A thread for little questions

[wisery]

Is there any point to do UAC Vaults after all UAC weapons and data reels? Missions are tedious, loot scarce and cheap...

[Gremlion]

It's a good source of gnomes, I believe.
They are good for "human-only" infiltration missions having almost ubergal stats where you are expected to have peasants.

[Ultimoos]

This is huge.
How do you use wrestling moves?
Is this special suit? An item?
I have this for 2 years now and I have no idea how to use this.

[Greep]

Most gal armors that have unarmed attacks use martial arts, the only thing that uses wrestling that I know of is MUD, the peasant armor.  It's your only way of restunning downed enemies before leather whips.

Sadly, no nude wrestling for x-prison

Edit: in case you wanted to know how to use martial arts, leave an empty hand slot on gym suit or bikini.  Your punch will be replaced with the skills.  Same with MUD on a peasant and wrestling.

[shinr]

A couple of Back to School questions:

1) *Mutant Alliance* is required for it, but surface search through the forum suggested not to rush it. Why, and when is the good time to research it?

2) Is it intentional to be able to bypass *MA* via Dr. X research (thanks to a captured Academy Esper from the Mansion robbery)?

[Greep]

1) There's a lot of priority research topics that simply dont require back to school (armored cars, chain mail, etc) and libraries are expensive.  The main immediate benefit you get is pharmocology, which gives you chateau level profit from runts.  However, it tends to be cheaper on lower difficulties to simply spam weed plantation bases, defended by tons of dogs.  If you aren't spamming bases, then honestly get back to school whenever you want.

The other reason is you will now get cmpulsory pogroms that drain -1000 infamy if you ignore them, although this usually isn't a big deal.

2)  Yup.  Honestly the chance of esper is the main reason for doing mansions.

Edit: btw got my own question.  Was looking through the .ruls and noticed the ninja bases have this:

genMissionFreq: 4 #% each day to gen a mission, default 6
    genMission:
      STR_MISSION_NINJA_CAP_2: 100
      STR_MISSION_HARASSMENT_NINJAS_BASE_2: 100
      STR_MISSION_NINJA_RAID_GOVT: 100

...

- type: STR_MISSION_HARASSMENT_NINJAS_BASE_2
    points: 0
    objective: 4
    spawnUfo: STR_VESSEL_NIN_LANDCRUISER_BA


This basically means the ninjas can't be repelled with base defenses right?  I guess it's time for literally legions of doggos lmao.

[aku]

A couple of Back to School questions:

1) *Mutant Alliance* is required for it, but surface search through the forum suggested not to rush it. Why, and when is the good time to research it?

2) Is it intentional to be able to bypass *MA* via Dr. X research (thanks to a captured Academy Esper from the Mansion robbery)?

You don't need alliance for back to school, you need sci books, one source of which is mutant alliance. The other two are x-prison mission and random research from interrogating gnome. If you get sci books from one of those two you can delay alliance as long as you want which means no -1000 infamy pogroms.

[qwertzy]

Finished my first playthrough doing the Cydonia Mission.
A question. I missed several types of enemies, like Raider Mistresses, Baron of Hell's, Succubi, and Magical Girls.
I'd like to know if they would be the eventual result of continuing the Shadow Realm missions (I still was stuck early on in the prisoners lose all equipment phase), or is it something restricted to one or more codex colour playthrought's?

Also "Not your business" seemed to be a key item that I didn't get. The naming theme fit's the Gnome research line. Is it connected to that, maybe a random drop from Armored Gnomes?

p.s.
As a side note, since I only got to loot a single Wand of Peace, it wasn't so bad, but for many missions Gnome's equipped with the Wand of Peace seem a bit overpowered. Do resistances increase in higher difficulties as well? But for second difficulty level, even relatively resistant enemies usually fall to the second shot, especially against the otherwise quite tough Marsec Colonial Marines and Mobile Infantry the Wand might even drop the difficulty a bit too much (or maybe not, I didn't do much of the the whole "finding the best attack for each enemy" thing yet, so maybe every enemy works like that).

[Greep]

On higher difficulties, increased enemy numbers and tus/reactions are what make things difficult  Just having an easy attack method won't make things easy on you unless it one shots things, but it helps. 

IIRC magical girls come in pink ships and one of the main triggers is offerings to purple bloom, created from 69 heroes' blessings and researching it.

A lot of the higher up enemies are just super rare so you might miss them by random chance, but since higher difficulties spawn more enemies, once you bump it up to blackbeard and beyond you'll see more of them.

Not your business is as the name implies, "not your business".  It's a dev tech you cannot research in an actual game.

[qwertzy]

I probably would have guessed that "not your business" thing if it wasn't for the Gnome research line that was very "not your business" like.

Aside from offerings to purple bloom what are the other main triggers? I did that at least two years before Cydonia (going by immortal awards) but never saw a pink ship.

About the wand of peace on higher difficulty, seing that practiacally all human enemies are one shot that still makes it easier, but since you can't really do much more than 2 or 3 shot's per turn without moving while wearing Moongose and the range isn't great, a swarm of enemies certainly will make it harder anyway.

Which reminds me of another question: Considering Sullstrider has almost twice the armor rating of Moongoose but 20% less laser resistance and 40% less Plasma resistance which one is better on higher difficulty? The Skullstrider has more time units but higher movement costs for turning around and less reactions.
So far I prefer Moongose, but outside from Star Gods and other enemies preferring Plasma, a larger amount of enemies should mean taking more hits and I'm not sure if Moooose remains late game viable in that case (not sure if Skullstrider remains viable either, similar to a tank they do get easily one shot later in game which may be a fate of all armor without shield).

