Last time we chose to take sides in the reticulan conflict, and ally us with the expeditionary force that arrived to take vengeance on the rebels that destroyed our planet in the canon-ending of Aftermath.
This got us three gray mascots, two of whom can partake in battles. Allying with the rebels should have given us two mascots, but due to the name-changer bug, they never showed up. I didn't mind as I knew they'd just leave when I allied with the expedition.
But now that Topher, Desmond and Zattie has joined us, let's take a look at what they bring to the party, shall we?
From the start, their powers are relatively weak, as the damage potential of their psionic powers is directly dependent on their attributes. Add to this, until they complete the appropriate training, they can only cause stun damage with the psionic weapons. I use this to stun a new enemy however, the spider.
Spiders come in two varieties. This is the red spider. It only attacks in melee, but it packs quite a punch. Since it needs to close to attack and it's relatively noisy, you can often deal with it before it becomes a threat. It's quite resitant to psionic attacks however, so stunning it only happened after attacking it several minutes of realtime (I was called away and let the computer run).
The other variety is the yellow spider. This has an acid throwing attack which is ranged. This makes it slightly more dangerous that the red, but it's still very much manageable. It has a large hitpoint pool though, so be sure to set more than one trooper to fire against it.'
Our new warp cannons give us a way of dealing with the annoying Mars Natural Forces.
They are neutral, in the meaning that you can ignore them and still finish the mission, but they follow your troops around the map, and when they get to melee range, they can cause quite a bit of damage, even to troops in heavy suits, so now that I can, I destroy them when possible.
Levelling up Topher and Desmond is easy here at the start. They'll soon be quite devastating with their psionic attacks.
The important thing to remember about psionic attacks is that they don't need a LoS. That's why I had positioned the grays behind a boulder in this mission, to prevent them from being fired upon by hostiles, as they are quite squishy at this point.
This also means that if you find a good hiding spot, they can wreak havoc on the enemy, especially as their training progresses and they start to be able to take over enemy soldiers..
Major psionic weapon training is needed, the total training time nears 6 days, but it's very much worth it.
Also, we've built some new toys for our heavy weapons guys..
Gatling cannons!
These puppies require level 6 metals though, so they're far from easy to manufacture. I took advantage of the rebel reticulans before I double-crossed them, our alliance involved them giving us 1 metal level, so we just reached level 6. I hurried to produce four gatling cannons before declaring war. These cannons do a fair amount of damage, fire 10 burst salvos, and take very little time to aim. Melee enemies don't get close to a trooper wielding one of these.
And here we get a streak of good luck. Advancing the tech research is highly dependent on capturing the right types of enemies, and you can only ever capture an alien if it's the target in an alien capture mission. Just knocking aliens out in destroy missions don't count them as captured.
I get three capture missions in quick succession however, and it's a beastman soldier, then alchemist and lastly shaman! Three different targets, greatly helping our research!
These debriefing screens are from two fo the capture missions, the second screen however if after a defend mission against the rebel reticulans. When going on a capture mission, you need to have an empy slot in your squad for the captured alien.
The way you go about it is similar to how it worked in Aftershock. Knock down an enemy and get close to it, and it joins your squad. Dissimilar to Aftershock though, you cannot simply ignore the captured alien from then on. If your troops move too far away from it, it'll get free and you'll have to capture it again. Kill it, and you lose the mission. I call this
Now I said the research received a boost, what I meant is that new topics got unlocked.
Once the shaman interrogation is completed, we get a new interruption in the geospace screen, where Drakron tells us we've learned some new tricks.
I haven't even begun building terraforming stations yet, even though that's our main mission. I'd better get started soon..
There are some enemies I haven't introduced you properly to yet though. Meet the alchemist.
These beastmen use grenade launchers as I've already told you. Most times they're merely a nuisance, as you can move away form where the grenades are about to land, but if you're not paying attention, such a grenade can both be quite damaging, and it has a tendency to knock lightly armoured troopers off their feet. Don't ignore alchemists!
