Cydonia or Bust! Kiri's question thread. Game complete!

[KiriKaneko]

Now that you mention it I captured a humanist instructor during a pogrom. We locked him in one of the elevator rooms with one grenade launcher girl blocking the lift and wounded girl blocking the door. We carried him into the room and woke him up so that he wouldnt die from system shock since I really wanted that guy. Anyway halfway through the mission I noticed he was gone from the room. We cleared the rest of the map and never saw him. I had my grenadier deliberately looking away from him and my wounded girl too so he wouldnt waste time moving during enemy turn but it seems as if wires came down from the ceiling and dragged him into the hull to be devoured while our backs were turned >.>

[KiriKaneko]

Damn, it's sep year 2 and the crackdowns have started. They targetted my first medical supply base and wiped it out, I have another one being constructed but that's a large portion of all the money I have made this game gone and it never even got chance to pay me back. If I'm about to start losing a base every month now I might have to restart

The worst loss was the surgery units. It takes 3 to make a surgery room now, and I haven't had any scientific experiments missions for half a year I think they might have permanently stopped. Will I never get any more surgery units now?

[JustTheDude/CABSHEP]

Did you get him as loot? Sometimes weapon sprite is showed instead of body if they are on the same square. I don't think waking up stuned foes is good idea. Handles and stun buttons don't do much overstun to kill victim so stuned in frist round will remain alive for more than 20 turns. If you want to be sure, use manacles. Especially, when trying capture ghouls or other regenerative enemies. During my playthroughs I never had problems with dying stuned targets.

Surgery rooms can be found in alien bases and some bigger ships. Mayby your base building design is bad, if you have that much of a problem defending them. Besides army of newbies there should always be veteran with weapon that could easily kill power armor foe. Loader suit is avialible early, it have good armor, and gal don't need to be strong to carry big weapon.

[KiriKaneko]

There was no one at the base so it was taken without a fight. The more troops you have the more wages you must pay them, plus they need equipment. Unless I have my med supply bases setup I can't afford the wages since the more troops you have the more exhorbitant their weekly wages become due to the way ranks work in this game. The idea was to just put a hideout shroud down and avoid making too much aggro, only shootdown ships if they have something I need and try to wait til they are far away from my base before I shoot them down. It was a deep one crackdown which is strange because I haven't seen any deep ones in this game so far and definetly didnt shoot any of their ships.

I can't pick up surgery units right? Alien bases are well beyond me and the aliens still haven't built any. I hope the ships that carry surgery units aren't the v large ones full of tanks, power armor, chrysalids, cyberdisks, psionics etc

Man, it's like 3 crackdowns a month, I have a feeling I'm supposed to have top tier ships and be preparing for the final battle by now, maybe I took too long and should've done more of the missions, rushed the medical supplies tech, gotten my production bases and built a research base

[greattuna]

Loader suit is avialible early, it have good armor, and gal don't need to be strong to carry big weapon.

While I agree that loader suit is a good suit (even more, it's the best one for slave soldiers!), it doesn't give very good protection versus plasma. Nothing gives actually, besides some late-game armor, bio suit and maybe guardian suit. Also, loader requires power armor parts, which are in short supply.

18 months before auto-crackdowns is a pretty tight time limit, but you should've expected that when you picked highest difficulty possible. Most factions can take a shot at your bases. Each month a random continent\region will get picked as their target, and they can miss the base, but you should have some forces at all bases no matter what. Train your troops, give them plasma-resistant armor, buy\ship\make damaging close-range weapons, melee weapons (ax!) and explosives, bolster your forces with ancillaries, and keep your interceptor fleet on stand-by to shoot down weaker ships of searching party.

I think you may have an alien base already, because by that point I had two bases. Fly a pigeon to search 'em out maybe? Though you won't be able to really take a base on yet, especially if it's manned by one of the tougher factions. Some ships do contain a surgery unit, but IIRC they're mostly located on upper end of the spectrum.

[KiriKaneko]

I didnt think auto crackdowns would be at 18 months, I was expecting it to be more like 3 years in or something. My plan was to garrison my manufacturing bases with troops from the training base, I was going to build the workshop bases first, use the money to buy the training base, then ship the new troops to those bases and use the money to buy good gear for them. There were people on some topics saying it's ok to skip missions so I figured that time wasn't THAT short and I would be ok for a while

