A thread for little questions

[RSSwizard]

I'm about to complete my first game-year, and just found an alien base.  Deciding whether or not I can take it out.    Best armor I have is chainmail or tactical armor, doing pretty well on weapon collection/research, so I think my firepower is in decent shape.  Although, I did run from some mercenaries, figured they were too much for me (but I made their craft take off).

Dojos are best to slow-drip improvements to units in other bases besides your main. Like lokknars, peasants, all those spare young-ubers that pop up and recruited raider scouts.

Ill make this simple for you about Enemy Bases. Send in an attack to find out which faction is there, then reload your Geo save. Now you know how screwed you might be.

Church - Doable
Academy - Doable but watch out for cyberdisks
Traders - You're screwed, you'll never take down the big boss. Need Rail Driver.
Mercs - You're screwed until late game, and even then you're not walking out without a limp.
(... though a cursory assault on Supply Ships or Hyperwave detection will tell you who's there)

Generally speaking you need to bring your Lasguns and fight defensively. Someone needs iGuns or Gothic Rayguns to help with anyone who might have shields. You can win but in year2 its mainly the Melee gals who will rack up corpses. And melee needs to have at least 100 TUs.
By defensive fighting I Mean It. Those 20x20 rooms will butcher you, whether directly or due to line of fire down the halls.

If you have a Syn Gal (android lady) give her chiller armor with the attack claws on it - she's the one you want to send into the command center to take it down. Because of her insane TUs and reactions/melee and damage resistance. She can get past the several dudes who will be in the wraparound hallway to reach it. Then she only needs to deal with maybe 1-2 mobs in the control room and entrance itself.

Should be possible by mid year 2 to have Death Blossom (big smg pistol thing) and usually thats how I roll with it. Basically a one handed Boarding Gun with lots of shots.

[Ragshak]

But how do you attack enemy base early without loosing craft because of hunter killer?

[Iazo]

Use bait craft. The base will intercept only tehe first in radar range for a while.

[Nilex]

There is no guarantee in early game I believe. Best chance is using SHARK JETBIKE as bait since H/K always targets fastest ship, escorted by 3 AIRCARs. Four of them together ensure air victory but it's hard to say if you'll lose the bike. It's down to luck and difficulty (which affects enemy ship accuracy).

I raided first enemy Hideout in 1st Jul 2601 using 2 AIRCAR and lots of save-scumming. For infiltration a BLOWFISH was used. More honest way would be to bait with JETBIKE while transport separately enters base as bike safely retreats to nearby base (it's only 250 slower with enough head start). You'd have to time radar detection pings to leave yourself max wiggle room. If the base is really close to enemy Hideout radar range even AIRSPEEDER/AIRCAR can be used in that tactic. However letting enemy base to solely dictate your own base placement in that way is stupid.

[Greep]

Personal opinion:  just wait until you have craft capable of taking out fighters without getting killed.  Technically base assaults are doable beforehand, but I wouldn't take the risk personally, the infamy drain of one base is pretty easily handled.

For taking down fighters without losses, you need to either outrange their weaponry and speed (brave whaler/nightmare + high tech lancer missiles OR low tech stringrays if you don't mind getting dangerously close each shot) or use a kraken equipped with high accuracy guns (I think a single beam laser should wreck them, so you can even make your krakens multi-purpose anti-everything by making the other two slots naval guns). 

Just be aware low accuracy weapons are almost completely ineffective against dodgy fighters (unless it's a gat lascannon, but those are pretty rare), so the mighty kraken with 3x naval guns usually gets so pummeled it'll be in repair for a month if it even survives.

[Vasja]

Hello.
I have a small question about base protection.
In XCOM, the limit of base defenders seems to be forty.
That is, if there were eight tanks and dozens of soldiers on the base, then when defending the base we had eight tanks and eight fighters on the battlefield: 4 * 8 + 8 = 40. The priority of appearing on the battlefield was with tanks, and then soldiers were added starting from top of the list.
How is this implemented in Piratez?
How many dogs / tanks / soldiers can be placed in the garrison of the base and what is their priority of appearing on the battlefield?

