned captives. At least we got a decent number of engineers, medics, and assassins.

Huge number of titles as well. Look at all those widow titles especially. Blood widow is 11 kills in a single mission iirc. Serial is 23.

Gandalf reaches legendary stormtrooper status. That catgirl wracked up a ton of titles here too. Hopefully she's one of the ones I gave a stasis pod. I think most of them do at this point.

Blessed empty space. I'm going to miss murdering their defense swarms for infamy though.

Speaking of infamy, we're very, very close to the 25k target for the next rank. Wasn't exactly on my todo list, but might as well try for it. We've got a whole day to find another ~1500 or so. Could probably do it with ships alone.

Dang, one of the catgirls didn't have a pod. It was the good one too- this one is only a warrior, rather than hero. I'll burn a sivalinga stone to revive her, should be possible I think.

 

[Average Manatee]

It only looks well lit because I've adjusted the display settings to make the screenshots more readable. The difference between dark and light tiles is very minor on most terrain that way. You might be right about the order of the day/night camo though.

One thing that I know has been requested as a feature and unfortunately denied is some kind of way to tell whether a tile is considered lit or not, since its an entirely binary thing yet telling lit apart from not lit can be very difficult. And I'm pretty sure it changes, depending on something like baseline area brightness, because missions just after dusk or right before dawn have "dark" environmental squares that seem to look more bright than "lit" midnight squares.

 

[Jaedar]

It only looks well lit because I've adjusted the display settings to make the screenshots more readable. The difference between dark and light tiles is very minor on most terrain that way. You might be right about the order of the day/night camo though.

One thing that I know has been requested as a feature and unfortunately denied is some kind of way to tell whether a tile is considered lit or not, since its an entirely binary thing yet telling lit apart from not lit can be very difficult. And I'm pretty sure it changes, depending on something like baseline area brightness, because missions just after dusk or right before dawn have "dark" environmental squares that seem to look more bright than "lit" midnight squares.

Yes. This is very annoying! The way the engine actually works is that a tile has a brightness number that goes from 1 to 16, and everything above iirc 5 is considered lit, and everything below is dark. So unless a tile is pitch black it's really hard to know if it will be safe, or if you're now visible to the entire map.

I think it actually skipped the loot sale screen. I doubt we got anything special. I was expecting a unique enemy prisoner at least, but none of those either. Just 35 new damned captives. At least we got a decent number of engineers, medics, and assassins.

Check your bootypedia, you should have received a captains log.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The boxes were nice.

Shit, the elite catgirl that died isn't eligible for the resurrection stone either. That's a damned shame; I really need to double check they've all got stasis pods now, we've got plenty to spare now that the hab section is done.

I managed to remember bringing up Aziri's stats. I wanted to show off Azira too, as I recall he was actually a really major unit early on.

Not doing a full dossier thing since he asked not to, but Aziri had remarkably high voodoo power, I think. Probably why she got named. Gnomes tend to have high voodoo power anyways, but I think this is near the top of the range. Would have made for an awesome mech pilot.

Azira reached the rank of Pirate Lord, and was actually one of our first hero units. I thought he might have been in the battle where Cleve died, but couldn't find it in the logs. 88 battles was a lot for the first 3 years.

Taken out in one of the humanist missions, probably that one I mistook for the easy version. Though we did manage to win the mission.

I think I've shown this screen before, but probably not for quite a while: Overall stats. Our ninja HQ raid was indeed the most infamous battle to date. Pretty sure the winter palace was the worst You can see how much I favour night battles- 511 out of 728 were night battles. Very helpful early on with vision range abuse. Over 12000 enemies taken down, an average of ~15 per battle. Really puts the scale of the LP into perspective. Surprised we've only killed 9 of our own that whole time, and I think most of those are technicalities, like we killed a tank and the explosion killed someone. Also, we've lost just over half the hands we've ever recruited, and our current roster is over 150. Way too many soldiers to keep track of.

rest of the stats aren't too interesting... 48 craft constructed, 12 hideouts built means we lost what, 6? Ouch. Also, 3611 researches or otherwise acquired bits of lore. So. Many. Words.

Well, enough of that. Time for the real benefit of killing the ninja HQ: Massive amounts of gambling.

Finally remembered to buy these. Feels kinda weird there isn't more jewelry slot items, considering how much gear is in the game. The only ones worth using are basically skulls for Syns, ribbons on everyone else until you get these, and then these are just superior to ribbons. Theres some other crap but it basically all sucks.