I'm still at hunter killer sadly. I don't know of any armor that's strong vs plasma and since it's base damage is very high I would need something with both high armor and high plasma resistance I think. I have about 8 well trained troops left and another 10 training in the 2 dojos I have in my main base. I do have hundreds of slaves but I heard they're really bad as fighters. Basically I've been in the middle of building my business empire, discovered that surgery rooms require surgery units that I can't buy now, and then lost one of my only 2 manufacturing bases with the crackdowns having already begun. I have a hunter-killer but there's very little it can actually shoot down. Sway local govt missions started this month but I managed to finish family ties so at the very least they can't kick the govts out from under me, but it seems like I'm rapidly heading for a situation where either all my bases except my main base will be taken out and I'll be crippled for income permanently, or my main base will be taken out if my 8 defender armor elites and 8 halfway trained soldiers armed with heavy shotguns, axes, recoilless rifles and advanced GL can't stop them

[Ethereal_Medic]

Dealing with base defences is a matter of equipment, moral and base layout:
Have a single chokepoint to squeeze your foes through. Have your barracks and vaults close to the chokepoint.
Give everyone a melee weapon and explosives.
Use flamethrowers and firebombs to break morale.
Get panzerfausts (Panzerfäuste) to deal with HWPs and discs. While small blast radius it certainly comes cheap, is instantly consumed and does enough damage to be relevant.
In case you know what faction attacks, brace yourself with the most efficient weaponry to deal with them.

Also the new corridor is able to choke the sewer path.

[greattuna]

3 years would made things too easy. I'm at 3rd year right now and only month away from unlocking gauss weapons, days away from getting savior suits, already have bio suit, guardian armor, tanks, whole 1 (one) syn, variety of laser weapons, simple hellerium explosives, 4 bases, no problem with money (even if I run out, I can just sell some of my spare parts, which worth millions), etc. etc.

Skipping some missions is ok, but you shouldn't slack off too much when you just start, or you'll be in a pickle. Even as you start, you need to gather as much as you can, so you could expand as fast as possible, and on (captain) jack sparrow, you can't afford to take your time.
Slaves are bad as fighters, but they're cheap, and bad fighters > no fighters. Just give them something like military shotguns and panzerfausts, and pray they won't hit each other.

16 gals is really not a lot people, I think I had more at year 1, since somebody had to replace the wounded. Maybe you should consider expanding your forces. And why are you still using heavy shotguns? They can't penetrate armor at all.

[KiriKaneko]

Well I don't see many armoured enemies. Shotguns can handle ratmen, researchers, GOs, spartans, humanists etc in 1-2 shots with even low aim, and are accurate at halfway across the map with high aim. The only enemies I can't really take out with them are osiron security, marsec operatves, guild security, marsec wolfmen/pigmen, etc but I do 90% of my killing with GLs

Usually I have 2 GL people in the lifts and 4 shotgunners at the doors. The shotgunners open the doors and shot at anything low armoured, killing quite a few. The GLers go up the lifts, fire grenades at anything while prioritising heavy armour and dangerous weapons then go back down the elevator. This ensures that the only fire the enemy gets is the odd reaction fire and with our armour we're usually ok. If I'm afraid they might hit hard such as with heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles, rocket launchers, laser guns or cellatids then I spot the enemy and fire a grenade over our ship control room, and stay aware of how is faced towards us and away from us so I know who can possibly reaction shot, especially if I miss or fail to kill

If the enemy is refusing to step into range then I swap one of my grenadiers into a mortar and start shelling where I think they are til they come out or I get them, when they're down to 2 left I get bug hunt mode and can just shell where the minimap tells me they are until I get them. While I go for 100% captures on civvie ships or easy maps like church, warehouse wars, scientific experiments etc, the other maps I usually turn into a smoking heap of rubble, you don't even want to know what the pogrom maps look like when I'm finished with them!

Anyway I picked Superhuman because I did UFO defense on superhuman ironman and I didnt think it was very hard past the first 2 months. I did the last build of piratez on 3rd difficulty up to when I was making the conqueror and grinding mercs for synthmuscle parts. It really wasn't that hard but I didn't get half as many crackdowns, it took much longer for the crackdowns to begin, and I didnt need surgery units to make medical supplies so it was simple enough to replace lost bases

[legionof1]

Piratez IMO isn't well tuned for max difficulty. The current early game is so regimented that any advantage you might garner from additional drops/captures is largely useless. All the tech gateing basically prevents any capitalization on big mission successes unlike older versions. All you get is a punishing start with extra inevitable casualties that is very difficult to offset since training takes so much time and resources to setup.

I personally play with scaling difficulty. I start on 3 and edit my save to increase difficulty by one step after certain major gate techs.   

[KateMicucci]

Dealing with base defences is a matter of equipment, moral and base layout:
Have a single chokepoint to squeeze your foes through. Have your barracks and vaults close to the chokepoint.
Give everyone a melee weapon and explosives.
Use flamethrowers and firebombs to break morale.
Get panzerfausts (Panzerfäuste) to deal with HWPs and discs. While small blast radius it certainly comes cheap, is instantly consumed and does enough damage to be relevant.
In case you know what faction attacks, brace yourself with the most efficient weaponry to deal with them.

