Help me git gud, question thread

[legionof1]

You have hit on kinda the point of why minis are where they are. Supply ships are one of the more lucrative ships in terms of potential profit. And if you leave the base active, hey look free revenue stream. Mini nukes keep risk vs reward active regardless of player tech.

[KiriKaneko]

Does anyone know where I can get fusion batteries or if I can make them? I just finish school graduation and I have like 30 aircraft unlocked that I cant build

[ohartenstein23]

The fusion batteries are the clips for the fusion torch, check the store.  You should be able to buy them once you have the requisite research to unlock all those ships.

[KiriKaneko]

Thankyou

[KiriKaneko]

I'm seeing a lot of very fast battleships, and the only things capable of catching them are the sabre, brave whaler and nightmare. Seems like the nightmare has the best combination of speed, power and toughness for these 4500 speed destroyers. I have a Kraken but it's not capable of actually catching anything

[ohartenstein23]

I've used a Kraken to tank for just long enough to take out a battleship, the key is getting a lot of fast backup firepower for those few precious seconds the Kraken is taking the shots.  The other part is flying the right way - you can't just target the Kraken directly on the battleship as soon as you see it, you have to use your hyperwave decoders to figure out where it's heading, and have your fleet already there to greet it for the short time it slows down enough for you to reach it.

[KiriKaneko]

Thankyou, I'll try that. I wonder if a crab would be better for tanking though. If I give it the ablative armor and big shield generator I'd imagine it could last even longer, with 3 nightmares/sabers for dps I'd think I could do better with that

[ivandogovich]

(sorry about the tardiness with this reply.  My account got borked with my avatar image and the new https settings. anyway. better late than never)

Supply ships have a timer on them (in the mission description it should warn about this) that will set off an explosive.  You may have faced the blast kicked off by the timer. The mission was designed for you to face tough, well armed foes (baby nukes, gauss, and energy weapons) with a limit to how much camping you can do.  In fact, this mission was designed to make camping impossible. 

In case you missed it, Dioxine's basic design philosophy is to make aggressive, hard hitting offensive play rewarding.  Yep, you get some early ships with doors to protect your small crews and weak girls, but as soon as they are tough and dangerous, you are supposed to upgrade to bigger more dangerous ships.  Yep the Menace class has wide open back doors (along with Thunderhorse and others).  But it also has a huge drop bay under it, and a nice roof port.  The idea is that you kill everyone you can see from the ramp, before they can kill you.  Drop down through the hatch and blast others in sight.  Set a sniper and a mortar gal in the last positions in your line up, and they spawn in the sniper's perches.  Use a parrot to scout enemies in the front of the ship, and blast 'em with a mortar on the first round.  By massacring enemies in the first couple turns you can cause panic spirals that can end the mission even quicker.  If the opposition is just too tough, abort and live to fight another day (Mercs with Tanks, Power Armor with Mininukes staring into your crew, etc).

Having said all of that, I understand what a philosophical shift this is for a defensive player.  I faced the exact same conundrum when I first started playing PirateZ.  All my previous experience had taught me to be cautious, with the most successful tactics being scout and snipe.  Smoke is your friend. Always shoot the enemy from beyond their line of site, etc.   But yeah, this tactical experience is a completely different design.

I do encourage you to upgrade your assault ship.  I like the Thunderhorse with a Sentry Gun for great all around firepower and assault opportunities.  Put heavy armor gals in front.  Put as much lethal power in the hands of your gals as possible.  Bring some newbies along for scouting.  Try hammering the enemy as hard as you can and see what kind of fun you can have.

[ohartenstein23]

Thankyou, I'll try that. I wonder if a crab would be better for tanking though. If I give it the ablative armor and big shield generator I'd imagine it could last even longer, with 3 nightmares/sabers for dps I'd think I could do better with that

Only thing the Crab has going for it in terms of tanking is the speed and versatility of the light weapons slot, which isn't much.  Give the Kraken the big shield generator and the armor or a shield capacitor, plus it can hold a gun for some extra damage.  If you have enough damage though, your Crab only needs to survive a few shots, so better pack those Sabres with the best you've got.

