A thread for little questions

[legionof1]

A time limit? is there one? Mercs and SG attack? When, when? Wanna kick their butts with my HARDWARE!

Not a hard one, you do get full strength faction crackdowns starting at 24 months(adjusted for difficulty). These can include mercs and stargods. Provided you don't lose a massive amount of infrastructure, or certain critical ones like old lab, to such attacks you can play forever if you so desire.

Also politely please do not Triple post. Most people here are perfectly able to comprehend more then a tweets worth of text at a time. 

[Ragshak]

Not a hard one, you do get full strength faction crackdowns starting at 24 months(adjusted for difficulty). These can include mercs and stargods. Provided you don't lose a massive amount of infrastructure, or certain critical ones like old lab, to such attacks you can play forever if you so desire.

Also politely please do not Triple post. Most people here are perfectly able to comprehend more then a tweets worth of text at a time.

So I am not safe while not reaserching topics with tag "game progress"? My tactic for current play was to reasearch all "trash" topics before moving with Library/School G. - Is it suboptimal approach?

[Nilex]

So I am not safe while not reaserching topics with tag "game progress"? My tactic for current play was to reasearch all "trash" topics before moving with Library/School G. - Is it suboptimal approach?

As I did exactly the same, being worried of adding too many juggling balls than I could handle at once, I can safely confirm this is suboptimal. There are no !missions! or *missions* in the game that would drastically affect difficulty, most just introduce a new enemy/map type (not even necessarily harder). All of the difficulty comes from hard-coded RNG embedded deep into the vanilla game engine. Example: I got a full blown Star God pogrom a whole year before even encountering my first SG ship. Wasn't tied to research at all. Luckily that was the only extreme case.
What you wanna do is prioritize global radar coverage, better Vessels+weapons, soldier weapons (piercing > laser > plasma; skip Gauss for most part) and armor at roughly the same time, while embracing mechanic changing research topic. Start Bounty missions as early as possible, this was my major mistake which needlessly delayed a lot of good stuff.
Like you I was also trying to research all trashy ones before moving on, trying to keep the list and gameplay as clean and manageable as possible... but the research list still ended being 30 pages long in extreme case (and lasted for quite some time). Now I kinda miss those times, lol.

[Ragshak]

Plantation only gives -100k or there is more to it? Like crops harvesting or something?
I see some wheat realated stuff at manufacture tab but dont know from where or whom get that wheat

[Nilex]

Regular Plantation is worthwhile if researched & built early for steady early game income. Not long after that its main benefit becomes obsolete but 3 more uses become available. Two new buildings that, when built over Plantation, produce two new product varieties. Sectoweed is useful for Green codex stuff, Onsen facility, taming Werewolf/Reaper, some stimms, and selling (don't expect riches); the other is Boom fruit which I didn't use at all. Third use is for Bee facility but considering benefits/drawback ratio I see it as joke. In short early game Plantation is useful but quickly becomes obsolete unless you choose Green codex. Much later you'll be able to buy Sectoweed (money won't be a problem by then) and Plantation becomes a thing of the past.

The wheat and other veggie stuff are only gained in limited amount from hard coded scripts once a month. Only use is producing luxury food together with meat of killed beasts, to sell for questionable profit (and hopefully as healing/refreshing items in the near future). Apples sadly aren't part of the script.

[Nilex]

Oops... Its not literally "Bandit Warehouse" bounty hunt mission, my mistake. I forgot the name, but generally its a mission with one building that has some air rockets for your crafts and deadly, but immobile gun placements outside. It appears after researching "We need craft weapons" (or something like that) and then disappears after researching some other craft weaponry project.

It's too late for me but maybe someone other can reap the benefits of what I managed to extrapolate on how get a Stormrat. I'm too dumb to confirm exactly via rules examinations so I'll go off what Dude said, pedia and some logic hopefully.

Mission that spawn them is called !Highway House!.
Research that disables the mission is Contacts: Krazy Hanna.
So Stormrats are then only available between those two research topics.

What makes them easily missable is both topics are unlocked by We Need Craft Weapons! (with Hanna having bit more dependencies) so it possible to research Hanna not that long after Highway House, disabling it before it has a chance to spawn (not before following month at earliest). And unlocking Hanna to be able to buy craft weapons ASAP is impossible to resist. So that's why I think I missed them.

UPDATE
Hanna apparently no longer (as of L7) disables Highway House. Mission finally spawned in my game in 2nd half of 2604, way after I completed all available research. I wanna believe Dio intervened and changed said mission spawn rate, rather than me being so damn unlucky that I had to wait 4 years to get a stinky Stormrat :)

[ZoA]

How is one supposed to deal with that battle tank in Sitzkreig mission? Typical anti tank weapons dont do enough damage even when hitting turret's back armor, and damn thing one shots anything it hits even through my thickest armors.

