Help me git gud, question thread

[KiriKaneko]

How do I link a save? I can make a spy zeppelin now but I already have radars everywhere and will have hyperwave decoders soon

The hull I got is a sparkling hull

[ohartenstein23]

You can attach a save file to your forum posts.  Usually this is the best way to get help with anything in your game, especially bugfixing.

[Scorrpio]

Weird.  Sparkling is gray, but you get "crappy laser armament" from green. Gray gives conversion launcher which uses seagull missiles in a way that ignores missile defense.

Saves are under user/piratez in your game directory.

[KiriKaneko]

I have a conversion launcher as well

I know where my saved are, oh I see the attachments and other options, I'll attach it to this post

Also I just unlocked Interceptor Assembly, it came from hellerium reactor and I'm not sure what I researched to unlock that

[KiriKaneko]

I'd appreciate any advice on my current save, what I could be doing better etc

Also I have a crapton of research going now, I found lots of new stuff in progroms, crashed smalls, and every now and then the transport ships have something unusual in like a new vessel armament part

[legionof1]

First glance nothing seems to be wrong bug wise.

You do have what is probably a horrifically severe over-investment in production with a very unfocused research supporting it. 300+ presently occupied making medical supplies??? You have neither a still(enable alcohol production) or a refinery(chemical production) in your production bases much are pretty useful for making cash when you dont need them building other projects. About 2/3 of your expenses are runts which are not even efficiently supporting themselves.

Research wise 1 brainer to a project while preventing overflow is horrifically slow for most projects. You seem to have just by sheer chance not focused on much related to general progression and gotten bogged down with the umpteen side items instead.

Your combat loadout is one dimensional and is both expensive and weak in terms of vision(no camo and poor NV). You have what is effectively only heavy infantry with no scouts and no support. Like trying to play Starcraft II with only zealots. Diversify and specialize the gals.

Also you are basically not utilizing training buildings. Having a base mostly dedicated to training to manufacture quality reserve gals is pretty crucial. I usually combine it with a triple hanger setup to give the reserve more to do then train, they can fly the fighters.

[KiriKaneko]

First glance nothing seems to be wrong bug wise.

You do have what is probably a horrifically severe over-investment in production with a very unfocused research supporting it. 300+ presently occupied making medical supplies??? You have neither a still(enable alcohol production) or a refinery(chemical production) in your production bases much are pretty useful for making cash when you dont need them building other projects. About 2/3 of your expenses are runts which are not even efficiently supporting themselves.

I thought medical supplies were the best thing I could manufacture. What should I make instead for money? Sadly I'm playing the slightly older version of the mod where I can't make another still. Are chemicals better money than medical supplies? I thought it was most cost effective to buy chemicals and turn them into med supplies then sell them

Research wise 1 brainer to a project while preventing overflow is horrifically slow for most projects. You seem to have just by sheer chance not focused on much related to general progression and gotten bogged down with the umpteen side items instead.

I can't find an up to date tech tree, and the tech seems vast. Since there was no time pressure I thought it would be fine to just research everything. Is there a specific path I should be focusing on?

Your combat loadout is one dimensional and is both expensive and weak in terms of vision(no camo and poor NV). You have what is effectively only heavy infantry with no scouts and no support. Like trying to play Starcraft II with only zealots. Diversify and specialize the gals.

