Messages

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XPiratez / Re: Feedback on the "Mutant Culling" Mission

« on: February 12, 2025, 08:21:42 pm »

It is a very difficult and long mission, yes, and the one I usually tend to not risk doing. Eridians using nasty damage types is bad enough, but chryssalids make it so much worse, and the acid rain is cherry on the top that all but makes sure I'll suffer some losses.

That said, I appreciate how much brutal the mission is because it's... well, it's culling. Not going to be walk in the park, and of course someone like eridians have no reason to surrender to you.

Is there a setting or option to disable enemies waking up?

You can stand over their unconscious bodies and shoot down at them with something strong until they die.

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Extended Piratez general FAQ/Strategy Guide

« on: January 16, 2025, 07:00:19 pm »

1. Presumably, since they defended their ship successfully, they're able to disarm the bomb.

2. Plenty of missions have a small chance of having zombies in them. It would be wise to pay attention to any ships under the "Unknown" flag as well. You can also read arcane tomes until you get lucky.

4. The bodyguards will fall to any high-powered weapon, especially when hit from the back: light cannons, auto-cannons, r-rifles and other anti-tank weapons, high-expolsives, axes/heavy melee, heavy lasers if you got them, and of course, plasma. Exoguards will be slightly more difficult, but after you drain the shields, you can treat them as slightly tougher bodyguards.

5. Plasma weapons just deal a lot of damage + armor damage + setting things on fire. You can see it if you compare assault rifle to a plasma rifle: one has 30 damage, and the other - 80.

6. Bossgun (a very powerful, accurate machinegun), kustom blunderbuss (better blunderbuss), commando rifle (a precise marksman rifle with Reactions scaling), super shotgun (strong shotgun with good range). All of them are very good, but I get the most use out of commando rifle, personally.

7. High-end military ships have plasma spitter parts: crusiers, battleships, etc. Shoot them down or raid them when they're landed to get your prize.

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Tips, Tactics and Cheese

« on: December 29, 2024, 09:55:56 am »

I know that police shotgun has a very good effective range both due to better accuracy and range, it's just I find it not really necessary. Though if I'm shooting to kill and not to stun, I'm using something other than a domestic; military shotgun or a heavy or combat shottie, they all work.

In my current run I've done a lot of splashed bandit craft in a V8 of all things (since I've got too greedy and lost my airbus in late feb '01). Yes, dogs loved this, and I didn't even have doors, but in response I've learned to strike first, strike fast, deploy camo paint (4 night camo almost halves regular human night vision; this propels peasants into usefulness by itself, and makes gals even more scary) and pre-prime smoke grenades. If the bandit can't see you, he can't react to you filling him with buckshot, and if the dog can't see you, the dog can't rush you; after T1 you'll have a lot easier time dealing with them. Bringing a lokk'naar helps a lot, too; they have both great night camo, night vision and thermal vision.

I didn't use the missions for "training" training, but after you deal with dogs you can set off a bandit or 2 to whip to death.

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XPZ Strategy/Tactics / Re: Tips, Tactics and Cheese

« on: December 28, 2024, 10:48:38 pm »

If you do your missions at night, you can kill multiple birds with one stone, or rubber slug for that matter. Since the fighting at night happens at the shotguns' effective range, you can stay out of enemy vision and pelt them with stun slugs safely for both captures and training, and the fact it does such low damage even plays to the benefit there, since the more hits you have to make, the more experience you'll get. Though I'm using domestic shotguns for this, as firerate > accuracy in these cases.

Even very early on, there are outfits that provide night camo, and personal computers to provide some light.

As for dedicated bravery training, I don't really bother with it until I get hallucinogen gas grenades, and even then it's only occasionally I drop one to hotbox my own gals.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N10 24-Nov-2024 Aurora's Dawn

« on: December 28, 2024, 05:34:41 pm »

There are a couple of options you have to deal with those:

1. Convince govts that doing these things to you is just not worth it, by researching *Family Ties*;
2. Get some AA and shoot down govt craft on approach; invasions shot down in that way don't affect score at all.
3. Capture the govt troops alive; once researched, all live captives give 10 score, instead of their normal score. You'll get good ransom value too.

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XPiratez / Re: Plantation Rush Guide

« on: December 23, 2024, 03:07:48 pm »

Very interesting strategy. I'm not sure about the viability of it in JS, since you first need a lot of money to missile-proof your own base (4 overcharged radars will run you $3.5m alone) and then there's always a risk of getting a dozen missiles or so on your plantations... Scrounging an extra few million or two per plantation base might be difficult early, and later on you'll have better means of getting income.

I'm also wondering on whether you're using weed plantations or bee hives to supplement this passive income.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N10 24-Nov-2024 Aurora's Dawn

« on: December 23, 2024, 02:40:22 pm »

1) standard flintlocks deal 44 damage same as the handcannon and guns using the boarding ammo, but the latter ones are supposed to have more broader, larger and heavier rounds, so damage shuold be increased a little? eg 47 for the handcannon and for the boradin ammunition shotters 48/50?

2) same goes fot the kustom handcannon, it sould be a bit deadlier so increase damage form 44 to 47?

