No you may not interrupt your pilot's meal. Yes the UI hates you, and you deserve it.
You may now uninstall any and all nu-xcom.
Why are you not designing mechs in the fever dream simulator
No you may not interrupt your pilot's meal. Yes the UI hates you, and you deserve it.
You may now uninstall any and all nu-xcom.
Pausing and dragging right click will dig walls if you have the melee upgrade on mechs. That one's for free.
Not supaa robato enough
>3 years early access
>incomprehensible mess of interface
>russian as the only other language
Is it Highfleet mech edition? Also is it more playable in russian?
The game has a command line for language packs, and it looks like there's just an english and maybe a russian translation in the game files. Dev says there might be a spanish and chinese pack floating the in steam fourms.
The UI graphics are very Highfleet, but this UI has layers of malice to it that is just wow. I'm still figuring things out 80 something hours in.
If it had more gripping narrative like Highfleet, I would consider it.
This plays more like stretched rougelite.
Waiting for updates and discounts.
The story is the UI. Here's my strategic map. For like 6 turns I was pinned by the swords into the square on my left. Couldn't move west or north. I finally broke free and am making a mad dash to get away from them.
What do any of those icons on the map mean? Well you'll have to play to figure them out.
So is it like a Kerbal Space Program or you actually need to pilot your shitty designs like in Armored Core?
More like KSP I guess. It's top down real time tactics with up to 4 mechs a mission. Orders frequency is limited by your radio tower level, so starting out you can give an order every three seconds.
Interaction with the battlefield is somewhat limited. You can order the mechs to change position, designate a target, mine, and move towards the objective or retreat. Battlefields are persistent, so you might need to send teams into a square multiple times to clear it. You can also drop artillery strikes on land maps that accumulate between strategic turns based on the level of your cannon. You can't drop artillery underwater, or underground, so I hope you brought a mech that can dig because destroying terrain is very valuable.
Having one mech that can dig is nice, but the best terrain destroyer is the rocket launcher (not the starter one) with the crit module and as much damage as you can put on it. Just make sure you increase the minimum range so you don't have a nice day.
Oh, and you have to be careful about usage too, you can click on any weapon's icon on the squad list in-mission to disable/enable it. If you arrive in a forest or city and let them shoot at will you will likely frick your shit up.
Oh, how opportune. I'm getting filtered by very first mission. I built my mech, started reactors, modified my guns but I've got no idea how to win this. I know later during the assault there are these big worms, but I never managed to finish it.
For the first mission they give you really shitty mechs unfortunately. You want to design one with two of the chain guns with the armor pen modifier and enough damage pips to get to 12 so that you can one shot the ants.
Just move forward during the luls in fighting, and then slowly move back to the turrets as you start getting overwhelmed.
The situation
looks like minesweeper
You're not wrong.
I am so lost… You guys weren't joking about UI, huh.
Ahh the armor layer. Coating is defense against projectiles, which you won't see too many of early.
For the armor plates the top number controls the materiel. The right number controls the layer. You can have many layer 1s, but only one layer two which is your outside layer.
You don't need the energy shields that come on the default designs until you start seeing later enemies.
Remember to pull down lever 2 on the main menu every time you load your game (for some reason it doesn't persist between launches), most things have mouse-over tooltips with that enabled.
The only thing that isn't explained in detail is reactor and weapon design, the latter is easy to figure out for yourself with the weapon testing range (and mech testing range for testing the near final integration - pilot stats not included) and recorded in your notes on Steam. Reactor design can be figured out with the manual and mech testing range but its more of a pain in the ass, luckily there are good guides on the community page now.
Oh, and the details of city repair are kind of included in the manual/tooltips and are actually pretty intuitive but also an unexpected detail in how much of a 'city disaster recovery simulator' it is.
Everything else could be sort of figured out, but this motherfricker was designed by a baboon.
Eventually it looked like "42-something" was good. Some of the plates were just heavy as frick for no apparent reason. I'll have to take another look.
It's really not that bad although poorly explained. 0-2 armors are your basic armors. They can be stacked twice, and as you go up you get more armor for a lot more weight. 3-5 are advanced armors. They can be stacked 4 times. Layer 2 armors, or the outer layers give you the best armor to weight ratio, but you can only have 1, and you need a layer 0 armor first.
4s for layer 0, and a 2 for layer 1 is ideal unless weight is simply not an issue for you, but armor production runs are 3 days for at best 20 or so sheets once you've upgraded the building for it. Researching armor gives you a lump sum of 100 sheets so you'll find that you're mixing and matching the crappy armor with the good because it takes so long to manufacture the better stuff.