Problem is, all the sets that have good camo, TV or NV are also very squishy. Right now I'm mainly facing enemies with ballistics and weak lasers and this armour makes us almost invincible to it. Only melee, explosives and plasma fire ever really hurt us. On the other hand it seems like every other enemy can see through smoke or darkness, they almost always hit with reaction shots. What's more, the difference between a soldier with 50+ bravery, 100+ energy and maxed TU is extremely apparent for me compared to a fresh recruit with decent starting stats. That extra TU and stamina frequently makes or breaks the mission. Having high HP means the girls are much less likely to die when hit with plasma fire, and I'm starting to get high aim girls who never miss with the eurosyndicate laser rifles I now have. I could use lots of camo and probably rely on explosives like mortars while my scouts spot for me, but I'd frequently lose them to enemies who can see them anyway or who engage me in narrow terrain where I cant avoid them and then I'd lose my girls and have to struggle on with fresh recruit scrubs. I'd love to have high NV/TV and camo but they're totally unreliable for me, and having high stat girls with amazing guns and high armour is something I can always count on. 90% of my progroms occur at night, and flares have proved sufficient to light the area although in the time it takes me to spread them around all the civvies die, I'm usually pulling 6000-8000 points a month so it doesn't bother me much. If I could get some heavy armour with camo and night vision that would be awesome. I'm also now making some chem and fire grenades to exploit weaknesses in certain enemies like mechtoids and mercenaries

Also you are basically not utilizing training buildings. Having a base mostly dedicated to training to manufacture quality reserve gals is pretty crucial. I usually combine it with a triple hanger setup to give the reserve more to do then train, they can fly the fighters.

Yeah I'm gonna get one of these towards the end. I wanted 6/8 of my bases to be specialised in producing medical supplies, and I was gonna put my last base as a training facility to replace my losses as I push through the plasma/gauss fire into the midgame. I looked up buildings a bit and it seems there's another training room I can eventually unlock. If I ever unlock labs I might convert one of my medical facilities into a research base. I'd like faster research but the things I can build are like 1 extra brainer or something, and I figured I needed to get my industry going first

Are you sure the medical supplies are ineffective? They seem to be making me vast amounts of money every month

[Scorrpio]

300+ presently occupied making medical supplies??? You have neither a still(enable alcohol production) or a refinery(chemical production) in your production bases much are pretty useful for making cash when you dont need them building other projects. About 2/3 of your expenses are runts which are not even efficiently supporting themselves.

Actually, I wrote a utility that parsed the rule file and did a full cost-analisys on manufactures.   Medical supplies are one of the top guaranteed money-makers in earlier game, even if you have to buy chems.    One batch is 5k for chems plus 2k to make a batch of 10 supplies selling for 3k each, that's 23k profit/batch.   At 360 hours/patch, 50 runts will make 100 batches in a 30-day month, which is 2.3M profit.   Subtract 250k runt salaries and about 100k facilities maintenance, and you are still pushing 2M raw profit.   So that 300-runt setup is about 12M/month after runt salaries.   If you can give me an alcohol recipe that will top that, I am listening.     The best one I know is wine:   800 cost, plus apple that is worth 100,  sells for 25k - so 24.1k profit per unit.   But at 440 hours, same 50 runts will make  ~82 units in 30-day month, netting 1.72M after runt salaries.   And apples are not a guaranteed resource.   I do agree about refineries though.   Soon as you can build them, so you can make your own chems - to funnel into manufactures like meds.   And of course, once you get to some better techs, you funnel the meds into things like dart pistol stun clips.   Which get you about 6M per same 50 runts per month.   

Sure, there are some other lucratives.   For example, porn.   If you have a decent flow of lower tier hostages that normally sell for 10-15k.
Two hostages that would together fetch say, 30k, made into slave and slave maid, make porn, you get 150k, 3x porn (pink scrolls!) plus whatever stuff you shook off the hostages during enslaving.   Total time cost is 650 hours.   Same 50 runts would turn out a whopping 6.5M/month, but only if you manage to nab ~50 each male and female trash hostages in that time.

Research wise 1 brainer to a project while preventing overflow is horrifically slow for most projects. You seem to have just by sheer chance not focused on much related to general progression and gotten bogged down with the umpteen side items instead.

Diversifying was my recommendation, cause Piratez has tons of real cheap projects.   Don't recall exact percentages, but like half are 10 days or less.   And the tree is so broad that you often just can't speahead it to a specific tech - you need like 6 other things that could be done parallel.   Still, putting 1 brainer on a higher-concept project is ill-advised.   Even without peeking into rulesets, you  can get a feel for what would be a 10-day and what would be a 50-day tech. 