No ninja interrogations. Sad.

Lootboxes were a waste too. Didn't even get a cool sword. At least the 6 metal ore is approximately enough to replace the 2 baby nukes we used. Note to self: knock off another excavator so we can put those new portable mortars to work in the next big open mission.

Well, at least the skyforge book we got from the engineers can be researched!

Oh frabjous day! This will surely be useful knowledge in the day ahead.

Well, the game decided to be a cunt and offer neither missions nor shipping for us, and the hideouts aren't defending themselves, so I had to invade one. Lucky us, I landed on the mercs.

Honestly I cocked this up a fair bit. I forgot we can't bring tanks, so we've got a couple naked goblins along for the ride. I mostly fixed our gear, but forgot to bring decent stuff for taking out hovertanks, like a blaster launcher. I'm seriously considering just running away after killing whatever we can nearby to mitigate the infamy loss, and try at the other base. Though I doubt the academy base would be that much easier. Have we done their's yet? We must have, right? Drawing a blank on what they defended with. Presumably cyberdisks?

Well, I decided to stick it out, mostly because we got really lucky with the base layout. Both spawn zones are along the same wall, fairly close together. One is even in the corner. It makes it much, much easier to defend ourselves and avoid having a commando or tank sneak up and explode us from below.

Lightbane is resting up, but Optimisto was fresh and ready to go, so I brought him along in the crystalsinger outfit, mostly just to see through walls a bit. But I'd forgotten how damned good that outfit is for mind control. Gotta use this instead of the cybermage going forward. It's got weaker shields, but the higher sense and psi powers are totally worth it. As a result, we stole a susceptible merc and had him hack away at this tank's shields for us.

Plasma to finish it off, nice and clean.

Finish off a couple more mercs as well1

Finally got a chance for that chaos dagger to shine! Red shields let warp damage right through, and both the merc commander and the shock troopers have massive weaknesses to warp. Knife goes through them both like fancy butter. I considered trying to capture him in case he's got more tech for us, but fuck it. Not a priority right now.

Going very fast, considering the sub optimal team I brought. The combination of the superior gear, units, and my knowledge of the mercs is making things very smooth this time around.

More mind control pranks. I love when they have rocket launchers.

Orcinator's freshness was totally fucked from the last mission, but I want to use the mecha again ASAP, so I brought her along in the Skullstrider to guard the spawn point and soak up refresher shots. We're getting... 17 freshness back a turn? Pretty good!

More chaos dagger targets in a nice clump. It's not really any different than using the force blade aside from that commander's shields, but it feels way more satisfying to use this weird rare weapon.

Nearly got caught in this room. Swear I checked everywhere but only spotted this merc with Maria as I moved back to a 'safe' spot and got shot at. Luckily a catgirl was in range to solve things via poisoned dagger.

Man, I wish the vulcan could be fired in space, such a fun weapon. Skullstrider is great for carrying it too- utterly massive carrying capacity and storage space means we can hold like 3 extra ammo belts. Also, just realized I think I can slap that Zortium jacket onto the skullstrider for better resists. This thing is better than I gave it credit for; with better resists, those massive armour stats are kind of enough even without shields.

At least I had the foresight to bring plenty of elite plasma. It's melting mercs left and right. Really gotta find more of these. I think Marsec carries them? I though mercs might, but they definitely don't.

Got a tank with the merc rocket this time. Very satisfying.

And we even get to finish it with the dagger.

One of the exhausted catgirls made it on the team as well. Lower defenses mean we get 54 freshness back from a single shot. Crazy.

Dug a little hidey-hole here into the plants. Though I think the AI cheats anyways; they did some shit where they walked past an elevator into a dead end to turn around and fire at a catgirl. I guess they knew she was there via spotter/sniper bullshit, but I didn't expect it to be smart enough to path that way.

Anyways, mission complete! 5k infamy is kind of overkill, but I'll take it, no question!

Knew there had to be a title for warp kills! It's really weak though, especially considering how hard it is to use and rare to even access.

Next time we see our balance go down, it's going to be because we bought WORLD DOMINATION. No more ninja terror hacks stealing our dollaros!

Looks like the operatives indeed counted as 'a star god that knows something' We might be eligible for this one too frankly; I suspect 'voodoo tech' means their plasma guns, and I think we've got merc secrets already, we certainly have their engineering.

Thanks to Jaedar for pointing this out, would have missed it for ages until I did a random check for missing lore. The reward is actually kind of dickish though- we can enslave the high rank ninjas now that we'll hardly ever see them? Hurray?

