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XPiratez / Taking Down Silver Towers

« on: November 10, 2020, 04:31:05 am »

I'm near the end of a campaign I've been really unlucky with stargod RNG.  No SG crackdowns, no bases, no battleships.  So I thought I'd take a crack at the silver towers and found myself woefully unprepared.  I came here and couldn't really find much in terms of a solid strategy, so I decided to figure it out and post it here for future lazy bastards like myself   

I don't know this for sure, but it seemed like none of the silver towers in my game spawned as hunter-killers, so you can plan and influence which crafts it shoots at, which is nice.

My first attempt was with dragons and devastators with the heaviest damage stuff I could cram in them.  Then I realized none of them could catch a Silver Towers, lol.  That was a costly oversight.

Next attempt was with 1 Sabre with tesla cannons and meteor missiles, and 3 brave whalers with avalanches. I figured the sabre could tank shots and get in close to start hitting the shields, then the brave whalers could overwhelm it with 9 avalanche missiles.  I couldn't even drop the shields with this fleet.  The sabre didn't last long, and I'm sure some of the avalanches missed.  I was using a gal pilot, so maybe a lokk with max stats and an extra shield generator or two would make this more viable.  I couldn't make it work, though.

Third time was the charm.  This time I went with 4 sabres, all with tesla cannons and meteor missiles, and that did the trick.  If you're good at pulling damaged craft away until the UFO targets something else you can even keep all the ships alive.  I had to savescum a bit, but I wanted to see if it could be done.  I think the key is having high bravery pilots to make the quickest approaches and retreats.  And reactions, of course, to dodge the attacks.  The weapons are both 125% accuracy, so I don't think high accuracy is that important.  I had one sabre pilot that was either normal or mostly bold for approach and I had a hard time keeping that one alive since the fall back until it switched targets was so much slower.  Then reapproaching took a lot longer.  The sabres could take 4-5 shots before they were toast

At the time I had forgotten about medusa missiles.  6 missiles per launcher instead of 3, 100% accuracy (worse than meteor but good), and roughly double the damage to shields that the meteors caused.  Looks good on paper, but then those 9 avalanches looked good on paper too     Haven't tried it, but it looks like a better option.

Assaulting the ship once it's down is a bitch and a half, but in the end I was able to bag an operator and the coordinator, so I was happy.  Speaking of operators, where else do they spawn?  This was my first time encountering one this campaign.  I figured a cruiser at least would have one, but none of the ones I assaulted did.  Just bad luck?

Also, I did this on L3.  I'm curious to hear what others have used to down these beasts

TL:DR - not an optimal strategy probably, but 4 sabres with teslas and meteors will get the job done.  Bring high bravery and reaction gals and do a little juggling in the interception window if you want everyone to come home

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XPiratez / How do you guys use Syns?

« on: December 05, 2018, 11:44:39 am »

I recently got a damaged syn in the loot from one of those orbital freighter missions.  Those missions are brutal!  Lost a few gals and everyone else came back wounded.  Lots of fighting in those grav lift shafts.  Anyway, once I did all the research and rebuilt her, I find I'm having trouble finding the best way to use her. 

The high TU, energy, and good resistances made me think melee, but the poor energy recovery and lack of inventory space for recovery consumables made me think twice.  Same problem for a dedicated thrower/bow gal.  Currently I'm using her a high mobility sniper, so she only needs to move a handful of times, then can sit and snipe while the energy recovers.  It works well, but I don't think it's really using her to her fullest.

I'm curious how others use them

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XPiratez / Finely Distilled Friendly Fire

« on: May 30, 2017, 12:07:37 am »

I was raiding a UFO and one of my gals takes a wound.  Nothing major, but I want ot heal her ASAP to avoid longer downtime.  I miss-click on the rum, end up clobbering her from behind, knocking her unconscious, and dealing additional fatal wounds.  Then I don't have enough TU to fully heal her until next turn.  I think I probably doubled her down time in the end.

Another fun miss-click happened while doing that cardinal sin of scouting with your last unit that has any TU left.  She stumbles upon a celatid, and instead of throwing the primed grenade in her hand, I clicked disarm, and she took a load of celatid spit full in the face on the enemy turn.  Luckily it only put her in the sickbay for a month or so instead of killing her.

Normally I'm pretty good with the grenades, but I've nearly bashed in heads with rum bottles more times than I'd like to admit.  Honestly, I don't know what's worse: that they picked ME for captain or that they actually follow my stupid orders.  I think the Star Gods breathed a little easier that day

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XPiratez / I had a dumb idea for a support weapon

« on: May 05, 2017, 04:39:44 am »

I don't know how or why I thought of this, but it would be a launcher that fires ammo clips. Give it to a support gal, load her up with extra ammo for your team and she can fire reloads from relative safety. Pretty dumb, huh? But I thought it sounded fun and would fit into the niche of things you put in the craft but almost never use.

Now since I can't see anyone thinking this is a good enough idea to make, I thought I'd give it a shot. Fun little project to dip my toe in the modding waters. Before I get started, though, I want to ask the modding vets: does something like this seem possible to make?  I can't really think of any examples of weapons that fire objects that don't do anything, you know?   I know there's a forum just for mod making, but I was thinking of this specifically with Piratez in mind, so I thought I'd try asking here first.

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XPiratez / Looking for some base management advice

« on: April 24, 2017, 04:17:34 am »

Hey everyone, I was hoping to get some tips on base management.  In vanilla I would rarely expand much, usually just a manufacturing base and (maybe) a few radar outpost type bases.  The far shallower tech and item trees made it easy to just stick a few soldiers in for defense with some laser weapons (or just leave them unmanned).  I could usually get everything I needed from activity around the main base or from terror/base missions, so I rarely even bothered with a secondary squad, but it's become obvious that ain't gonna work here.

What usually happens is I'll make a new hideout, buy 10 or so hands for defense, but then I always get tripped up by equipping them.  Most of the good stuff I can make or buy they're not able to use because it's too heavy or their skill is too low to make good use of it. Add to that the wealth of different armors and melee and throwing being actually relevant now and I just find myself getting overwhelmed with trying to manage it all.  I opted for low-weight/high-accuracy carbines and pistols, and nearly lost to a ratman retaliation.  I had to resort to panzerfaust spam in the end.  It was embarrassing!

I'm trying to figure out if it's better to transfer a few good girls from my main base to the others to act as aces in the hole for defense, or if I should start trying to build up those defense hands with some of the easier missions.  I don't really want to dillute my main squad by shipping the good ones away, but maintaining multiple squads just seems like even more of a logistical nightmare.  And it leads to the next problem I'm facing:

I'm starting to run into cash flow issues.  I thought I had a good handle on the economic portion of the game, but I find I'm mostly just breaking even with the bases I have, and it's a challenge to put together the funds to expand them or upgrade gear/craft.  I think part of it is I haven't made the secondary production base beefy enough, and I also tend to horde things.  I think "I'll save those for a rainy day", but then the day is never "rainy" enough.  I always think I can squeek by without dipping into the horde.  I'm going to try to work on that stuff on my own, but in the meantime any advice on managing so many bases would be welcome.

Also, speaking of bases, I'm not quite done with year 2 and appear to have a star god base.  Is that normal or am I just lucky in the bad way?  I went to take a peak at it and found sectopods and what looked like ethereals in red robes called Star God Guardians, and promptly GTFO'd.