Whoo! Finally!
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.
