Ritual of Rebirth: A guide to the New Post-Apocalyptic Person

[Torchwood]

Ritual of Rebirth: A guide to the New Post-Apocalyptic Person
    
Version M4 brought an exciting new feature to X-Piratez: The Peasant Revolution. When faced with the choice between embracing gal supremacy or male touch, you can now take a third option focusing which is centered around the common peasant. Can the most humble class of soldiers prevail against the challenges of post-apocalyptic earth? To help you survive, this path offers some extremely desirable techs early on. One of them is the wondersome ritual of rebirth, a human analogue for the gal shakedown ceremony. It costs nothing except for three bottles of moonshine and a five day leave for the reborn soldier, making it easy to apply in large qunatities.

Upon getting reborn, the soldier loses:
25% of their current TU, Stamina, Health, Reactions and Strength
50% of their current Firing, Throwing, Melee, Freshness and VooDoo Power

And gains:
10-20 TU
10-30 Stamina
5-20 Health
5-20 Reactions
15-40 Firing
15-30 Throwing
5-15 Strength
15-40 VooDoo Power
15-40 Melee
15-35 Freshness

In addition to base stat changes, the Revolutionary award itself also gives a stat boost: +5 TU, +5 Reactions, +10 Bravery, -10 Freshness. Like all condemnation-based changes, this does not affect stat growth, which means those stats can be overcapped. Quite helpful, since TUs and Reactions are the two categories where human soldiers are far behind Uber gals, and the extra bravery helps with keeping morale up in long missions, operate weapons that scale with bravery, perhaps even become competent drivers - remember that vehicle weapon accuracy is 50% bravery.

So, if we take a freshly recruited peasant, not even looking at her initial stats, how much will she change? Here are the possible ranges to base stat changes, not taking the award bonus into account:

TU: -4 to +7
Stamina: -8 to +15
Health: -5 to +11
Reactions: -6 to +10
Firing: -3 to +25
Throwing: -3 to +15
Strength: +0 to +11
VooDoo Power: *See summary
Melee: -3 to +25
Freshness: -22 to +5

Note that average results are more likely than extreme ones - the max roll on the post-revolutionary change assumes the recruit had a min roll on initial stats and a max roll on transformation gains, and vice versa.
 
Summary: There is little reason to not just immediately rebirth every peasant at the moment of recruitment. The stat changes are biased towards improvement, and if you follow up with militia training you can get an adequate soldier who can shoot straight and set a spear in just a matter of ingame weeks. Only freshness is badly affected, but peasants have plenty to spare.

The sole exception to this rule is VooDoo power. Rebirth tends to average out a soldier's VPWR, which is good for those whose power is low, but high. Check the attached graph for details: It shows the soldier's VPWR, with the pre-rebirth value on the x-axis and the post-rebirth value on the y-axis - the blue line is the lowest result, the red line the highest, the green is the average. Not depicted on the graph is the unfortunate fact raise VPWR above the stat cap, 69 for peasants and damsels, 70 for male soldiers. If you want a peasant psi specialist, consider not rebirthing those whose VPWR is high - given that VooDoo implements are taxing on freshness, you might prefer a higher reservoir to get more mind control attempts out of your psion.

Damsels can also be reborn. Their starting stats are not listed in the 'pedia, so feel free to use this data mined from the rule files as a reference:

TU: 45-60
Stamina: 40-70
Health: 30-35
Bravery: 50-70
Reactions: 40-60
Firing: 30-45
Throwing: 30-40
Strength: 10-15
VooDoo Power: 20-69
Melee: 30-40
Freshness: 40-70

Range of changes when rebirthing a freshly recruited damsel:

TU: -5 to +9
Stamina: -8 to +20
Health: -4 to +13
Reactions: -10 to +10
Firing: -8 to +25
Throwing: -5 to +15
Strength: +1 to +11
VooDoo Power: *See summary
Melee: -5 to +25
Freshness: -20 to +15

Stat caps are the same as a peasant.
Summary:
Mostly the same as peasants, but it's worth noting that you get a chance to improve bad VPWR, which means better odds of getting a damsel who qualifies for magicienne, which makes recruting them more worthwhile if you're on the peasant path.

The revolution is not female-exclusive. Male soldiers can be reborn as well. Here's the change ranges for a male recruit:

TU: -5 to +9
Stamina: -8 to +20
Health: -6 to +12
Reactions: -8 to +11
Firing: -18 to +22
Throwing: -8 to +15
Strength: -5 to +16
VooDoo Power: *See previous
Melee: -15 to +27
Freshness: -35 to +20

Summary: Less useful compared to rebirthing peasants, as it has a nasty habit of deleting present existing skills. Harder to train up due to lack of easy followup trainings. Still, having a few soldiers around who can operate heavy weapons without a levitator is always useful.

That's all there is to it. If you haven't given the peasant revolution path a try, I'd highly recommend it. It's a very fun experience, imagine X-Com Files except you a transport that'll turn car-driving X-Com's agents green with envy, or playing IG in the 40k mod, except you still get to keep a limited Space Marine contingent around

[Iazo]

I will have to make a point to people attempting to minmax Vpow via such training.