Your combat loadout is one dimensional and is both expensive and weak in terms of vision(no camo and poor NV). You have what is effectively only heavy infantry with no scouts and no support. Like trying to play Starcraft II with only zealots. Diversify and specialize the gals.

I think you can only really start doing it once you hit bigger capacity crafts and better specialized techs.  If you can only bring 6-8 gals, you probably want 8 heavy hitters.   Once you are up to 12 or so, diversifying is a lot more viable.

Also you are basically not utilizing training buildings. Having a base mostly dedicated to training to manufacture quality reserve gals is pretty crucial. I usually combine it with a triple hanger setup to give the reserve more to do then train, they can fly the fighters.

Yeah, training buildings are quite important.    I really wished something like them were in vanilla.

[legionof1]

Diversifying research is fine but something like 4-5 projects at a time with 3-4 brainers each keeps long projects from taking forever while still completing small projects at a decent clip. 1 each will net lots of small projects but leaves the long projects often important for advancement through the major stages languishing for months. The campaign in question being crippled from the air game is case in point. He is running more brainers then i have ever run and somehow manged to unintentionally cripple himself.

Medical supplies do indeed make bank but without a refinery your cutting profits unnecessarily. Particularly if your having cashflow issues, products that dont require purchased components are quite useful.

Snip
I think you can only really start doing it once you hit bigger capacity crafts and better specialized techs.  If you can only bring 6-8 gals, you probably want 8 heavy hitters.   Once you are up to 12 or so, diversifying is a lot more viable.
Snip

But he doesn't really even have heavy hitters just decently armored riflemen ie heavy infantry. Effectively the only tactic hes has allowed himself is trading hp.  While that works against lower quality opponents, hes asking for a squad wipe against stronger foes. Even with a small squad, devoting a gal to a scout or heavy weapon broadens what he can handle. Also his pure defender armor choice mandates high quality gals that he can't readily supply or replace.
   

[KiriKaneko]

Diversifying research is fine but something like 4-5 projects at a time with 3-4 brainers each keeps long projects from taking forever while still completing small projects at a decent clip. 1 each will net lots of small projects but leaves the long projects often important for advancement through the major stages languishing for months. The campaign in question being crippled from the air game is case in point. He is running more brainers then i have ever run and somehow manged to unintentionally cripple himself.

I ran out of research at one point and dropped down to 6 brainers. I then managed to find various new tech, and I suspect some of them were gateway tech that I was missing that unlocks new levels of tech. Eventually I was getting more projects available than I had brainers, after about 1 year so I got the other 12 back. I think what's happened is I've unlocked about 5 research branches that all needed 1 more tech each to unlock, so suddenly I'm being flooded with tech. I'm being held back by tech, but there's no pressure from the AI so, like playing Mount and Blade I feel I can take my time to prepare for the next phase of the game. I don't have all of my production facilities or my training facility yet, I haven't found any power armour parts for better armour either, so I don't feel desperate to finish off this tech yet.

Medical supplies do indeed make bank but without a refinery your cutting profits unnecessarily.

I also need a refinery to manufacture certain equipment so I will definetly get one in each of my bases. I've got hyperwave decoder researching so when it's finished I'll build one in each base, and when they finish construction I'll delete the overcharged radars and build a refinery in that slot for each base. Is making chemicals better use of runt hours than purchasing the chemicals and making more med supplies?

But she doesn't really even have heavy hitters just decently armored riflemen ie heavy infantry. Effectively the only tactic she has allowed herself is trading hp.  While that works against lower quality opponents, shes asking for a squad wipe against stronger foes. Even with a small squad, devoting a gal to a scout or heavy weapon broadens what he can handle. Also her pure defender armor choice mandates high quality gals that she can't readily supply or replace.
   