Have you put armor on your mechs? Without it anything can mess you up real fast. All hits will do a bit of stability damage which will show on top of the mech itself as a green bar. Once your stability is broken you're screwed since you'll move at .10 speed, and not be able to shoot at all, or not very well. If passive armor is greater than pen or damage then hits will do no damage to the frame, but a small amount to your armor. You'll still take a bit of a stability loss, but it doesn't seem to be that much as a penetrating hit. Evasion modules can really help get you out of a surround, but when you really get surrounded you're in big trouble.
Mechs will throw little tow lines to each other and drag mechs with broken stability if they're close enough, so if only one mech is surrounded you can move the others in to drag them out. You can also drag mechs back to the retreat point if the pilot gets taken out.
>Have you put armor on your mechs?
A little bit, yeah. You can't do much with a starting motors.
What I can't get is why thing did not become a cakewalk when I sent better mechs with better everything.
And I only attacked locations with smallest bugs, how are you even expected to fight off anything bigger?
I'm not really sure what you're doing wrong then. Mid game can be a bit of a cakewalk. Maybe post a design?
Here' the armor formula according to one of the steam discussions posts.
>Kinetic reduces armor 0.01 per bullet.
>Missile reduces armor by (1+missile penetration)/10.
>Laser reduces armor by laser damage/100.
>Thermal doesn't reduce armor instead lowers damage by 5% per armor point. 0 damage at 20 armor. (update 59)
Basically if you're not penning with a gun it's worthless since damage is only applied when you penetrate. Missiles with the pen mod are pretty good at stripping armor. Missiles with the damage mod are great for clearing terrain. Lasers will strip armor pretty fast, but won't do damage until it's 0, and apparently armor will regen slowly for the aliens. Thermal can be pretty good for clearing out small stuff since it has AOE, but won't do much against heavy armor.
Early game I mostly use the 20mm with pen mod, and a couple rocket launchers. At 12 damage you'll kill the ants in one hit, but you could also go down a bit to around 13 pen with the 20mm for a higher rate of fire or accuracy. Max range in the weapon test window does not seem to be the max range for the battlefield, so you'll be less accurate at max range than you'd think from the weapon test window.
Guns lose penetration as they slow down over range, so unless you're making a close range weapon the penetration mod is nearly a must for them.
A starter engine.
Middle right is a 6 pressure injector over a 10 pressure piston.
Middle left is 5 internal resistance modules and one multiplier. Never mix the external resistance modules and internal resistance modules. Your choices are internal resistance or external resistance not both. The multiplier will affect either however. All of them are ordered according to their cell number 1>6. Put the multiplier in the 6 to 1 direction i.e. last.
On the bottom is the engine stats. Weight belongs to the engine type. The energy output comes from the piston and injector pressure ratio. The stronger the injector compared to the piston the higher the energy output, but lower max temperature. Cooling power comes from the resistance modules. Each resistance module will add some resistance, but the multiplier will increase resistance more at the cost of less cooling power.
I've seen a few guides for this games, and they tend to tell people what to do, but not why. I personally don't find following strict instructions to be fun.
So, can you elaborate?
Some advise to put multiplier module in the cell 5 as well, how exactly does it works?
Max temperature stat seems to be different from external t that can be endured by engine, what is it mean then? When do I use strong piston to rise this stat?
Also, you can test engine for different amounts of load, but how this correlates to the mech design? If I use all energy engine gives me, does it counts as lever 4 load? Do I benefit from having excess of engine power?
I'm only giving out something that 'works' since I don't even know how it all works yet. You just have to play around with everything. You will spend so much time redesigning each mech throughout the game that you just have to learn something that works for you.
From the in-game manual: Cooling (for ICEs only but I don't remember if it specifies) has an order, 1-6, right to left from top right to bottom left.
The manual or tooltips/stat readouts tell you what each cooling item does and what its effect in the 'cooling chain' is. The tl;dr is that right now the different types of cooling cancel out so you only want one type - and unless you're only operating underwater (or maybe you're overclocking ROF-built 20mms with rapid fire but still only have ICEs for some reason) that type is the external cooling system. For multipliers you have a choice between 2 and 1, 1 gives you better cooling (2.2 vs 2.15) but 2 makes you slightly more resistant to external temps (1 - 26% resistance, 2 - 32% resistance) which might make the difference in a volcano or something idk.
You can also quickly check the 4 different combinations of pistons/injectors to see how the performance changes - you're trading between heat efficiency and energy. The only reason to reduce your available energy is if your deployment area is too hot for ICEs but you still have to use them. And conversely, the only reason to increase your available energy is if you're underwater or at extreme latitudes and know you won't be finding ~100C ambient temps soon.
