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Anticheese posted:If you can get an Assembly city and have a strong research team, the Assembly self-repair mod is better than the Autonom. My Assembly game ended with me popping out a ton of regen + esteq Bulwarks and surrounding the superweapon bases with them. Oh, for sure, but the Autonom come a close second, at least as far as I see it.
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Mar 10, 2020 19:02
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| # ? May 7, 2024 14:22 |
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 Defeating an enemy player completes the warmonger empire quest, getting a free t2 unit and a doctrine that grants extra morale against other players. Probably worse than any early game combat doctrine. The free units are always nice  In the hinterlands, Valdony is still plugging away, securing a new double cosmite sector to leave me set for cosmite forever.  We also pick up aquatic development, the tech that lets us upgrade any water sectors we have. Water sectors work differently from any other sector, providing a mix of food, energy and research, and further enhancing land bound research, energy or food sectors. The two sector specializations available now improve the food or research income of said sectors, while an energy upgrade requires a later tech.  With Zhanna defeated, we have free reign of the eastern continent. A sensible man would settle a pile more cities in this lightly settled land, slowly build up our armies and technologies, then steamroll the enemy forces on the southern continent. I am not a sensible man.  With the primary military threat dealt with, our forces split up. Korvin takes half the troops to deal with the pirate camp and these cosmite nodes near my capital  The next turn we actually pick up the ability to evolve our pustules for real. Generally, when you have to insist you haven’t lost control of the project, you have lost control of the project. Especially when, according to the fluff of the unit this tech unlocks, these very monsters have, or will kill your husband. Then in the process of clearing the second cosmite node, Korvin spawns the sixth xenoplague unit necessary to complete the penultimate stage of Voss’ quest   The lifegiver comes... It spoke of ascension... of ancestry... none of that remains now... the meaning of the words is lost... we have become more... Can you hear me lifegiver? Inessa! Get away from him! I must learn from him before he is lost, his sacrifice cannot be for nothing.They are already lost, Inessa! Do not be consumed by your desires! Do not endanger yourself like this!...Voss is gone... Part of us now... You commanded him when we were weak... we cannot accept you any longer lifgiver... Prove your strength... or be consumed Voss leaves our faction at this point, and spawns a stack full of xenoplague units next to where he was, which is this case is the wilderness past Zahanna’s city with Inessa. Who is out of movement. As I haven’t gone down this questline before, I press end turn praying very hard that Voss stack doesn’t move.  Thankfully the developers are not sadistic enough to spawn a relatively strong stack that will attack you without warning, and I have some time to pull some forces together and engage it on my own terms. Also, the spacers want some of our giant supply of cosmite. I oblige them.  Now, another concern is that we are still at war. While I re-route troops to engage Voss, we start seeing concerning sensor readings from amazon territory. There isn’t much time to waste.  In the end, I decided to take out Voss as quickly as possible, only after bringing in a few pustules I had scouting and adding some extra mods to the stack. I particular, I’ve added the hallucinogenic regulator mod that I purchased from the spacers to several units. This makes a firearms or melee armed unit inflict hallucination, which reduces the accuracy of units inflicted and makes all attacks against them count as flanking. I seriously feel for whoever made the skyboxes in the combat maps. They put in quite a bit of work on something that the camera will almost never be looking at.  Rather than engage my main force, the xenoplague army breaks for the much weaker force of pustules on their left flank.  As we cant have that, the pustules and my main force run towards each other to re-group. Antav uses his class ability to teleport over to provide some extra support.  The xenoplague, as expected, charges my xenoplague units, while their giant monster stuns a pustule unit from afar. Oddly, Voss spends both his first two turns buffing himself, without even moving forward.  As we gain control, our air force arrives to reinforce our melee forces.  Our melee forces charges into the xenoplague destroyers, making steady progress, and in a fight obliterating turnaround, Inessa tags the plaguelord and manages the 53% chance to panic it, taking it off the field for a turn.  Without their fire support, the xenoplague finally sends Voss forwards. On my turn, the remaining minor xenoplague creatures are mopped up, and we dogpile Voss.  Voss proves to be remarkably resilient, surviving the attentions of four melee units before being dragged down via opportunity attacks. The plaguelord gets panicked again.  Then, without it getting another turn the it is taken down.  Voss is gone... I have failed... was I a fool to seek a cure? I though I could help us, but I only condemned one of our bravest to a painful end. How could I be so blind?Some things are not meant to change, daughter. Do not mourn his death, make use of what his sacrifice taught us. Director! A swarm of creatures bearing the marks of the Xenoplague have been spotted near the capitol! They seem to be... waiting for something? I see... It seems that Dragan’s sacrifce did bring us something then. What he said in their last moments... was that still Dragan? The Alpha strain cannot bring us a cure.. but it might bring us victory.So, at the end of the day what was the moral of the story? That bioweapons can’t solve all your problems, but are really good at solving problems that can be solved by murdering lots of other people? That the pursuit of your obsessions will lead you to ruin unless you’re willing to cut your losses and make lemonade out of the lemons of dead test subjects? That all your unethical experiments with a semi-sapiant virus may actually end well if you successfully smack said virus on the nose hard enough when it gets rowdy. Like a ravenous and infectious puppy. Actually, destroyers are kinda dog-like already. This is one of the strangest narrative decisions I've seen in this game. If there was a time to be mean to the player, it would be here. Just take Voss away from you, give you a disappointing amount of research and loot, and leave the player sadly wondering why on earth they decided to go down a road the was so obviously a bad idea. Instead, this strange turnaround. To a degree, the writing is contorting around game mechanics. I don’t think the planetfall code can actually handle you switching secret techs mid-map, so there has to some reason why Inessa would continue to use the barely controlled bioweapon to defeat her enemies. But they didn’t have to have Voss actually try to kill you either, which implies they did like the way the quest ends out. Now, on the other other hand, the player can disagree with Inessa here. If you are devoted to roleplaying, there is nothing preventing you from deleting all your xenoplague units, removing all the mods, ignoring all the operations, and never researching another tech. There really aren’t many rails on this game.  The turn after we disciplined the xenoplague, we pick Dawn of a New Union. This is an economic tech from the doctrine line, but is a generic tech that provides some useful things to all factions. Most importantly, the planetary unification protocol operation is the singular tech requirement for winning a diplomatic victory. This also requires an impeccable reputation and excellent relations with NPC factions, which will generally take much longer than picking up this technology It’s a good time to point out that campaign missions can be won by any of the standard victory conditions in addition to completing the main quest line. The main quest line will usually take much less time, but if you don’t want to bother, feel free to annihilate everyone else. More practically, the Hero Resurrection protocol does exactly what it says on the tin, bringing a defeated hero back to life for a nominal cost, while the unification efforts doctrine With all immediate threats dealt with, and twice as much cosmite as I have energy, it’s time to pay Claudius.  Very well, we will dedicate some of our researchers to interfacing our systems.Think carefully about this Inessa Zhelezo... if we do this, there’s no turning back. I’ve read the old logs. CORE will not be content with our mere assistance. It will demand our allegiance. If we object to CORE, we will be creating the weapon it can use to destroy us.No offence, Korvin, but I wouldn’t have forked over one hundred cosmite unless I was willing to go all the way with this. Besides, the xenoplague experiments worked out ok. This starts a research project that takes just a turn to complete. It is done, the uplink is established. Is the weapon ready? Well, that’s a plan I guess. I don’t suppose I could convince you to test fire that fancy gun on Kelshana’s capitol instead? No?  Anyways, we have a concerning amount of enemy troops just off the coast that Korvin is moving to intercept.  Claudius, being a swell guy, decides to hand over some energy out of the goodness of his heart. Well, I guess it’s something, as relying on the AI to help in a war is a bit foolish  Kelshana retreats, and I decide to embark Korvin’s army, in hopes of catching some enemy troops in the water. It possibly be a better idea to hold off, but if the enemy is running, I just have to chase them.  Along the way, we pick up Superior Engineering, the second of three dvar doctrine techs. Fortification efforts improves the stats of garrisoned units and turrets, while also cutting the production and the maintenance cost of defensive buildings. In general, my play style in this game is almost counterproductively aggressive, so I have little desire to build fortifications, but some players will probably enjoy it. The real prize is cosmite collection program improves the output of all cosmite nodes. The second one is a very unique bonus in planet fall, and if you aren’t totally starved for energy it can seriously supercharge your production lines.  Meanwhile, Inessa finds a teleporter in the wilderness that leads to the far side of Kelshana’s territory, and like her father decides to do some reconnaissance in force. Also, Kelshana robs us, using the espionage system to take what little remains of our operating budget.  The redeemers decide that Korvin’s landing is the real threat, and sends three stacks in that direction.  Finally wrapping up my exploration of basic economic technologies is Food development 1, winning the prize of most subtly sinister flavour text. The upgrades can either boos the growth of the city itself or the abilit of the city to export food, an economic subsytem I haven’t had much reason to engage with yet.  Seeing a lack of danger in the are, Korvin loots a nearby energy sector, to try and get my economy out of the crippling energy shortage I’m dealing with. It’s not like there are that many enemy units around.  Well. poo poo. ---- Now, well things look bad, they are also coming to a head, which would mean I could wrap up the dvar campaign next update. However, there are still a few Dvar units I haven’t had a chance to build, and a ton of techs I haven’t had a chance to research. So, I thought I’d leave things up to a vote [] Go for the throat, and finish the Dvar campaign in a timely manner [] Durdle around some, and show off some more Dvar stuff. If we do vote for finishing the campaign, the remaining dvar units will get an overview if I find them on the other side of any combat I would be in, but we will probably not see the techs unless you decide to take the Dvar to the final mission. mr_stibbons fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Mar 16, 2020 01:59
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Show us the Dvar things! I'm curious to see more. 
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Mar 16, 2020 02:21
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Yeah, show off as much content as possible. And if you know, showing off or telling us about the consequences of alternate choices/allegiances during the campaign would also be interesting. I'm curious to see how much things can actually diverge.