Here we see a worm. A melee unit with almost no hitpoints and it's vulnerable to anything you throw against it. It's a minor nuisance and can be ignored if more threatening prey is around.
The roller is also a melee unit, but this one it's not safe to ignore. They look deceptively silly, their attack animation in particular, but they hurt like hell and have a lot of hitpoints. Shoot it with armorpiercing ammo, and make sure to kill it before it gets close! They can one-shot your squishy gray allies.
Speaking of our gray allies, Zattie has helped us research an upgrade to our fossil fuel powerplant. If we want to produce even better suits than our current ones, we need to make this a reality.
Unfortunately, we lack the resources.
We need two more regular mines, or one more yellow mine of both crystals and metals before we can build the new power station. This becomes my primary focus at this point in the game, taking about half a month to complete.
In the meantime, something happens on the geospace screen..
Martians! I thought this was a dead planet that we were simply going to terraform and take over. Though I should have guessed something was awry, when we found fossil fuel and evidence of a biomass growth on the planet long ago.. I bet it's those darn horny Giant Space Walnuts!
Happily, we've yet to spot any walnuts in the sky yet. So let's take the fight to these green aliens, as we lack a way of communicating with them for now.
I only thought about taking a screenshot after I killed this particular specimen.. They certainly are small and green though, and they take very little damage from our projectile weapons. We might have to adopt new tactics against these buggers.
And look! They brought their pets! These are even more annoying, as our projectile weapons completely fail to do any harm at all, and even our warp cannons make no impression whatsoever. I had to regroup and re-assault this territory, and when I came back, there were no pets.. I have yet to find their weakness, but in the future, I'll be bringing fire, just to make sure.. :twisted:
Something odd has happened back at base though.
Blondie's identical twin has shown up.
The difference being that this Blondie is a soldier/technician and not scientist. I decide to take advantage of this bug, as we could definitely use more technicians. She'll be put to work in the base, building stuff.
We soon get a mission to capture a martian, and this mission takes place in a completely new environment.
We're apparently inside some sort of structure.. I suspect we'll see more to this kind of structure in the future, if only we start digging a bit. There's the option to start more excavations in some territories, something I haven't done yet, as I wanted to tackle one thing at a time, but as soon as Pariah Zeal finishes training in his planetology major degree, he'll be out digging and putting up terraforming stations. Maybe we'll learn more about our green neighbors then.
Speaking of which.
Here we see that Desmond has used his mind control device to take over a martian, and we can now tell it to attack its drones. There are two bipedal mechs, and a quadruped spider bot on this staircase.. They look like they mean business, so I find it prudent to occupy them for a bit with our new pet martian. He soon bites the dust, but he bought us time to better position our troops, and soon the battle is won.
And as you can see in the above screenshots, I brought energy-based weapons (laser sniper rifles) to this mission, to better be able to bring down mechs. A good decision.
In the loot screen we take a look at some of the weaponry these martians bring to bear against us.
Two odd-looking types of guns, a robot control-device, a couple of melee blades, and some grenades.. The pink oblong things are martian batteries...
This remote-control robot thingie looks useful. Taking over control of a spider-bot seems like a lot of fun in theory. I hope to try it out soon.
By this point in the game, when you do a mission, the map is literally crawling with enemies. I bring all the ammo I can carry, yet barely have enough to finish the fight. I need to get a second workshop going, so I can produce enough ammo.
One map, 4 spiderbots, 5 mechs, 6 crawling drones and 1 levitating drone. On the plus side, that's a whole lot of experience.
I'll end this update as this message pops up on the geospace:
Level 6 metals. This should mean that I'm ready to upgrade the powerplant.
Yep!
That takes us to level 7 in energy, when the plant is completed.
Won't have to worry about energy anymore.
Finally, I take a look at the different factions, as it seems they have a sort of HQ each.
Beastmen.
Martians.
Expedition.
I have yet to find the HQ of the reticulans, but I plan to rid myself of them soon, once my first drone is ready. Just need to produce some gatling cannons for it.
Until next update!
Oh, and please, if there's any requests, let me know. Anything you want to see or have explained in particular? Just say so. I shall try to accommodate.