Right now I'm still raiding v small and small craft. The only thing that can hurt me reliably is armour piercing shotgun, and a full clip of 6 shots has never successfully downed one of my girls with face shots. They do sometimes take wounds from peripheral shots from other weapons, but I've discovered the AI targets the closest soldier so I split my team and head in all directions to ensure no one gets shot in the back. Even on the odd occasion they do they rarely suffer greatly.

They can also be harmed my melee. Now when I do blood rituals I check if there are many werewolves near the craft. If there are I try to kill them and if some are still alive at the end of my turn I just evac, not worth the heartache. I stopped using mortars because they occasionally blow up in my face, and I only needed them to deal with carapace armour and progroms. I've discovered laser rifles and frag grenade work just as well, especially since I can get 100% accuracy with these rifles at >30 tiles, they have an autofire that can be effective at point blank, they have a decent clip size, they don't weight too terribly much (80 str girls can then carry 4 grenades each), and every other weapon available to me has some kind of drawback. Heavy shotguns suffer at very long range fights and cant effectively hurt armoured enemies, heavy slugthrowers are heavy as hell, low in ammo, not as accurate and this also means I cant carry as many grenades, mortars are rarely fatal against tough enemies like carapace unless it's a direct hit, they backfire, they hit the trees, cant fire into buildings unless I break the roof, require the soldier to be out in the open (cyberdisk loves that), kick up a cloud of smoke for enemies to hide in, can only be fired every other turn

For progroms I've found that dashing (ctrl + click) out of the pachy, taking an aimed shot and then dashing back inside allows the full team to fire without being shot at on the enemy turn. That means I have timed to get flares out, I wont be hit with grenades or rockets from offscreen, I wont be instagibbed by plasma/gauss fire, I only need to worry about reaction fire. Camo, smoke and darkness are just too unreliable, even for factions who cant see through it, they often have at least one who can see through it. That humanist rocketeer might not be able to see through smoke but if his buddy can then I can just eat wound recovery time. Armour will definetly save me even if I'm spotted and hit with something less than a plasma shot or powerful melee creature, and I can always counts on my laser rifle shots to hit at 80 aim or higher. I see there are weapons with better aim damage scaling that will probably be better for the super elites I end up with that have 100+ aim, but I just cant see a weapon worth using over eurosyndicate las rifle when I consider that it's versatile and useful in nearly every situation, accurate as hell, hits fairly hard and most of the tough enemies I face have no laser resistance, plus it lets me have a ton of grenades for when I want to avoid reaction fire and pile a lot of damage on one target

When I get a new recruit I buy about 10 hands, then check which ones have >60 reactions and decent in TU/Str then ditch the rest. That way it won't take me very long to train up their TU/Str to max and energy tends to raise fast anyway. After that if they have low aim/melee I let the dojo handle it, and the new training facility will let me get my idle elites up to high combat levels quickly. Because all my soldiers end up with 80-100 reactions they almost never take reaction fire from the current enemies, and if they keep surviving their reactions will get even better. It's one of the things that makes my pachyderm camping on progroms/mediums so effective, it would suck if a rocket or tank shell was shot right into the pachy (as has happened before), but by making use of dash to preserve TU and rotating the soldier in the pachy we can all take an aimed shot without taking retal fire and all be back inside the pachy when the turn ends. It feels cheesy, but so does getting hit through smoke and darkness by rockets from offscreen so I take what works XD

I'll probably have to change up my tactics when I'm up against stronger enemies, but I hope that by then I have some camo that also has decent defense so my soldiers dont die instantly to the first enemy that can see them through it

[legionof1]

snip
I also need a refinery to manufacture certain equipment so I will definetly get one in each of my bases. I've got hyperwave decoder researching so when it's finished I'll build one in each base, and when they finish construction I'll delete the overcharged radars and build a refinery in that slot for each base. Is making chemicals better use of runt hours than purchasing the chemicals and making more med supplies?
snip

More runt hours overall but better profit margin. Also you can arrange it so you can just setup the production of chems to balance the medical production requirement and set the two jobs to infinite and the medical supplies to auto sell and never touch it again.