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Mar 16, 2020 09:40
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We left off in a bit a tricky spot, surrounded by a much larger force from Kelshana, with some troops being debuffed. Also, Korvin is this army and we lose if he dies. After some experimenting, I’d determined we can’t get away-embarking removes all our movement points, and the enemy isn’t slowed by forests. So, if we can’t run, and we can’t sacrifice the army then there’s only one option. KILL. THEM. ALL.  Step one is to hand out the xenoplague parasite to Korvin and Bodan. Psynumbra is very reliant of morale debuffs, and the xenoplague parasite negates that entirely, which is why that strategy is awful. I also thrown the explosive resistant armour on Bogdan who needs to not be staggered so he can take his sniper shots.  Step two is to kill this scout with extreme prejudice. Despite the beach model, this scout is over a water hex. Land units will not be drawn into battles in adjacent water hexes, even if you have embarkation researched, which is why the adjacent enemy stack can’t help this scout, and why only the xenoplague units and ramjet are available on my side of the battle. There was, in retrospect, no good reason to actually use the pustules here. They can’t hurt air units. Since I auto combated this fight, I only noticed that now.  Step three is to throw twelve air units and xenoplague units into the water, and have my six best land units concentrate into one stack, then picking a fight with these two enemy stacks on the this little peninsula here.  This gives us a 3-2 numbers advantage, and the opportunity to isolate and overwhelm the forward enemy stack with 2-1 or greater numbers advantage. We’ll need this, because my army is being filled out with lightly upgraded pustules, and has a shortage of mods in general, while the enemy has fully modded their troops fully, leaving us at a bit of a quality disadvantage. Mostly.  One thing which is pushing our average quality level up is this baby, courtesy of the departed Dragan Voss. Plaguelords are tripod tentacle monsters that wear many hats, being simultaneously a heavy melee monster, healer, and long ranged fire support. Like destroyers, these evolve from smaller xenoplague units when their technology has been researched. The primary attack is really their lacerating tentacles, as their repeating ranged attack is weaker than some T2s, and not really why you brought a plague lord. There are also two once-per battle abilities, a nine ranged full action super infection which can stun biological or cyborg units, and a complete resurrection of a dead xenoplague unit (this includes other plague lords, which can make late game xenoplague armies hilariously hard to get rid of). They also have the regenerative spore cloud ability, healing themselves and any adjacent bio-or-cyborg unit 8hp every round, and fully healing the plague lord every strategic turn. Overall Plaguelords are a very pushed unit, and have a wide enough toolbox that you don’t care about the loss of speed and evasion when you evolve destroyers.  Also contributing to the overall quality level is Korvin, newly holding a very fancy gun. He will be sitting in the hot seat this battle, as his stack will be taking all the fury of the enemy’s rear stack, and about half of the enemy’s front stack as they run from the xenoplague tide.  The first punishment Korvin and company recieve is worse then actual damage. Flash bangs. This is one strongest tools the amazon faction has early game-an AOE stagger and blind with decent range on every basic infantry unit. It can be infuriating, as it is really hard to keep your troops spaced to avoid flash bangs and in cover and in range of the enemy. This is why I wanted the explosive resistant armour on Borgan, because anything without stagger resistance who can be staggered will probably be staggered.  The debuffs don’t stop, as both trencher units are immobilized by psynumbra psionics.  But in their desperate desire to break out through Korvin’s troops, and are attacked from the rear by the xenoplague/helicopter hammer force.  A unit of pustules jump on some initiates, knocking them into AOE range of an incendiary rockets, where they can immediately die.  As their vanguard is mauled, the enemy rearguard moves in, and a powerful psychic unleashes on my probably too densely clustered Dvar forces.  This leaves the two trencher units too weak to keep standing, and their tormented spirits rise against their commanders when they fall.  As my turn comes around, the xenoplague finishes overwhelming the enemy vanguard, killing the enemy hero and being ready to sweep into the amazon rearguard  I peel off some pustules to exorcise some ghosts, or at least shove them out of opportunity attack range of my heroes. Normally these spirits have stagger resistance, which would make them rather hard to deal with with pustules, but the careful application of xenografted muscles handles that problem  This frees up Korvin to get to work with his new toy. Mephtis, being a gun with a proper name, is the first piece of T4 loot we’ve acquired, and it’s honestly a bit disappointing as far as T4s go. It only has a high damage for an assault rifle, innate armour shred, and a debuff which reduces enemy morale, accuracy and evasion. That should probably tell you how nuts T4 hero weapons can get.  With the enemy lines crumbling our mercenary trucks charge in ahead of the xenoplague tide, and are promptly mind controlled.  One visit from a ramjet, destroyer and Mephtis kills the psychic freeing my troops and ending meaningful resistance.  Unfortunately, the stragglers manage to take down the overextended truck before being overwhelmed  Now, thanks to spore feeding, basically all the damage my surviving units has been healed, which means its time to shuffle a few hexes south and attack this mass of amazon units, headed by a familiar cyborg face.  Yes Mephitas the Redeemer is back, as a hero. It turns out his reward for failure wasn’t death or a fate worse than death. He just got demoted, and got a cool sword. Of course, staring down two full stacks with only a single infantry unit supporting you isn’t a place anyone wants to be in. So maybe this is the kind of punishment where he’s supposed to do something suicidal and get himself killed to keep the boss’s hands clean  The hot seat this time is being occupied by a ramjet and a pile of xenoplague units. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. Movement was tight this turn, but I should have shuffled units a bit to stiffen up this stack, and give them more guns. Last fight the fast melee units were running across the map driving the enemy before them, but this time slow shooting units like Korvin and Borgan are going to be hoofing it instead of shooting most of the battle. At least they’ve got a decent amount of cover.  Mephitas is quickly exploded and jumped by pustules, and the rest of my troops don’t even slow down on the way to the real battle.  Our xenoplague forces perform the only strategy that’s really available to them-charging. Unfortunately with the widespread deployment of anti-stagger mods by the enemy forces leaves them more ready to counterattack then we would like.  One destroyer is immediately taken down and another barely hangs on, and is going to spend the rest of the battle running away as fast as possible..  In addition, the far back enemy troops launch a delaying attack on our main forces, even bringing down another destroyer. Thankfully, that one isn’t going to be staying dead.  The bloody melee grinds on, and our ramjet is shot out of the sky. Reinforcements are almost there, but it’s unclear how much of my forces will be left when they arrive.  Eventually the fury of the xenoplague falls on remaining amazon forces, ending the battle.  That was bloody, bloodier than it needed to be. Regardless, we’re not quite done.  With the last scraps of movement we can get a large amphibious force near Kelshana’s embarked stack and engage.  The mechanics of embarked combat in planetfall are a holdover from Age of wonders 3, but they really don’t really mesh with a sci-fi setting. Basically embarked units work like would on land, but have their speed reduced to a crawl and gain three points of vulnerability to all damage types. In a fantasy setting it roughly makes sense that that is what would happen if you embarked your swordsmen and archers on crappy transport boats, but in a sci fi setting it doesn’t really make sense. I feel like replacing the units outright with a generic or faction specific transport ship unit would make more sense, but it works from a game play perspective.  Anyway with the debuffs from being embarked, the only really dangerous unit on the enemy side of the battle is Kelshana herself. And ultimately ,this isn’t a game which rewards throwing one overpowered unit at a whole stack. Even if they can obliterated one unit a turn, there’s too much incoming damage to stay alive.  And with that, we’ve just defeated the pretty much every unit Keshana owns. From here on, we’re going to be taking a less day-to-day perspective, as there are no real opponents left on the map, and I’m just durdling a bit.  After that eventful turn, we finish up research on a new unit, which I’ll cover a bit later.  This lets ups walk into Kelshana’s secondary city. Now, one of the more interesting choices you will have to deal with in planetfall is conquering cities of other races. If we want to build high their units from a city of another race we would have to start from the bottom of that races tech tree. Now, normally you would be able to build secret tech units from these cites but the xenoplague cannot build units, so that’s not an option. Instead we could decide to be a bastard, and migrate the city to Dvar at the cost of city population and a major hit to our reputation, because think about the implications about that action for ten seconds, or cut our losses and raze the city for loot. As there is basically no challenge let it this game, I’m going to try to make the city work.  Since my ability to manage an economy is still pretty questionable, I engage my secret weapon-hawking cosmite to the AI.  Now, as the thread consensus was to explore the rest of Dvar tech tree, we won’t be finishing off Keshana, as if we took her capitol we would take control of the throne of communion, which would advance the plot. (This actually wouldn’t end the mission, but I didn’t know this at the time). So instead our army is going to poke around in the wilderness on the other side of the city while Kelshana launches terror attacks on her own cities.  In the meantime, lets go pick some low hanging fruit. One of the features added in the Tyrannosaurus patch is exploration sites. These are like mini-landmarks, in that they don’t take up an entire sector, but still can be explored with a single stack, and if the guards are defeated they will provide loot and bonus income if they are within controlled territory. Generally these get ignored in the early game, but are something to do once you’ve run out of easy expansion room and need to keep your armies busy while figuring out which of your neighbours you’re going to be at war with. This particular one is a broadcast centre, and provides additional influence once it is under our control.  A new unit we get to play around with is the spacer melter, their t3 unit. This is not a complicated unit at all, with range seven repeating acid jet attack, a single action short ranged AOE acid bath, and defence mod. It also has a bit of biochemical resistance and armour shredding on both of its attacks. That’s it. If you need a lump of stats in excess of a t2 unit, this guy can be your guy, but it’s not going to change you strategic or tactical plan.  One thing I do like about them is just how much mess they create. Just one angry melter can cover half the battlefield in green goop over the course of the battle. Very satisfying to use  A few turns later, we pick up what is normally a key Dvar tech. The primary purpose of the this tech is the reconstruction kit, a mod for foreman and barons that gives them a repair ability that is actually good, with either a large heal or the resurrection of a mechanical unit. If you don’t have a way around the healing problem, either with an alternate healing source or a pile of decent biological units, this is your official answer. But taking a subpar unit and then filling up one of its mod slots to get it up to par still leaves you behind an actually good healer with a mod from an equal tech level. This also gives us our first combat summon operation, which we’ll discuss when we get a chance to use it, which will require more operation points. Oddly, I don’t quite understand what the flavour text in this section is supposed to be talking about. The capital letters on Risk Management Framework imply that that was the name of a mod or other game element at one point, but it is also possible that this was an oblique reference to the breach protocol operation, which was then moved to an earlier tech. I do know that all of the tactical summons were added to these techs fairly late in the game.  Speaking of tech tree shuffling, Accelerated Force Deployment, a technology created in the latest patch. This combines the mountain and ruin navigation passive bonuses, which were originally part of the now removed mountain and ruin exploitation techs, with the bonus movement speed in own territory buff that used to be part of the colony infrastructure tech. By moving that bonus a bit further down the tech tree, and making the initial economy techs more valuable, it’s much less important to rush this bonus, but still basically mandatory if it looks like the game is going long.  Operational effectiveness is the first of a chain of identical techs all of which hand out more doctrine slots, better chances for strategic doctrines to work, and the ability to use more and bigger strategic and tactical operations. It feels a bit clunky just throwing all these bonuses in a pile, in a completely separate branch of the tech tree, with no variation, and it often feels like a bit of a tax tech, something you need to get to use the fancy operations and doctrines you actually want to use. On the other hand, hunting through a tech tree for where the next bonus was could be frustrating.  Our continued efforts to butter up the spacers bear unexpected fruit, as a quest they offer has the games one and only t4 sword as a reward.  This little errand is a perfect chance to test out our new tanks. The excavator is essentially a ramjet on treads-with both a single action ram and a short ranged AOE on cooldown, though it trades the afterburners for a system of defensive flamethrowers that hit all adjacent units and put the tank on defence mode. That summary is also its biggest problem, it doesn’t offer anything new, no fancy T3 only abilities like massive impact or a big cone AOE like the melter, and doesn’t fill any holes in the Dvar lineup. It’s a solid unit, and in very late games it’s a solid workhorse for your army, but there’s no reason to fast tech to this unit. The fact that neither the cannon or the ram can stagger heavy units is a little bizarre, though their are mods that can fix either or both of those problems, and would be an easy way to give the tank a standout quality to draw players toward it.  It also looks a little dinky in game. It feels like the hull should be a bit taller, and the weird track-guard make it look more like a buggy then a tank. Regardless, I easily complete the spacer quest, and begin to question how long I am willing to durdle around on this map.  And then the Kir-ko commander decides to declare war on me, which neatly solves that problem. Join us next time for a war against the Kir-ko, the peaks of Dvar science, and the exciting conclusion to the saga of the Zhelezo.
