The hellerium is basically a question of money, which I'd been playing for all along anyway.
Mansion runs aren't essential for armor. Once you have all the techs, Annihilator suits can be made from grav units, power armor parts, common bits and pieces, and money.
Some stats: According to my memorial, I had 144 non-auxiliary deaths. Which is about the same as the number of kills my best units had. Time taken: let's see, I started playing in early April I think? (I lost fairly quickly the first time I played, but restarted.) Call it two months and an average of, say, three hours a day... Maybe 180 hours?
Favorite weapons: Battle Rifle with Plastasteel bullets (until I got better stuff, my standard weapon of choice, accurate at range and damaging enough to take down non-power-armored foes.) Spiked Mace (for enemies with tougher armor) Electro-Whip Vulcan RFG Tornado Mortar Plasma Destroyer Heavy Plasma gun (I was surprised to find this can be used one-handed...) Heavy Plasma Pistol Mono-claws Flechette Multicannon BFG
Final mission report:
Spoiler:
The last battle was actually pretty exciting. It was going pretty smoothly, until I spotted the goal, and sent as many of my units as I could down the corridor towards it. At that point, despite me using a team consisting entirely of gals with high voodoo strength, I nevertheless suffered five mind-controlled in one turn. This was followed by some very nasty explosions and deaths, inflicted by one another. I was left with enough of a team to try to enter the final room after that, but one of the entrances was blocked by an invisible enemy standing vertically above me, and the other by a mind-controlled ally in an Annihilator suit, a veteran of countless battles. I gritted my teeth and moved one of my remaining warriors up behind her, and auto-fired into her back with a heavy plasma gun, killing her and clearing the way. (I didn't bring any Stun weapons to this battle - I hadn't intended on taking any prisoners.) This created an opening for an injured gal in a Superhero suit to move up and attack. There was a Star God in her way, so she moved around it, only to spot another one, and another. Finally, with two stamina left, she had a clear shot, and fired her Big Fraggin' Gun at the target, ending the battle.
Most heroic character not on final mission: The interestingly-named Pussy Shiva. Normally it was her job to stay in one place and fire the mortar. This caused her to score a lot of kills and raise her accuracy sky high before I had training facilities. When a pogrom went very bad, she picked up a battle rifle and went out alone to finish the job. She picked off around five enemies: one shot, one kill - and saved the lives of a bunch of unconscious gals. Later I found she had low Voodoo strength; ultimately she was retired to base-defense duty.
Amount of save-scumming: Varied. After that battle, things were so grim it stopped being fun, and I started undoing some of my mistakes to get things back in balance. Later I developed some rules: I'm allowed to reload if the wonky ship damage readout causes me to lose a battle. I'm allowed to reload if one of my supposedly one-hundred-percent-accurate area-effect weapons inexplicably blows up my own team.
Amount of hacking: Some, mainly to allow me to meet a Star God Coordinator. I really think the mission generation system needs significant improvement. My save file had this in it (except when I modded it temporarily to "race: STR_ETHEREAL" so I could actually finish the game): - nextWave: 1 type: STR_MISSION_SWAY_GOVT region: STR_AUSTRALASIA race: STR_FLOATER missionSiteZone: -1 nextUfoCounter: 0 liveUfos: 0 uniqueID: 37 spawnCountdown: 33180 - region: STR_AUSTRALASIA race: STR_SECTOID_NONCOM type: STR_MISSION_SWAY_GOVT nextWave: 4 missionSiteZone: -1 liveUfos: 1 nextUfoCounter: 0 uniqueID: 56 spawnCountdown: 90 This caused me to experience a never-ending flow of idiot enemies constantly sending fleets of ships to sway the government of Australia even though it had turned against me long ago. Maybe someone could code up something like: region: STR_RANDOM race: STR_RANDOM to keep the game varied?
Thank you for this engrossing mod. Now I am going to never play it again so I can get my life back.
Some of these depend on game settings. Add your own below, or correct me if I've got any wrong.
You can Control-click on an object to drop it from the inventory screen.
You can Control-click when moving to sprint.
You can Control-click when firing to try to shoot through walls.
You can hold down Alt to reveal the location of enemies your characters have spotted if that part of the map isn't revealed.
Grenades won't explode in your hand if the time runs out.
You can throw things further indoors if you're crouching.
Enemies have all their time-units reserved for reaction fire on the first turn of battle, making popping your head out dangerous. Wait, or use lots of smoke (not that I ever did) or send an expendable scout out first to draw their fire.
Reaction fire only works via snap shot attacks - auto-fire-only weapons are useless.
If you fire even a single bullet, you will always lose the entire clip after a battle, unless Statistical Bullet Saving is enabled in the menu.
Some creatures are near-immune, or completely immune, to Stun damage - though you can still capture them in other ways (like if you have a weapon which inflicts another type of damage plus bonus stun damage).
'Invisibility' just means you can only see the target on the diagonal.
