Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N10 24-Nov-2024 Aurora's Dawn

[Warface]

Assuming I was doing fine all month, why would I suddenly drop to -2000 Infamy? It was around +2000 on the previous month. Something "hidden" is hitting me for around THREE TO FOUR THOUSAND INFAMY IN A MONTH. This has happened three times now, twice on the previous playthrough. It's May. If I have to cheat to make it stop happening, I will. This kind of arbitrary punishment feels game breaking. What do?

[Psyentific]

isn't that just the ninja base?

[Warface]

isn't that just the ninja base?

If it only happens once, I can deal with it, I guess. Still sucks to lose 600k in an unavoidable way. Probably too early to take them on with sprayguns and smoke grenades. Oh well.

[Iazo]

No, personally I would not go there with less than hovertanks.

[Apocca]

Had the same in the beginning. Probably the ninja base. It stops after a few months.
Though after that the ninja base tends to spawn other bases that you want to clear as soon as possible. Though make sure you have stuff do deal with those 14mm turrets.

[nicedayright]

The ninja hideouts themselves are practically farmable, which can offset the score negatives of ninja activity from the main base. A convoy with three HMGs can take care of the jetbike interceptors as long as it's not close enough to the main base to be covered by proper fighters. Though they are very dodgy, so remember to pay attention to who you have in the pilot slot. High accuracy gals manning those guns is a must. Bump those up to 2x25s and you can take care of ninja fighters pretty easily.

Once you're on the ground, scum it up. Smoke the hell out of your landing site and snipe from your little armored APC fortress (there are some flaws with this, a bad landing site can fuck you). The top hatches let you poptart. Pop up through the hatch, shoot a ninja, pop back down. Kill all the little minigun turrets with indirect fire weapons like a grenade launcher (you should have at least one from survivalist camps), javelins or hand grenades.

Once you've mostly cleared the map, you can focus on those 14mm turrets. Many schools of thought on how do deal with them. A ton of mortar shells with eventually do it. Acid Cannonballs can eventually wear down the armor. My personal strategy is flamethrowers, since fire bypasses armor and they reaction disrupt. I've even killed one with a hammer before, though you need a plan to deal with the reaction fire first. RPG's and Recoilless Rifles are not great options. Since they're direct fire and very slow, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose a gal to reactions every shot. You could probably kill one with enough molotovs if you were willing to take all day.

Remember to bring a hammer or pickaxe to crack the hideout gates and you're golden. Easily a thousand points in score and a bit less than a million bucks in loot.

[Warface]

The ninja hideouts themselves are practically farmable, which can offset the score negatives of ninja activity from the main base. A convoy with three HMGs can take care of the jetbike interceptors as long as it's not close enough to the main base to be covered by proper fighters. Though they are very dodgy, so remember to pay attention to who you have in the pilot slot. High accuracy gals manning those guns is a must. Bump those up to 2x25s and you can take care of ninja fighters pretty easily.

Once you're on the ground, scum it up. Smoke the hell out of your landing site and snipe from your little armored APC fortress (there are some flaws with this, a bad landing site can fuck you). The top hatches let you poptart. Pop up through the hatch, shoot a ninja, pop back down. Kill all the little minigun turrets with indirect fire weapons like a grenade launcher (you should have at least one from survivalist camps), javelins or hand grenades.

Once you've mostly cleared the map, you can focus on those 14mm turrets. Many schools of thought on how do deal with them. A ton of mortar shells with eventually do it. Acid Cannonballs can eventually wear down the armor. My personal strategy is flamethrowers, since fire bypasses armor and they reaction disrupt. I've even killed one with a hammer before, though you need a plan to deal with the reaction fire first. RPG's and Recoilless Rifles are not great options. Since they're direct fire and very slow, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose a gal to reactions every shot. You could probably kill one with enough molotovs if you were willing to take all day.

Remember to bring a hammer or pickaxe to crack the hideout gates and you're golden. Easily a thousand points in score and a bit less than a million bucks in loot.

