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Author Topic: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Finished:Incomplete (52 episodes)  (Read 130972 times)

Offline Dioxine

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #195 on: May 26, 2015, 06:37:53 pm »
Well, after watching that one, I think I have a picture that will sum up your pirate enterprise pretty well :D


Offline ivandogovich

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #196 on: May 26, 2015, 06:48:01 pm »
0:194 feels about right.

Offline pilot00

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #197 on: May 27, 2015, 01:29:04 am »
Well, after watching that one, I think I have a picture that will sum up your pirate enterprise pretty well :D

Nobody should lose Jooles, Jops and Stoo  ever. Thats a crime.

Offline ivandogovich

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Let's Play OpenXcom PirateZ! Ep #027: Plastasteel!!
« Reply #198 on: May 28, 2015, 04:05:00 am »
Let's Play OpenXcom PirateZ! Ep #027: Plastasteel!!



Whut? Guns that work?

Cheers, Ivan :D

Limerick:
Spoiler:
The days of the month are advancing,
The runts with a will are financing.
  But of shippin nearby
  The well is bone dry
The loss of the game it is chancing

Offline Arthanor

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #199 on: May 28, 2015, 04:28:50 am »
hehe! I watched that episode this morning :P You sneak 'em up on youtube first, eh?

Progress looks good, heavy cannons especially will be great to have (and the runts can make the ammo eventually!).

Only thing to say: Radar coverage capt'n! If we can't see 'em, we can't crash 'em!

New hideouts are really expensive ($1M+) but building a hangar is ~200k, and you can build a spy zeppeling for relatively cheap too. Then all you have to do is check the graph to see where the activity is and sent the zeppelin to anchor there (It has a great radar range too, as bit as your base).

Trying to catch UFOs from the graphs is hard, because you usually notice that the curve has gone up only until after it has, which means the UFO left already. What it is best for is identifying the region you need to keep an eye on, which is really easy to do with the zeppelin.

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #200 on: May 28, 2015, 05:21:02 am »
Very nice!  I'll have to look into that Zeppelin thingy when we are more solvent.  ;)

And yeah.   :-\  Horrendous day.  Made me way late putting up the episode here.  I had medical stuff in the morning and work melted down without me, so my afternoon was ridiculous.  Two straight hours on the phone to India with a microsoft technician. :P  Bleh.

Offline Arthanor

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #201 on: May 28, 2015, 05:48:26 am »
Oh my.. and I thought I had a bad day... I got to deal with indian HP once and that wasn't fun. I bet indian microsoft is even worse.

Solvability is indeed an issue.. So we need some money! A bottle of rum is $13999 profit in 420 runt-hours.. $33.33/hour profit for a runt. That's ~$24k/month per runt.. A run costs $10k to hire, 5k maintenance, so that's a profit of 9k/month on the first month, 19k/month after. A workshop is 800k, 30 runts: First month they'll pay back 270k, then 570k.. yeah..

It takes a month to build a workshop, 2 months for the runts to pay back the building cost, 3 months overall before they actually make a profit. Looks to me like we only have one possible solution, capt'n! We gotta get some loot!

Gotta get looting to get the money, gotta get the money to do anything, gotta do something to get the points, gotta get the points to keep looting, gotta get looting to... No, I already said that! ;) Well, we know where to start! Good thing we all like looting! :D

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #202 on: May 28, 2015, 07:13:33 am »
Think selling off the nuclear fuel is worth it to start a hangar?  Its probably a couple months before we have it up, and a zepp.. and from the sounds of it 3 or more months before I have a chance at that second rum factory I'm dreaming of. 

Until then, I guess, I just pray to RNGesus that some fat ship rolls past my base, because patrol the charts is ineffective?  Also.  High chance of getting hammered at a Pogrom and ending the campaign at this point if no shipping shows up.  Or more likely it loiters overhead for weeks but the radar misses it. ;)

Cheers, Ivan :D

Offline Dioxine

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #203 on: May 28, 2015, 10:47:22 am »
Well, selling half of your fuel and plastasteel would set you up at about +700k, more than enough to make a hangar and a Zeppelin... OR a workshop to double your manufacturing profit... but if you gonna do it, gotta do it sooner than later. Both of these projects take a full month to complete, though. Interrogate anyone you can if hard-pressed for score - the stuff you get from interrogations is rarely immediately useful, but grants good points (especially if it's a new enemy that hasn't been interrogated before).

Still, there is another solution :) Gotta finally win a Pogrom, man. It's sort of a rite of passage. With new, better explosives you can actually take on an average Pogrom... Dynamite often takes out a power-armored dude in a single hit, and it's a guaranteed kill against personal armor. Otoh there is 1 chance in 2 of meeting tanks or cyberdiscs, and those eat explosives like candy. Fire is about the only way of killing them available to you now - but it takes a LOT of fire.