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Mar 23, 2020 02:47
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 Last time Jikuku Cos’Rax, who was well on his way to surviving the events of this map, decided to declare war on the most powerful force on the planet over minor border frictions. To be fair, he does seem to have a plan, marching through the neutral territory of Claudius Proton to attack my undefended city of Estev with a small elite force. I really should have gotten the cyborg mad scientist to sign a defensive pact.  In preparation for this war, designs for some heavier equipment are drawn up  We also pick up Energy Development 2. This lets you upgrade what energy sectors you have even further, as well as opening up an option to increase a cities scanning range instead of the alternative economic upgrades.  In the next turns a separate Kir’ko assault force lands on the southern sector of my captiol.  In an effort to bleed the assault force on my district defences, I take command personally and blow my limited on a tactical reinforcement operation. Hopefully this can distract and slow the bulk of the enemy force enough for the militia to get some kills on the smaller half of the enemy force.  The sapper is the first “reinforcement unit” we’ve seen in this LP, a unit that only can be spawned by players through the use of a tactical operation, but is otherwise a functional unit-not immobile or suicidal. Infamously, this was not always the case, and there are early promotional materials which show Sappers as part of the Dvar unit tree. It’s not entirely clear why the developers thought this was a good idea, though the official story was that the tech tree was too long, or that there was too many units. It’s telling that one of the oldest mods for this game makes these build able. Regardless, the sapper isn’t a unit that the Dvar are missing, unlike some other units I can think of. Frankly, being completely expendable immensely improves its viability. It’s primary features are the assault tunnel, which lets it take a full action to jump seven spaces, doing damage and staggering anything adjacent, and its seismic charges, which damage all terrain within two hexes and apply massive impact stagger all units within the same range. The most common use of this unit is to have it spawn in the middle of a clump of enemy units, then use the charges to stagger them and destroy their cover. At that point, it is fairly unlikely for the sapper to survive the counterattack, but as you don’t get keep the sapper anyway, every bullet shot it’s way is a bullet that isn’t being shot at real troops. If it does survive, its fold-out support guns are a repeating attack with only 5 range, not that that really matters. It’s situationally useful, but even if I could produce them I don’t think that I would be making a bunch.  My gambit does not pay off- the Kir'ko troops have some high quality defensive mods, and easily shrug off the attacks of the militia, losing only some scouts ad basic infantry, before they are outflanked and overwhelmed.  The spacers continue giving me quests, offer a second copy of the sword edge, which is a rather strange result of the RNG.  While what troops are left in the homelands frantically run back to secure the captiol, my actual army is finally in position, and falls on Cos’Rax’s lightly defended capitol like a hammer made of ravenous plague monsters.  With the loss of their capitol, the Kir’ko forces retreat back to their nearest coastal city. Not that it matters. Not only are they not going to provide enough troops to hold off my main army, but they are reinforcing the wrong place. This city doesn’t matter.  What matters is my city of Estev, where Jikuku Cos’Rax is himself. With his capitol in my possession, if he himself dies his faction is out of the game. And despite holding a powerful T4 sniper rifle, he is cut off with a small force.  Next turn the psi fish decided that they can’t be outdone, and decide it’s time to offer me Edge for the third time.  A collection of backline forces, led by Valdony Rassavet, drops on the unsuporrted Kir’ko commander. It turns out that Cos’Rax actually has the synthesis secret tech, a technology focused around using hacking and massive amounts of computing power to their advantage. Unsurprisingly, it’s very focused around supporting mechanical and cyborg units, and thus Cos’Rax has the only race/secret tech combination as awkward as we do.  Cos’rax focuses most of his efforts on bringing down the excavator I brought along, and I make the foolish move of charging it forward, hoping I can use operations to bail it out.  But perhaps the sapper was the wrong choice.  Despite stoic resistance, Cos’Rax is eventually surrounded and swarmed by xenoplague monsters.  With that done, it’s time to clean up those quests we’ve been getting, with the help of some new units.  The Mad Preacher is the T4 spacer unit, a powerful psionic leader of the spacer tribes hiding inside his custom ride. The most interesting ability is it’s passive ability Ardent Brand, which makes spacer effigies like a spacer truck would. In addition, it has a debuff that makes an enemy unit easier to hit and drop a friendly effigy on death, as well as a free action buff to improve the abilities of all effigies on the map. Besides that, it’s damage output is mediocre for a t4, a single action attack with a chance to inflict Insanity on its target. In an odd bit of trivia, the Maddening Rant is the only range 8 attack in the game. While the defensive abilities of the preacher don’t look incredible, it has a rather silly ability that makes it hard to permanently get rid of-when the preacher dies, all friendly psycho and melter units gain “power struggle” and can take an action at the destroyed preacher’s wreck to become a preacher themselves. It’s a cool ability, though it raises awkward questions about where the psychic powers are coming from. Does the preacher have some kind of technological source for the psionics? If not, then do all spacers have some degree of psionic powers?  The preacher is a bit hard to evaluate right now, because it shines the most in battles that are long and very close, to take advantage of spawned effigies, and those are in short supply right now. In general, I’d prefer units that don’t require I sacrifice units I have spent production and energy on to be good, but some people like having an insurance policy  Effigies are basically not a unit, they’re more of shootable buffs, randomly increasing the damage of a random nearby unit every turn. A few turns pass while my troops try to get back into position after crushing the Kir’ko, and Kelshana makes a bit of a resurgence, raiding Zehanna’s old capitol. During this point we get more techs.  The second xenoplague doctrine tech works much like the first: there’s one unclear and underwhelming boost to your xenoplague unit spawning abilities, and a much more powerful and simple second option. Forced Infection makes any of your dead biological or cyborg units contribute points to the biomass pool. Like the mad preacher, I’m not really a fan, and my initial impression instead of spending resources as a hedge against losing units, is that a straight economic or combat buff doctrine can leave you in a place where you don’t have to take close battles to begin with. I’m also not clear how this, or the xenoplage in general, works if you are defeated outright-if this can cause units to spawn after you lose that would be bad, they’re just going to get swept. More practically Organic mutation research provides a straight +20% to research across your empire, through the widespread distribution of xenoplague based brain boosters. That one is getting slotted in immediately. With Keslshana unwilling to pick a fight, I recapture the sector and continue advancing, picking up yet more techs.  Advanced DV-R Suits is the penultimate tech on the dvar mod tree, and it contains some sweet stuff, even if it seems oddly more useful for your tanks than your infantry. Super powered pistons works much like Xenografted muscles, providing increased stagger on melee attacks, but with a larger damage bonus and a chance to stun bio or cyborg units, and is great on any melee units. The Illuminator targeting system can be applied to any heavy unit granting it a free action ability to launch targeting flares. Any unit in the flare AOE is 30% easier to hit, and a unit with a targeting flare mod (not just the unit that launched the flares) does 20% more damage to the unit in the AOE. This, con-incidentally, is great on any ranged unit, and really s Lastly, the localized earthquake generator has a unique effect of reducing stagger resistance of the targets before hitting them with massive impact stagger. This is one of the few ways to stagger units that are otherwise stagger-immune, and as those can be a serious problem for the Dvar, this is an important tool  Kelshana recaptures her second city just in time for my returning primary army to smash the troops she’s built up here, where they’re going to spend seven turns sitting outside her capitol while I pick up a few more techs.  Planetary Oligarchy is the final Dvar doctrine tech, and like many final techs, it’s a little nuts. It offers a pair of doctrines that synergies into giving the dvar the ability to drown their opponents under a tide of tanks and artillery. Crysochracy gives the dvar player an additional 2 energy for every point of population in all your cities, at the cost of -10 happiness in each of your cities. The moral implications of using this doctrine are pretty obvious, but it’s effectiveness is also fairly obvious. Military industrial complex both reduces the upkeep costs of all heavy units in your army by half, and the cost of rushing production on said heavy units by 35%. Endgame Dvar is simple-get a pile of money, and use that pile of money to buy a pile of tanks on the cheap. Interestingly, not one of the dvar doctrines is going directly buff your armies in the field. Instead, they’re all economic or buffing the performance of your defences, and you have to leverage that to achieve victory. Now the problem with this is that the game has a tight stack limit, which makes it difficult to leverage pure numerical advantage. Often the dvar are going to be finding themselves taking advantage of their economy to win a non-combat victory instead of outright crushing their enemies.  The final mod tech fro the Dvar provides one mod for the infantry, and a much better one for the tanks. Captains Regalia is, at this point mostly just for heroes, and provides any nearby units damage resistance and additional morale. Though it appears to be misnamed in the tech popup, the reactive kinetic battery is a much more interesting one. It adds stagger resistance to the unit it is on, and adds a stack of kinetic energy every time said unit takes a hit. Then, it also gains a close ranged aoe attack that increases in damage dramatically the more stacks of energy. In a way, this is a bit backwards from what would be optimal. Generally, high tier units, aka vehicles, have enough quality abilities competing for their action points and don’t need new ones modded on, while lower tier units can gain a lot from modding on more potent actions. Sadly, you can’t give low tier infantry reactive kinetic batteries.  Now that we control it, we should see to investigating what directs the Communion. I doubt this ritual will be safe for the likes of us. We should prepare for the worst.After that tech, I finally take Kelshana’s capitol, starting the endgame. Or thinking that I do. Instead, we have to actually walk to the throne of communion and start a process. I take the opportunity to get one last tech.  Cataclysm generation is an endgame tech that leads nowhere and provides only a single operation. It is probably worth it though. Ignore all that text about spawning mountains and a geothermal instability, that isn’t important. What is is that last sentence-any armies in the target sector cannot move next turn. This is the kind of ability that ends games on the spot, trapping armies before they can retreat, enabling your escape, stalling reinforcements before they can group up, all moves that can turn a war around. Now let’s end the game. The final preparations are in place. Prepare yourselves, brothers and sisters. I doubt this will be pleasant.  A new voice requests an audience, yet it stands in the place of the faithful. You must have questions if you have contacted me this way.The... Empress? You are behind all this? The redeemers... the council... it was you who pulled their strings?Yes, young one. I offered the Redeemers a gift. They serve me faithfully as a necessary tool in this war, as do your council.That is what we are you? Tools? You once ruled the Union, countless trillions of souls, all of whom loved you. And you use them as a miner would a pick?Sacrifices must be made. CORE ever tightens its grip on the remnants of the Star Union. Its servants came for this world and they will come for yours. The council serves me so that CORE can never enslave the Dvar again. You have already chosen the path of dissent, siding with CORE’s pets. You disappoint me. You have no place in the Star Union’s rebirth.Inessa Zhelezo! A massive monstrosity has surfaced nearby! Could it be this Lohikarne the Empress mentioned?We must destroy that monstrosity before it comes for us all. Now, this a moment that can go a couple ways. Had we not made a deal with Claudius Proton, Carminia will give you the opportunity to serve her. If you join her, you’ll get a new objective to defeat Claudius and capture is proton coil construction site landmark. If you refuse her, you have to fight Lokiharne as usual, without the proton coil on your side but with the dialog that actually mentions Lokiharn.  Now, this choice is somewhat undermined by the game mechanics. The Echo of Lokihare and his whispers are just a single stack on the map, and there is nothing stopping you from throwing a full six stacks at him at once. Considering you probably got here after beating two enemy factions, and have a very, very obvious warning that you should probably be prepared for a fight before pressing the button, you'll have those stacks ready. This makes the deubff applied to him by the proton coil being active pretty much unnecessary. If these units had been stuffed inside a landmark, the debuff might actually matter.  Ultimately, surrounding a single enemy stack with a ton of your won does mean that you aren’t going to get to use all of them. The enemy stack is going to all run towards one side of the battlefield, and the rest of your troops are only going to get to the battlefield by the time that fight is over.  The Echo is quite scary, a fully modded up t4 unit including a damage reflection mod, a chance to stun or drive insane anything on hit, and a unique mod that resurrects it if any of it’s allies are still standing. This means it can teleport into a three xenoplague units and actually have a chance of coming out on top. Howeveryou probably aren’t ever going to see that resurrection clause take effect. The whispers of pride, change, perfection, prosperity, and dissent are just t1 units with weak mods and all having mostly unnoticeable differences, which makes them easy to mop up.  I have brought a the world’s greatest mop for this job.  The Rocket artillery is an example of mechanics getting twisted in knots to a get a unit to work the way it should-i.e, being an artillery unit with a repeating attack. The missile barrage, by itself, is a range 7 repeating AOE attack with an embarrassing base hit chance of 20%, though as an AOE, it does scatter on miss. However, if you the train weapons action, that becomes a much more respectable range 9 attack with 60% chance to hit, as long as the artillery doesn’t move. Compared to a regular artillery weapon, the full barrage does more damage-assuming all three shots hit, which is unlikely, but importantly has no cooldown. Most artillery in the game is forced to use secondary weapons every other turn, but not rocket artillery. In addition the missed shots have a high chance to stagger, and with mods debuff additional enemy units in addition to primary targets, who are very likely to be hit at least once. The tradeoff here is that the rocket barrage does not have massive impact without some specific mods. While most of this is probably good, you are also losing a lot of flexibility. The secondary guns are pretty bad, the artillery is relatively fragile, and on the first turn and when you reposition you have to waste turns training weapons instead of defending or shooting. It is a powerful tool in the dvar arsenal, but isn't a unit you can spam easily.  With the whispers handled, all that is left is to paint the Echo with flares and dog piling it. It’s going to hurt, but the health of these troops no longer matter. Once this battle is over, we win.  Fittingly, Inessa finishes it off herself.  Very good, the test went well, although it will be some time until I am able to bring it to full power. Nevertheless, your assistance has been duly noted. In fact, I have someone who wishes to meet you. CORE itself? We graciously accept this gift; a new beginning is just what our people need. COORDINATES WILL BE TRANSFERRED. YOU WILL RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PROCEED SOON. THERE IS STILL A THREAT. YOU WILL BE CALLED UPON WHEN THE TIME COMES. And with that, the tale of the Zhelezo Dvar is over, at least until CORE decides it is time to call in it’s debts. But the story of planetfall is not over. Dear readers, where are we going next? -------  []Leave 6, with Jack Gelder’s replacement, trying to figure out what the hell happened to a paradise.  [] Arcadia Celeste, with Poz Tk’Nor, claiming a life for themselves  [] Thanakiwa, hunting down a mad scientist with an Amazon taskforce. mr_stibbons fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 1, 2020 02:38
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Thank you for that! I'm interested in seeing the Amazons next
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Apr 1, 2020 02:49
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Thanakiwa, I think we kinda owe the galaxy to clean up some mad science. Here's hoping an Amazon faction isn't a goddamn misogynistic embarrassment for once.