To be fair, at least making them slaves seems to give a ton of glamour, which would be pretty nice. Too bad I already went ahead and molested the medics after finding out they had no tech for us. And the assassins aren't even eligible to be enslaved.

 

[Andnjord]

Ah you poor, poor bastard. Have fun!

I only played Xcom once when it still was abandonware and barely did anything before quitting it. Now, a few missions in, including a Ratman Rodeo and a Brothel Raid with only three gals, and I can safely conclude that younger me was an idiot. This shit is so good even if I’m still bungling the controls half of the time.

 

[Jaedar]

Knew there had to be a title for warp kills! It's really weak though, especially considering how hard it is to use and rare to even access.

I was going to say +1 VPWR was really good, but then I realized it was not every rank, just last rank. Pretty useless. It's also way too late for one or two tiles of extra NV to matter.
Gray codex does have a pretty reliable warp weapon though.

Looks like the operatives indeed counted as 'a star god that knows something' We might be eligible for this one too frankly; I suspect 'voodoo tech' means their plasma guns, and I think we've got merc secrets already, we certainly have their engineering.

So are you going to blitz all the bases in a single month to hit 30k?

Ah you poor, poor bastard. Have fun!

I only played Xcom once when it still was abandonware and barely did anything before quitting it. Now, a few missions in, including a Ratman Rodeo and a Brothel Raid with only three gals, and I can safely conclude that younger me was an idiot. This shit is so good even if I’m still bungling the controls half of the time.

Regular x-com is merely a great game. Xpiratez is crack.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So are you going to blitz all the bases in a single month to hit 30k?

Feels like I might need to. 30k is a pretty crazy target. I'm a bit reluctant actually- almost all the bases left right now are rimrider bases, which don't spawn annoying supply ships and pairs of fighters on a regular basis. But if I gotta grind out a ton of bases to hit the target, that's what I'll do. Not this month though, we've got the 2k penalty from our new rank up.

 

[lightbane]

Regular x-com is merely a great game. Xpiratez is crack.

Long-term crack that can bring exhaustion, as the game can last for 100h, so you play until you're bored, or you take breaks. XFiles is even worse and doesn't have enough new content and has strict timelimits to boot. I would like to play the UNATCOM mods that have a storyline of sorts between mods, but I'm wary of the same issue.

 

[Average Manatee]

If you want to cheese, you could always just farm score by

Spoiler

Fire a nuke off in a base to get points for a few dozen kills, leave and repeat.

 

[Jaedar]

So are you going to blitz all the bases in a single month to hit 30k?

Feels like I might need to. 30k is a pretty crazy target. I'm a bit reluctant actually- almost all the bases left right now are rimrider bases, which don't spawn annoying supply ships and pairs of fighters on a regular basis. But if I gotta grind out a ton of bases to hit the target, that's what I'll do. Not this month though, we've got the 2k penalty from our new rank up.

Yeah, hitting 30k basically requires lining up multiple high infamy targets, or matching it with a bunch of research infamy. But there's no good way to tell beforehand when it comes to research.

If you want to cheese, you could always just farm score by

Spoiler

Fire a nuke off in a base to get points for a few dozen kills, leave and repeat.

Does that even work, considering the -500 penalty for retreating?

 

[Average Manatee]

Does that even work, considering the -500 penalty for retreating?

You can definitely outweigh it by killing things. Have no idea if a single nuke is enough to gain substantial net points though, that would depend a lot on the map.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you want to cheese, you could always just farm score by

Spoiler

Fire a nuke off in a base to get points for a few dozen kills, leave and repeat.

There's a few problems with this. First, we don't have unlimited nukes. They're actually a real pain to make- I need to make enriched uranium, which requires 10 metal ore. The only places to get metal ore are excavator ships, basically, and those don't spawn often these day. 10 ore gets us 1 uranium, which makes 3 nukes.

Second problem: When you finish a mission, the craft returns home automatically, and you can't tell it to go right back in, so this would involve a lot of flying back and forth.

Third problem: It'd be pretty hard to get many kills with a nuke on round one. Obviously we can't mortar it to the other side of the base, so we'd need to arm it and have a catgirl drop it off somewhere and leave. But round one every enemy has full TU's, so that'd get her murderized.

Fourth problem: I don't think the nuke would actually kill enough things to outweigh it. That merc base, for example, gave us 40 points per kill on average, probably very heavily weighted to the hovertanks and commanders/captains. So we'd need like 30 kills to even make ~700 points or so.