[Greep]

Well, ultimately you need scented message #3 for the pink ships, one of the reqs is this tech:

https://www.xpiratez.wtf/en-US##STR_SHADOW_DESCENT

So yeah, maybe you do need to investigate the shadow realms more :/

If you want to make sure you have the full checklist, replace STR_SHADOW_DECENT with every str_ lister here to make sure you had everything

- type: STR_LFS_002
    eventWeights:
      0:
        STR_LFS_002: 100
    firstMonth: 12
    minDifficulty: 1
    minScore: 3000
    researchTriggers:
       STR_LFS_002: false
       STR_LFS_001: true
       STR_GODS_E2: true
       STR_OPTRONICS: true
       STR_CUISINE: true
       STR_DARK_STAR: true
       STR_CLOAKING_DEVICE_INVESTIGATION: true
       STR_OFFERING_TO_PURPLE_BLOOM: true
       STR_GLAMOUR: true
       STR_WHITE_DRESS: true
    executionOdds: 54
  - type: STR_LFS_003
    eventWeights:
      0:
        STR_LFS_003: 100
    firstMonth: 24
    minDifficulty: 1
    minScore: 3000
    researchTriggers:
       STR_LFS_003: false
       STR_LFS_002: true
       STR_SHADOWREALM: true
       STR_SHADOW_DESCENT: true
       STR_SHADOW_CHASING: true
       STR_MAGITECH_SUMMARY: true
       STR_LINGERIE_SET: true
       STR_DIPLOMACY: true
       STR_LUXURY_SPA: true


As far as armors go, well usually you put gnomes into vehicles which is what they're best at.  Honestly haven't gotten all the way to skullstrider tech, usually get bored of the grind and restart midway haha.  But skullsrider will tank hits better if that's what you want to know.  It has 100 more armor, so that 40% less plasma resist would only matter more if the average plasma hit did over 200 damage which it doesn't.



---

Btw, anyone know how ninja base evolution works?  Is it 5 months from when the outpost is created that it evolves or is it 5 months into the game?  Or am I just completely guessing incorrectly.

[qwertzy]

That's proabbly it, If I remember right I read somewhere that you need higher difficulty levels to get the scented messages in the first place and I was only second lowest for my first play.
I wonder if the next grade, Blackbeard is already enough, don't remember the full post.

Aside from vehicles I had a complete Gnome/Lokk'Naar strike team due to the underground missions, Gnomes are also reliably decent against voodoo (at least it seems like it, the VooDoo school text suggest resistance more about voodo skill than power, but I never had any Gnome fall to Star God trickery regardless), and since I got the Moongose earlier than good Gal armor, they became my main force for a while (Also used them for underwater fights until the end).

As for the skullstrider Moongoose thing:
Well depending on the side, Skullstrider has 60- 80 more armor points, not quite 100 (which is of course still enormous).
Still percentage wise Moongose has a bit more than 50% of the armor value of Skullstrider and takes 40% less plasma damage (assuming that's how resitance works, not sure if it's substracted before or after the armor value). Not gonna do the math, but I don't think you'd need 200 weapon damage to feel a difference.
Also I'm not sure if armor size influences enemy accuracy, if it does it would probably also factor in since Skullstrider is twice as big.

An advantage of the Moongose seems to be that you have to get wounded for more than the 25 bonus health points to actually take real damage, at least my fighters regularly could directly return to combat despite taking damage in the previous battle that day. The Skullstrider of course has the same thing going for it with the 15 health bonus, I just don't notice it as often, since they tend to be not wounded at all or dead (neither armor can take a single Sectopod hit though).

Aside from all that I noticed that the Skullstrider seems to be more easily discernibly superior to Moongose in 0-G space missions in particular.

[legionof1]

resistance is applied before armor, and is a % of the damage. Armor is a flat subtraction from hit.

Skullstrider is better defense up to a point, the mongoose at best case only fully tank a plasma hit of up to 140 power, the same as the worst faceing on the strider.
However at the point where both start taking damage(166 incoming) the mongoose starts to narrow the gap and eventually pulls ahead starting at 200 incoming plasma.

Also worth noteing the mongoose will last longer against lower value armor shred because the resist will reduce the shred amount.

The ideal would be the skullstrider with carried resistance gear such as zort jacket.

[qwertzy]

It seems you only get the Zortium Jacket after the shadow realm missions questline. I tried doing that but gave up since my soldiers got further in age (collecting Immortal awards) and I was still in the "repeat the first mission type until further notice" part. So I just went to Cydonia without it. But I cerainly did go with the whole durathread Braa, armored corset and studded stockings set.

Anyway the does the bootypedia site somewhere show how exactly hitbox size of armor influences gameplay, I missed it so far.

[legionof1]

it does not, because it's very complex for what is a relatively minor result. It could not be adequately explained without picking apart and exposing the inner working of how the game manages 3d space and how shots actually travel. and that would then demand further explanations of how non standard weapons like arcing and shot guns really work.

Much illusion would be lost, and would require probably take 7-8 pages to do justice, for what amounts to your model is slightly fatter you will get missed a few % point less.

to be clear, A bigger model means something that does not pick the best cone of fire has more surface area to maybe strike. More near misses become hits, but anything that was a clear hit or miss didn't change.