Edit: After some testing it turned out Holy Hand Grande deals with that tank quite effectively. Indeed the tank did snuff it, as the scripture foretold.

[Nilex]

Direct fire: PS rounds for Recoilless Rifle, MAG rocket, Portable Lascannon.
AOE fire: powerful explosives, EMP, Plasma Scorcher.

Pretty sure I missed some but I remember successfully using all mentioned except EMP.
Btw, are these turret's stats? Funnily enough I just beat one not even half an hour ago and it ate 4x P.Scorcher rounds. Tough cookie. Not as tough an my Annihilator armor though

[BBHood217]

Y'know, I still got a highway house or two (admittedly over the course of several months) long after I've contacted Krazy Hanna.  So miraculously, it's not entirely disabled.

But really, I don't recall stormrats being vital research for anything.  If you want, you could ask for stormrats to be implemented in another more common mission at the risk of making said mission harder.

[legionof1]

Direct fire: PS rounds for Recoilless Rifle, MAG rocket, Portable Lascannon.
AOE fire: powerful explosives, EMP, Plasma Scorcher.

Pretty sure I missed some but I remember successfully using all mentioned except EMP.
Btw, are these turret's stats? Funnily enough I just beat one not even half an hour ago and it ate 4x P.Scorcher rounds. Tough cookie. Not as tough an my Annihilator armor though

That is not the turret. turret is even more sturdy.

The biggest obstacle to the slitzkreg encounter is the tank hull. Unless your on the same z-level with the turret it is very easy for direct fire to be wasted into the hull. even small direct fire aoe like rockets are significantly weaker when the hull gets in the way because of the added distance. Arcing aoe weapons are your friend here. If you have okay cover on the map against the tank even simple fire type nades will kill the turret.

[Nilex]

Ok now that the Hydra is out of the box and too late to address, my really final last question:

If I recruit maximum possible Hands (living quarters permitting), would the promotion algorithm suddenly buff promote my entire eligible planetary Gal force? They are all Princess worthy by now I presume. Maybe I'd need to play a mission or two with Gals I'd want to be affected by promotion but that's okay. My current quota only allows for 1 Queen, 4 Princess, and so on (64 Gals total). Goal is to bump it up as much as possible (even temporarily replacing 1700+ runts if I must). After all possible tongue-in-cheek promotions are rewarded the expendable recruits would walk the plank without demoting main force, in theory. How does my deviously ingenious explo.., ahem, I mean crash-course military academy graduation sound?

Just realized 64 isn't enough to trigger Queen promotion, meaning my other classes must be positively affecting the count (80 more Peasants/Lokk'Naars/Bugs/Gnomes/Syns). It would save me money to just buy cheapest Peasants and still get the same mass-promotion extravaganza across all soldier classes.

[legionof1]

Unless your really leaning on rank bonus gear why? you just end up inflating your eventual roster salary

As to mechanics all soldiers of all types are counted. what's not counted are auxiliaries like dogs, and tamed reapers. The promotions are given when the units that are eligible(based on most total experience+missions+kills) next get there status check usually the next battle, but i think a transform that changes soldier class will also force the update.

[Nilex]

No particular reason except to max out everything I can think off before Cydonia (couple of real weeks away). Wanna finish with a flourish. There's also some future-proofing potential, better to think ahead before Dio axes it. Princesses could salute each other when passing by in the hallways, like in that office scene from Lethal Weapon 4. Mini-games like these are half the fun.

Salary I eyeballed not to present a problem but after your cautionary warning I did the math and it'll only be 6.5M monthly total, around 5M increase from current expense. Sky Ninja 50M hack hit I don't even bat an eye anymore so... no biggie :)

Thanks for laying out the fine details. Looks like I'll need to recruit ~1400 Peasants (costing 7M) to make Princesses outta 59 remaining Boss/Gals and then so some token missions for the triggers. I intend to come back to XPZ in some 10 years when last trace of XCOM leaves my system and hopefully mod gets fully completed so I'll have all this waiting for me neatly organized. Starting over after that time, to get full experience, would be too much to ask of myself coz I'll be old and probably senile AF.

[ZoA]

Are Black Pyramids in Zombie Panic intended to materialize  at some later point in the mission or should they be there from the start of the mission? Is this intentional or some kind of bug? They sure are nasty surprise when they pop up above your gals out of nowhere.   

[Nilex]

Intended, from my experience. Not sure what the trigger is.

Is this a one-off mission btw?
Asking coz getting a live Tomb Guardian and its corpse from this mission might be one chance only.