Oh and don't even bother with Tac armors on Pogroms. Leather and Metal give much better chances of survival. Tac armor (and Warrior) is, on the other hand, much better for raiding small ships, where the crews are poorly armed.

On the other hand, if you avoid losing, avoiding Pogroms makes for an interesting game - you are cut off from certain tech, and might advance in an totally unexpected direction... but then you absolutely need a patrol craft to be able to survive on shipping alone - most of it isn't very brutal on the ground as you have seen in the first months. Anyway, best of luck!
« Last Edit: May 28, 2015, 10:52:23 am by Dioxine »

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #204 on: May 28, 2015, 03:00:20 pm »
Dynamite often takes out a power-armored dude in a single hit, and it's a guaranteed kill against personal armor.

Thanks very much for the tips!!  After the deepone village, I thought dynamite was probably only little better than HE grenades or something.   Are all those things really that tough, or did I just have bad luck with the little variations in elevation on the sandy hills, etc.?

Offline pilot00

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #205 on: May 28, 2015, 03:15:31 pm »
Thanks very much for the tips!!  After the deepone village, I thought dynamite was probably only little better than HE grenades or something.   Are all those things really that tough, or did I just have bad luck with the little variations in elevation on the sandy hills, etc.?

Kinda both, as far as I remember the deep ones have resistance to explossive to boot.

Offline Arthanor

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #206 on: May 28, 2015, 04:03:25 pm »
Dynamite is really worth it, but always carry a few HE packs too. At 8k, they're expensive, but you need the extra damage to punch through cyberdiscs and tanks. My counter to power armor dudes is a hammer blow in the back. Works well enough..

Back to moneys:
Workshops are a long term safe investment: You take 3 months to pay it off, but then you get $570k every month. It works well if you then reinvest that into more workshop and create exponential income. But right now, it doesn't really look like we have the "seed money" to start on a rum venture. Would be a good thing to do when/if we get some good money from looting though! Cover the cost of 'em brainers..

I think I'd sell some slave AIs first, then maybe a ship engine or two (always keep.. ~3-4 of 'em for the next crafts you might build). Chances are that besides a zeppelin, we won't be building much soon. We should find more AIs and engines while looting!

If that's still not enough to get us a hangar, then selling some nuclear fuel or plastasteel is doable too. Just make sure we have enough to fly the Bonny for a while (at least 100?) so we can catch the shipping! Once the hangar is built, we can figure out where to get the cash for the zeppelin (which is pretty cheap if I remember well). If we're lucky, we'll have caught some shipping in the meantime and already have the money.

It's better to sell a few things for the hangar, and then sell other stuff later if we need to (but hope we catch something), than to sell enough for the hangar and zeppelin both now, only to get some loot from a chance UFO but run out of nuclear fuel and have to buy some back.

In the meantime, it might be worth it to just keep the Bonny at anchor over swtizerland or something. Pretty central to europe so whoever is flying there should ping on the radar. Trying to catch something after you've noticed the graph is hard because it's probably already done and gone.

The best use of the graph for me is finding where I need to setup patrols, then keeping a craft there to catch the next thing. You can't do it for a day or so either, since there is usually a gap between UFOs. Patrolling immediately after one means you're probably in that gap and you likely won't see anything. You have to patrol for a long time. Ideally in a central location without moving. Being at anchor costs less fuel than zipping around, so changing waypoints all the time is not a good idea unless you are hoping to catch a UFO that went off-radar. Zeppelins don't use fuel when at anchor, which makes them awesome for long term patrols (and they have great radars too!).

Offline Dioxine

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #207 on: May 28, 2015, 05:05:27 pm »
Bonaventura isn't the best patrol craft available, with its small radar range. Keeping a 100 fuel might be overdoing it, unless you indeed plan to patrol - a typical mission run costs you about 1-5 units of fuel, while a full patrol (3-4 days afair) would burn 20 or more, which is 220k+ in hard cash (in selling price) just to see the sights. And yeah, a craft burns fuel only half as fast while patrolling (rounding down).

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #208 on: May 28, 2015, 05:43:52 pm »
I had no idea about fuel conservation while patrolling!! Dayum!! How long have I been playing this game?   Very nice!  Thanks for the tips!

Offline Arthanor

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Re: Let's Play PirateZ! (0.9j) Now with Limericks!!!
« Reply #209 on: May 28, 2015, 06:43:38 pm »
Yeah, it depends what you catch in those 3-4 days... Some UFOs can be worth 2 millions, but it depends on what it is and what's inside.. Ivan is worried about the points (have to gain some to not get a negative again) though, and cleaning up UFOs, even at a loss cash wise, might be worth it.