Synthmuscles availability

[psavola]

Another note inspired by Stone Lake's SH/IM run. If you get lucky and obtain synthmuscles (and later alien surgery from somewhere else) early in the game, this can dramatically change the game, even change the game balance. It's a completely different early and mid-game experience to have a number of synthsuits versus having to do without. You can even go through most of the campaign without seeing any of them.

There is about 4 % to get one or more synthmuscles out of an osiron crate. This is a very high chance (among the highest of what you get from osiron crates). If you wanted to rebalance the game to avoid these "extremely lucky runs", I'd remove synthmuscles completely from osiron crates or decrease their chances. On the other hand, the chances to get them from MIB crates could be increased. Given that MIBs actually use synthmuscles themselves in their armors it should be reasonably likely to find them there (currentl it's possible but it's actually more likely to find them in osiron crates rather than in MIB crates).

[Solarius Scorch]

I've moved this post to a new separate thread since I think it deserves a more focused discussion.
I realise it can impact a campaign, but I'm not sure if it's actually bad. So, more opinions are welcome.

[Juku121]

Personally, I'm totally not a fan of the 'lootbox' approach and tend to sell all Osiron crates (and not only them) without opening. Tends to cheapen the victory of actually getting the stuff through your own efforts.

But this specific situation is mainly problematic because of how many Synthmuscles you can get from just one box. Move at least the '10 Synthmuscles' option to MiB crates, and there won't be entire early-game teams all clad in alien body parts. Possibly move everything but the '1 muscle' options. Or perhaps the actual muscle suits, being pretty much all muscle and no armour/alloys, could get an increased SM requirement.

[Stone Lake]

I may be obviously biased, but I think it's fine as-is (reduction in synthmuscle amount may be warranted, though - maybe 10 to 4?). It's OP if you're still at HQ stage, sure. But I only saw that once (that is, synthsuit at HQ) when I couldn't beat RD in time. So, that was somewhere around mid-99 - not exactly perfect timing. Past-99 you can get PSI/Power suits/Spatanism, which are better at what synthsuit does - assaults and hit & runs.

[Nerro]

I'm pretty sure I managed to get some synthmuscle early in my run and it was fine.
Having a few guys running atound cutting people in half was fun, and because I had not idea how to get more, I had to be carefull not to get them killed.

I actually like that you can stumble onto some advance tech early or fail to get a tech for a long time. That is what make each run unic.
Sometime you get Etherals in 99, sometime you don't get more than 5 alenium shards for years XD

[Solarius Scorch]

I'm slowly getting to making the Great Factions stuff (missions for or against them); perhaps one of them could use synthmuscles, being an easier source of them than Mutons. But I'm not sure if I can write this into the lore.

[psavola]

One of the big synthsuit selling points seems to also be using it to train non-maximised agents (like SL has repeatedly done in the vids). It provides huge stat boosts to various things and nothing comes even close otherwise (closest being stormtrooper armor?).

For example if you want to train agents up in their melee accuracy to qualify for martial arts prerequisites (-> helix knight), synthsuit makes this more straightforward because without it you will be missing a lot more melee attacks and training is quite a bit slower and you'll need to put far more focus on it.

[Sneak Dog]

Even disregarding synthsuits, assault suits are a very nice way to bridge the gap from cyber armour to power suit. Power suits requiring an advanced laboratory is non-trivial. Assault suits are also just pretty good, being a melee armour with actual armour. Though looting power armours from MiB and gillman hero does mitigate this.

[Daynarr]

Synthsuits have a pretty big penalties to fire, laser and plasma damage which means that aliens and groups like MiB are quite dangerous if you rely on them too much. So their OP status fades as soon as you start to mainly face these kinds of enemies.
OFC, if you get them early, they can be a great boon for your agents and make things at least temporary easier but you can also get lucky and get early Power Armor from M.A.G.M.A. missions as well, or some other RNG based stuff.  You CAN also get quite unlucky and have some missions just not fire or fire very late (i got pulse weapons AFTER i got plasma weapons in my last playthrough for example, or envoy ship showed up only after i got Avenger from Starbase mission).

Personally, i don't think that getting synthmuscles early from Osiron crates breaks the game. I do however think that players should sometimes get good stuff from RNG instead of only bad so having such rare but possible occurrences is a plus in my book. I'd say keep it as it is. Makes things more interesting and varied (read - more exciting and unpredictable).

[Abyss]

OFC, if you get them early, they can be a great boon for your agents and make things at least temporary easier but you can also get lucky and get early Power Armor from M.A.G.M.A. missions as well, or some other RNG based stuff.

Which MAGMA mission yields power armor, can you remind?

[psavola]

Which MAGMA mission yields power armor, can you remind?

You can get it if you share both elerium battery and terramite with MAGMA. So, it's not a very early tech and not a specific mission.

In 3.2 Gillman Hero gives you power armor instead of power suit. So, repeating the undersea city mission multiple times gives you easier and usually earlier access to them. And while it's somewhat clunky, it gives you almost a medium immunity to electric, concussive, kinetic, etc. In my current SH campaign, I'm in Dec 1998 and I have already done undersea city twice and tasoth factory three times (the mission is trivial with a couple of power armors and gives you over 10M in sales).

[Daynarr]

Which MAGMA mission yields power armor, can you remind?

Yeah, as psavola mentioned, you need to get elerium battery for which you just need to get elerium researched - should be able to do it fairly easy since you can get some elerium as soon as you get event where military shoots down ufo. Terramite is however highly elusive as it depends on rare RNG events where reptoids attack - if you get it really early you can get power armor early. Streamer that i'm watching got his terramite so late he had assault armors, power suits and almost juggernaut suits researched. In my game i got it so early that i was cleaning up cult bases with agents in power armor. RNG can be really quirky in this game but thats what makes it so much fun.

Edit: ugly typos.

[Abyss]

You can get it if you share both elerium battery and terramite with MAGMA. So, it's not a very early tech and not a specific mission.

Oh, I got it. Bought it in a plenty previously. Now just mulled it up with power suit, and was thinking what part of MAGMA missions I was missing for years.