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Apr 1, 2020 02:51
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The Kir'ko have one of the better earlier storylines and characters in my opinion.Cythereal posted:Thanakiwa, I think we kinda owe the galaxy to clean up some mad science. Here's hoping an Amazon faction isn't a goddamn misogynistic embarrassment for once. Apart from being constantly barefoot (which has more to do with their 'one with nature~' characterization), they're pretty non-mysogynistic. They're less a bunch of half-naked muscle lesbians and more typical fantasy elves.
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Apr 1, 2020 04:52
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Let's party with Poz
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Apr 1, 2020 05:45
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Let´s go with Poz, I´m curious about the storyline for our buggy friends.
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Apr 1, 2020 11:05
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The votes are in, and we are continuing our tales with Poz tk’nor and the Kir’ko  As swarm herald of the Kir’ko Teryn, I have been chosen to lead my colony to a new place to settle, a new place to call home. This is a heavy burden, as we are confronted with our past in every corner of the former star union. With the unity of the hive mind gone, different voices have risen amongst our people. Some are seeking vengeance, while others like myself feel that we need to build our own future, away from mankind and human conflicts. Arcadia Caeleste lies ahead of us. I can feel it reaching out, a soothing presence bringing calm to the turmoil of the swarm. No wonder Hatyl Ur’ulk was drawn here. This may be the place of tranquility we’ve all been longing for.The central hook of the Kir’ko is similar in spirit to the psi-fish we met last mission. They a stock sci-fi villain trope-the psychically linked hive mind insect race, but without being one dimensional villains who cannot be negotiated with. They are aggressive towards humans, but because of historical atrocities that were inflicted on them by humans, not an all consuming desire to consume. There’s a parallel to be drawn with how the portrayal of “barbarian” tribes has slowly been changing in fantasy literature. While there can be great fun in mindlessly and guiltlessly destroying the horde of killer bugs, it’s easy to draw parallels to how many perfectly human enemies were demonized as mindless savages who must be exterminated.  Yet I still fail to understand it’s bizarre beauty, when black tides start swallowing the echoes of the ancestral dreams. Hatch-brother Kurrash made an early landing to search for the dream reader. I feel his mind drawing closer. He must be returning soon. Until he does I need to control the urges inside and listen to the will of the swarm. My people are restless. The new hatch has emerged hungrily from their eggs and the cocoons of the previous generation larvae have all been feasted on during the rite of conversion. Now they lust for more. And the colony must provide.Upon landing, we receive a quest to boost our colonies food income that will give us some free units. We also start with two free techs, aquatic deployment and production development, from Poz’s traits. Not the greatest pair, given our situation. I’m generally not a fan of the free techs trait because of how inconsistent it is. More importantly, we have some friends within easy reach!  I feel the ripples of the Void resonating within you. Yet I don’t recognize their strange, new patterns. What are you? The Void? Home is lost. We are K’Chru. From beyond the Veil.Void creatures? This world must seem very strange to you then. We feel with you. The Kir’ko also lost their home world a long time ago.Kir’ko soothing. Unlike the others we found. They observe. Bland grey smell. Though they look...tasty. Perhaps you want to visit them. Quite close. This gives us a plot quest to find another faction, and a marker for said factions location. This scout will continue beelining east towards the new quest marker. This is also the only place in the game where we learn the Psi-fish’s name for themselves, but for the sake of clarity I’ll continue to use their in-game name.  We also get a proper minor faction quest to murder some utter jerks who are being mean to purple jellyfish friends. Since this quest is nice and close to a bunch of clearable pickups, we’ll be handling it, and the various wildlife, while I explain how the Kir'ko work in the field.  The basic Kir’ko troops are Frenzied-which are essentially “civilian” Kir’ko workers pressed into the military. They’re a fast melee unit with a short ranged “grenade” they can use ever few turns. This presents the Kir’ko with a unique challenge, as it is very very easy to hard-counter armies made up of mostly melee units, like fliers, overwatch, heavier melee units, and overwhelming amount of firepower. Thus, much of the tactical concerns the Kir’ko have is trying to figure out how to get your frenzied into melee without getting too shot up. When they do get there, they’ll have a great time-the eponymous frenzy ability increases their melee damage every time they make a melee attack, capping out at 30%. They also do have some ways to keep themselves alive innately-while battle bile does not stagger enemy units, it does inflict a nasty Choking debuff. In addition, they along with all Kir’ko, have the swarm shields ability, gaining two points of shields if they are adjacent to another Kir’ko unit. Now, while this creates the image of a giant swarm of Kir'ko in a shielded bubble, it doesn’t work like that, and in play the Kir’ko operate on the buddy system to minimize the impact of enemy area of effect attacks. This also makes it slightly inconvenient to add non Kir’ko units to your kir’ko armies, which fits the fluff quite well.  Now, how does one get some fragile melee units into close combat? Well, not getting shot is a good way.  The starting skirmisher for the Kir’ko are the Hidden, sneaky sniper types. This is the first real sniper unit we’ve had a look at, but the basics ares simple-they have an ok damage, nine range full action sniper shot that staggers, a very underpar snap shot with seven range that doesn’t stagger, and overwatch with greater range than a rifle squad. Hidden have a couple of advantages on the basic template-they have agile overwatch like bulwarks, and their weapons do psionic damage. Unlike every other damage type in the game, psionic has built in special rules-it ignores all armour on the target, leaving them with only shields and psionic resistance to keep themselves safe. Now, all mechanical units have an innate four psionic resistance, so this isn’t as useful as it might sound, but it will generally give you a bit more damage than the listed value over the course of the game. Also, while we’re on the subject, shields are by default ignored by melee attacks. Yes, there are psionic melee attacks in this game, no further questions at this time. The other big trick of this unit is shrouded step-this is a short range teleport, that leaves the hidden with a single action point, and fills their destination, and every adjacent space, with smoke, giving a large amount of evasion to all units within. Now, while all this is great, this is still a t2 unit that does little more damage than trenchers. While hidden are very good at controlling the battlefield, they don’t do much damage. They do, however, nicely compliment frenzied, being able to shoot air units, out range rifle squads who are on overwatch, and keep the enemy from hitting them until they engage.  In addition to our regular starting units, by virtue of being Kir’ko we have a few bonus units.  These adorable little bugs are one of the strange quirks of the kir’ko faction. You can’t build them, but you start with two units and can spawn more through strategic operations and some other shenanigans. While they aren’t good by the merits of their stats, they have enhanced experience gains and upon reaching max rank will metamorphose into a hidden or transcendent. But to do that they have to fight, and their fighting prowess is a bit questionable. They’ve got a single action range seven attack with poor damage, and terrible defences. Their two selling points the ability to tunnel seven spaces then take another action, and the fact that their attack has a chance to blind their targets. Their primary job is just to sneak around the back, blind the enemy, and stay a good ways away from any damage until they grow up. After that, turn two starts and the plot happens.  I have returned. Pox Tk’Nor, old hatch-mate. Shi’ty’ru, how I’ve missed the soothing presence of the swarm! It was unmindful of me to scout alone. I will never understand why some of our people are embracing this new-found solitude of the lost hive. Still I fared will on my mission. This planet is a marvel. It speaks to me, sharpens my psionic instincts. Whispers of the Harmony Beyond have guided me to the Dream Reader. In my mind I saw him meditate within a ruined city, where void tears had fallen from the sky. Krz’Tk Xrrit Ptkch! Is there any place in this galaxy left without the sack-bleeders? They infest every planet, devour every species crossing their path. Their greed knows no satiation and consumption is their only purpose. And yet we showed them our mandibles and claws. On Cadilus Prime and on so many other liberated worlds. The Kir’ko Terym were one of the first colonies to rise up and fight. Since then we evolved and grew stronger, while the sack-bleeders withered like the ruins of their empire. When called to war by their herald, the swarm will not hesitate to respond... and prevail. You know my position on this, Kurrash. Last night I revisited the third dream of Kzara Tosh. I was there, on Xa’Kir’ko, and though my senses were unfocused, I felt that I was home. Then I looked at the night sky, and the fateful constellations guarding the secret of our origin, but once again they remained intangible and blurry. Together with the Dream Reader I need to return to this fragment of the vision. With Hatl Ur’Uk’s guidance I can achieve something greater than finding new hatching grounds for our swarm. We do not belong with the humans. Not in peace and not in war.As our scouts travel further east, they find an independent vanguard settlement. They don’t seem pleased to see us.  Another wave? More of our brethren must have sought refuge on this planet. Did Hatyl Ur’Uk not come alone? We must focus our senses to detect their presence.We’re going to leave these settlements alone for now, though I am eyeing that old government palace to the south.  Heading east, in pursuit of the psi-fish quest, we find another vanguard settlement, as well as a psi-fish dwelling.  Now, one of the oddities of the food generation tutorial quest is that it just checks if your city ever reaches a food income above the target threshold. It doesn’t require you to actually end a turn to claim this income, so it’s entirely possible to spec your city for max food income for an instant, get two free units, then switch back to a more balanced income. With each new hatch, the colony continues to proliferate. Still there are some of my brethren that know a deeper hunger. And ancient caste that is insatiable and can instill even our own kind with fear when they devour our enemies to strengthen the swarm. They resonate with our growth – and we nurture their appetite. With the free troops, we move aggressively to clean up the psi-fish quest.  The starter quest to gather food gave us our starting healer as well as the Kir’ko flying unit, who stack up with our new hero to help out.  Transcendent are the Kir’ko healers, and after a long time complaining about terrible Dvar healers these guys are great. They can heal any unit in the Kir’ko lineup (technically any non-mechanical, which will be important later) for 25 hp at range 3 and they can heal themselves-a rare but convenient bonus. Not that that will often be necessary, as they also start with regeneration, an ability I cannot emphasize enough, is very good. This self healing is a highly important, as it ties into their one buff, absorb pain. This targets one friendly unit, and any damage dealt to that unit is reduced by 35% and is dealt to the transcendent instead, until the transcendent is killed or staggered. Because of regeneration, said transcended will sleep off all that damage at the end of strategic turn. Their one attack is pretty reasonable, with good range and acceptable damage due to psionic damage type, which can let them help the cleanup fairly well. In addition they are floating, making them one of the few healers that can keep up with flying or floating stacks. All in all, a fantastic unit that you should always keep around.  The Engulfer is a fairly typical flying unit- a repeating attack that does bonus damage against other air units, a single action aoe on cooldown, middling stats. The fact that it’s aoe is an armour melting gas cloud that lingers on the battlefield instead of a staggering explosion is interesting, but not incredibly powerful. It certainly doesn’t look like something which was one of the most overpowered units in the game at one point. The short explanation is that the Kir’ko have a selection of very powerful tools designed to make an inherently impractical strategy like charging into melee with half your army viable. When said tools are applied to a practical unit like the engulfer, the results can be a unkillable blob of flying death.  Between the two of them, the independent guards don’t stand much of a chance. This is one of the easier starting missions because of the amount of free stuff that arrives so quickly After these battles, a scout finally reaches the quest marker, far to the northwest.   You bring a dark passenger with you, traveler. A weight burdens you, greater than you can bear alone. You search for something – what is it? For what reason have you come to this tranquil planet?We are in need of guidance and came here seeking for a wise Dream Reader of our people. We followed the psionic trail of his presence to this planet. (you focus your psionics in an attempt to break the mind link.) (The other Kir’Ko tightens the link between you.) A Dream Reader? Hmm, perhaps it was the will of the cosmos that brought you here. My hive sense tells me I am the only Dream Reader on this world, but sadly I cannot help you. You are on a fallacious path. Dark clouds flow through your mind. I am following the Celestian ways and must not seek conflict with the ones that wandered astray. I warn, do not enter the forbidden archives. Only more darkness to find.(the psionic connection is broken, and a sudden silence settles in your mind.) Zzir’rok, what a waste! We come all this way to seek Hatyl Ur’Uk, yet he refuses to guide us on our path. He will not swarm with us because we draw on the darker Void. But while he stays silent to our please, the Harmony Beyond always answers. I believed its whispers would guide us to the Dream Reader, but I was wrong. The ruins from my vision point to much older knowledge... ...the forbidden archives! The connection has been growing stronger. I can hear its melodies from afar, feel the pulse of oblivion ripple through my inner fluids. Will the emptiness consume me when I embrace its song? I cannot tell, but there may be no other way... After that disappointing conversation then meet the fourth of our minor factions-the paragon. These are the survivors of the star unions upper classes, their lives extended far past normal human lifespans with extensive cybernetics. They still consider themselves the true star union, but without the assistance of CORE they have lost the understanding of how their massive stash of union era technology technology functions. In other words, the brotherhood of steel, if the brotherhood were made up of arrogant, ignorant, upper class twits. Who are also half dead cyborgs.  Now, like any minor faction, we could put aside our distaste for the very concept of the paragon, and take quests from them, but I just can’t see Poz, in his current state, go through with that. Our opinion oh humanity in general I’ll leave for the thread to decide later, but these guys, the guys who personally got rich over the enslavement and mutilation of our ancestors? gently caress em.  Now, this battle lets us a chance to really show off one of our strangest starting units, but also show off a rare NPC unit.  