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Re: REKT: God Throws Dice (Main Thread)

#19
Right, another Question!

I forgot to ask durin the last 2-3 days...so now Question-Time :ghost:

The Quantum-Skills...do those have any kind of drawback? Or was I rightfully paranoid regarding those who wanted to level them up endlessly?

Was there any Scenario planned where they were really needed (apart from Mission 3 as you said in your report) or where the Quantum-Users were supposed to be handicapped?
Apparently, sometimes stuff might happen.
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Re: REKT: God Throws Dice (Main Thread)

#22
It's possible, yes.


I'm torn between providing condensed summaries of each mission or detailed descriptions... I think I'm beginning to lean towards condensed summaries, mostly because I'm not going to have nearly as much detail available for the later missions. (To some extent, I was putting things together as I went along. I didn't know what path the campaign would take, after all.)
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Re: REKT: God Throws Dice (Main Thread)

#23
Mission 4


This mission has some new tech introduced for it: Droppod ships. Sound interesting? No? That's okay. In this mission SCAMPS is giving you guys the option of "borrowing" up to three of them for free - and trust me, they'll be necessary. I'll start with a brief description of just what the hell it does.
I'm sure you guys wished you could abandon those cheap hunks of scrap and just blast onto the surface paratrooper-style in special drop pods, right? No? Tough luck for you, then. Sometimes an immediate ground presence is beneficial. The Droppod Ship is pretty simple in its functionality and design: it has an autopilot, droppods for each person in a five-member squad, and carries your ships, too. You just tell the autopilot where to go, it drops you off and floats around out of sight. You smash into the ground inside controlled-grav pods, and burst out with guns blazing. I'm sure even idiots like you could figure it out. Later, if you're standing somewhere open and flat, the Droppod Ship can land and pick you up, or remote-pilot your ships to you.

  • Drop pods are one-use only.
  • All misfires and poor aims are considered the product of your immeasurable stupidity.
  • No refunds, but we'll restock your pods before your next mission.
  • Pods are well-armored and the landing can be weaponized.
  • For the love of god, make sure you don't have any allies beneath you.
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They'd also be epic - full-on Warhammer 40k-style pods crashing into the ground at high speed, the occupants escaping a splattering only by a combination of anti-shock tech and grav-based acceleration neutralizers - and they're one use: the insides are rigged to melt three minutes after landing to keep enemies from reverse-engineering the technology. Fortunately, they're restocked after each mission.

~~~

After you spend some time (a month or so ingame) piddling around on Tartarus, they finally tell you, "Ohai, we have a mission." You groan and grumble, following SCAMPS's orders and heading to the briefing room. That's where the fun begins.

Remember those cultists-turned-monsters from the last mission? I called them the "Rashyvr" in my notes... (not actually sure why. Can't remember.) Anyway, they're causing trouble. Their big thing, SCAMPS reveals to you, is Quantum Artifacts. And not just Quantums - but another species of Quantum-like beings I'm going to call Alts, because that's what they were called in my notes (I think I may have mentioned them before). The Rashyvr actually see Quantums as the "bad guys" and want to obliterate any trace of them - and by any means necessary. In the meantime, they're trying to "bring the Alts back" through hokey summoning rituals and ominously pointless chants. Naturally, Tartarus is interested - in the tech, not the rituals. There's profit to be made from that tech, after all! Another evil group with possible knowledge on where to find artifacts? Hell yeah!

At this point I imagine you'd be saying, "Aw, hell no!", and not without good reason. SCAMPS reveals he's sending you to a cultist outpost to hack into their systems and steal any interesting information and/or technology you can find. Naturally, as these are cultists, they have an incredibly well-defended compound that's going to take some serious work (and balls of steel) to break into. As a result, he's sending two platoons instead of one. Yes, I was going to do this. I had a little program set up to do all the calculations for me - simple calculations based on how many CASKETs and CASKET-equivalents were still alive on each side.

So, let me go into how the mission goes down.

~~~

Elchar is a planet in the Rim - a mostly-flat, thunderstorm-prone, desert-like world with an atmosphere over twice as dense as Earth's (i.e., nukes are bad, m'kay). You get there just after Platoon 103 - 103 is already headed toward the surface. Their objective is... well, rather grim. They have to keep as many enemy fighters as possible off of you long enough for you to finish the mission - no matter what the cost. Whether they're actually capable of doing this depends on your performance and decisions.