As far as combat goes i guess its working for you so i am not gonna keep pushing it.  Your so far from what i consider a normal game state for year 2 i guess you had to adapt something. Though you might want to think about packing some heavy eurosyndicate lasers for pogroms. The rifles are somewhat anemic against terror units large hp pools. Even with there armor pen "bonus" lasers have issues with really beefy targets due to generally lower damage.

[KiriKaneko]

Yes, the Spartans had some kind of weird hover tanks that dont fly and they took 2 rounds of laser fire each to down. Grenades seemed worthless. I considered the heavy laser rifles, but their aim is worse, theyre heavier and the TU cost is higher. I'm concerned I wont be able to use my pachyderm sprinting tactic to have everyone step out and fire if I use the heavy version. There are weapons with higher damage available for the enemies who are that tough, and I'm currently trying to get some chem weapons specifically to combat them, though I'm concerned the mechtoids and vehicles might be immune since they're not living beings. Also trying to get some fire based weapons, the incendiary grenades can set ground units on fire, and if I can get a heavy flamer I can use it to set flying units on fire, but I'd like something that hits harder than that. Gonna see about chem and incendiary mortar but that takes some setup, and I think I'd need some good camo and armour for my mortar unit to reduce the chances of it being spotted but keep it from dying outright if it does. It'd be nice if there was some item that raises unconsciousness so I could nearly knock out my mortar, then if they get shot they will instantly pass out and not get shot more

I never played previous versions of this game and I'm very inexperienced. It took me til halfway through the second year to really get any interceptions going and I dont know the tech tree at all which is probably why it's taking me this long. I also started out trying to play the game like UFO defense/TFTD and later started playing it like mount and blade when I realised that once I was reliably getting a lot of points there was no actual time pressure aside from the threat of base assaults by an unstoppable faction like star gods or mercenaries. If I went back and restarted now I'd probably progress a lot faster, but it's not like there's any time pressure so I dont think it matters that much

I'm very interested in this autosell. Can you explain how to do it please? I'd love to set up an infinite loop of production and selling so I don't need to actively manage it. That would also let me downgrade my large vaults to 2 armoured vaults, and 1 more barracks and workshop per production facility

[legionof1]

There is a large toggle button marked sell in the production job screen above the unit to be made. Enabling it will automatically sell items as they are produced. Take care with multiple output products like robbery/corpse butchery as it will sell ALL outputs.

Chem has nothing to do with organic foes. Chem is not poison but more acids and caustics. Chem, particularly chem shotguns, are the best armor strippers in the mod. Chem does some armor damage irregardless of penetration unlike most weapons which do a fraction of penetrating damage. Chem has that too but has additional stripping of usually 20% of base after resist. 

As far as the mortar goes its pretty easy to setup behind your craft towards the map edge, to stay out of vision, after the first few turns. Arcing fire means you do not need line of sight. It exceptionally rare that a enemy makes a beeline around your craft. The AI is a brutally simple set of if X than Y conditions that generally results in a unit puttering around the general area of there spawn until they make contact. Once a portion of the map is cleared 99% of the time it will stay that way.

[KiriKaneko]

The mortar has a tendency to hit my pachy wings unless I move the mortar user quite far back. The cyberdisk killed a mortar user who was behind the pachy by flying up high. Because I have to put my mortar quite far back to not hit the pachy, any enemy who approached the pachy at an angle and has a clear line of sight might see the mortar user. Best way I have found to deploy a mortar is to crouch on a roof somewhere near the pachy and have someone shoot out the staircase, but it's not always possible, and flying enemies won't be obstructed by that

[legionof1]

True if you are faceing disks, or mercs but not much actually flies.