[Greep]

Pretty sure there's no limit.  Though there is a limit on your sanity to equipping and moving them all. 

[Vasja]

Pretty sure there's no limit.  Though there is a limit on your sanity to equipping and moving them all.

Well then, 100 tanks will roll them all into a pancake. We need to check it out.

[Greep]

Well, if you're going the "no kill like overkill" route, I'd say

-10 tanks to soak enemy reaction fire on turn 1 and kill heavy armor
-2 gyrocopters with pre-primed barrel bomb per hanger
-1-2 gyrocpters with 4x pre-primed high explosives for the access lift
-10 veterans to enter sewers as needed for mop up
-20 dogs for mop up scouting so your veterans don't get killed
 
Tanks are pretty expensive, this costs about 15 tanks and is probably more useful.

Just don't accidentally end turn early xD

[Vasja]

Well, if you're going the "no kill like overkill" route, I'd say

-10 tanks to soak enemy reaction fire on turn 1 and kill heavy armor
-2 gyrocopters with pre-primed barrel bomb per hanger
-1-2 gyrocpters with 4x pre-primed high explosives for the access lift
-10 veterans to enter sewers as needed for mop up
-20 dogs for mop up scouting so your veterans don't get killed
 
Tanks are pretty expensive, this costs about 15 tanks and is probably more useful.

Just don't accidentally end turn early xD

Thanks for the tip. This should work well.

[Cimbri]

So I'm having trouble downing either the

Spoiler:

Marsec Gunship

or the

Spoiler:

Viper Fighter

without blowing them to pieces, if I go in too light I die if I go in with what I have that can kill it it blows up what seems to be 100% of the time, any tips on weapons to acquire or build for this purpose? I'm using

Spoiler:

Beam Lasers, Lascannons, and Meteor Missiles

on most of my craft.

[Dogbarian]

Today’s little question - another keyboard control related one. What’s the key combo to remove unequipped gear from a craft, from the Inventory screen?  Meridian uses it several times during his XP LP after equipping his gals, for missions when he doesn’t want to risk losing extra gear (it’s burned him a few times when he didn’t have something he needed!). X drops the gear from a character, so I figured it would be a modified version of that, but couldn’t get it.

[Greep]

So I'm having trouble downing either the

Spoiler:

Marsec Gunship

or the

Spoiler:

Viper Fighter

without blowing them to pieces, if I go in too light I die if I go in with what I have that can kill it it blows up what seems to be 100% of the time, any tips on weapons to acquire or build for this purpose? I'm using

Spoiler:

Beam Lasers, Lascannons, and Meteor Missiles

on most of my craft.

I think there's just a percentage chance of a crash with hunter killers regardless of weapon damage, sounds like bad luck.  I don't think you're ever really going to get crash by overkill damage unless you're downing hotrods or early ships with missiles/flame cannons, it's pretty extreme iirc.

In any case, while the lasers will damage vipers, beam/lascannon won't really do anything to marcsec gunships due to the armor.  10 armor roughly halves a beam laser's damage, at 15+ the weapon is basically useless apart from keeping shields down.  I'm guessing all the damage is coming from your missiles.

[Cimbri]

I think there's just a percentage chance of a crash with hunter killers regardless of weapon damage, sounds like bad luck.  I don't think you're ever really going to get crash by overkill damage unless you're downing hotrods or early ships with missiles/flame cannons, it's pretty extreme iirc.

In any case, while the lasers will damage vipers, beam/lascannon won't really do anything to marcsec gunships due to the armor.  10 armor roughly halves a beam laser's damage, at 15+ the weapon is basically useless apart from keeping shields down.  I'm guessing all the damage is coming from your missiles.

That would sound about right on the damage, I've had the most success against them with my Missile heavy craft, if it is just a flat percentage chance that'd be good to know at least.

[Nilex]

For Marsec Viper Fighter blowup chance is 50%, determined at start of month. Obviously the air fight must occur over land. My first five encounters all resulted in blowups. And first encounter appeared only after I researched every single topic. Was getting mad since they're the only source of AP lasers. For Marsec Gunship I have no idea about chances but my 3 fights thus far all resulted in blowups. Think I drawn the short straw in every imaginable scenario.