The 7th Transcendence Succession game

[PM]

Jumpgates are among the most dangerous places to stay at. A fleet of enemies can warp in anytime (or go to a gate to gate out) and attack whatever is in the way.

I did not have enough time to upgrade all of the ships, and the armor shops did not have enough level 5+ armor for the SuperMule.

Probably the safest place to be is on a star, but it is difficult to park ships there.

[pixelfck]

There should be enough armor in the supermule to give it an armor upgrade (C5000 composite armor if I'm not mistaken).
Also, there is also a Yoroi S500 I think (not ideal, but not bad either). I just didn't have the time to install the devices and armor yet.


Anyhow, StealthX051, if you want to take this turn (you can, it is free), please also update the etherpad.


~Pixelfck

[StealthX051]

@PM I thought that planets don't block shots anymore because of the Succesion modpack.

[PM]

Planets may not, but stars do.

[PM]

I will take a turn tomorrow.

EDIT - Picked up save and playing. After a quick examination, I noticed the big ships took heavy damage, and the Lindworm suffered multiple device damage. Rather than look for replacement items, I will self-destruct to repair them.

[TVR]

Ordering drones to wait seems to be fairly risky - they won't perform any evasive maneuvers or retreat when shields are down.

Perhaps in the future, we could add a "Patrol" or "Avoid combat" command to communications. It seems "Wait" is only ever used to keep wingmen/drones out of combat, and a specific command to do just that would likely increase wingman/drone survivability.

For now, we could order ships to wait only in deep space (>1500 LS from the star).

[PM]

I ran out of time today trying to wrap up my turn. I will upload it tomorrow.

[PM]

It took a while, due to delays, but turn #6 is finally at Xelerus.

Highlights:
* Self-destructed a few times for free fuel and item repairs. (1)
* Bought uranium fuel to use and make waste (for waste cannons).
* Traded in the Antares-V and Lindworm into themselves to fix interior damage.
* Backtracked to Rigel, destroyed Black Market, and got Hiro's ROM. Did not fight Slicer. (2)
* Destroyed more Charon frigates, total of three killed. There is a fourth frigate in the Izar system, which I left because I did not want to fight Kronosaurus. (2)
* Cleared Charon. Saved Korolov and got mark I howiter reward. Star Castle Boss was there, and he is dead.
* Cleared St. K's. Finished Dall mission. Finished one Militia mission to bump our rank and gain access to Armory in Fortresses later. Attacked a Sung slave camp that was rebuilt several times, and looted 42 slave coffins total. Meanwhile, AI Commonwealth fleets clear the rest of the system, leaving behind many wrecks to loot unopposed.
* Sold all illegal items to a Black Market in Kaus Media (before Charon), including 42 slave coffins. Did not get arrested. (3)
* Reached Sindikat lieutenant (rank 5) by entering a buy-and-sell loop of illegals with the Black Market. Costs us less than 100K credits, out of our near million credits at the time. As compensation, I got the freebie weapons and shields, including the Hanzo and Yoroi MX. Rank 5 should open up some ship choices at their shipyards later. Getting final rank of Commander requires spending almost 200K credits - not worth it yet.
* Did some mining in previous systems.
* Bought eight unidentified engines in the second system. Turns out to be a level 8 engine worth 60,000 credits. I sold most of them. It is a good engine for bigger ships - .25c, a high amount of thrust, and very low powerUse.
* Sold lots of stuff to the Aquilae Merchants Emporium station in the Aquilae system. (4)
* Wrote stuff in Captain's log. Read it for some hints. I wrote identities of TX3 from Dall and radioactive waste from Sapiens.
* Repaired all of our damaged armor. All armor in the mule is undamaged.
* Donated some fuel to increase Sisters' attitude by 5. (5)
* All ships have high level armor - they will need it.
* Wyvera has 1GW, a new dark fire blaster, and a new overpowered shield with lots of hp and resists. Has level 9 armor. Also two patch spiders.
* Lindworm "Megas" has 1GW, new engine, an ion Beamer, thermo and dark fire blasters, and a high-powered shield with fast regeneration. Has level 8 armor.
* Antares-V "SuperMule" inherited the 300 MW reactor and shield from the Wyvera. It has level 6 and 7 energy weapons. Has +50% (heavy) blast plate.
* Left a bunch of damaged items, ores, and the fake ID at the wrecked Anarchist station in Rigel. (6)
* Credits are over 600,000.

Footnotes:
(1) If you get fuel problems (with the 1GW reactors) due to lack of fuel and do not want to lose progress, save your game, reload, then self-destruct! When you reload again, your fuel is full, and your armor and installed devices are fixed - for free! What? Score went down? Who cares?!

(2) I did not want to babysit wingmen Volkov and The Slicer. Rather, I left the option open for others if someone wants them. I cannot promise that someone won't kill them by accident with our overpowered ships.

