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Belated Merry Christmas, thread. Today. we're giving the gift of assimilation You do not need to shed any tears. The Assembly existence is nothing to be afraid of. Your knowledge of Dr. Montinga and her operations will be valuable additions to our strategic database. In return, we will help you overcome all those human flaws and misconceptions that are still holding you back This type of initial reaction is not uncommon during the transition phase of nay first generation Assembly. But in time you will realize that the benefits of this new existence clearly outweigh the grief caused by some minor cosmetic inconveniences. Anna Smithson is a very solid hero, regardless of whether she is assimilated or not. She starts with a T3 stun shotgun, and has pre-picked skitter and improved weapon damage for her starting abilities, both of which are quite good with a shotgun. Her unique abilities are the best two of the amazon biomancer abilities, Mend and Scan:Catalogue.  Ellen herself is paradoxically our weakest hero, because as a commander she doesn’t have any unique abilities. She’s running a basic arc gun, which looks sweet but kind of generic. Because of this, she’s just picking up generic support skills at the moment, like infantry commander.  Next up, our scouts run into some Autonom. Having an NPC faction around that we aren’t obligated to murder is a good thing.  I have heard of Chax Uz’Kol, Eva Montinga’s bodyguard. There is no information available concerning his motives, however it is reasonable to assume his allegiance is founded on some promise involving the Alpha Strain and the restoration of Qoppa-2 morphologic guise – the Kir’ko Queen of Queens. Dealing with Chax Uz’Kol will be complicated since the Kir’ko physiogonomy continues to prove resistant to our usual reassembly methods. Therefore adjusting our strategy should be considered.Before Eva initiated the Xenoplague project, she was one of the lead scientists at Terratech. Given Terratech’s role in the creation and distribution of the Kir’ko we should find some evidence in her facilities that will make Chax Us’Kol reevaluate their cooperation. By using our Synthesis technology, we can remotely access Eva Montinga’s Xenolabs and search her data banks from a distance. A good way to put our experimental infiltration daemon to practice. Meeting Chax gives us what should be a pretty long research quest, but this wont actually take that long. With the power of battlefield autopsies, it’ll get done in a couple turns instead of eleven. Also, there’s five research pickups in this one sector here. Two of them give us this event, which makes the autonom our friends by the end of the run, and let’s us purchase a small detachment of friendly killer robots to supplement the mishmash of assembly troops we’re picking up from quests. These series of easy fights does give us a chance to show off the unit we got last update, the reverse engineer.  It’s heal, Reassemble, is slightly held back by only working at melee range, but does have slightly more healing than your normal heal. Oh, and it can bring dead units back to life.  The Reverse engineer is the actual assembly healer, which you will unfortunately need to research before you can make. The primary reason for this is that these are noticeably more combat capable then your average support unit. The arc blaster is about the same effectiveness as a scavenger’s shotgun, and the sawblade actually does more damage then the claw swipe, though there’s no life drain. It’s also fairly tough for a healer. The real reason this is a decent combat unit, is that they have summons.  Constructs are a melee suicide unit, armed with their surprisingly dangerous claws and the ability to explode in the enemies face. In practice, exploding is probably the wrong option unless it’s the only way to kill a dangerous enemy unit. Otherwise, keeping the expendable cyberzombies alive to absorb bullets and stagger people with opportunity attacks is a better option. Anyway, after grabbing all these pickups, we manage to both hack Eva’s databases and scavenged enough research ships to bring our search for the Atriah to the next stage.  Still, not all of the acquired information is useless. The laboratory logs revealed the name of the scientist executing the memory sweep. It is an individual called Erich Wolf, and according to the personnel files, he is performing field tests infecting growth specimens with the Alpha Strain here on Gardip XX. Once captured, we will extract the required information from him.We dismantled several vessels, but have not found any sigh of the Atriah. Our searching method is clearly flawed. We require more information if we want to avoid having to extend this blind chase across the entire planet. What we do have knowledge of is that the Atriah was scheduled to travel to Hangar YA8-4 for deconstruction. Looking at the old airport logs should provide us with the necessary indications to make our search more efficient.The next step is to send a unit the exact spaceport my units have been scavenging in the general vicinity of. That will take zero effort.  