Make sure you have some explosive weapons for tough enemies - someone on the roof of your ship with a Mortar can destroy tanks from long range without even needing to see them.
Doubling the number of Brainers on a research project doesn't double the speed - it's more efficient to split them up across multiple projects.
Early research projects with unpromising names like 'Flintlocks & Bombs' are essential pre-requisites - these are more important than, say, researching the same type of prisoner multiple times.
'Superhero' allies may not seem very good, but they're worth testing to destruction.
You can't have too many Damaged Grav Units or Power Armor Parts. If you can get those by robbing a prisoner, that's more useful than ransoming them. On the other hand, plasma weapons take such a long time to learn to use, you can just sell off the ones you find early on; there will be plenty more later.
Make sure you understand the difference between the vessel weapon slots. Early on, the Seagull launcher is available, but horribly expensive. Heavy weapons are generally pretty great, but most fast interceptors can't use them.
The minimize button in the top left of the ship-to-ship combat window causes time to continue passing, allowing you to attack a single foe with up to four ships.
Just because you shoot down a ship, it doesn't mean you have to assault it. There's no shortage of potential targets, and you get better loot attacking intact ships that have landed on their own.
I built it. It wasn't that hard from where I was - I'd built up a sizeable fortune while waiting for a Star God Coordinator to show up. You don't need hundreds of workers - you could even just have fifty or so and let them take a few months building it. The main obstacle is that you need hundreds of millions worth of Hellerium. I had multiple bases buying and processing it and shipping it to my construction base. The other obstacle is if you decided to emancipate all your slaves before beginning - in which case, destroy some stuff and build lots of Armored Vaults. Also, you need a couple of dozen stasis pods, which means finding and shooting down Battleships.
I'm pretty sure the mission generation system is bugged in some way. My game contains missions that have been going on for years, the same thing over and over again.
You can try to edit AI missions in the part of the save file beginning
alienMissions:
(That's where you can change the faction of an AI ship.)
Changing the faction of a Cruiser to STR_ETHEREAL did the trick. I had an unusually exciting battle, during which I suffered two deaths, blew up half the cruiser with BFGs, and captured one Star God Co-ordinator.
Unfortunately, it won't let me research him. Checking with the tech tree viewer, I see this is because I didn't capture a Guardian. Anyway, it looks like I'm in sight of my goal. Thanks for the help.
Well, I hacked an alien mission to replace the race with Star Gods and assaulted a cruiser while it was landed to make sure there weren't any exploding-engine-huggers.
Haul: two Star God novice, one Star God operative. I've got the actual capture down to a science. Eliminate the waspites from a distance (or mind control them), then run around with stun weapons, pulling out the mono-claws when we see a cyclops... That way, if we get mind-controlled we don't actually hurt each other.
There aren't two different Star God races, are there? I used to see pogroms with Sectopods and Star God Guardians, back when I was too weak to fight them. Now it's all cyclopses and waspites and rockies...
I think I nearly had the opportunity to do a Base Defense against Star Gods, but the incoming ship was annihilated by my plasma batteries. Not that I'd have been in a good position to capture one if I had; it was a minor base with few defenders.
Base Attack? I suppose if another base ever appears I could hack the save file to turn it into a Star God base... So far they tend to be Church bases.
I'm not worried about appearance: I capture anything even vaguely god-like. I've stopped even using area effect weapons on these missions. I've taken more Star God Novices than I know what to do with. Not much I can do about the fact that the leaders of the Star Gods think the exploding engine compartments are the best part of the Cruiser to live in...
Where do I find a Star God Coordinator? I've shot down a Star God Battleship, Corvette and Cruiser without finding one. I've found one Star God Operative. (I don't seem to be able to research him... bug?)
I'm willing to hack the save game file if that's what it takes. I'm ready for the game to be over now. I have over a hundred million in the bank and I've run out of other stuff to do.
a single unit of ore uses up less space than the 50 units of scrap you can convert it into.
Here's how I mentally justify that: ore is dull-looking and low in value, so you can leave most of it just lying around outside the base, not taking up any vault space, and it won't draw any attention.
I don't know if making the ship-engine cylinder a bit smaller would be easy/worthwhile; I posted this mainly to warn players not to assume the room is empty just because it looks empty. I've spent ages searching a cruiser for the last guy, only to discover he was in a room I already checked.
1 Arrived in a previously unexplored leg of a cruiser... Seems to be clear...
2 Well, I still have a few turn units left...
3 I think I'll move around to the far side of the glowing thingy to take cover in case anyone follows me down...
4 Aah! Where did you come from? How come I could see the floor you were standing on through the glowing thingy, but couldn't see you?
(The part of 'my favorite scout who would have been brutally murdered' was played by 'expendable mind-controlled minion'. We thank him for his assistance, and for the synthmuscle mesh we were able to retrieve from his body.)
Is it the engines that are the light source? I thought my vehicle was light because I brought along a bunch of spare electro-flares and didn't equip them to anyone...
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