That's what the scaling part of their damage profile does. At 100 bravery, handcannon deals 59 damage and boarding gun deals 54 damage, which quite a lot already.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: December 21, 2024, 11:22:40 pm »

I'm still on n10 so this may have been fixed already but I'm getting Witch missions as a Soreass Green captain. Which shouldn't be a chaos saint?

You sure you didn't just unlock them the normal way? Witch quests aren't a saint-unique thing, saints just get them a lot earlier.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: December 21, 2024, 11:13:39 pm »

As far as I understand, the spotter mechanic simply puts a flag on your unit in question that makes it targettable for all the Sniper enemies for a certain number of turns. They seem to be having an accuracy penalty if they can't see the unit, but it doesn't matter much when there are enough of them (of if they are throwing grenades or shooting RPGs).

That's correct, though any given sniper only has a percentage chance to act on that information depending on how good they're at sniping. And yes, they have the same no-LoS penalties and limitations as your units, including throwing accuracy.

And it was, pretty much, the answer to your own ability to shoot enemies outside of your LoS, as well as a counter to camouflage and invisibility - before sniper/spotter, a dark spot and a bunch of flares was all you needed to make dealing with enemies almost trivial. It's kind of a necessary evil, but I agree that it can get really heavy-handed and annoying sometimes; the worst part for me personally is the spotter tagging anyone who hit them.

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XPiratez / Re: Stuff I'd love to see in XPiratez!

« on: December 04, 2024, 05:42:38 pm »

-snip-

Since we're talking about game changes, I'm going to throw in my own two cents:

>Hivers: I imagine it's that way because (almost) everyone can hire bugeyes with cash already past a certain point. The hivers' voodoo is also going to be much better thanks to that +5 VPWR and VSKL, and a singular sectoweed harvest can net you enough for, like, 4 of them? Not to mention an option to just buy sectoweed once you research Contacts: Reticulans.

>Plantations: It would be nice, but that's the way it's done due to engine limitations. The event checks look for whether you have a plantation, not how many you have.

>Bounty Hunting: In the first few months you could easily maintain positive score without interceptions before, and you can still do it now. I actually quite like having it pushed back for two months, because it means I don't need to rush it in january.

>Ship Junkyard: Durathread is very common, but stapler can mess up with your plans indeed. That said, even without junkyard you have ways of getting more 14mm ammo, or even using different weapons altogether.

>Tiger and Raptor: I agree that there's a big gap between the two, and even bigger one between Tiger and next interceptor you'll actually be getting (Corsair), but giving Tiger missiles would do scarcely little to make it relevant; by the time something better than Spike and Seagull appears you'll be using better vessels anyway. It's already got enough firepower to dominate early-game ground and air traffic; the problem was always the speed not letting it catch up to anything better. So if I were propose anything it'd be another faster jet craft between Tiger and Corsair, at somewhere about 1400-1600 knots of speed; just enough to catch a freighter if a player is lucky to spot one, and an alternative if you can't or don't want to engage with ninjas too much.

>Gnome route: not really feeling this one myself, they have their niches, and that's perfectly fine. I actually like them more as a support unit, and in my opinion, they don't need more spotlight than they're already getting.

As for what I'd like to see: more ground vehicles past the first few months. Something to give the divebombs more reasons to be used beyond ninja APCs and crawlers and occasional necroplane. Maybe a convoy with a big tank, or a raider band accompanying a vehicle similar to the one we're facing in the Defend the Fort! mission.

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XPiratez / Re: XPiratez Information Compilation, Starter Guide & Weapon Spreadsheet

« on: November 28, 2024, 02:26:02 am »

No, you straight-up got four suits of chainmail before it was changed to aggressor (aggressor didn't even exist back then). It was pretty busted: immune to shotguns, resistant to small arms and lasers and very effective against all sorts of melee threats, all in march or february if you played your cards right.

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XPiratez / Re: 85mm Battlecannon (Tank) question

« on: August 29, 2022, 07:53:25 pm »

This is just a cannon. You need to put it on a tank chassis to get a full tank.

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XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: August 24, 2022, 05:44:51 pm »

After stripping shields, 2-3 HEAT rockets or AT rockets or even MAG rockets would do the trick. You can also fry it with a flamethrower, use R-Rifle on it or throw a couple of EMP grenades (hovertank is weak against EMP, so it's weird that it did nothing).

If you don't want to strip its shields, shoot it with chem until it dies. Might take a while though.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N1 29-Apr-2022 Every Day Is Caturday

« on: August 05, 2022, 07:02:45 pm »

You'd still have 20 guns in your harvester regardless. Possibly more trained than your gals, too, with all these benefits Peasant Revolution provides. You'd also still be able to drive cars and tanks, so I don't really see how cancelling the gals would change much.

Also, where do you find enough gals to fill out harvester? I can do that in second year, but by then I hardly need so many at one place, plus I have a menace or can outfit my convoy enough to feel safe about sending it somewhere.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N1 29-Apr-2022 Every Day Is Caturday

« on: July 22, 2022, 01:42:36 am »

Yeah, I'm checking the graphs and there's a second spike of enemy activity in june. In Arctic and North Africa... That's very unlucky, I'm sorry. On the bright side, you've weathered it out and probably on your way to recover from it. The next few months should be a lot less harsh on the score.

Still, don't take too long. Ninjas don't sleep, and shipping will become more frequent in second year. You'll even get an event warning you about it.