Glorious update time!
Behold the mighty Goatse in all her glory. Crew names allocated to people who's votes did not win as a consolation prize.
Great big empty sector. No nebulas and no scanner.
First beacon was a merchant. Guy wants us to deliver drone parts.
Kind of a no brainer. Especially nice for us; even if we get double crossed, we can keep the 5 drone parts and this ship certainly needs them.
Goal is close by, not that it matters much since we've got nowhere in particular to go and therefore no other plans but to beeline for the quest.
Mercenary ship. And a Zoltan at that. If we had scrap, we could pay him to either map the secotr for us or delay the rebel fleet. Since we don't have scrap, we can only choose to fight him or somply move on.
This ship is actually pretty good vs Zoltans, so I pick the fight. Note the green bar next to his normal shields. Zoltan ships have a 'super shield' which functions as a 5 point shield that absorbs damage from anything (even missiles or beam weapons) before it goes to normal shields. OInce the supeer shield goes down it stays down until the ship jumps to another beacon. This generally means these fuckers get a free round of attacks in before they can possibly suffer any damage, and they fuck over ships that rely on burst firing the enemy weapons down before they can fire.
However, we have two advantages here. First; ion weapons do actual damage to super shields, and double at that. Our weapon there tears through that thing fast. Second, our anti ship drone spams shots quickly. It's drawback is that it targets randomly and we can't time it's shots, but for just eating through a shield, it's perfect. These fuckers do still manage to land a missile on us though.
They beg for surrender...
Refused.
We already have drone parts to last us a while, what we desperately need is a ton of scrap to buy certain key items from any stores we can find. Drone schematics or additional weapons would be great too. Pretty much anything is better than fuel and missiles and drone parts right now, if we have the option.
We actually ate quite a few shots towards the end there and our crew is banged up. However, we don't need to bring everyone back to the medbay. Just switching it on is enough on this ship;
It starts with this augment, which makes the medbay heal all of your crew onboard, although at a slower rate than if they're in the medbay. Still a huge convenience.
The weapon we start with is an odd one. It does only 1 ion damage per shot, and requires THREE power to run. However, it fires once every 4 seconds. Assuming every shot lands, this is enough to chain the disables together, so given enough time this single weapon can fully disable even a 4 point shield. Of course, if it misses a shot or two, or gets disabled by enemy fire, we'd have to start from scratch. So this won't be nearly enough to end the game.
We find a distress beacon on our next jump. May as well board and investigate.
Well shit. Crazy armed scientists chase us off and one of the crew falls sick.
The sick crewman turns on us. Not a good start to the run.
So yeah, now it's just Black and lightbane. Agassi is now a zombie or something (and also is not on our ship, Agassi was an Engi and the invaders are all human). And we've got 3 boarders to fight off.
We employ standard anti boarding measures.
The fight takes a while with so little firepower, but is won with no more casualties.
Agassi.
Next beacon has pirates trying to charge a toll on us. Not in the mood.
Awww isn't that cute.
Rewards in this sector have been rather underwhelming. Not even a store. Not that we could afford anything.
Moar distress.
Moar assholes with guns.
Moar easy victory and blank beacons that could have nearly anything.
Dude we just had this conversation with the dead guys over there.
It's kind of harder to show whats going on in screenshots with ion weapons, since the disabled systems blink blue, they appear normal half the time. Though as you can see, their shields are disabled right now, not even a hollow bubble under their hull.
This enemy has a somewhat rare weapon: a bomb. Bombs are like missiles in that they bypass shields. Unlike missiles though, bombs do no hull damage, and can't be shot down by drones. Instead, they damage systems and personel in the rooms they target. Of course, the enemy is retarded and just bombed an empty airlock, which does nothing at all.
Well, at least we keep winning back a drone part or two after these fights.
Ooh a storage cache. Hope it has nice gear. Or any gear, honestly.
A quick victory at the cost of a few hull damage. Theres not much we can do about missiles at this point.
The cache was empty. Not cool.
Lets take our rage out on this guy.
Didn't even take damage this time thanks to some nice evasions.
Yet another average reward. This wouldn't be so bad if there were a store we could use.
Of son of a bitch, I though this beacon was connect to the one in the bottom right.
This can get you killed very easily, a lot of sectors have troll layouts like this, where the exit is only accessible from one direction.
We need to waste some fuel backtracking now...
And on top of that, now we have little time to spare for searching more beacons.
We find a rebel scout on the one we do have time for before hitting the exit.
Pretty easy pickings when the drone plays smart.
:yawn: Gimme a god damned laser already.
Cutting it pretty close here.
But we make it without getting caught by the fleet.
Gah. For any other ship this would mean a lot of free scrap. But we need those drones.
Onward to Zoltan Sector. Our ship would not do well in an ion storm at all, and those only appear in nebulas, and we can't see them coming.
Plus, this place will have more Zoltans to beat up.
Black has already reached level 2 in weapons, thanks to the fast reload time and how long these fights take.
Ouch. That is troublesome. Fortunately he's an engi, so he can patch it up fairly quickly.
:hmm: Fucking beam weapons man. Not cool.
Oh come ON. Also, note how the shitty ship layout makes it take forever to vent the engine or shield room. The nearest airlocks are very far away and require venting every room in between, so it's not safe to go repair.
Oh yeah, thats perfect. God forbid you ever hit an empty room or fail to start fires and hull breaches you lucky green cunts.
So, we're down 12 hull since we started this fight, and have lost 4 different systems entirely. At least weapons just came back online, and the enemy shield system got taken out by the drone (which has ignored their weapons pretty much entirely.)
And here's our shitty reward that doesn't even come close to covering the costs.
I'll have black repair the systems while lightbane does the hull breach. Only system repairs give repair xp, and I'd rather have our engi level up so he can repair things super fast.
Another distress beacon. Lets go for it, sometimes these lead to stores or free repairs.
Nope, it's two ships fighting in an asteroid field. Fuck that shit.
Note that we still have to actually charge our jump drive to get out of here, unlike normal beacons where it just automatically charges if no enemy ships are near.
Being in an asteroid field is kind of like having an anti ship drone on your ass the whole time. 1 damage rocks constantly pelt your ship with random targetting.
Unlike drones though, the rocks have a random frequency, which can sometimes overwhelm shield regen speed, especially if you only have 1 shield and nobody manning the system.
Fucking cunt rocks hit our piloting, stalling our jump drive gauge until we can repair it.
Also we're now down to 5 fucking hull points.
Out of the frying pan and all that. Where the fuck are all the stores?
Well shit. Their weapons are kind of weak, but they have an anti ship drone too. Oh, and more hull than us.
Our drone has made the brilliant tactical decision to harm their piloting and weapons system without harming the drone control. Their drone, OTOH, went straight for our shields. Which are down.
Sooooo.... yeah.
Going to restart since that was such a short (and abysmally unlucky) run. Restarting gives you the same ship and names but is otherwise the same as starting from scratch. Just saves on the time spent renaming. Wish me luck on this run.