The Imperial buggy is our first recipient of the “units I have no reasonable expectation of ever taking control of” clause for getting a unit spotlight. There are a whole line of Imperial era vehicles that, while the occasionally show up in Paragon, Autonom, and pirate armies, are fairly rare to show up as units. You can somewhat reliably get them as vehicle for you commanders, but actually gaining control of them is pretty rare. The flavour text seems to imply that these units are used heavily by the Paragon, but oddly they aren’t for sale anywhere. Anyways, part of the reason that these don’t appear often is that none of them are terribly interesting. The buggy has two attacks, a repeating laser, and a sniper shot on cooldown, and defences that are on the poor side. Really, you’re probably better off with racial vehicles than this.  One of the changes brought about in the tyrannosaurus update is that you will always start with the first unit of your secret tech, even though it will take you some research to build any more. And, since Poz is not exactly in a good place mentally in this mission, we start with the first Psynumbra unit. Now, these initiates are not much like the initiates that we spend the last mission fighting, who weren’t like the ones we fought in the first Dvar mission. Unlike other initiates, who, at least on this patch, are a purifier style unit with a 5 range single action psionic attack, Kir’ko initiates are melee units, who have fast movement speed, more health and a very damaging single action soul rend. And this is a bit of a mixed bag. Kir’ko initiates are not bad, but early game you are very dependent on melee units, and don’t exactly want more melee units. The other trick of the unit is their devour hope debuff. If this is successful, this heals the initiates a small amount and makes said unit filled with despair, badly reducing their morale.  However, when a unit who is filled with despair is murdered by some helpful emergents, they turn into malicious phantoms.  Echoes of despair can be summoned in a couple ways, mostly by the aforementioned debuff. They are suicide melee units, with a basic repeating melee attack, and the ability to detonate themselves in their bleak crescendo. Now the catch is that the explosion has a chance to inflict filled with despair, hypothetically letting one echo slowly multiply itself across the enemy army. They also debuff any unit enemy unit that is next to them The central problem with these units is how long it takes them to active. Unlike most summons, an echo spawning from a dead unit does not have any action points on the turn when it spawns. And, because of range and operation restrictions, you will have a hard time marking and killing an enemy unit until at least turn 2 of combat, so on a good day, this does something turn 3. If you miss the kill, then this is delayed to turn four, or later if the enemy is smart enough to run the despairing unit all the way to the other side of the map.  The issues with spawned echoes leaves initiates in an awkward place, because there one trick doesn’t pay off very often. It doesn’t help that other half of devour hope, the self heal is pretty hard to get take advantage of in combination with the summon-if you mark a unit as soon as possible, you probably haven’t taken much damage. If you wait until the initiate needs healing then the battle will be over before the echo gets a turn. And let’s not get started on the flaws in a self heal that needs a nearby enemy unit and fails to happen every now and then. Kir’ko initiates, at least, can be pretty functional by mostly ignoring their secondary attack, and just soul rending all the time. The standard initiate attack is, well, not good in terms of damage. At the end of the day initiates a very disappointing units. Comparing them to the Purifiers, a unit with the same combat style and place in the tech tree, and they look like an underwhelming joke.  Declaring war on a minor faction has it’s own benefits beyond claiming their sites without paying them off. You also pick up a randomized reward every now and then when you kill enough of them With that, despite nothing really happening but a ton of unit analysis, I’ll have to cut the update. Quarantine has resulted in a change of my living arrangements, and I somehow have less time to work on this now then I did before the world went crazy. I’ll try to return to a weekly update schedule after this, if I can.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:51
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Well I hope everything goes fine then. As for the apostrophes, it was fun making obvious bad choices every time with the dwarves but I'm not sure I want that for them. We'll see.
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Apr 10, 2020 21:34
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 While having one of the most rocking flavour texts in the game, really getting you in the mood for starting the bug revolution, Unshackling is a pretty poor starting tech. It offers a detector mod the increases accuracy, and mod to make melee units shred armour on hit, which can be useful, but is not really what you need. Frenzied kill pretty much anything if they get stuck in the early game, but they need to not die. More damage is overkill.  More impressive is the first Kir’ko economic tech, offering two solid doctrines and an incredibly powerful unique building. Dream sharing improves experience gain of all Kir’ko units, which is very helpful to get emergent to evolve in a reasonable timeframe, and to generally stiffen up your starting forces. Preserving the future provides an increase to food income, which synergizes well with the brood cluster, a building which converts excess food income into unit production, up to half of the cities base production. If that last clause sounds like the result of a hasty balance patch, you’re correct. It turns out it’s very easy to crank food production incredibly high to build units as fast as you can pay for them. Still, this is a large boost to unit production that no other race has access to, and can be very powerful.  After the initial few clearance fights, our forces split up to cover more ground, with Poz taking the basic troops and breaking south, while Kurrash keeps the engulfer and hangs around our capitol hoping for reinforcements.  He’ll have to wait a bit, as the first thing getting produced is a colonizer, which is heading west to the newly cleared Mirrortree Grove, eyeing expansion towards the double cosmite sector a bit further west, once I have time to kick the paragon off the cosmite nodes. Thankfully, Kir’ko have good colonizers, unlike the dvar, these have hover movement, and are much faster over rough terrain. Heading east, our scouts finally find the faction the psi-fish pointed us towards.  A Kir’ko! My huntresses demonstrated keen instincts when they scouted your colony. Though it is not surprising that your race, engineered to adapt to different tasks and environments, did survive the Cataclysm – ethical or not, Terratech Inc. Always aimed for perfection.Do not mention the name of that accursed company in our presence, human! Murderers! Mutilators! That’s what they are called among my people. When they defiled our Queens there could have been no greater guilt.Keep your calm, Kir’ko. You misunderstand. If anything, the adaptive capabilities of your race are an inspiration to the Amazon. When we shape the land, when we tame its different plants and beasts, even when we redesign our own genetic profile, we apply the same principles that make your species excel in so many of nature’s most important disciplines.  Only with great reluctance the Kir’ko Terym agree to reach out in cooperation. Not for your sake or that of your experiments, human, but for the sake of the Psi-Fish, which sound like their fate could be oddly related to our own. They may need our shelter.This gives us a quest to achieve peace with psi-fish, something I was going to do anyways, so even though our relationship with humanity is undecided, we might as well get the free stuff. As I end turn, I apparently meet another faction, though I can’t see any of their units when I regain control.  Grzz kl’tk rsh’nrr! (You create a series of clicking sounds as a response. It is an old Kir’ko curse, but the sack-bleeder surely won’t understand its meaning...) I see that you are not willing to talk to us. I sincerely hope you will change your mind and come back to us, before there’s any more needless conflict. Unlike Unshackling, Domain of purification, the first psionic weapons tech, is a pretty nutty tech. This is mostly because of one questionably balanced mod, Mantra of Clarity. One of the unique features of the psionic tech line is that all mods, in addition to improving psionic weapons, also improve any psionic buffs, like the transcendant’s transfer pain, or the hidden’s entire smoke cloud. This mod adds 15% evasion to all these buffs, which brings the smoke cloud to a rather silly. In addition, it also adds a target painting effect to all attacks of the unit. Focus: flames is the obligatory damage type switching mod, which also provides a serious amount of thermal damage resistance. This can be very strong against factions dependent of thermal damage. Finally, cleansing pulse is a simple operation that clears all status effects from all friendly units in a small aoe, which can be a lifesaver if a key unit is stunned or mind controlled.  Heading south, we find our immediate objective, the forbidden archives, just on the other side of some mountains from yet another neutral vanguard settlement.  Fending off a pack of dangerous animals, our staring emergent both evolve into transcendant. This is probably the best result, as I am much more in need of healers than snipers. Once again, we meet a new faction without my catching where they first appeared.  Hox’Krit’Pat, Tik Ji”Glux. The Kir’ko Terym are dignified by your presences – your victories surrounding the liberation of our people are still echoing throughout the dreams of present Kir’ko generations. Yet it is Hatyl Ur’uk who drew us to Arcadia Caeleste. With his help we seek to find our lost home world, Xa’Kir’Ko. Xa’Kir’Ko? By Ro’Qwer’zs horn and tail! You are bold to take that path, Poz’Tk”Nor. But that foolish Khaz’Ak of a Dream Reader will be your disappointment. Hatly Ur’uk’s mind has withered. He preaches indifference and pacifism, when his voice should be the smiting park that ignites the sack-bleeders’ purgatory. How can you revile one so respected among our people? With his teachings Hatyl UrUk gave new purpose and direction to many Kir’ko.Hatyl Ur’Uk may have been great once, but his recent acts are an insult to our ancestors and their suffering. He is cuddling with the sack-bleeders, defiling the memory and dreams of all oppressed Kir’ko. I sense their agony channelled through you as well, Poz Tk’Nor. You share the instinctual knowledge that tells any true Kir’ko to be mindful of the sack-bleeders and strike them with ferocious determination whenever given the chance. Arcadia Caeleste is crawling with sack-bleeders. Unleash you inner hatred! Let them taste the fury of the swarm. Meeting Tik grants us an objective that I am not, at the moment going to even consider completing. At least for the moment.  I finally identify Tik’s territory, being just south of the forbidden archives.  We then pick up Vigorous Emergence, a branch technology that provides two useful strategic operations. Spawn Emergent, obviously, creates an emergent unit anywhere on the map. Berzerker pheromones is a more expensive strategic operation that heals a stack to full and gives it a large damage buff for a turn. It’s a bit expensive to get much value out of the healing, but the damage buff can be quite powerful if you have it at the right time.  This psi-fish ask us for energy, and in the interests of getting them onside we pay up. This isn’t too expensive anyways.  We also have our capitol large enough to hit the food threshold for a free Ravenous. Kuresh about faces to link up with the new monster. Heading across the seas to the southwest, we come across a plot important landmark.  Swarm Herald Poz Tk’Nor! We have found an ancient temple complex. The air around it seems to be humming with psionic energy, like a soothing presence calming our mind.That must be one of the mythical Celestian Archives! It is said that inside those archives the clear-minded can find any answers and knowledge he might desire. Yet only very few are allowed to enter these sanctuaries of wisdom, even within the Celestian order. Those whispers... should I date to follow their calling? The Harmony Beyond never betrays. Yet intruding into the archives would be no easy task – and a violent one. There would be no turning back. Much like the last quest with consequences in red text, we aren’t doing this now. We aren’t remotely in position for it anyways.  We also gain a quest from the psi-fish with some concerning implications, but in the name of peace, and pet eldritch horrors, we’re going to be focusing on it as soon as possible  What we are doing is finishing the simplest non-consequences quest we have on the books, and storming the forbidden archives. I probably should have taken that pulse defence turret out beforehand. Won’t be a problem though.  The archives are lightly defended, a small amount of kir’ko psynumbra troops.  Poz staggers the transcendent, leaving the enemy frenzied on the flank vulnerable to a counter charge.  Our frenzied, with their pain transferred, engage the enemy frenzied and slowly take them apart.  Then our own undamageable initiates charge into the main enemy force, while the ranged units clear up the enemy scouts. Everything dies well before the pulse turret can fire. This place is daunting and yet inspires me with awe, I can feel the wake of the Void tear at every inch of my body. The voices of the Harmony Beyond are no longer whispering but turned into a chorus, and its anthem proclaims dominion and power.  This spawns a shadow version of Poz’Tk’Nor that we now have to kill. I think that this is supposed to be a metaphorical fight, but mechanically there is an entirely normal stack of marauder units standing on the strategic map, that do real damage to units who are not Poz’Tk’Nor. So the metaphoricallness or lack thereof of this battle is a bit up to debate.  But before we handle our evil doppelganger, we get to loot the archives! This gives us some research and a friendly dark wizard who is willing to help us.  The various loot gives us enough research to complete the first psynumbra tech. This gives us a somewhat generic staggering damaging operation, and the Mark of the Dark Sun, a mod which gives a unit bonus damage every time it kills another unit. Like much of the psynumbra toolkit, battles really aren’t long enough for this to actually be very good, though it does have more than the normal damage boost for a starting mod, which makes it use able, if very boring.  Evil Poz has all of our skills and gear, but does not copy our army, which leaves him rather outmatched with a single unit of initiates and some echoes and whispers  We will be assisted in this purging by a fresh recruit from the Forbidden Archives. Being a filthy sack bleeder is a bit of a mark against him, but he’s also one of the most dangerous units in our army, so we’ll let that slide.  Malictors are the second psynumbra unit, those initiates who, with a mix of actual talent, backstabbing, and ability to remain somewhat functional after immersing your mind in despair, suffering and spite. They’re a fairly unique unit, held back by poor mobility and short range. The most unique feature is their primary attack, soul seeker, which bounces of the initial target to hit nearby enemies twice. This can get very nasty if you can apply some mods which add extra debuffs to it. The also have two range 5 full action debuffs- a mind control effect and a three turn stun+filled with despair effect, either of which will pretty much remove anything which fails the save from the battle-which one to use is mostly based around how likely you think it is that your malictor survives the next turn, as mind control ends if the malictor dies. Now, being a secret tech infantry unit, different races have different malictors. If we actually built a kir’ko malictor, it would have the dark locusts ability instead of the mind control, applying a damage over time effect to the target that would cause it to explode and inflict filled with despair to adjacent units on death. This is not, really, an upgrade in any shape or form, and I probably won’t be building any.   Regardless, Evil Poz’s lack of backup is pretty quickly overwhelmed, leaving him outnumbered and surrounded.  In the end, good Poz shoots his evil doppelganger in the back.  