[KiriKaneko]

Supply ships have a timer on them (in the mission description it should warn about this) that will set off an explosive.  ... this mission was designed to make camping impossible. 

Well that explains it then. I guess I can go back to doing these if I want to, provided the supply ship isnt too close to my pachy

In case you missed it, Dioxine's basic design philosophy is to make aggressive, hard hitting offensive play rewarding.  ... The idea is that you kill everyone you can see from the ramp, before they can kill you.....By massacring enemies in the first couple turns you can cause panic spirals that can end the mission even quicker. 

This strikes me as odd, because my experience is the exact opposite. Enemies have high reactions and many instant death weapons (effectively) such as gauss, chem, high explosives early on, and can often take one hell of a beating. They sometimes panic but not often even if I wipe out most in the first rounds, and that isn't reliable. Later on the power armor is incredibly expensive to make, and even advanced power armour can be OHKO by a tank cannon, a plasma shot that rolls high, a mini nuke, a plasma rocket, and buying marsec bodyguards means these things are effectively 20mil a suit until you're strong enough to farm more power armour parts. Even if you can, it's no good if you're losing a suit for every 5 power armor enemies you kill, you'll still run out of the armour. They can also typically see in the dark or through smoke, so it seems the game is encouraging me to play it safe by camping the pachy or behind buildings, trying to inflict wounds to make the enemies bleed out, trying not to aggro the strong factions and spending a lot of time running around in power armour wielding sticks and chasing after civilians wielding peashooters for cash and exp

With all the high reactions enemies with OHKO weapons, it seems like the game was made to enforce strict caution and patience, and to punish the player for ever stepping out into the open. If I wanted to make a game that forced the player to be patient and careful, but not just reduce all tactics down to smoke camping tactics I'd do it like this, but make it so the slidy doors on the craft cant be shut so turn 2 the player has to dash for the nearest building that can conceal them and then play it safe, and would otherwise make the enemies exactly as lethal as they are in this mod to punish aggressive play

[KiriKaneko]

Ok so I need some advice

I've been getting base assaulted about 3 times every month. I lost 1 person to a mercenary plasma rocket on a progrom (I stepped out of the deliverator to patch up a wounded merc after I killed like 20 of them, big mistake, she got insta killed by the last merc alive ofc), and 2 more were wounded by a tank on a humanist progrom. I need some time to replace my losses and heal wounds. I also need time to finish building my new interceptor fleet to stop those crackdowns from landing, and I'm afraid they might wipe out one of my expensive side bases with these 3 crackdowns a month (luckily theyve been my main base and they had some atrocious aim on those assaults)

So I'm wondering if this strategy will work, or if the increase in enemy aggression is hard coded for the time of the game I'm at and I can't change it:

I'd like to just ignore faction ships and only shoot civvie ships. I'll keep doing progroms and only shoot at a crackdown ship if it comes too close to one of my bases. What I'm hoping is that the heat will die off and the aliens will stop pestering me so much. I'll get enough points and exp from the civvie ships and progroms, if I can spend a few months doing this I can complete my fleet and increase my team size to about 30 people, hopefully buy enough advanced armor suits for all of them that I can upgrade to the Triton and have a full team with me, maybe unlock gauss weapons so I can upgrade from 32mm rifles and start carrying grenades again. After that I can start doing bases and big ships, and shoot down any crackdown ships

However, if the aliens are gonna send this many crackdown ships no matter what, then I'd rather have a team of 10 people in each base and rely on increase in protection payments to make up for the increase in wages

Can I just lay low and let the heat die down while I continue my research, training and fleet building, or should I just continue and hope they dont wipe out too many bases?

