Author Topic: The Vampire Castle  (Read 4142 times)

Offline BTAxis

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The Vampire Castle
« on: September 19, 2018, 02:47:11 pm »
I'm making this topic as a followup so some discussion in the bug report thread because I don't want to derail that.

I did in fact get another Vampire Castle mission, and although I didn't run into anything near the same issues as before it was still more trouble to finish than it was worth.

I've attached the save for the last part of the mission, dubbed Operation Let's Melee Cheese The Shit Out Of These Zombies Since Melee Is Really Hard To Train And It's Not Like I Can Make Synthsuits Or Anything Because I Never Get Any Mutons It's Just Sectoids Every Single Time Ugh.

(It does use the 30-turn bug hunt mod as well as a custom submod I made, the latter of which just sets the female frequencies to 50. It doesn't affect the mission at all.)

The last time I was here mentioned I couldn't access a large chunk of the map, but this time around that was not the case. I had the dining hall behind the gate that time, not the crypt block that's there now. I could swear that the parallel passage that connects to the other two rear blocks wasn't there, though I'm not ruling out idiocy on my part.

I didn't have to camp anywhere near as much as before because I had flying armor and once you get familiar with the map moving into the castle is not so bad. Nevertheless, I hung way back for the first part of the mission because of that bloody vampire queen. That thing is just way too dangerous to get close to. It can fry your soldiers at range just by thinking at them. So, since it always hovers around near the walls I just sent my tank after it (which it nearly broke anyway) and relied on long range aimed fire. After that, the tank took out any Strixes it could find because those can ruin your day if you let them, and following that the fliers got down to the business of hacking apart zombies.

So the state of the mission as it stands in that save is that there is ONE enemy that appears entirely unreachable. It's stuck in the underground on level 0 all the way on the east side. A second enemy apparently jumped into a grave near the player start, or downright spawned in it. Killing it is easy enough, but suffice to say I would never have found it without Bug Hunt mode.

At this point I debug killed those last enemies because I didn't have the will to tunnel down, or pull everyone back.


So, overall thoughts.

I think I'm not a fan of the gates. They're kind of annoying to remove because standard grenades won't do it and hitting them with projectiles can be tricky. Maybe they should be solid objects that can be seen through, like the glass walls on some maps.

Ultimately though, I think it all comes back to the queen. Not only is it by far the most dangerous thing on the map, it's also the MacGuffin you're there for in the first place. So far so good, but you encounter it almost right away. Then once you deal with it you face a choice of either killing the rest enemies or going in to collect the queen's body. The first choice can be problematic, as demonstrated by my save. Moreover it feels like a chore because the objective has already been achieved. The second choice can ALSO be problematic because the queen often hovers over terrain you can't get to, so if it happened to fall on such a tile you might as well just abort.

In summary the issue with this mission in my opinion is that it near enough opens with a boss fight, and then follows up with a long and frustrating bug hunt that is potentially unwinnable. Oh, and having to climb out of a hole in the ground at the start is kinda mean.

Offline legionof1

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Re: The Vampire Castle
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2018, 04:27:23 pm »
yeah ill agree with the queen often being front loaded and flying over unreachable terrain can be quite frustrating. Any time the objective is a mobile unit you can have these type of problems, but flying does make it worse.

Offline BTAxis

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Re: The Vampire Castle
« Reply #2 on: September 19, 2018, 05:22:49 pm »
I'm undecided if the queen is too hard to capture. It's pretty much immune to stun damage so you have to hope you knock its health down just low enough to stun it. The only other way I can think of is flying units with stun rods, but they'd have to be high-psi units all and even then they'll likely not succeed because the queen has really high dodge too.

Offline Toothless Shark

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Re: The Vampire Castle
« Reply #3 on: October 25, 2018, 07:10:24 pm »
I played through this mission 2 times so far. You HAVE to bring explosives to this mission (dynamite is usually enough) to destroy those gates and to get access to sections of the castle. Problem is that the castle is like a catacomb and that 'bug hunt' mod doesn't seem to trigger. That means that you usually end up hunting few last zombies in one of the many corridors in the castle and since they also move around you can't really be sure that they are not in the explored area now. Bug hunt mode is something that this map really needs, and if it already has it, it has to trigger way sooner.

As for the Vampire Queen, first time she was near the entrance of the castle bombing me with psi attacks. Second time she was near the top on the other side of castle but fortunately was not floating so i could reach her with melee attacks. In both cases i had to deal with her with my best melee char (120+ melee) and was using Ancient Katana to do the deed. Fortunately, on my second run she didn't die but on the first one she was killed in 3 hits. Apparently shes totally immune to stun because i shot like 25-30 darts in her (type C) and she just floated away. In my experience shes definitely too hard to capture since shes apparently immune to stun.

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: The Vampire Castle
« Reply #4 on: October 25, 2018, 07:27:36 pm »
The gates were removed from the castle, except for the main gate, so it will not be a problem in the future.

As for the Queen, she is not in fact immune to stun, but her resistance is pretty darn high (she only takes 30% damage) and her armour is strong 40-50).

Offline Niewiem

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Re: The Vampire Castle
« Reply #5 on: October 25, 2018, 07:40:05 pm »
I stunned her using power maces and synthsuits :)