The main complex is built on a small plateau, and covered with a massive dome-shield that's basically inpenetrable. They throw it up as soon as they see Platoon 103 descending from the upper atmosphere. Nobody gets in or out until that's down. They do, however, have a small spaceport filled with cultist fighter planes and larger transport vessels. Another building is a barracks/maintenance area, which has a tunnel leading under the shield and (in an alcove of the cliff) a Systems Node (for lack of a better name) which, although heavily protected would (over a mult-turn hack) allow you to shut the shields down from outside. Also in the building lineup: a communications array, AA turrets, and an administration building. This last is useful for shutting down the AA turrets and gaining early intel on cultist computers so you get rid of any penalties for hacking them.

~~~ The mission proper:

Platoon 103 provides a necessary distraction at the "front gates" to keep as many cultist fighters occupied as possible.

The NPC squads of Platoon 56 start by bombing the communications arrays to keep the Rashyvr from calling for backup. They take very heavy losses from the AA guns. After that, they're yours to command.

The first player squad drop-pods near the administration building (drop-podding to avoid AA guns) and storms it. They get scratched up pretty bad, but manage to hack into the computers (which aren't linked to the main cultist network, and thus have little in the way of useful information) and shut off the AA guns. The point of this is to make things a lot easier for the squads hacking the computers in the main complex. This job is of moderate difficulty.

One squad stays CASKET-bound and destroys any fighters they can find inside the spaceport and begins securing and fueling a few of the large transport vessels. This is critical - without these, nobody gets home. They'll face lighter resistance than some of the other squads - these are probably newbies.

Another squad drop-pods down into the barracks alcove to shut down the shields, and soon has their work cut out for them as alien supermutants emerge from the building to attack. (I always wanted to make a REKT PC game (still do) and was always coming up with ideas for it. This would be the squad the trailer would feature. I wrote up a script for it, set to music.) They take losses - maybe one or two deaths - but shut down the shields and get out of there alive (unless they're stupid, in which case you'll have to look into other options). There's no room to send CASKETs down, so they have to find a way to get up the cliff face.

The final squad stays in their CASKETs and tries to kill off any stray fighters trying to interrupt the other operations. They have more free-range over the area than anyone else does and can be called in for fire support if necessary. Their success (or failure) at this determines how well Squad 103 does - they tip the balance. Soon after they begin, they discover that Rashyvr's big thing is heavy cutting lasers and psionic tech. They're in for a horribly tough fight. This cannot be a newbie squad.


After all of this is done, the squads gather up their CASKETs and begin assaulting the main base (which they can do now that the shields are down). Turrets abound, as do cultists - and the main computers SCAMPS wants you to hack are underground. Platoon 103 keeps the distraction up by forcing a heavy assault which what troops they have left on a fairly sensitive (to the Rashyvr) portion of the base, which keeps you from getting overwhelmed. If most of Platoon 103 has already died due to a poor performance of the aerial squad, you're in for a really rough time of it. Actions (or lack thereof) have consequences, you know.

(You also find a functioning Quantum Orb there. Yay for more powers!)


Fortunately enough, you guys manage to hack into the computer and send an encrypted stream of data to SCAMPS, as well as gathering up some pretty awesome artifacts - although you of course incur heavy losses. About 50-67% of you are dead. Some of you may have your corpses recovered, but anyone out of either platoon that doesn't load up into the commandeered freighters gets left behind.

~~~

Instead of getting taken back to Tartarus, you end up on a battle carrier - the Hermes. The Hermes is decently-equipped with some decent combat ability and cutting-edge engine tech, permitting you to traverse the galaxy at warp 15 (almost 600k times the speed of light) - which is twice as fast as most vessels in 3152. Naturally, you're confused by this, but SCAMPS responds by saying they're in the middle of something right now and can't be bothered to come pick you up. For now, your home is on the Hermes.

Your ships are patched up by the engineers, and you receive a new group of inmates to replace your fallen brothers (and sisters). Platoon 103 is not as lucky; Hermes is not carrying enough adequately-leveled prisoners to replace all of their losses.

I feel like I'm forgetting something important, but I'll probably remember it later.
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Re: REKT: God Throws Dice (Main Thread)

#25
Yeah, which is why I wasn't actually going to do any "real" calculations for the second platoon. :P It would've been in the background, sort of like a low LoD thing. At most I would've had to put in the number of additional kills/losses of your fighter squad each turn. That's easy. Of course, you wouldn't have known that because I wouldn't have told you. No sense in spoiling the immersion.

edit: also, I probably was a little bit crazy. :P
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