Max Temp is the point at which the reactor will shut down. Max Outside Temp is the highest ambient temperature at which the reactor won't just shut off indefinitely - but ONLY when unloaded. The manual recommends an overhead safety of max ambient temp 1.5x deployment ambient temps to allow for heating from shots/reloads/special hazards.
The load testing levers are just another way of seeing how effective your cooling is, think of them like the weapon testing range for reactors. You still want to test final integration in the mech testing range @ your expected deployment temps (or a bit more) to make sure the whole package works as expected.
Here is a basic mech with the reactor installed and the energy tab open. On the bottom are the stats derived from the reactor. Max cooling comes from the resistance modules, and later heatsinks. Basic heat comes from the engine, and in this case an extra .2 heat from the 10 wires I've ran. 2 read wires each to the 4 motors to increase our carry weight at the cost of energy, and two blue wires to the guns to save a bit of energy. They use bullets so they don't actually benefit from extra energy. Next is how much heat is generated by reloading. That's divided over the ammunition reload time so reloading generates about 1 extra heat during during the cycle. The guns use bullets so they don't generate any extra heat for the engine when shooting. For next is 4 ammo modules that increase the gun's firing time to 7, and reduced reload time, and heat from reload time a bit less so. This comes from the control stat it adds, and later a lot more from better pilot cabins so too many ammo modules will start overloading the reactor with reloads that are too fast.
After clicking the odd circle shape to the left of send we opened up a test range to see how well the design preforms. There is a slider for heat, so you can test designs at the temperature of the area you are going to send them to, and a toggle for simulating underwater performance.
Has anyone attempted to use this thing?
Great for clearing terrain in the early game. Just make sure you have armor and coating because there is friendly fire. You can set a minimum targeting range so you're not constantly blowing yourself up, but it'll still detonate if you hit a pillar two squares away.
It has a tendency to blow the ants/operarious in all different directions including in your face which becomes a problem when the swarms get bigger.
Ended up using this instead, 30 armor shredding + 6k damage vs 0 armor + pretty large terrain clear (like 3/4ths of the size 1 version built for terrain clear)
Ohh that's a special missile launcher. Let me know how it goes.
>try this out
>first mission fails repeatedly
>make mechs with weapons that weight a bit more but do a ton more damage
>the mission is now easy
Ok what do I do now? God this game just assumes you somehow know everything already, it's even worse than graviteam.
You can find cities with the terrain type filter. Even through the FOW. Beeline to the circular pings while hitting has many cities as you can for goodies and shuttle part locations.
The city can be moved with the arrow keys on the mission tab where the map is. A day not moving towards your objectives is not a good day.
Does this play like MechCommander(2) of more like Hostile Waters?
Neither?
Of those two you could argue it is closer to mech commander but that is very misleading.
Pic related is what combat looks like. Your primary way of control is giving movement orders.
The game is very much it's own thing, especially with the impact that mech design and city control can have.
>that whole pilot/mech UI with a whole lot of icons and gauges you have no idea what they mean
But there's a free will slider!
This combat phase seems to be unreasonably hard. You can quickly lose even if your mechs designed with no glaring drawbacks, if you get surrounded by nests or a worm spawns turrets in your way. Not to mention instakilling laser head you need to sneak around.
I tried to skip a few weeks and develop a better tech, but it didn't amount to much for some reason.
This filters me almost as much as playing DF without a tileset did, should I even bother trying to understand what am I looking at?
put the hover tooltips on in the menu, and read the manual by clicking picrelated (I just realized you can actually flip pages to find more info instead of just clicking at the tabs lol), and just click on things. I think everything in this screen is understandable after that. Aside from maybe the freewill slider which I haven't touched much. The name is sort of self-explanatory though. Most of the stuff is just controlling the battle-view, like going fullscreen and switching color schemes, and firing artillery. The mechs and pilots show their status. I click the button on the bottom right to go into an unlocked WASD view. Most/all those buttons are controllable with the hotkeys, which are viewable on the menu.
By comparison, much of the functionality of the armor screen isn't explained at all anywhere in the game, and I had to read from this to understand it
It's really nothing nearly as bad as tileless DF. There's maybe 10-20 symbols to learn what they do an they're all pretty intuitive once you understand them. I've never once needed to 'inspect' a symbol or look it up once I know what it does.
The not knowing what a symbol is part could be frustrating though.
Xcom or Xcom Apocalypse played in a Factorio map is probably the closest thing it 'feels' like to me, but this is one of those games that is doing something totally different.
I've thought about pulling out calculus and differential equations textbooks many times when designing a mech since it might not overheat until 5 minutes into it's firing cycle.
