Newbe questions

[incas]

1. Is the mod balanced for all difficulties? Since there are scripted crack downs down the road I have the feeling the slower pace of easier difficulties might be a problem. Perhaps I'm wrong though, the crack downs might be a lot easier.

2. Any way to identify robots before they get the chance to wipe a squad? The civvies they hide in are tougher then others but if there is any other way to identify them I'd like to know it.

[sanyaskillpro]

Scripted crackdowns(from major factions - there are minor that come earlier) come later on easier difficulties. On 3 it's around end of year 2. On 4 it's around 1.5 years. At this point church may be tough, mercs and star gods would be very tough. You can always build hideout shrouds and hope they fail a scan. To help that, Sentry and fighter should be beatable with a good HK(maxed pilots+thrusters+good guns). The big ships might find it anyways. Keeping an empty hangar to simply reinforce the base with your A team is always an option. As long as you don't lose your starting base with a lab its ok, you can afford to lose a few. Lategame full staffed factory base will make more money in 3 months than you made in 2 years.

Middle mouse button to examine. They look a bit off, but to make sure click once more to bring up the bootypedia entry. If it's a tough gal you will open her examination(you need to capture and interrogate at least one of course). If it doesn't open, well...

[incas]

Thx, that was very informative. 

[KZad Bhat]

What advantage does an empty hangar provide?

[legionof1]

If you have an empty hanger you can transfer the craft and all its gals and gear into that hanger. If you know the strike is coming from spotting the scout wave you can just send your best ground team to bolster the defense.

Its not particularly effective overall since there are retaliations missions without scout waves now.

[incas]

If you have an empty hanger you can transfer the craft and all its gals and gear into that hanger. If you know the strike is coming from spotting the scout wave

The scout wave are the flying groups with speed 100?

[ivandogovich]

The scout wave are the flying groups with speed 100?

Sometimes. There are often different types of missions that result in base attacks.  The slow flying or walking swarms are only one of them.

[incas]

All right.

Another thing that is quite annoying. Sometimes chugging beer/moonshine to regenerate energy does nothing at all. Just now a gal drank two times from a beer bottle - nothing. In the next round she drank the last bit and it worked again. Why is that? A bug?

[ohartenstein23]

If you're facing a friend when trying to take a drink, you'll give it to them instead.  If you're standing over a friend or an enemy, they'll get the drink instead.  You'll see exactly who is going to get the energy by hovering your mouse over the item and reading the tooltip just above the battlescape UI at the bottom of the screen.

[legionof1]

Also its easy to confuse which beverages give stun, which give energy,ect, there are alot drinks with alot of effects. Ive messed up which is which alot.

[incas]

Oh, I wasn't aware moonshine and beer were also passable to others. Could have been the cause.

[Shrugger]

I just lost my first campaign because I couldn't generate enough infamy.

Now, I never played any of the old X-Coms before, and I was also told to just relax and play the mod as it comes instead of trying to metagame it. So I did. I attacked landed craft and ran off when they proved to well-defended, tried to stop pogroms (usually failed) and sky ninja/ratmen raids (usually succeeded with no survivors), did as many missions as my permanently wounded gals could handle, boosted my economy by making space and hiring runts and going big on selling Grog. I felt things were going well, given that I regularly defended the Gobbos, took down towers, raided landed ships, did some bounty hunting, made good money, was steadily expanding my bases and crawling through the tech tree.

When, about two years in, the air was red with shipping and I had no armed craft to take down any of them, and my infamy was getting into the negative thousands, it all ended up being over very quickly.

So, I guess attacking shipping is not optional?
And what other ways of earning infamy are there (something something interrogations? Which are interrogations, exactly?)?
Give me all the ways of earning infamy, please!

Also, what is pimpcraft good for?

And is there some guideline as to what to do with prisoners - whom to research, enslave, rob, ransom etc.?

[KZad Bhat]

Check as many of the shipping runs as you can see. If they're civilian or government, they'll be a net infamy loss, so don't bug them unless they have something else you need. Actually attack a few of factions shipments each month, but after a few good missions it shouldn't be as important. Always try to at least make it to start a mission with a landed vessel, even if you know you can't fight it. If you land, start the mission, and abort right on the first turn, even before exiting your vessel, you at least abort the mission and prevent the faction from scoring points, which means less of reduction of your infamy at the end of the month.

Interrogations are generally questioning any prisoner, though later you can interrogate Broken members of certain class/factions. (Guild Engineer, Academy Medic, such as that.) Pimpcraft will allow you to turn certain female prisoners in COURTESANs (hookers) who generate income every month. $20k a month, if I recall correctly.

Generally, research every prisoner until you can't research them again. My preference is to pimp anyone I can, after that enslave. Only if they have something I can really use do I bother to rob them, otherwise I ransom them.

By year two you should already be able to distill Chateau de la Mort, it's very easy to get, with only one or two subjects really only good for Chateau de la Mort. It uses apples, but sells for a hell of a lot more than X-Grog, and you can still use X-Grog as a backup every time you run out of apples. Won't do much for infamy, but it does help with funding, which can help with equipment, which in turns helps with fights.

There also a few special researches to round certain branches of research, such as for each region of the world, or each type of activity. When you get all the researches completed in a category, you'll get something like World Lore: North America (for all the regions on the North American continent) or Activities: Political (for faction missions affecting government influence and such). Each of those is worth 1000 points.

[Rince Wind]

It also sounds as if you were behind on the research. Try to hire more brainers quickly, as soon as you can afford it. I interrogate almost all the prisoners, unless they have something I need, like aqua plastics if those are in short supply. Power armor parts are worth more than the research power armored enemies can give you as well.

Completing interrogations give you infamy and you get infamy for the topic they tell you about. So more brainers give you more money, in a way. Maybe not enough to pay for them but they do boost infamy quite a bit.

I just had a month with very few missions, probably only about 1k infamy, but I still had almost 4k at the end.

[AgentFransis]

After much diggin by ohartenstein23, they spawn on "ninja seeker" ships.

If you don't mind, can you or ohartenstein23 point me to where in the rule files it says that? The rule for the ninja seeker does not list it as a possible drop. Also I started a new game on 99J6b and the mission isn't listed in the possible missions in the save. Shouldn't it be there or will it only appear after two years?

I never looked at the rules or saves before but I'm in year 4 and been playing for a while after the upgrade and never seen a prismatic shield or ninja ship yet. Since it's blocking the forcefields research now I wanted to make sure it's not a bug. For now I took my save back to 99J4.