[ivandogovich]

Not sure where you are in your campaign but after year two, monthly crackdowns begin.  They don't always find your base and assault it, so its not a guaranteed base defense every wave, but a new wave will spawn with orders to search various corners of the globe every month.  You can target ships on the crackdown waves with no backlash.  This means it won't spawn a new revenge wave looking for your base.  You can only successfully prevent a crackdown by killing the last ship in the mission that is on its way to go after your base.  These are usually extremely fast, so its very hard to target successfully.  Shooting down other ships in the wave may delay others so the wave will take a little longer than if you left them alone.

Otherwise, you can reduce the heat by not targeting other missions.  Leave faction vessels alone and their "revenge" crackdowns won't spawn. 

So yes, you should be able to get some sort of a breather.

[legionof1]

To my mind it's about measured aggression. Knowing when and what is a risk worth taking. But that sort of thing comes from experience.

Also something to keep in mind is that X-com mods and titles have a mindset of expendable units. We fully expect to lose soldiers by the dozens. Playing with a mindset of zero loses is unreasonable. The gals have more in common with RTS units then RPG heroes. You trade them as efficiently as you can but they are mere tools to a goal. Sacrifices are needed.   

[KiriKaneko]

Thanks, that's what I was hoping for. I hope the monthly waves only target my main base. I'm actually 3 years and 2 months into the game and this only just started to happen. Nightmares aren't fast enough to target breakers but they can catch cruise ships. Problem is they probably cant endure their fire and the kraken definetly cant get them in time, I'll try and get 6 nightmares up and spread them around so I can hopefully get at least 2 on every crackdown ship, and I'll stop targetting the other faction ships for now

[KiriKaneko]

I played UFO defense and TFTD while considering my soldiers to be expendable. I only really tried to keep them alive when I got to psionics, using hover tanks as scouts, and psionics got powerful enough that they were never in danger anymore.

However, in piratez the soldiers suck up vast amounts of cash, it severely limits the soldiers you can have early on, and while my industry is powerful enough to pay tens of millions in wages now, the cost of their power armour is now the main bottleneck, I just cant be throwing away 35M a girl because I'm bored with camping my landing craft. Maybe if I'm prepared to skip months while my cash regenerates before I go back into battle, if there's no real time restriction anymore than there's nothing to stop me waiting years for billions to accumulate

However, there's also the restriction of craft size. In UFO defense and TFTD I had much larger groups from the start, and my soldiers were squishy and expendable. In piratez the starting craft is limited to 6, the pachy was limited to 8 and the deliverator isnt much more. I can have a lot more with the Triton which I have finally unlocked. What's more, in the early game my soldiers were rather less squishy than xcom, and much more likely to survive. This meant that although I had a smaller team, they were also far more elite than xcom soldiers which made up the difference, and I got by a lot of the sheer skill of my elite soldiers vs rookies

Now I have a training base it's not really that hard to replace them. I screen for reactions and bravery, everything else can be raises in the dojo, then they just need a few easy missions to get TU up. If there's really no time restriction then losing people isn't that much of a big deal anymore in terms of replacing the actual soldier. But it still takes a while to train them and their wages can get insane. Either I go with a lot of throwaway girls and their wages become obscene, or I go with a smaller number of crack soldiers in obscenely expensive armor.

Or I camp the interceptor XD

I think in the end, it all comes down to cost, if I dont have elite soldiers or have well equipped soldiers then I will definetly lose. If I go with poorly equipped elite soldiers then I'll run out unless I'm constantly train a lot of them which is expensive in wages, and if I go with a small number of well equipped troops then the gear costs are expensive. Only choice is to play it safe and either camp the starting craft, or get into full concealment and play peek a boo from there. However, it could be that the enemies I'm facing right now are too strong for the gear I have. Could be I aren't supposed to be facing them without gauss/plasma weapons and the top power armour and that I'm lagging behind or I've attracted too much attention already