Also the new corridor is able to choke the sewer path.

I'm not so sure that a choke is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Enemies love to hang around the hangars without advancing into your base so much that you end up having to clear them out, and deal with subrifle reaction fire.

[legionof1]

It is a mixed bag strategy certainly on max difficulty since it hinges on wipeing out the majority of foes in the elevator vicinity leaving the remainder demoralized and weak. The extra foes on max tend to limit the impact.

Of course alternative strats haven't really been explored much since this has been the gold standard for base defense since original vanilla. Maybe time to reexamine the wheel?

[KiriKaneko]

Well there's not really enough space to squander imo. Main base I am thinking of deleting some building to build a large barracks so I can delete 1 more barracks for the CPU core which I will eventually need, but then I need to get a study room from somewhere and might have to delete a workshop or a dojo, which would be awful since a training base certainly isn't on the horizon and my main base is one of the few which can currently produce medical supplies

I gave it some thought and the game might still be salvageable. If I can make a push for nightmare and produce one then I can shoot down the majority of crackdown ships. If I build 4 shrouds in my medical base, and I transfer all my troops and equipment to any base that has crackdown ships appearing nearby then even if a crackdown occurs my A team will be there waiting for them.

Only question is where I am going to get surgery units from to replace my lost base and finish my other manufacturing bases. I might need to build something else that doesn't require such rare materials. Any idea what else is profitable? X-Grog seems to barely pay for the maintenance of each base and runts, and with a tiny profit on top of that, I can't run a decent sized army off of that profit or replace any bases that I do lose

Did some digging. Barracuda isn't far off, has higher damage soaking, is faster and has an additional light weapon. It loses missiles but missiles are currently too expensive. If I push for that and make two of them they can probably put out enough damage to drop the smaller enemy craft. Only 1 pilot each required so my hunter-killer pilots can handle them. I'll be pushing for nightmare when I finally get powered armor parts. Any ideas on what is good to handle the bigger crafts? I was thinking of using the kraken or crab for tanking. Kraken is twice as tough and crab is 50% faster and more likely to actually reach the battle. I'm not sure what to use as my primary damage dealer tho since I don't think light weapons will do the damage and missiles are too few, perhaps a heavy weapon focused ship? The dragon has 4 HW slots but is a long way off, the Kraken is very close with 1 less HW slot and very tough so able to do some tanking.

[Ethereal_Medic]

X-Grog seems to barely pay for the maintenance of each base and runts, and with a tiny profit on top of that, I can't run a decent sized army off of that profit or replace any bases that I do lose

Try selling chemicals (x25). More profit and requires only an extractor and a refinery.
100 runts as an example for profit calculation:
Chemicals: 3.1M / month
X-Grog: 1.6M / month

Chemicals net twice the profit.
Bases without alcohol production can mass produce Bikinis.
Bikini: 0.9M / month

Those are my strats that need no maintaince of supplies to look at since the projects cost no materials to produce. Invest money to get more money.

The baracuda is a lovely ship. Try get a light shield generator for each of your ships to reduce maintance time and increase durability.
Arm it with 3 lascannons. Mid-late game ships should be easy dealt with using 3-4 baracudas depending on the size and class of the ship.

Once money is easy to stack and you've the 2nd/best fighter of the game, build as many nightmare/sabre in the key locations of the globe to react to any enemy encounter.
Arm them with 2x lascannons or 1x lascannon and 1x tesla coil as finishers and use the "Medusa Rocket" to blast the shippings out of the skies.
The medusa launcher and rockets can only be gained from the black market and are not too expensive to be hooked onto the whole fleet.
Using mass Sabres and Nightmares can deal with every ship in the game except the "Silver Towers". But this vessel looks very optional to fight.
Yes it has the SG Leader on board but there're other ways to get one.

[KiriKaneko]

Thankyou for the excellent info! I think I will try to get a SG leader from a smuggler ship like last time. I had no idea interceptors could take down large and v large vessels even in groups of 4. I'll make a push for shield generator. If I can get a lot of barracudas with 1 s gen and some 50mm cannons it should allow me to swamp and deal with the small ships at least like fighters I think. All the other L guns are gated, I need power armor parts for school graduation and I'm just not seeing any power armor enemies anywhere. Fortunately a base was finally built (eurasian autonomy left me, I guess family ties doesn't count for sway local gov that started before I finish the research, probably just stops the mission from happening in future). I'll try to get the base supply ships, camp for 20 turns and finish the map, see if I can find any power armor guys among the survivors of the explosion.

I can already make refineries and have quite a few, I'll switch over to chemical production, thanks!