I think this cheese could work on the ninja HQ if we hadn't destroyed it, by making us of the bombard's hellerium shells, which are basically nukes but can be easily mass produced. We could fire 2 off at the start of each round to nuke the back half of the map, murder the closer turrets/ninjas with normal guns, and then bail. Would probably earn us 1k per attempt maybe? Would take a lot of IRL time though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Managed to mind control a guardian at a SG Cruiser. Was actually fairly handy- they've got SENSE 8 so I was able to scout the enemies on the whole ship. Plus it's funny.

Also refined my refresher abuse techniques. Using a catgirl to claw the shields off, I can use it on people with power armor, like the ogres that have 4x freshness drain. I even managed to get it to work on Lightbane, though breaking the purple shields without killing him was a bit trickier, and involved using a mind whip. Ideally some kind of daze weapon would probably work best. If I can figure out something really convenient we could really spam the hell out of that possession ability.

Annoyingly, the ship is heavily damaged, and had no operatives, let alone coordinators. Lots of sectopods though. This one stubbornly refused to move somewhere we could easily fire on it, and I was afraid to approach and leave our mechs exposed to the ones inside the ship.

Turns out that was silly, because the damned things can't escape the ship. Strange that they spawned inside.

Yeah, with infamy rewards this low from targets as high value as a SG cruiser, we'll definitely need a bunch of base raids. Maybe some ships too- I haven't fought a guild freighter in a while, I bet we could roll right over Marsec with the death rays, and they have so many troops and loot the score should be much higher.

This seems vaguely ominous. Maybe I should have told them to fuck off? Eh whatever, not like we couldn't kick their asses all over again.

New toys!

Wait, I forgot about the freaky ninja guns! Is this one of them? It wasn't available for research... will need to try send them to other bases.

Anyways, the new gun is garbage. Range is like 13 tiles. I suppose it's not terrible for something we can just buy, but at this point we're swimming in legit plasma guns.

This, likewise, is a huge step up for store bought weaponry, but serves no real purpose. Ammo count is just too low. Nice accuracy though.

Another dreadknight came to visit, and this time we get to see her ship! It's pretty cool honestly. The bits at the front are animated, seems the fighter is powered by a bunch of V6 engines.

Took out a bandit town, mostly to farm kills for Luka 2. She got all tuckered out and fell asleep though (I forgot how easily that happens with low energy and health stats) so Tits got to come out and practice being a hairy wizard.

7 levels of gal of steel in one mission, not too shabby! Going to need about a dozen missions more like this before she's on par with the gals I'd say. These are kind of fun though, it's all one hit kills and a lot of reaction fire kills, I don't even need to click much. I might try to specialize her for something else instead of melee. Maybe throwing. The laser stars kind of fell off a bit now that the power armour is gimping it a bit. Luka might be able to crank them up to ~400 max damage, which would be hilarious.

Found an ace pilot outfit on an old catgirl hero in a base we haven't been using her in. Almost feels like a waste to have stats this good on a pilot. That dodge bonus though, damn.

Free mystery box! Very cool. Sadly, the reward was only a stasis orb.

Certainly quite the upgrade. I'm kinda curious what we'd get if I shot one down, but it's a 3k score penalty. Haven't seen one yet anyways.

Bogeyman swarms still show up once in a while. Unlike the probes, they don't despawn when tractored.

I wonder if this would be a viable way to farm pilot xp? I don't know of downing a craft this way awards points.

Annoyingly, it seems battles with these guys automatically change the map to night time. Was hoping for a quick and easy win in daylight. Ah well.

Forgot how quickly Syns gain stamina. Still a long ways to go.

Seems we are indeed lacking merc secrets. I'll try and take another commander when we get the chance. Also seems weird the church is only listed here once, but I'm certain I've got a cardinal sitting around doing nothing.

Even more titles for Luka. 20 kills is the threshold for the first point of 'master of X weapon' That first level grants throwing. If I keep swapping her weapon every time she gets it, I can probably rack up a ton of throwing bonuses over time, while getting a good variety of other titles to bolster stats in general as well.

Finally we get a chance to do this properly!

Hah, these things have no mind resistance at all. Death rays eat them alive.

Because we're forced to use the drakar, we're actually really tight on crew space. I brought 2 Xecs and 4 crew.

