Phew. I actually saved that hideout. It was... complicated to say the least.
Stun batons is a big "just why".
See I knew you could probably do it, but not without losing people, and I was expecting 20 dead and you only lost 8. Then again you had 100 hands. And remember beating a base assault means they wont send another one like that, unless you roll snake eyes on the dice again.
ME? I never keep more than enough to man the two ships ive got - 8 or 9 - and I dont take death for an answer on the battlefield. Though I have started adding Syns and im trying to keep myself nerfed on 99.F4 to only about as many as the damaged syns that I had discovered.
All my other bases only have enough to defend against a basic assault, usually 5 Hands, but each of them now has a Tank to help them at least. Thats usually where I send well trained hands to go when I want to train more, either due to veterancy or just because they were sitting in the luxury spa for several months, so they're not exactly shaky guns either. I feel that the more you've got the more likely you'll get careless and let them die because of having to control so many units and wanting to get the battle over with.
I design my bases for defense so that way its rare they ever get out of that containment area (the hangars/airlock are all up on one part of the map), and after about turn 10 its still easy to check where they are on the aye phone.
Re: Stun Baton is like many other civilian weapons, one of those things that makes them dangerous to you, but its pretty much useless for yourself. Its just sales loot to put it bluntly. I dont even know why its on the manufacture list, I think (?) its buyable.
Some higher order techs are like that too such as the Plasma Subrifle, you scrap those things. Reticulan Plasma Gun is already a much more effective plasma weapon and you get it early on, and I dont know about you guys but by the time I ran into a Ret Base in year 3 I already had Magneto Plasma Guns.
Another one is the domestic shotgun with acid shells, just enough to mess you up, but by then you've probably got blunderbuss/acid or even death blossom. Just to give some examples among many.
The ghoul town is the epitome of "they can hurt you, but their stuff is worthless to you" since they're literally immune to their own weapons (even the firey explosions from the busted pipes are practically worthless against them). Their acid stuff is good for other things, but you get the idea.
I understand that, but it would be much quicker and easier to work with a GUI.
I find it amazing that the save file format is in text and thus easier to look through and see whats going on, so we've got alot to be grateful for when it comes to that. Usually do to enormous data chunks for things like where all the tiles are in the battlegame that forces a designer to just dump their savefiles as raw data. As far as I know the current Funds you've got are the only part thats convoluted since it looks like it tabulates the grand total of all your income and expenditures and that determines how much money you've currently got.
There's alot more you can do to savegames than just giving yourself items. Its even somewhat easy to give yourself money in X-Piratez because you can just give yourself the credit chips and sell them ingame.
Sometimes I cheat by checking the missions slated, map positions of enemies, and otherwise spying on the internals. In a roleplaying game (tabletop anyway) the characters would have a much better understanding of whats going on, so theme-wise its not entirely out of character.
Ive used it for honest hacks to bypass the game's RNG by giving myself something that frankly should have come up already. Either that or I made a stupid mistake with forgetting to construct a building earlier because I got carried away with micromanaging - ordered a guy from the mercinaries which I already had in my stores - yknow forhead smacking screwups that would have been corrected by reloading a savegame but I didnt want to perform all the micromanaging I had just spent 15-20 minutes tweaking.
(ie, clicking Undo button)
There's cheating to make the game fun when its not cooperating, and there's game genie NES cheating that just lets you do whatever and destroys the fun of the game. Its a personal responsibility.
for OXC and X-Pirates its a case of lets be grateful we
dont need a savegame editor