You are not like you seemed before, Poz Tk’nor. Many falter when facing their personal fears. You did not. Some of our brethren seek vengeance for the past, but you can still avoid that path. I never sought vengeance on Arcadia Caeleste. Our people need to prosper among their own, away from the humans and their greed. I am looking for our ancient home world Xa’Kir’Ko. The third dream of Kzara Tosh... I need to return to its starry sky.The constellations of Kzara Tosh are an enigma amost as old as our desire to return to Xa’Kir’Ko. Her dream must be strong in you, if you believe you can succeed where so many others have failed. It is a worthy goal. Still, you must first show the wisdom that is needed in someone who seeks to reunite our people. Many of our brethren are still filled with bitterness and hatred. They need to learn that humans come in just as many forms and shapes as we do – and that there are those among them also seeking to heal the scars of our troubled past.Talk to Nicole Crustus. She has been walking the Celestian path alongside me and will be your guide on your journey to forgiveness. Recite the Litany of the Thousand Stars, and she will know your intentions.Nicole Crustus... a human as my guide? Every Lyn’Gol inside me yells reluctance at this thought. Yet it is Hatyl Ur’ur’uk’s will, and I came here to follow his words, did I not? ...the Harmony Beyond stays silent... then it is settled. I will talk to the human.This plotline is a little strange. I think the implication is the most psynumbra practitioners fail to defeat their shadow, and then turn into insane balls of spite and despair. Since Poz wins, the voices have no hold on him anymore. Which, should probably be a harder fight, but this is an early quest in one of the first missions, so maybe not. From the overall perspective, the fact that the only way to get Hatyl to give you the time of day is to do exactly what he advised you not to do can be confusing to the player, even if it makes sense in context, as it depends on something the player cannot reasonably expect happen. Still, that moment when have as your only objectives to start committing atrocities or to delve more deeply into dark psionic lore, and are trying to figure out a way that this ends well, can be quite powerful. It often isn’t easy or obvious how to get yourself out of a bad headspace, or make positive change in the world.  Regardless of my thoughts on the plot... We now, officially, have a set of contradictory objectives. There are two ways this mission can play out, but rather than a binary dialog choice, we just choose which objectives we want to complete. [] Exterminate the Vanguard and take the Dreamer’s Archive by force. [] Make peace with the Celestians, and risk Tik’s wrath.
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Apr 19, 2020 17:03
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Make peace. Don't be the monsters they tried to make you into.
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Apr 19, 2020 17:33
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Peace. We made a campaign of bad decisions, now let's try to get some good ones in.
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Apr 19, 2020 17:38
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Peace is good. These poor bastards deserve better than a forever war with humanity and the goddamn Psynumbra.
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Apr 19, 2020 18:05
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Apr 19, 2020 18:16
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Peace. I think this will be the best for our bug friends to find their long lost home planet.
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Apr 19, 2020 18:21
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Peace
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Apr 19, 2020 18:37
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Peace, let´s show that we are better than our enslavers.
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Apr 19, 2020 21:28
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Yeah, let's do the peace thing. Be good buggos.
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Apr 19, 2020 21:46
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Kill the sack bleeders.
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Apr 20, 2020 11:20
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Peace with these particular sack bleeders and end the cycle of abuse here. There'll be plenty enough opportunity to put the hurt on people who actually deserve it.
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Apr 20, 2020 11:57
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Peace! The homicidal bug swarm thing never ends well, for anybody. Let's go for something different.
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Apr 20, 2020 17:58
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 Welcome back. After claiming the forbidden archives, Poz is looping back to secure the territory between the archives and our existing territory, while the fairly significant militia that appeared from.. somewhere, keep some marauding pirates away from our archives. We also finish of the production quest for the psi fish, getting us to a state of peace and advancing their questline.   A soft presence... yellow vibrations... Poz Tk’nor, what brings you closer.We seek more knowledge. Your connection with the Void, your biology... there are so many questions! How does you offspring look like? Do you nurture it to grow and prosper?K’Chru... always hungry. Looking to feed. Take them with you. Come back... if more are needed. Always in search. You help us more..This gives us a new quest, related to the psi-fish gimmick. Like the emergent, most psi-fish units can evolve into bigger psi-fish when they reach the final rank of veterancy. Our objective is to promote one psi-fish. This shouldn’t be difficult, as long as we have a couple psi-fish in our primary armies, and get into a bunch of fights.  Meanwhile, Kurresh has taken a task force to the northwest, to clear the paragon forces occupying the cosmite nodes out of the cosmic ruins, which we have just annexed, and to provide some meals for our new ravenous.  This surprisingly elegant hybrid of an insect and a dragon is a pretty classic melee monster, with two flavours of painful melee attack, more health and armour than any other t3 unit before swarm shield even triggers, and absolutely no way to deal with flying units or enemies behind impassible walls, at least stock.  It’s signature ability is Devour, a more painful single action melee attack that can only be used on light biological or cyborg units, with very high chance to instantly kill the target, and give the ravenous a bit of healing. This is, obviously, a great move to open a fight with, hopefully knocking out a target instantly and healing up the damage you took on the way in.  Now, the main trick is that, after successfully devouring a unit, the ravenous can spawn larvae-creating a unit of emergent s that can immediately take an action. This unit will stick around after the battle, and if a ravenous or two are allowed to rampage around throughout an uncleared part of the map, and said emergents can evolve, they can provide a fairly significant amount of free troops. Now, obviously this mission is going to give a fairly rosy view of the ravenous, because we pick up this one dozens of turns earlier than you’d be able to get one in a normal game, and there are many more easy fights against neutral enemies to feed to it. In a normal game, you really need to rush research these to get much value out of the unit spawning, but with the right mods it can be a perfectly viable combat unit with the emergents as an occasional bonus.  Our assault on the paragon give us some token rewards.  Our next priority is to open negotiations with the southern vanguard settlement. We are allowed to annex one of these before we are considered to be going down the violent path, and I’m going to be taking advantage of this loophole. We’re annexing this one, because its right next to the forbidden archives, and I really want a colony capable of exploiting it for the sweet research benefits.  In preparation for the annexation, Poz is storming this celestian shrine just outside of the archives. The secrets within include an incredible amount of research, completing the research quest and a new tech.  An easy thing to say when it was your kind who chose who was to stand in the light – and who needed to serve in the shadows. Why are the Kir’ko the ones that should show their good faith when the dreams of our ancestors keep reminding us of humanity’s cruelty and greed?I do not defend the atrocities we humans committed against your race. But will you not agree that their suffering would receive some comfort if they saw us learn from the past’s mistakes? In the end, it is not me who you will need to convince with your actions, Poz, Tk’Nor. It is yourself.You foolish Khaz’Ak! Is that where you lead your swarm, Poz Tk’Nor? Just like the sack-bleeders they now all have to burn in the flames of my fury. Your treachery will be remembered in the dreams of many future hatches, when your ashes have long been scattered on Arcadia Caeleste’s charred remains. Tik immediately declares war on us, though she doesn’t have a plot grudge and her defeat is not an objective, so it’s theoretically possible to get her to back down from this. At the very least, she doesn’t seem interested in attacking us off the bat. But, if she is planning on burning the planet, we should probably not take our chances.  If there is a tech that the Kir’ko should be rushing towards as soon as possible, it’s this one. Regenerative carapace gives the target unit regeneration. Kir’ko have problems with their melee units getting shot up. Regeneration is amazing. Put this mod on everything that you can afford it on.  Just in case Tik does decide to get aggressive, we burn our reserves of influence to buy two more psi-fish units  We receive the first psynumbra doctrine tech, neither of which is particularly notable. Initiation rites adds an additional level of veterancy to all produced psynumbra units, which would be a lot better if the starting psynumbra mod and/or initiates were actually good, and turns them into an echo of despair when they die, but losing units is bad. As it is, this is questionable pick early game, but isn't the worst once you can build malictors. There are probably better options Sadistic Indoctrination grants all units the sadism ability, increasing their damage against low morale units. Now, it isn’t hard as psynumbra to passively stack enough morale debuffs to put an average army into terrible morale, but it does take a bit of effort. My real complaint is that widespread morale immunity, or simply very high morale, is a fairly easy thing for a variety of factions to do, which can shut this down if your opponent is paying attention.  What we really wanted that tech for was the doctrine slot, which lets us implement this hilarious doctrine. All of the secret tech themed landmarks grant factions of the matching secret tech a fairly hilarious doctrine that supercharges their secret tech in one way or another. In this case, a massive cut to unit energy costs and research costs. Meanwhile, a nest of wildlife that was too dominated by flying units for our starting armies to clear is getting a visit from our new psi-fish army.  The chrysalis is the first form of the psi-fish available, with a fairly painful but range 5 repeating psionic blast and an equally short ranged full action aoe. Psi-fish being strange extra-dimensional monsters have a the ethereal tag, which provides variety of across the board rules. Most noticeably, they all have a fairly large amount of resistance to kinetic, biochemical and arc damage and immunity to all status effects associated with those elements. However, due to reasons of balance, most psi-fish a quite fragile if they can’t take advantage of these resistances. They also have the ability to walk through obstacles in tactical combat, which most floating units cannot do. The flip side to this is that it can be very hard to find mods which are compatible with the fish. They are not biological, cyborgs, or mechanical, are also not infantry or animals, and don’t even have land movement, which locks out further mods. This leaves you with psionic damage mods, if you have them, global mods, or light unit mods, as well as their own mods.  The primary problem with the Chrysalis, is that the spawn is available for purchase at the same time for only a slight premium, and is better in pretty much every way. More damage, more health, more evasion, and best of all more speed, which compensates for the short range on the mind blast attack. They do lose the AOE attack in favour of fascinating bond, a range seven full action debuff which prevents the target from taking actions for two turns, though the debuff is interrupted if the spawn is killed or staggered. Spawns are one of the main reasons the psi-fish are such a good faction. They do sterling work clearing neutral sites, where you usually have a numerical advantage, and are incredibly fast on the strategic map. More spawn are rarely a bad thing. As an example, the spawn can fascinate the two larger flying dinosaurs prior to to them diving down on us.  This lets us clean up the smaller enemies unmolested. Interestingly, the AI will often retreat units which cannnot take actions, which forces them to waste a turn getting back into range, which makes the fascinating bond better than it seems, at least against the AI.  Next turn, out of the goodness of her heart, Nicole Crustus offers a formal non-aggression pact, as well as some energy reparations.  With not much else to do, we’re going to rattle the paragon’s cage. All minor faction dwellings set up lightly guarded forward bases in adjacent sectors, and taking them offers some loot, and drives up your kill-count.  All of these outposts come with a twist, depending on the minor faction. The paragon one starts with three warden heavy turrets set up. These hit very hard if you let them get a shot off, but are fairly fragile and miss around half their turns due to the debuff “time ravaged” that they start with.  We acquired our first wild animal from clearing that nest. Like many neutral units, the wild swift beak is pretty simple. It’s fast, it hits hard in melee, nothing really else. The most noticeable thing is it’s fluff text, which references these things living on Terra-3, which could, possibly, maybe, be a reference to the actual planet earth, and tie planetfall to the real world. Again, maybe.  While the vastly outnumbered paragon troops never had much of a chance, but standing around next to an easily hittable walker for a Malictor to bounce shots off of didn’t help.  Taking the outpost gives us resources, and killing ten units gives us some favour with the psi fish.  Now, originally I had planned to trying to take the governor’s palace up in the northeast, but it looks like it’s a bit too well defended for what I have available.  So instead Kurush will quickly loot this here war memorial and then link up with Poz.  Now, while this monument is defended by paragon units, they aren’t considered part of the paragon faction, and won’t count towards faction war rewards. What the do provide is an excuse to talk about some more imperial vehicles.  Now, this would be the point I say that this unit is a standard tank, but tanks in planetfall are a fairly varied and inconsistent bunch. This unit has a decently powerful single action AOE on cooldown, and an ok repeating gun, which makes it a bland t3. Oddly, the pilot able version of this unit is considered a t4 loot drop, despite being worse than most any researchable t3 vehicle option. The fluff is a bit more interesting, as it implies the paragon’s technology cult was actual present in one form or anther prior to the fall of the union, which could explain how they reached their current state in such a relatively short timeframe.  The imperial walker is a generic artillery unit-weak repeating gun, full action giant missile. This is a slightly counter -intuitive but consistent rule in planetfall -all the big mechs with missile pods are artillery style units.  However, the vaunted imperial armour is noticeably vulnerable to begin ripped apart by an angry ravenous. and a combination of concentrated fire and angry frenzied bring down the walker. While it doesn’t feel like much has been accomplished, I’m going to be ending this update here, with a vote that may or may not be feasible to implement. [] Defeat Tik [] Attempt to make peace with Tik, and at least leave her alive.
