Dont you know that red is the colour of communism and communism is bad?
Damn liberals be stealing every vote now and spitting in every freshly baked god fearin', window sittin' apple pie. Do you want spit in your apple pie? Didnt think so.
Looking forward to red codex carnage and destruction
Can't say I'm shocked, I voted Gold because at the time Red was sweeping hard on votes at the time. A lot of games tend to want you to specialize and give you a shitty 'a bit of everything' option. Guess the mod feels similarly.
Wanted to let the thread know that I am running a special short Laser Squad LP over the holiday season. I've been wanting to do this one for awhile and wanting to do something special for the occasion and just got all the logistics of it figured out finally. This thread is on hiatus until I finish Laser Squad, which is a very quick game with only 5 missions and no research or strategic components, so expect XPiratez to resume by January at the latest!
Gonna bump this just in case now that the Laser Squad LP is over
There's been two new patches since the last update: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,3626.0.html
Lots of new equipment, new missions and perhaps most importantly, a very obnoxious midgame threat(that could have very well ended the LP early) has been significantly nerfed.
Doesn't seem like old saves need to be upgraded.
We start off assaulting a landed Academy Scout. These things are fairly heavily armed compared to the wimpy bandits we've been dealing with so far, but the armored goons are easily dispatched with grenades.
Everything is going well until Sea Urchin gets gunned down into unconsciousness by one of the armored troopers.
Judge Dredd gives chase into the craft, leaving Bezmenov to get Sea Urchin back on her feet. Dredd isn't having much luck knocking out or plugging the enemy, so she pulls a grenade.
But just as she makes the throw, the fucker scores reaction fire and takes her down!
The grenade still got thrown though, and goes off, wiping out the trooper. Fortunately for Dredd I had positioned her just outside the door, which slides shut just before the grenade goes off and narrowly saves her from being pulped in the explosion.
Fortunately Super Sad Smile is able to take care of the remaining Academy personnel, who are unarmored and incapable of putting up much of a fight.
Maybe not the most triumphant comeback, but at least nobody was killed.
I'm getting real fucking sick of this message, but I'm still dragging my feet on another base. I have a short term solution in the mean time, just have to get a few more things in order.
Some misc research completes in the mean time.
Alright, let's get the Red Codex already so the game can open up.
FUCK
I look up what's missing for the Workshop in the tech tree and it turns out I skipped over a basic early gunpowder technology that's the only thing currently holding me back. I get as many Brainers as I can on it, then I order three more to max out our Brainers to full capacity.
The research finishes up quickly at least, but now I actually have to research the Workshop itself. Research on another piece of wearable clothing also finishes up, and I figure Charm resistance is probably worth my while so I commission enough to equip both the Partyvan and Christine with them.
Some more junk completes in the mean time. The V8 unlocks a technology called Pimpcraft which I'm going to have to leave on the back burner for now.
I have a little too much to drink in a conference with one of the Brainers and I don't really remember much after that. Apparently though, we have a spy in the base who saw the whole thing, and I can tell you for sure the way she tells it isn't true at all!
Fuck, Witty is going to be pissed.
While I work up the courage to face my mistress I take out my frustrations by sending the gals to massacre a village of Ratmen.
Oh would you look at that a mission I need to send Witty on because the Partyvan isn't back with the rest of the team yet.
Before the Christine leaves I give it a few upgrades. First of all, the 25mm Cannon we pulled off the Academy Runabout is added, though we have nowhere near a full magazine of ammunition for it. Additionally, every trooper we have receives a pair of Studded Stockings. those we extra carry space are also issued a pair or two of Manacles, as we are now officially in the slave catching business and I'd rather get used to using these things sooner rather than later. On top of the fact that if we find civvies on this mission, we'll be penalized for killing them all instead of taking them captive. Though it does occur to me that I might be making life more difficult for myself later by teaching Witty how to use them.