The Xecs are able to camp the only base exits on the map, meaning Maria can carve her way into the central tower. Lightbane is sitting on the roof sensing enemies.

It's still a little scary, as a single warp cannon could kill Maria with a fairly average roll. But with this level of precaution we're able to pull off a flawless victory.

Took 39 god damned turns though. We're not doing this mission ever again.

All that for 3 glitterdust.

Last time we got some, I was torn about making glitterswords or bikinis. The swords might have actually been the smart choice back then. But we've got more weapons now, and a single extra outfit is probably better than some melee weapons.

 

[Jaedar]

Turns out that was silly, because the damned things can't escape the ship. Strange that they spawned inside.

Pretty sure they can. The cruiser aka vanilla battleship has a 3x3 elevator, and the exit has two doors that are each 2 tiles wide. The corridors on level 2 are perfectly pathable to vehicles.

Last time we got some, I was torn about making glitterswords or bikinis. The swords might have actually been the smart choice back then. But we've got more weapons now, and a single extra outfit is probably better than some melee weapons.

Swords can be taken as weapons into shadowrealms, which can be quite good, but I guess at this point you already have a good stash of shadowrealms compatible equipment.

My least favorite thing about the moon outposts is how the enemies have vehicles, but there's no way to actually drive a vehicle in or out of the base.

 

[Average Manatee]

Regular x-com is merely a great game. Xpiratez is crack.

Long-term crack that can bring exhaustion, as the game can last for 100h, so you play until you're bored, or you take breaks. XFiles is even worse and doesn't have enough new content and has strict timelimits to boot. I would like to play the UNATCOM mods that have a storyline of sorts between mods, but I'm wary of the same issue.

Xcom mods need what Not so Long War did for Long War for NuXcom

 

[Jaedar]

Regular x-com is merely a great game. Xpiratez is crack.

Long-term crack that can bring exhaustion, as the game can last for 100h, so you play until you're bored, or you take breaks. XFiles is even worse and doesn't have enough new content and has strict timelimits to boot. I would like to play the UNATCOM mods that have a storyline of sorts between mods, but I'm wary of the same issue.

Xcom mods need what Not so Long War did for Long War for NuXcom

I really don't know how you'd do that for xpiratez without doing an almost complete rework. There's some stuff you could do, but not enough to make a real dent. The scope of going from 6 lab experiments to a major military and scientific power just doesn't compress well, unless you remake it from scratch.
Long war had the benefit that it actually didn't really add that much stuff, so I guess it just needs some rebalance to half its length? (not to trivialize it, the devs tried to allow for this with a mod option and it was pretty bad). But I can totally believe a human could remake long war to half length pretty seamlessly, I can't even imagine how you'd cut xpiratez to half length without throwing out a lot of content.

 

[Average Manatee]

I think you could prune away missions that are far beneath you and can't advance research pretty aggressively. Couple that with some big boosts to out of combat training options and making the strategic economy easier. Then you'd need some way of generating points, buffing air combat points would probably be the best option (maybe nerf tactical combat points a bit to disincentivize grinding missions).

 

[Damned Registrations]

I don't think you could cut the length of the game massively, but the main things that come to mind for me would be-

Reduce glamour/token costs for unlocks. It's balanced well enough for exchanges for rewards, but you have to either sacrifice a lot of equipment or grind a fair bit of extra missions to get the higher bounty badges.
Make the main quest missions more common. Waiting around for months, even if you're mostly just passing time, still means a lot of extra missions or interceptions to keep your infamy above board.
Fewer enemy patrols/escorts/etc. on the geoscape, with more score reward for killing them. Generally speaking, if you can take one out, you can do it safely and frequently, so this would have little impact on the challenge. Reducing the spawn rate for these would safe a TON of time spent clicking to ignore them.
Make the 'here's the location of the final enemy' mercy feature happen a lot sooner. Looking around for 2 enemies on a map with literally thousands of tiles and hundreds of doors took up a lot of my time and didn't represent any real gameplay, let alone challenge.
Condense some research. Instead of researching every type of gauss gun individually, just unlock them all as a pack. Would save a fair bit of micromanagement in research and clicking through excess screens.
Enable some better sickbay stuff. This would make the game a fair bit easier early on, but again, a lot of time was spent sitting with my thumb up my ass waiting for soldiers to recover. It's not the sort of game where you can just recruit a fresh batch of peasants and throw them in while your elites are healing; you'll just lose a bunch of soldiers and equipment.

If you did all that, I'd say my play time would probably have been cut by about 25%.