1) Peasant revolution lacks the Ravenclaw outfit, so if you're looking for minmaxing peasants, you want to choose GaS anyway, and mass screen for gifted peasants by mass recruiting and dismissing the duds. Even rolling max vpow Damsel who rolls max Vpow rebirth and magicienne only brings you to equal footing to a max Peasant in Ravenclaw. So...don't do this, not worth it.

2) Bugeyes on any path can blow humans out of the water on Vpow anyway.

In short, I'd advise not fretting to much about minmaxing Vpow. It's likely inconsequential at best.

[Ragshak]

Iazo, can you elaborate about Ravenclaw? I dont see any Gals are Superior stuff on "depend on" list

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

[Iazo]

Depends on Batglad and Superslave. That line is exclusive to GaS.

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

Of course, I do not know all gambling outcomes, so it MIGHT be possible to pull a Superslave and a batglad suit from events or gambling or missions. But I have never seen them from either sorce other than making them.

[Torchwood]

Right, VPWR is a fairly niche case. I only mentioned it because magitech items like the ret electrogun and meridian's autogun are very powerful, and having some operator skilled in their use could be helpful.

Having said that, I've played a bit more on the peasant path, I can give you some comparisons to the gal path.

Obviously, gals are at a premium, which means you need to good care of the handful you have. Expect to have a harder time going toe-to-toe with dangerous foes on the battlescape. Take good advantage of hard cover whenever you can get it.

The one stat revolutionary peasants have in abundance, other than freshness, is bravery. However, after getting used to an army of walking armories, weight constraints hit hard. It is not uncommon to find yourself with 110 bravery peasants, thanks to overcapping from revolutionary and various trainings that all add some. Consider putting bravery scaling weapons that aren't too heavy to good use - anything that fires ol' rifle rounds, linux smg, flintlock rifle, silver snake, or any kustom SMGs you can loot from the ninjas.

The rev HQ is a great early game asset, build your starting hideout with room for a 3x3 in mind and try to build it ASAP. This facility cannot be rushed in any way, unlike smaller structures which you could just build over a burrow or corridor, or plantation for 2x2s, and building one into a tiny base takes some prep work since you need at least 250 storage space for all that scrap metal. Still, it provides a lot, and all that living rooms makes it a lot easier to make big production bases for gear and profit.

A lot of production is exactly what you need to build a harvester, not very expensive but a lot of manual labor to get a vehicle that has 20 crew. On top of that, it's got a nice setup, the top floor is basically a fort with murderholes, great for hunting but terrible if enemies can outshoot you. Has doors for days to deploy from all sides.

Hyena riders combo well with this setup, since the harvester has room to spare and you badly need some units that can actually take a hit. If you only have a few gals, make the most out of them. Hunting bows with poison arrows are surprisingly good at captures, until your cavalry gals become too good at archery and start killing soft targets with them.

Contacting the scavs will unlock a semi-hidden feature - bandit fighter planes will start appearing. These guys *are* spotters for retalitions, and just fast enough to kill unarmed harvesters or blowfish. On the bright side, if you have a craft that can down them consistently without taking damage in return, you can get some experience shooting them down, and even salvage the wreck. On the bright side, you can get some positive events as the revolutionary - free supply crates and new recruits, which occasionally include some very high-class peasants like the girl guides or even assault clones.

Things start getting more managable once you can make large quantities of legion armor, which dramatically increases survivability of a human soldier. You can occasionally get a few durasuits from revolutionaries joining you, and buy more if you luck into postrapture early. They won't make you bulletproof. Failing that, runt jumpsuits save lives - that damage resistance isn't much, but it's all the difference between casualty and fatality. An honorable mention to the Theban aqua suit, which is helpful anywhere *but* conventional gunfights. It is, however, excellent in hazard situations - anything involving zombies, deep ones, ghoultown or undersea missions. Go ahead and make them standard issue for garrison peasants once you enter the midgame proper and can just buy more, their shields won't take more than one plasma bolt, but that's a vast improvement over instant vaporization.

As usual, RPGs are your friend. The sooner you can contact Krazy Hanna, the better. The weapon is light enough to  be carried by a well-trained peasant and can delete both armored threats and clusters of enemies. Mercy is the privilege of the strong, if danger threatens your peasants, don't hesitate to blow danger up.

Whereas gals and lokks excel at night missions, a peasant-centric earlygame struggles with them. Not only is your base NV only 9, the harvester's interior has a lot of lights. Try to go for daytime missions as much as possible.

However, fighting the ninjas is going to be a nightmare - their weapons are rated to put holes in tac armor, needless to say an unarmored peasant does not survive long against their firepower. Getting your hands on armored cars, or even better, tanks, but against ninjas you should stick to hit-and-run tactics, as their EMP grenades can oneshot a tank.

On the strategic side, I should mention the human-centric mission unlocks - City raids prohibit gals barring a few hard to get outfits, but a platoon of trained revolutionaries can handle it with just their combat fatigues. Organ grinder is doable with some specialized outfits like cleanser or aqua suit. And zombie bait is a good way to practice firing accuracy, it trains fast when you shotgun meaty targets.

All in all, it's quite the challenge, but it is endlessly exciting, as you will be punished for any misplays, you can't walk around like you own the place the same way gals do, nor carry massive guns or make use of heavy battleaxes and maces when your soldiers are capped at 45 strength, but with good tactics, you can still win. Perhaps even without butchery.