You have a basic strategic map that is turn based, a research tab, production tab, and send out squads to kill aliens, but there's no factions or special alien stuff to collect or capture.
Just insanely detailed customization options and weapons to tinker with all while keeping your engine from overheating in zones ranging from -30C to 281C. Overland and underwater battles are both a thing.
The RTS part itself might be a bit underdeveloped in that it can be a bit like tower defense at first i.e. do you have enough DPS to kill this enemy or will it come in and wreck you, but there's plenty of stuff that keeps you on your toes as the aliens progress.
Some notes on making missions faster:
Killing the big Colubra worm on a mission will stop the nests from 'reloading' mobs. They'll still hold their last batch of mobs, but won't spawn anymore.
You don't have to loot all the little green squares if you complete a mission. You'll loot them afterwards, but I think a strong specials monster, i.e. two of the yellow pips on it's icon will prevent you from looting everything when you leave, so clear out the last few of those before finishing a mission.
Otherwise you only have to worry about collecting the green squares when you plan on retreating.
I'm really interested in playing this, even after studying most of the research, I don't feel super-strong. The battle with a giant centipede is very difficult for me, as is the battle in the mazes. The best motors provide an opportunity for more serious weapons, since weak motors lead to the fact that many guns had to sacrifice power to lighten the weight. Most guns should add restrictions for the firing range, so as not to overload the reactor of the mech. I would like to be able to destroy mazes in addition to nuclear weapons, such as laying explosives at the base at different ends of the maze.
You can nuke bases from the strategic map. I'm not sure if you can clear them from inside. I tried one yesterday and got glitched through a wall by a centipede boss unfortunately.
Just won for the first time, biggest things I learned:
Setting up target priorities and using MMB for manual targeting is critical. You'll never run out of resources (because construction is bottlenecked by the hangar space) if you kill every resource worm, and MMB'ing the colubra with your kinetic snipers will destroy the energy shield rapidly, freeing up your missiles/energy weapons to hit everything within the shield area.
Having terrain destruction trivializes caves/ocean floor missions, just be careful about locking down/opening up the rocket launcher to avoid blowing yourself up early game, especially in forests or cities (IDK if it was armor or resistances or what, but late game I noticed I couldn't hurt myself anymore)
The city repair is a lot less scary than it seems, it feels like as long as you float 100 components (for consumer goods creation) and don't waste repair teams (you can't hold more than 5) you can't lose by destruction - unless your city gets attacked which is how I lost my first game. In a new game I think you can safely rush the research, passive resource generation, and artillery nodes before thinking about energy -> life support -> goods.
On the other hand, you're more or less on a global timer - while the bug breeding cycle you see later on in the calendar isn't too scary due to your equipment by the time T2 bugs on every square arrives, the bloom of red swords (all of which are potential gold swords) that comes with the breeding cycle will destroy the world (see pic rel). I'm sure you can fight back and win if you go all in on nukes, but the lack of other production might see you resource starve.
Find the convoy mission ping, beat it, and build the huge weapons you get from it ASAP, they trivialize combat against non-infected bugs. A huge tesla is all you need to kill infinite operarius swarms, a huge cannon will let you snipe resource worms across the map, and a huge rocket will let you both destroy every T2 and clear plenty of terrain.
Sadly, I can't beat the boss centipede in the ocean, even though the new update added a life lane for the boss, which is great. This boss is very heavily armored, is there any way to quickly destroy the armored part of the centipede?
Last one I fought I just shot in the face at every opportunity since it seems unarmored, or you can at least directly damage it. Breaking the side armor plates seems to be a waste of time in comparison and fairly random in how fast it'll happen.
Stability mods and fire lasers are your friends for when you inevitably get surrounded. Even when I got speed all the way up to around 2 it would still get one or two 'constrictions' off on me.
>just shoot it in the face
Classic advice.
I am checking this out after having lurked a bit. Not super enthused by the lack of control but assuming the build variation is autistic enough that's not a deal breaker - I just prefer more tactics in my /vst/, ironically enough.
bought it yesterday and had a lot of fun. Had no problems understanding how to play, i only wish it had more tooltips as i have to go between mech bay and pilot view too much to see which mech has which weapon.
- frick the captchas holy hell
>HighFleet-style UI but with pixels
>Mechs
>with research
>and battles to test your mechs in
>and it has xcom gameplay loops
>and it runs on low specs
Im sold, im not gonna lie to you this may be what i wanted from xcom games and xpirates, while managing to scratch the "you can make everything" sandbox, got stale for me
Gonna buy it when its out of EA
bruh