Yeah that ain't happening for another 6 months. No HMGs, no mortar, no acid balls, no grenade launchers. Six gals with Tommys (or more with the convoy; they'll still die) just aren't going to pull this off. The sheer volume of all the necessary research makes it so that I (a) don't have enough air power to shoot down much of anything, (b) can't get the battlescape weapons researched fast enough while also trying to research air power, (c) get jacked at random for 3k or more infamy in a month and thus can't make enough money to do shit for shit. I'm in the 7th month on this attempt and my cash just got chopped in half AGAIN because Dioxine sky ninjas. I am clearing, killing, kidnapping, and completing EVERYTHING ELSE. 1 million a month on brainers researching non-stop just doesn't pay for itself, when everything else I do that month is ass-fucked all the way into the negative no matter how well i did in the battlescape.

I'm a Superhuman Ironman X-Com "veteran." I played Piratez a few years ago and this problem didn't exist. I'm attempting this on John Silver and I still think it shouldn't. I had annihilator armor, Marsec laser rifles, and the huge spacecraft (forget the name). Yes, I want it all back.

This isn't just a case of being off to a slow start or a steep learning curve. It's unnecessarily prohibitive. I've restarted four times and the results are the same. Around May I start hemorrhaging infamy just because the mod maker seems to think that new players should be hamstrung arbitrarily before even being close to having the ability to fight back. "Barely playable" would be my assessment of the completeness of this monolithic mod.

All I want to do is stop the stupidly massive infamy hits (the ones that consistently penalize more than the available monthly missions can possibly provide). So before I go through and bork the whole game trying to fix this one glaring blister on the ass of this otherwise fantastic mod, does anyone know how to stop the stupidly high infamy hits caused by the sky ninjas? In the files I mean. I've lost interest in trying to counter this. Otherwise the mod is great, but this aspect really spoils the fun. Might disable missile strikes too, depending on how likely they are to completely ruin an otherwise well played game.

[Iazo]

On below JS, there is ONE instant infamy hit in Apr, and it actually serves the purpose to show you clearly on the graphs which continent is gonna be ninja HQ. You know, before you run your airbus over it, and cry because it got splatted.

Other than that, ninjas deducting points is due to normal enemy mission activity, not any sneaky events that Dioxine put in there to futz with you.

And man, if 3k infamy is a problem for a superhuman ironman vanilla veteran or whatever, then you should REALLY read up on my guide what to do if points are not enough.

The advice is: Max brainers, max missions. If a month is unusually mean, stop advancing research and start documentations, girl guides, and interrogations.

If that STILL is not enough, I would advise you to pick green codex and put the bioplasma to good use. (Or red, but Ilya requires some extra logistics to keep it running).

[Warface]

WADR the bulk of your article is what you've just said, and what I do, which is literally how this game is played (vanilla or otherwise): Do every mission possible and research as fast as possible. What's happening here is that there is apparently exactly ONE golden path to merely survive. One MUST unlock every mission type immediately or sooner while more or less disregarding all other research. One must also immediately (or sooner) accrue well over $1.7 million in monthly bills that are most certain to go unpaid in that first few months. One must ALSO research the requisites for Chateau before any of this or else you'll go broke (see above). By "immediately" I mean in the first month. The punishment for not immediately taking that exact path is basically being rectally violated by the game from the 4th month on.

I've been hiring brainers as soon as I can afford them, and doing at least 90% missions (couldn't do the first haunted forest, for example, and didn't have peasants for the valley, but those missions are rare). On each attempt I'm up to 10 brainers before the Infamy tanks. The first month, it's anywhere from -1500 to -2400. On the following months it's potluck but so far anywhere from 1400 to -1400. I've estimated the former to be 4000 or more lost, and subsequent months to be up to 4000 with wild variability.

I think a lot of players here have played the mod through its evolution and thus were introduced to these changes gradually. When I played Piratez back in 2018 or whenever, there was no (specific, competing) sky ninja base; there wasn't a huge imperative on, for example, unlocking lokk'naar and undersea missions; one's major goals -- direct goals, not a byproduct of a meta-plan to front-load certain techs -- were to research weapons, armor, craft, and people. That's what I've been doing, and if that's the problem, it isn't one that any X-Com player is prepared for.

