I've been trying to get further in an xPiratez playthrough and keep running into walls I don't know how to pass. John Silver difficulty.
I'll be doing pretty well and then around 6 months in my score will just omega tank due to the Sky Pirates (guessing). I'd go from 1438 Thug one month to a -3489 score the next.
Now, the score situation is pretty scary but there is stuff I can do to try to fix it, like unlocking more missions, and really going heavy on the research. Doing that helped the early months but I still start tanking hard 6 months in and I believe it's because of all of the explosion of air activity I can't do anything about.
The biiiig issue I'm running into now is sending my Airbus to far off missions and it just getting shot out of the air, losing my main craft, and a whole crew of my best people, effectively ending my run randomly just out of the blue.
I have been looking up guides and scouring the forums but I just don't get it. I feel like I need a walkthrough to play this game, but I love it so much, I'm so torn.
I tried to research aircraft but the game just gave me some shitty helicopters that can't even reach the areas my shuttles get shot down at.
It's so brutal constantly restarting, so I made this thread. Any tips or help would be greatly appreciated.
This game has a lot of moving parts and trying to figure out what works is half the fun... that being said here are the basics. I play on Jack Sparrow so your mileage may vary.
1. First things firsts, the start location: Theban is the best by far. The clones are downright broken early game and will make a huge difference in the battlescape. With clones you can easily capture everything in Academy Outpost/Temple Run which will give you a lot of money. Money... you will need a lot of it. If an enemy is worth more than 10k alive you should try your best to take it alive. Clones have a lot of TU/Stamina from the get go which make capturing with melee easy. With clones you can also delay recruitment techs.
2. Regarding research, you will want to have max number of brainers always - that's your number one priority. I always try to get as many as possible at the start of the month. For the research path, I like to have bounty hunts and mess hall researched and built in the first month. Bounty Hunts are very easy in general and give a huge score. My goal for the second month is to research recruit brainer: castaway gal. You can have enough castaway gals + money to have 13 brainers in march. Another key tech is chateau de la morte which I get in march.
3. Codex choice also plays a huge role in your early game. Building an extractor asap (february) so you can use a codex by feb/march. If you go for red codex for example, you can ignore armor research early on.
4. For the air game you basically need a new ship and weapons. The early ships you can build like the little bird are indeed underwhelming. You can research contacts: car thieves very early on but you probably won't have weapons/ammo. To really get the air game going, you need shadowmasters tech, which you can get from interrogations and weapons that don't require ammo (rng/codex) or a supply of ammunition. Eventually you will be able to buy spike rockets (mutant alliance prize), 25mm rounds and 50mm shells (contacts: krazy hanna). One thing to keep in mind is that rockets are very expensive and might not be worth using on anything but the juicer targets. Sonic Oscillator is another craft weapon that you can get early that requires no ammunition - you can get the parts from USOs wrecks (undersea missions). Good thing you got the clones, cuz they make early undersea missions pretty trivial.
5. Contacts: Krazy Hanna. This is another key tech that you must get asap! It's rng gated though (homefront rifle and light machinegun) but usually you will have those by the time you run through all the other prerequisite techs. Besides allowing you to buy tac vests, mortar, rpgs, etc which will make the battlescape a breeze, it will allow you to buy ammo for 25 and 50 cannon (your bread and butter early on), unless you luck out and get something like lasers or plasma from landed/crashed ships.
6. Check the graphs in april for a huge spike: that's the continent with a ninja base that will shot your craft down if you are careless. Waypoint your way around that area on the way for missions until you get faster/better crafts. You don't have to worry on the way back cuz your ship is immune to interceptions when returning from missions.
7. Even without airgame, the score is really low for may/june. In the example you gave (1438 one month to a -3489 score the next): it's not like the lack of airgame is fucking you up and more like your score is too low to begin with. You should focus on raising your score so you can take the hit from all the air activity and still have a positive score. By june you can easily have 10k+ score WITHOUT airgame. Higher score also means more money which means more bases, more brainers, more everything. The more brainers you have, higher will your score be. Also, unlock new missions asap. With clones you can easily tackle stuff like underwater missions and organ grinders (this last one can give you almost 1k score).
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