Ah, we decided to attack another cultist territory and one of the buggers was carrying a Barrett sniper rifle! Fortunately for us, said cultist decided to start inside a building, so we could ambush him easily. Here's a screenshot from another building ambush, to give you the general idea.
JoKa has played the spotter and bait, and is now waiting around the corner. The 5 cultists inside the building spotted him and are rushing to the attack. Outside, I've posted three snipers armed with the burst-firing SR-25s, and they've already felled two cultists as they went through the door. Desmodus is running up, trying to get a piece of the action. Unfortunately, he ends up in a position where the cultists can see him without exiting the doorway, thus obstructing the line of fire from our snipers. Desmodus retreated behind the same wall as JoKa and this mission was quickly over.
The result is that we got our final piece of the puzzle and can now research AP ammo. This will help greatly against armoured targets such as some cultists, the flatsters and later enemies.
Research is quickly completed, and an assembly line is started.
Now I'll show you what new armament has become available. Grenade- and missile launchers first.
I don't use grenade launchers very much, for the same reasons I don't use grenades. I prefer direct-damage weapons, and the missiles and grenades travel too slowly for my tastes. Maybe I will make an exception in this LP. Time will tell. :mystery:
We've also captured some human-made laser weapons from the cultists.
The laser pistol and rifle are inferior to the reticulan counterparts, but the sniper rifle is unique in that it doesn't have an alien counterpart. It also sports an insane accuracy.. We will stick to regular sniper rifles for now though, as we have plenty of ammo for those, and none for the laser variant yet.
We also have some new grenades to showcase.
Again, utility items I tend to neglect. :blush:
The next batch of weapons though, those I use occasionally.
These require commando training, which JoKa and Storyfag has. They have both been issued a katana, but are currently relying on regular firearms. I want their speed to reach heroic before they start depending on their katanas, except for when they go up against reticulans. The grays drop like flies before angry humans wielding ancient blades.
Now, over to psionic weaponry.
Honestly, I don't remember if these things require a line of sight, or you can use them on any detected enemies within range. If it's the former, they're rather useless. If it's the latter, then these babies will be issued ASAP for Phoenix and Bee! But first, I need to research psionic equipment so we can manufacture a couple of these vambraces the devices seem to need to operate..
For the finale of the armaments show, there are some weapon add-ons that have been salvaged from the fights with the cultists.
I've stuck recoil compensators and gyro stabilizers on the machineguns, and they are now instruments of pure death.
The accelerators I've captured I've issued to our snipers, to further improve their kill rate as well. Once I can start to produce more on my own, every troop will be issued a fully customized weapon, but I need to research a few more topics before this happens.
I've yet to use the under-barrel grenade launcher, but I intend to explore its uses in this LP. Stay tuned for more.
Now, with the missions I've played, we've managed to expand nicely. I'll provide you with a snapshot of the globe and our base overview.
As you can see, we've limited the cultists to two territories on this side of the atlantic ocean, and we are building some psionic laboratories. We already have some implant labs in place, and I hope to soon be able to provide our cyborgs with better, stronger and faster limbs.
Speaking of research, here's a look at what we currently have cooking.
Research is progressing nicely in our basic weapons labs and our laputa lab. Those are the ones we've had running since the start of the game. The advanced weapons labs and implant labs are newcomers though, so not much to see in their research line.
The advanced weapons lab in particular will see much use in the near future, whereas the implant lab has a more limited selection of research topics.
The final screen depicts our current diplomacy standings.
As you can see, our relations with the human faction isn't as high as it's been earlier (the green bars next to the slider). It had been maxed out, but we were running low on alien tech, so we beggared some from the humans, and with the amount of help missions we're accepting, the relations are quickly repairing themselves. If you look back to our geospace screen, you will see that we have no problems whatsoever with low-tech and high-tech income, and our stockpiles are frankly huge. I expect the same will never be said about our alien tech income nor stockpile, but that's how it usually is in this game.
At this point in the game, I'm starting to think that korenzel might have been right about the difficulty, but later we will be swarmed with random attacks all over the globe, and that's the exact thing I hope this normal difficulty will reduce the rate of.
On to a different, but related topic. What do you think of the screenshot size? Is it OK? Too large, too small? The reason I ask this, is that Afterlight, the game I intend to LP once this is done, I can choose a resolution as large as I'd like, but I'm thinking I might be better off keeping it around this level, for purposes of legibility.