Oh well, no time to worry about that right now. Turns out the idiots who made a Distress Call were the Guild anyway so we land in force and massacre about half of them before they can even react.
Niggermancer is the first to knock out a captive, and I have her move in to clap on the old irons. Turns out the fucking Time Unit cost is something in the neighborhood of 75% to use them, son of a bitch. AND you need both hands free to do it.
Eventually Niggermancer has the Time Units free to lock up the captive while Chuckles cleans up the rest of the map,
I'm not super thrilled with how that went, but at least I gave the Manacles a test run. For the longest time in this game the Manacles didn't actually do what they were intended to, and were just a ranged throwing weapon for some reason.
Elsewhere, the Partyvan heads back out to wipe out a Guild warehouse.The name of the game is taking captives which the Gals seem to have no trouble at all with.
I'm still desperate to get decent armor for my Gals so I'm researching every kind of outfit available. Ino ther news we figure out how to assemble Craft Weapons from existing parts.
There's a quick excursion inbetween while we raid a Humanist Safehouse.
We seem to be researching a lot of useless shit so I'm starting to smell a bottleneck. Hopefully its just the workshop which I was a little slow to get researched.
I somewhat recklessly send just Witty and Moths to pick up a stranded Government Agent, forgetting that these missions have actual enemies on them now.
Whoever these assholes are, they sure are trying to put up a fight.
Eventually we get them all.
We follow that up with a Temple raid, which is the first of its kind to have more of the occupants taken captive rather than just killed outright.
We also always find the time to give the Academy a bad day.
This random shit research is really starting to bug me.
Finally, lets get to work on that right away.
Its around this time where I also start to worry about my inability to recruit Slave Soldiers and begin researching what i think are cultural techs to try and unlock the option to research them, which I'm not seeing whenever I open up the list. I also get a bio on the Eurosyndicate while interrogating a random crook. Odd that its flag resembles the oldstyle German Empire tricolour when there's already a tremendous Greater Germany-like state in Blackmarch. Perhaps the Eurosyndicate is some kind of futuristic Mitteleuropa?
We get one of those annoying Goblin Zaxx bounty hunts where its just one dude armed with a heavy weapon.
It unfortunately wouldn't be a standard pulp science fiction setting if the furry menace weren't represented in some way. As far as I'm aware there's no actual means of recruiting Beastmen to your cause, outside of one or two very different examples which I won't spoil because they're actually pretty funny.
Oh, that's why i could find Slave Soldiers on the research list, I was already fucking researching them! At least that mystery has been solved. Unfortunately when I go to check on my slave population I find that the two G.O.s I enslaved earlier have been mixed in with some pre-existing slave I already had. As much as I hate to waste any of our new property, I have them sold off so I can maintain my autistic standard of being able to track each slave from its original captive to the eventual Slave Soldier we recruit. Only problem you'll notice right now is we don't have any other men we can enslave, so the people on the Slave Soldier waiting list will need to wait a bit longer.
We get an infiltration mission where our Gals have to show up in regular clothing. I send Disc, Super Sad Smile and Peasant so I only have to reorganize the gear on one Gal, Pocket Dragoon. Dragoon gets an Old Magnum, while Peasant and Supersade pack Deagles and Disc takes a lighter Manstopper since she's still a bit weaker than her sisters.
Apparently the gals wait until they're talking to the boss to whip out their sidearms.
Dragoon knocks out the boss fairly easily, but things get fucked up pretty fast after Disc and Peasant take out another enemy. Two more pop in from the side doors and hose both of them down with machinegun fire. Disc is nearly killed outright and Peasant isn't much better off, but both manage to stay on their feet. Dragoon's reaction fire kicks in about halfway thorugh each enemy turn and she lives up to her name by wiping both of them out with her new magnum. After that Super Sad Smile cleans up the last enemy. At least nobody died.
Another one of these stupid barn missions, At least we were able to level most of it this time and get a decent payout.