One little caveat is that I've saved about 1.5 mil in chips that I haven't cashed in. That will get me one extra month. I otherwise know how to play the game and have little to no problem in the battlescape. It's just the addition of this base that renders all of the other mechanics cumbersome and prohibitive. I love the sheer volume of content, but it should follow from that sheer volume that there ought not to be a perfect (or required!!) golden path to survive the beginning of the game.

[greattuna]

After its creation, HQ only drains 450 score per month. It's only slightly more than a vanilla base, and if you can't handle it... well, I'm not sure what to tell you. Maybe you got unlucky and angered some excavators.

WADR the bulk of your article is what you've just said, and what I do, which is literally how this game is played (vanilla or otherwise): Do every mission possible and research as fast as possible. What's happening here is that there is apparently exactly ONE golden path to merely survive. One MUST unlock every mission type immediately or sooner while more or less disregarding all other research. One must also immediately (or sooner) accrue well over $1.7 million in monthly bills that are most certain to go unpaid in that first few months. One must ALSO research the requisites for Chateau before any of this or else you'll go broke (see above). By "immediately" I mean in the first month. The punishment for not immediately taking that exact path is basically being rectally violated by the game from the 4th month on.

Well, no, outside of max difficulty the game is fairly relaxed about straying from the "golden path" (and you don't need chateau on first month because 10 runts won't make much either way). Again, you get one big hit in April as ninja mobile fortress goes around and picks the spot for HQ, and then there's not much pressure after that (unless you get unlucky and a pacification or excavation mission is happening somewhere).
Even on JS you can make quite a few mistakes and still pull through.

I'm curious on what exactly you're doing to get such a low score. Do you like, lose 10 gals on every mission you do? Do you ignore bounty hunting? It's pretty important. Maybe you could even post a save so we could see what's going on.

[Warface]

After its creation, HQ only drains 450 score per month. It's only slightly more than a vanilla base, and if you can't handle it... well, I'm not sure what to tell you. Maybe you got unlucky and angered some excavators.

Well, no, outside of max difficulty the game is fairly relaxed about straying from the "golden path" (and you don't need chateau on first month because 10 runts won't make much either way). Again, you get one big hit in April as ninja mobile fortress goes around and picks the spot for HQ, and then there's not much pressure after that (unless you get unlucky and a pacification or excavation mission is happening somewhere).
Even on JS you can make quite a few mistakes and still pull through.

I'm curious on what exactly you're doing to get such a low score. Do you like, lose 10 gals on every mission you do? Do you ignore bounty hunting? It's pretty important. Maybe you could even post a save so we could see what's going on.

I'm not losing gals; I've been save scumming ever since I started playing again. I'm basically playing with training wheels. I just started a few days ago. Last month (June) I did everything except shoot down what I couldn't plus a hidden valley and a haunted forest. Score was -300something I think. I've switched to random seeds to see what if any difference that might make.

I'm giving it another couple of months to see how it plays out. Maybe I'm griping about nothing. Here's my current game:

[greattuna]

Yeah, I'm checking the graphs and there's a second spike of enemy activity in june. In Arctic and North Africa... That's very unlucky, I'm sorry. On the bright side, you've weathered it out and probably on your way to recover from it. The next few months should be a lot less harsh on the score.

Still, don't take too long. Ninjas don't sleep, and shipping will become more frequent in second year. You'll even get an event warning you about it.

[Warface]

It happened as well in a previous save (2nd month following the base appearance) but I'm going to go with the consensus of the community and hope that rng straightens out or whatever.

[Warface]

August

[Apocca]

Playing the new version. No problem so far on Jack Sparrow. Got 1 big hit in the first few months, after that it was fine. I cleared out the first few ninja outposts with Satchel charges and assault rifles. Pretty low tech. After that I got M-lasgun and Satchel charge / acid cannonball.

I do find that you need to capture a new type of enemy immediately otherwise you won't get another chance for a whole year (certain zombies, reticulans, bogeyman, etc)
And sometimes an item is a pain to get (currently looking for 3 eggplants  )