(3) With Domina powers disabled and longzhu stacking eliminated, slaves are only good as food for the Teraton fabricator (+5 disposition per coffin). Since smuggler's hold does not guarantee smuggling, and the consequences of getting caught can be catastrophic, I decided to spare us all a headache and sell all illegals where they are safe.

(4) The Merchant Emporium station type does not call (intDestroyItems gSource) when destroyed, meaning all items it has and sold there will be there to loot! In the Aquilae system, there are two Ferian colonies. Are ye thinking what I am thinking? That's right, sell as much as possible to the Emporium for maximum cash, destroy it by Ferian Warrior, and take our items back! As noted above, I sold a lot of stuff, especially the big ticket items, to this station. What I plan to do is attack the colonies until the warriors spawn, and goad them into destroying the station for me (by having a warrior stop inside station and me outside, and shoot until station dies), and sending the SuperMule to take it all in the span of a second, and then we can re-sell a lot of the items again. I almost did this, but did not because there are many more systems ahead, and as long as the Ferian colonies there are left alone, we can pull this heist off anything we need to.

(5) Fuel is the generally the cheapest option to raise Sisters' attitude (for Pilgrim's Aid). It takes 750 credits worth of fuel per point.
Helium fuel rod: 25
Helium assembly: 6
Xenotite fuel rod: 4
pteracnium fuel rod: 3/2

(6) I did some source diving, and noticed the fake ID decreases chance of acquittal! Chance of acquittal is 35% without fake ID, but only 20% with it! pixelfck, methinks you reversed the chances.

[pixelfck]

(6) I did some source diving, and noticed the fake ID decreases chance of acquittal! Chance of acquittal is 35% without fake ID, but only 20% with it! pixelfck, methinks you reversed the chances.

Oh damn. It was intended as an 20% increase in not getting caught: first you can evade being arrested, then you go to trial. But I may have overdone it while writing the fluff texts for it. I definately need to check this!

Thanks for noticing!
~Pixelfck

[PM]

I installed the dark fire blaster on the Wyvera because I encountered few enemies that rolled up ion-immune armor. The dual ion Beamer of death has no effect on these enemies. The new blaster should take down anything in the game that the Beamer cannot.

@ pixelfck: I did not read all of the Black Market code, just skimmed through it. I did not know that fake ID can prevent arrest. If it does, that lets the player roll the dice twice instead of once. My comment above assumed one dice roll.

[Tshark9999]

So, I guess I just post this and say I'm taking turn 7?

[Tshark9999]

Whenever I try to recycle a weapon in the SDW Weapon Labs, a dockscreen comes up with "Line 62: Identifiers must not use single quote characters: 'don"
Sold most of our mundane damaged items to the SDW Weapon Labs in the Kaus system, and the rest to the Tinker in the Aquilae system.
Upgraded the Tsurugi Star Cannon on the Wvera to a dual version, and enhanced it with a gatling rom I got. We now have a weapon that does 1200 dark fire DPS (8 [x5] @ 30 shots/sec).
Gave our SuperMule light ithalium plate and orthosteel armor that has regen, along with a Mark 4 Accumulator shield that I repaired.
I broke the game. I got 3 gatling roms from a trading post, they give a weapon 30 shots a sec. Left them in inventory for next person to have fun with :3. (On the other hand, we have about 150000 credits, though I feel that it was worth it)
Saved in the Sanctuary system, which is semi cleared, I cleared all others before it.

Uploaded to Xelerus at http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=1447

[pixelfck]

Good to see there are more takers!

Just to make sure we don't have any turns taken twice, I've list your name to the etherpad for turn 7.

~Pixelfck

[TVR]

Fixed the Weapon Labs dockscreen bug, and will include it in the refresh of the modpack.

Volkov's ship is upgradable, his Wolfen can be docked with and piloted like a PSD drone. He also auto-upgrades.

Didn't have time to add UGW or CFW support to The Slicer, though.

The Tsurugi has decent DPS for a darkfire weapon, but it has no WMD or omni, and only does scratch damage against stations and interiors. Do we have any howitzers or launchers equipped on the Wyvera?

[PM]

No launcher on Wyvera. Its basebuster is the +Fast dual ion Beamer. It carves through everything that is not immune to ion. The Beamer may not have WMD, but it hits so many times that WMD is not necessary. The Tsurugi is only there to hurt ion immune enemies. If there were no ion-immune enemies, I would remove the dark fire weapon to install a patcher arm.

As for no omni for Tsurugi, those are perfect weapons for ships with swivels and turrets.

Once George adds some useful collision detection functions, I intend to make the Beamers not passthrough everything like they do now. They were meant to be merely short-ranged hitscan versions of stock energy weapons, not superweapons.