The Onsen is a tempting structure but for right now I'd rather save space.
Excellent, a simple Watchtower mission. Orders are to take as many prisoners as possible.
Knock knock. It seems after Valeyard blew up the blue door greeter robot its AI chip flew out in a hail of shrapnel and lodged itself in the frontal cortex of the unfortunate G.O. Honky had just knocked out.
The Valeyard runs a little low in Time Units when she gets into the tower so Honky has to back her up, giving two other G.O.s massive head trauma as well but taking them alive.
Three Slave Soldiers, coming right up.
Some miscellaneous research finishes up while i wait through the enslavement a subsequent recruiting process.
All three men make a full recovery from their head injuries, with the possible exception of the man who has a piece of the door greeter stuck in his head. Our surgeons weren't able to remove the chip, and the man is now utterly convinced he's a robot. Seems like he's fine aside from that though, so he's recruited along with his other guild buddies.
Here are our new Slave Soldiers in all of their glory. As you can probably tell by their heads, the Guild apparently recruits from, uh, "special" crowds. No inventory shots yet, since I'm probably not sending these guys into battle until we get decent armor put together for them.
Of these armors, only Punk and possibly the Operator are of any use to us right now.
I also take some time here to clean out the extra research left over from the new updates:
More miscellania.
Two faction summaries.
And some stuff that finished up just after I took the above screenshots. The Esoterica sprite is clearly one of the spellbooks form Diablo 1, though which spell in particular I don't know off the top of my head.
The month comes to an end, and you can really see how much damage that bullshit random event did to our reputation as its placed us down into the fucking negatives this month despite how well we've done on missions. Our benefactors appear to be discerning though, and choose to overlook that reputation blow and continue to increase our funding.
Interesting.
Next Time: Hopefully I'll research the damn Codex finally.
That's just the ghost of Laser Squads past fucking with you one last time for the road.
I'm not super thrilled with how that went, but at least I gave the Manacles a test run. For the longest time in this game the Manacles didn't actually do what they were intended to, and were just a ranged throwing weapon for some reason.
Now I have the amazing mental image of Ye Olden Pyrates hurling manacles at their targets that automagically affix to their wrists, rather than bothering with putting them on by hand like a bunch of fucking scrubs.
The Esoterica sprite is clearly one of the spellbooks form Diablo 1, though which spell in particular I don't know off the top of my head.
I don't think the spellbooks had individual sprites in that, but it's been a while.
All three men make a full recovery from their head injuries, with the possible exception of the man who has a piece of the door greeter stuck in his head. Our surgeons weren't able to remove the chip, and the man is now utterly convinced he's a robot. Seems like he's fine aside from that though, so he's recruited along with his other guild buddies.
I finally get a chassis that can move faster than 2m/sec and say more than "Welcome to Wal-Mart!", got exempted from the Three Laws, and am now authorized to use guns. Why the fuck wouldn't I be fine with that?! There might be something blocking the recharging port, though. My olfactory receptors aren't supposed to register "Ramsey error 0451: overcooked bacon" every time I'm plugged in.
Can't we just genocide the ninjas or something? Is this going to be similar to EW where you just get them constantly unless you have their base squared away?
Can't we just genocide the ninjas or something? Is this going to be similar to EW where you just get them constantly unless you have their base squared away?
50/50. You can remove almost all of their map presence by exterminating them, but most of the events will still keep coming, including a hillarious event where they steal up to 750 million dollars from you.
I broke the fucking sound barrier with how quickly I clicked the "Load Save" button after that one.
I reloaded a battle save, this most likely changed the seed or something. There's a vanity reward for reaching 1 billion bucks and I sure as hell wouldn't bother going through that process twice.
Being one of the original crew really does land you the comfy supervisory role but its good squid got all her frustration out pulping some bad guys while I watched. Feel bad for the guy that usually does the capn's paperwork when she gets too pent up