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Apr 27, 2020 23:16
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Defeat Tik
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Apr 28, 2020 02:09
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Is it possible to Vassalise Tik? That leaves her alive and not going to set the world on fire.
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Apr 28, 2020 02:18
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Consume the weak, as is our way
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Apr 28, 2020 02:29
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Attempting to destroy the world out of spite and revenge is pretty bad in most cases, even if you can gently caress off to another one. Render her incapable of pursuing her ambitions.
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Apr 28, 2020 02:48
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Anticheese posted:Is it possible to Vassalise Tik? That leaves her alive and not going to set the world on fire.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:39
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Welcome back to Arcadia Caeleste. The first thing we pick up is Accursed gifts, providing us with two pretty questionable tactical operations and a very good mod. Consuming Gaze is the primary reason to head to this tech. This grants any infantry unit an auto-hitting psionic attack that heals said unit for 20hp, with a chance to inflict broken mind. Unlike the terrible initiate life drain, this can’t fail, which makes it actually a reliable source of healing, and access to auto hitting damage at range is very rare, and can be very useful in a large range of situations. Being locked to infantry is a bit of a shame, as high tier infantry pretty rare, but it does a good job of keeping early units relevant into the later game. The tactical operations are interesting, but suffer from being fairly expensive single target buffs, which by nature are not an appealing use of energy. Dark Icon makes all enemy units near the target lose accuracy and take more damage, while Gift of Oblivion makes all attacks gain +25% damage and life drain for non-mindless targets. Generally though, these aren’t as immediately useful as emergency damage sources or debuffs, to neutralize a threat, or buffs or debuffs affecting multiple targets, to swing a key engagement  I also plop down a new colony in the uplands.  Next turn we pick up a the tech to actually make Engulfers, which references one of the other holy grails of the post-collapse Kir’ko-the myth that one of ancient hive queens survived the conquest of the Kir’ko and is out there, somewhere.  Poz is mostly killing time beating up neutral stacks, and trying to funnel experience to the psi-fish in his army. Because this map is fairly easy, and we’re lacking many opponents, it can be surprisingly hard to evolve one to progress the questline.  Kurresh is still fighting fires near our capitol, beating up some marauders and handling quests from our friendly tentacle monsters.  While we’re doing this, we are slowly moving towards an alliance with Nicole.  Eventually Tik decides to stir from her territory, and I start consolidating my forces  However we are at war with more than just Tik. The paragon start sending forces into our newly expanded territory, and I’m forced to send some forces away from Tik to keep a lid on them.  The first stack goes down easily, but we get a warning that another paragon army is coming.  Because we have a happy vanguard settlement, we have a vanguard hero willing to join our cause, who I accept the services of.  By the time my troops are in position to push through the volcanic wast between my territory and Tik’s her forces have left the area. It looks like a quick shot to her capitol.  Just to be sure, it’s time to get the good stuff from the forbidden archives. Symbol of obliteration is the penultimate Psynumbra mod tech, and it is very worth beelining too, at least as the Kir’ko. The thing we’re looking for is the forbidden mantra, a mod for any unit with psionic attacks which gives them a chance to disable all attacks on the targets, and granting all buffs a large morale bonus and psionic resistance. Also useful is the pain mirror mod, which responds to any damage from enemies within four hexes with a bit of psionic damage and a chance for a morale hit. Good for units that are going to in the thick of things, but not outstanding. We don’t have the operation points to fire off the Aria of Emptiness, but it is quite powerful, attempting to apply the same catatonic status effect to every enemy on the battlefield.  As our forces move in, we find where some of those troops we saw earlier are. Unfortunately, they simultaneously going to beat us to the city, and contain Tik herself. This could derail our plans.  While our primary armies are watching helplessly as Tik reinforces her capitol, the back line crew have their own problems, attempting to head off a marauding stack of cyborgs.  I immediately make a huge mistake, and get our new hero Lisa stunned by a retaliation on the paragon melee troops. This leaves me down a unit in a fairly close battles.  While the paragon troops advance, we take advantage of the new mods to squeeze a bit more punch of out our lightly armed and slightly out of position healers, getting some early kills.  This isn’t enough to save one of our beautiful psi-fish from the fury of the enemy, but it is enough to fend off these attackers.  We pick up some research notes while we’re at it, granting us a new tech.  I quickly pick up a dead end tech Whispers and Visions. The whispers half lets you summon an invisible scout unit called a whisper of discord, and the visions half as another mediocre army nuke that does some damage to a stack and might apply a morale penalty.  So, the vote in the thread was somewhat ambiguous between defeating Tik and trying to vassalize Tik. This is a slightly rare mechanic where a sufficiently weak faction can somewhat surrender to another player, losing their autonomy, becoming a permanent ally of the overlord, and being forced to win or lose with them. I will be at least making an attempt to vassalize Tik, but getting the AI in a state where it is willing to accept this is really annoying. The problem with doing this is the small matter of sufficiently beating up the AI. Just standing outside her capitol with an army she cannot expect to defeat isn’t enough to scare Tik into accepting vassalization. The question is, what else can we do to scare her? With a small map and a fairly low AI setting, there’s a good chance that the majority of Tik’s army is currently sitting on her capitol. I can’t beat up a bit of it without taking all of it.  So, instead of winning outright, I head east, sacking the outlying districts and spot a second city, which we can take to put on a little more pressure.  The second city is lightly guarded and falls easily. However, Tik is still not willing to throw in the towel. After all, she still has most of her army, even if she can't beat the one running around in her sectors.  We make more progress on the diplomatic front with Nicole.  So, let us apply some heavier pressure to these negotiations.  Tik’s forces end up concentrated on the right flank, leaving Poz in the thick of the fighting. Or he would be if he didn’t stun or disable half two thirds of the troops gunning for him.  On the much less well defended left flank, Kurrash is pulling the same trick. Really, shotguns and shrouded step are just too good a combination of Kir’ko heroes to not use.  By the next turn, everything is covered in fire, acid fog and electrified mist. Nothing dies, but much of our troops are now debuffed or wasting turns getting out of the hazards. We soldier on, and take out some of the enemy air units while we do so.  One of the problems that could be very bad, is that Tik has been throwing the hazmat protection mod on most of his forces, so the engulfer is mostly bouncing off biochemical resistance, despite a pile of good targets. Most of our troops are psionic though, so this isn’t a complete disaster.  But, for all the tricks and defences, Tik is outmatched. Our melee forces are taking the left flank, and the pile of stuns are leaving the right flank unable to really fight back. Though it does give us a chance to talk about a unit we probably should have mentioned earlier.  Unleashed are the obligatory flying scout unit for the Kir'ko. They're cheap, and they fly, and I'd really be happy with just that. But there is some more potential here. Despite being officially a scout, these can be a competitive alternative to frenzied. They can easily fight flying units and stagger-resistance melee units, two of the kinds of units frenzied are terrified of, and only lose a bit of damage. Staying alive when being shot at is more of a problem though. Unleashed have less health, can’t take cover, and can’t hide in the smoke clouds of frenzied. But if you can get a stack of these and transcendents, you’ll be able to cover much more ground than a normal, footslogging army that has to deal with terrain. Of course, you start with an army of frenzied, and only two unleashed, who will be busy with normal scouting tasks. Getting this hypothetical flying army out in a reasonable time frame will probably take some practice.  In the end, Tik falls to a point blank discharge of screech.  Now, in a perfect world, having beaten Tik down to a single military unit, she would finally accept vassalage. But because I shot her in the face with screech, she can’t do any negotiations right now. After several attempts to get Tik to bend the knee, and with this update already being later than I’d like, I’m going to throw in the towel, and just finish her off. The PyreX flames are protecting me, and with fire I shall rocket back to the stars! My campaign against the sack-bleeders isn’t over yet, Swarm Herald Poz Tk’Nor. We will meet again some day.Besides, that’s probably better for the overall continuity.  The last thing on the to do list is to finally get a psi-fish evolved. These pirates will do nicely. Curious. The Psi-Fish go through various evolutionary stages, similar to how we go through our larval phase after we hatch. Only, for the Psi-Fish, the journey doesn’t end there.All matured... sated for now. Connected with you... stay with you. Stray not. To learn more we need to compile our observations. Then we can decide what to share with the humans and what to keep to ourselves. This gives an easy research quest, that is more significant than it appears. If we complete this quest and provide the research to the humans, they will hand over some of their advanced technology, and in the next mission Poz will be using that as his secret technology instead of psynumbra powers. While I have a strong bias towards switching whenever possible, it is a fair subject for a vote. [] Keep to Psynumbra [] Switch secret techs.
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May 6, 2020 03:31
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I say switch techs. We've seen the Psynumbra tech, and honestly it seems a little too creepy/gothy to me. Too much "Darkness and suffering, fill my soul! Join me in the madness!!" That stuff never ends well.
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May 6, 2020 06:19
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Switch. Switching from suffering magic to alien brain eater magic is questionably wise, but it's interesting.
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May 6, 2020 06:46
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Switch Tech
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May 6, 2020 10:45
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Switch. We're done with the dark side!
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May 6, 2020 13:01
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Switch. I'd love to see more secret techs. Are any of the secret techs race-incompatible, say, are there any races that can't have Psynumbra as theirs? Or are they all interchangeable?