Another broken down Inspector. Sometimes I think we should abolish the series...The data does look corrupted though. There must have been a serious malfunction in the bi-supplementary matrix to fragment them this badly. Still, it is nothing a well-executed recovery algorithm won’t be able to fix.This hands us another serious research quest, this time as an economy research, to finish balancing out the excessive supply of research pickups on this map. This won’t take very long either.  Anyway, next turn, we pick up the actual tech for reverse engineers. As previously noted, these things are good.  We also pick up our first arc damage tech, electron impact, though this doesn’t actually have any arc damage exclusive mods. The one thing we are picking up is Arc Retaliation Defence, an incredibly annoying mod which will do damage and attempt to stun nay unit that attacks the bearer within a few hexes. This isn’t as good as it sounds, the stun does not carry over to the next turn, it just stops a unit from completing a repeating attack or following up free action attacks.  Attempting to deal with an annoying pirate nest runs into some problems when it spits out an attacking stack right before I get to it. This is probably a bad idea, but I don’t want to wait a turn to deal with this-my troops have places to be.  This also lets us take a look at some racial hacker varieties we probably wouldn’t see normally. Vanguard hackers trade scrambling virus for a much more plausible scrambler grenade, and also gain an additional buff to use. Meanwhile, Dvar Hackers have borrowed some riot shields from the trencher corps, gaining extra armour from the front. You may notice that we have a new unit hanging around.  This particular cyborg abomination is the lightning rider. It’s one of the less useful filers, as it’s attack is shorter ranged than normal and it’s secondary attack is a bit situational, but it does have a useful self buff. The arc charge ability will give +50% increased damage and an additional level of stagger to the rider for one turn. This generally makes your turn two attack pretty devastating. The secondary attack for lighting riders is the arc strike. This hits everything, friend or foe, in a two hex radius for decent damage and a level of stagger. Because this hits friendlies, it’s hard to justify massed lightning riders, as you’ll either be wasting your arc strikes on suboptimal groups or frying each other.  Because the AI isn’t capable of booking it with their entire second stack, or retreating the front stack, things go pretty well, and my melee units are capable of getting stuck into the front enemy stack mostly unopposed.  Meanwhile the autonom backup crew and Anna easily take over the right flank.  The arrival of the second enemy stack to the front isn’t pretty, easily killing a scavenger unit that I was very sure was safe, and engaging the other scavengers and Anna. Anna can handle a scavenger easily, but that scavenger unit on the far left is probably dead.  It can be tempting to charge turn one with lightning riders and rush in and zap everything turn two, but in practice that will get your riders killed. It’s usually better to be a bit conservative, just use your buffed guns turn two and then committing to an arc strike at the start of turn three or later, like so.  Anna moves up to heal Logan (no, I’m not going to spell it with numbers), and we’re in the mop-up phase now.  Especially after the enemy lightning rider is gooped. The research pickups from the pirate camp does manage to complete our current research objective at least.  No Glenn, this only proves that you never went to a proper party in your previous life! - Did so! - Did not! - Enough you two! Can’t a man read in peace and quiet only once in a while?Not again... why were they never sent to Reassembly? Still, we are making progress: The Autonom will know where they brought the Atriah. We should interface with one of their robots, either by directly acquiring one or by assembling the parts we can scavenge from their broken models.This provides a quest to either destroy 10 autonom, or buy one. Since we’re already friends, we just buy an extra sentinel and move on to the next phase.  Very interesting. It would appear the Autonom took the Neural Plexus to their main dwelling and repurposed it to manage and monitor their entire Gardip XX network. We need access to this Central Hub Nexus. Only then will we be able to salvage the Neural Plexus. This gets to the quest we’ll be staring at for most of this mission. The central hub nexus is on about the opposite side of the map to our starting location, and we’ll need to link it to a colony. Unless someone we’re allowed to kill is nice enough to settle near it, this could take a bit.
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Dec 26, 2020 17:44
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| # ? May 7, 2024 19:56 |
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Is there any diplomatic side effect for loving around in the innards and network of that Autonom sentinel?
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Dec 26, 2020 21:44
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