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May 6, 2020 16:54
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Ay race can use any secret tech. Not all combinations are the best idea from a purely competitive perspective, but there are no restrictions on your choices.
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May 6, 2020 17:45
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You have successfully made first contact with the Psi-Fish? And you even observed their offspring growing up? Excellent! Apparently the Psi-Fish sustain themselves by drawing energy from the void and by feeding on the minds of other living beings – fascinating! Well, maybe also disturbing.But this is the level of scariness that you have to expect from a Void creature. Yes, the Psi-Fish originate from the Void! My theory is that they were driven out of their natural habitat when the Cataclysm occurred. Since then they have been stranded in this reality, which must be a scary to them as the void to us, and yet they managed to survive. A human sharing technology? Is this some trick or scheme? I do not know, but for once my curiosity is stronger than my mistrust. The Psi-Fish carry a strange sense of familiarity with them that urges me to delve deeper, even if it means straying off the natural path. The Kir’ko Aterym accept your offer.  However, because there is a pretty significant chance we never are in a position again to explore the deeper secrets of being a nihilistic death cultist, I’m going to be pickup up a couple of the later techs from the psynumbra tree Vile Manipulation is the second psynumbra doctrine tech, with one decent combat buff, and a mediocre defence buff. The good one is Torture regimes, which through the power of the dark side makes all our units tougher and do 20% more psionic damage. This can really take a psi damage heavy strategy to the next level, and is probably worth planning around if you are Psynumbra. The other one, Sinister chants, makes your territory so spooky that any enemy units within it get a penalty to morale and psionic resistance. Now, this may be my pathological aversion to spending a cent on static defences talking, but it really isn’t worth investing energy and a doctrine slot in.  You have shown great wisdom today, my friend. Letting go of anger and hatred requires a lot of trust. And trust is as fragile and in need of care as a hatching larva in a rough winter night. Come to the celestian archives. It is time to revisit the third dream of Kzara Tosh.Finally allying with Nicole Crustus gives us the final quest: Get any unit to the Dreamer's Archives landmark. Which, we’ll get to, after a quick meander through the psynumbra tech tree and anything that looks like it could have some decent loot.  Ruthless dedication is the final mod tech for the psynumbra, but I’d have a hard time recommending anyone pick it up in serious context. The primary draw is the Avatar of the Abyss mod, which will grant any infantry unit psionic resistance and the ability to inflict panic with all of it’s attacks. Now, for the best infantry unit that’s reasonably available, malictors, you already have the forbidden mantra, a mod which does a fairly similar thing, even if panic is better than just a disable, so is this really important? They do stack, which could be interesting, but you’re probably better off improving their stagger resistance or mobility. Outside of the secret tech, there are more impressive psionic units to put the forbidden mantra on than there are infantry to put Avatar of the Abyss on. If you have a large amount of low level infantry that you’d like to supercharge, it could be useful. As for the operation, well, it’s the kind of operation that we really need to arrange a demonstration for.  To do so, we’ll need to upgrade our operational effectiveness so we can actually use the operation.  Then we’re going to take some nearby units to finally attack the governor’s palace we’ve been eyeing this whole game.  Sacrifice to the abyss permanently kills one of your own units, and turns what remains into a giant despair monster. Now, practically it’s better to find something a little more expendable to sacrifice, like a combat summon or a mind controlled enemy unit, but in a pinch something that isn’t much use anymore can do.  This is one of two ways to acquire a herald of oblivion. You can get a permanent version from the units branch, but the temporary version lets me chat about it without killing a dozen turns going up a whole nother tech branch. Interestingly, the summon keeps any compatible mods and status effects from the source unit. But it also keeps the health, which is a serious issue for making the operation practical. Your giant monster will show up with half or less of it’s health if you use something expendable. Though it’s probably better to do a proper summoning, the herald is a pretty decent unit. It’s primary attack is a psionic melee attack, which ignores armour and shields, and comes with a life drain effect on any non-mindless unit. To get into melee it has the ability to teleport seven spaces and hit everything adjacent with it’s standard attack. However, it’s ghostly claws will not stagger heavy units and it is reliant on shields for defence. Do not try to get into slugging matches with other heavy melee units. If you don’t want to throw your expensive shadow monster into melee, it has two support abilities-an AOE panic effect in Glimpse of the Abyss, and a map wide morale buff from Oblivion’s Refrain. That kind of ability is a common way to discourage spamming T4 units-every Herald after the first might as well be down an ability. Because of these anti stacking measures, having the option of a more varied t4 lineup is an advantage of the psynumbra tech on super-large maps. Access to two researchable t4’s, plus whatever you can convince the NPC’s to part with, will improve your super-late stacks noticeably.  Clearing the palace doesn’t give me the t4 gun I was hoping for, but I’ll take a single action mind control as a secondary weapon. After that diversion, and some other unsuccessful hunts for loot that don’t pay off, it’s finally time to wrap this up.  It is beautiful, isn’t it? I too can feel its presence calling to me through your mind. Now look up to the sky and tell me what you see.Darkness... and light! A glistening swirl of stars, right before my eyes, but impossible to touch. They seem bright and clear, yet whenever I fix my vision on one of them it eludes my sight.Then take a step back. Relax every compound of your eyes. Instead of searching a single star, look at the constellations, and instead of looking directly at the sky, seek its reflection within the silent waters. Become one with the echo of Kzara Tosh. Embrace her dream, and her truth will reveal itself.Yes... I can see it now! The mists of my mind are clearing up, the stars and its constellations slowly taking shape. Xa’Kir’Ko – how much I’ve longed to see your gentle face. Soon your offspring will return.Thus concludes the fist mission with the Kir’ko. I have to say I’m quite fond of it. It does a good job of introducing the Kir’ko, their history, current political issues, without feeling overly alienating or cheezy. Possibly could do with fewer piles of consonants and apostrophes pretending to be words. The game play is pretty easy but at least gives you plenty of options for how you want to play.  This return will mark the beginning of anew era for the Kir’ko. As we reunite and reclaim our heritage, we cast off the last shackles from the Zok’Shiar and take the fate of our race into our own claws. In ancient times, the Kir’ko swarm channeled it’s thoughts through the Ez’Qi’Yu, the Queen of Queens. There are rumours of another Swarm Herald trying to bring back the Queen – and our lost Hive along with her. Switching away from Psynumbra has lead to Poz ditching the edgy purple colour scheme for a happier teal scheme. While this is something I approve of symbolically, I have to admit that the purple goes with the general Kir’ko aesthetic better. Our ancient home world... it is unreal to finally be here. To taste the dulcet air and hear her humming melody. No dream experience could be as rousing as the fervor evoked by this moment! What answers will we find on Xa’Kir’ko? There is so much we do not know about our past. Ok, those teal borders a bit more eye searing than I expected. This map actually uses a unique ocean tileset which paints the seas pink, and is used nowhere else in the game. Nothing gamechangeing, but make the map stand out a bit more.  Our only objective right now is to talk to the three independent kir’ko settlements that are nearby. This will probably take a few turns, because scouts exist. A quick hop across the bay and we’ve met our first settlement.  Sharing the coordinates of Xa’Kir’Ko with my fellow Kir’ko was my pleasure. Tell me, have you heard any word of another Swarm Herald trying to revive the Queen of Queens? Oh Poz Tk’nor, the Kir’ko Xad’Ma do not concern themselves with that matter. We have learned that, even as individuals, we are relying just as much on our swarm mates as the Kir’ko of old. Why should we give in to the instinctual desire of the Hive Mind, when we are doing rather well without it?It is true, there are just as many of our brethren still yearning for the lost connection as there are Kir’ko seeking to shape their own fate as individuals. The Kir’ko Terym thank you and your colony for your thoughts.Heading south, let’s talk to the next settlement. Hox’Krit’Pat, brother! Why do I see so many troubled faces? Is it not a moment of unclouded elation to be back of Xa’Kir’Ko? Grzz Kl’tk rsh’nrr! Death to the syndicate slavers that dare to defile our home planet! Give us their location. They shall regret the day they set foot on the land of our ancestors.This hands us a sidequest to sack or occupy the capital of the syndicate. This will hand us two t3 units if we succeed in it though, which makes it a high priority.  While the scouts are running around meeting people, our starting troops clear the northwest sector, and annex it.  Though a pair of kitted out heroes can basically solo anything that’s being thrown around by the basic site guards, we also have the help of two fancy new voidtech unit. Wait, that's not right...  Voidtech is, in short, using science instead of psionics to explore and utilize the powers of the extradimensional void. The primary result of such is the ability to bend the laws of time and space into knots for fun, profit, and tactical advantage. In the case of the echo walker, voidtech, through quantum entangling time shenanigans, allows our squad of dudes to create an exact copy of themselves a few hexes away that will last for two turns. However, due to the aforementioned quantum shenanigans, if the original unit dies while the copy is still on the map, the copy will stop being a copy and turn into a real unit. Actually taking advantage of this is tricky, because the copy only has a two turn lifespan and a four turn cooldown, plus will often be more exposed than the original. But, anything shot at the copy doesn’t have to be healed off, so it's a win-win. The Kir’ko versions of these units do pick up frenzy and swarm shield for free, which improves their quality nicely, but leaves them working basically the same. Of course, the Kir’ko also aren’t very interested in more melee units from their secret tech, and Echo Walkers aren't really a draw. This smell... the sweet, verdant odor – I recognize it from the fifth dream of Kzara Tosh. The ones that were once lost are returning. Greetings, Kir’ko. You are different from when we sensed you last.You remember our ancestors? What can you tell us of Xa’Kir’Ko? What were we like before the invasion of the Star Union So it is true that our two species were once living together in harmony. The allure of the Nectar is still present in the dreams of each Kir’ko.Queen and Mother Node, Kir’Ko and Growth; we all prospered together. Collect our Nectar, Symbiont. Spread our pollen. Relive what once was and you will find the answers you seek.And thus we meet the final minor faction, at least in the base game. The growth are, as you might have noticed, sentient plantlife. This gives them a rather unique perspective on the world. Their plot quest is to funnel a bunch of production into gathering nectar, and they may give us information about the history of the kir’ko  They also have another quest for us. I’m fairly certain this is a huge misunderstand that could be cleared up if the growth were willing to listen carefully.  But, that’s not really an option in the scope of the game, the cult of vegetarianism is pretty close by and I could use the loot. Especially the influence.  Said influence can be used to bring one of the neutral settlements around to our way of thinking. Since By’Dax’yl here is without a leader at the moment, we’ll start with them. Then a scout heads to the last neutral settlement.  What news? So far, we only found distant rumours, but nothing of credibility. It is true! The hatch sister of the cocoon guardian of the Kir’ko Nei’Lim’s third brood mothers; swarm gorger twice removed heard it from her Pa’Tchorr; the queen will be made alive, here on Xa’Kir’Ko, by another Swarm Herald who followed your call.I see... and how exactly does that Swarm Herald want to bring her back?How would I know? I am no Transcendent or Dream Reader... but isn’t it exhilarating? I can already hear the gentle voice of the Ez’Qi’Yu reach out to me in my mind. The chaos brought to the swarm by the Zok’Shiar will soon return to order in her motherly embrace....Not terribly helpful. But now that the quest is complete...  Hou’Keir’Pat, Cekto Xa’To! I remember the Kir’ko Noz’Rix from the second dream of Lit Bik – it is a colony with a strong JixZok. Is it true what he rumours say, and you are indeed trying to revive the Ez’Qi’Yu? Thank you, Swarm Herald Cekto Xa’To, for allowing me to join the telepathic connection. My name is Zarai Loreg, and I am here as an envoy of Empress Carminia, to make amends to your people for their troubled past. We wish to restore what was broken, and have offered Cekto Xa’To our help in recreating the Kir’Ko Queen of Queens. With Zarai’s expertise and access to old Terratech data, we can retrieve the correct genome and bring the Ez’Qi’Yu back. Once brought to life, our Queen will renew the Hive mind that once united all Kir’ko!Are you really going through with this? What about the Kir’ko who do not wish for the Hive Mind and have grown used to their individuality and freedom? I believe you all know the drill by now. [] Revive the Queen, and bind the Kir’ko once again. [] Oppose, in the name of free will.
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May 12, 2020 02:08
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Well, obviously, keep mainlining the free will.
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May 12, 2020 03:29
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