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Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
By the way, this LP is now officially two years old. And counting. As I said in the OP, I'm insane.

Faylone posted:

It's the "C. Class" which would mean it's probably referencing the Constitution Class of the original series Enterprise

Valid.

ousire posted:

Gonna be honest, when I did that level, I never thought to use the Rock Burner to crack open those trapped emitters. This level'd've probably been much easier if I had.

It's nice to hear occasionally that I'm not the only one solutions aren't immediately obvious to :).

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Regallion
Nov 11, 2012

You have quite a few duplicate/excess text screenshot in the last 3 updates (including this one) you might want to review that.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Thanks for that - quite shoddy work, there. Origin's been corrected and I'll go back to see how much of the rest of it I can get. Grrr.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Codex (8:04)


The majority opinion in this thread so far, which I have sarcastically promoted, is basically 'gameplay reasonably good, plot bad'. If you adopt this mindset, you may need a sedative here because it's all plot, no gameplay for the Codex.




The starry background effect from the Prologue is back. I can't let it pass without comment, because there we were headed somewhere specific. Here, we are not. Remember, we jumped without deciding where to go. Why are we going past stars and other galactic bodies if we haven't picked a destination yet and are theoretically just adrift in Rift Space??

Just sayin' ...













The Executive Summary is uh ... lengthy. It'll be necessary to present it in three parts. Here I am surprised to be told that the origin world is not in fact, Earth. At least, if this tale is to be believed more than your average GalCorp company line. The tale is also told of the first two games in the Creeper World series.




The repeated names are interesting. Do they signify a lack of originality on the part of he who once projected a finite existence, or perhaps a guard against identifying the correct individuals if he forgot what he was up to while skipping about through time?

Also, the Seloi were just super-doggone special it seems.




What's this, another mystery piled upon the revelations of would-be answers? Who could have predicted this??

synthbuttrange posted:

At this rate I'm betting on 'no mysteries solved at all.'

NVM then.

So we now know where to place Particle Fleet in the CW timeline. For most of the game I've thought it was just sort of a themed story completely outside of that timeline, an alternate CW reality if you will. Clearly that's not the case and we are in the vast chasm of time between CW2 & CW3, which begs a great many unanswered questions such as why it takes place in space when all the other conflicts were resolved on land. This is particularly true when you see the Particulate/Creeper as described counterparts.

If the Seloi were so doggone visionary, why did they mark out an area of space, call it Redacted, and focus the Particulate there? Were they unaware that the Creeper needed to map everything in all of space - and time - to reveal the Arc? Clearly the crew of this expedition apparently doesn't yet know that either, because they don't understand why the Seloi plan didn't work. And why would the Seloi give us all of this history, but NOT mention that particular detail if they knew it ... or why they abandoned their plan? If the Seloi knew they were doomed and the plan would fail, why did they ask the Loki for the Arc? Did they wish to accelerate their destruction in order to hasten the end of the timeline and the arrival of the final confrontation between 'Skarsgard' and the Loki?

** Note: It later occurred to me that what with the Redacted Space thing and all, the Seloi's plan probably was instead to keep the Arc from ever being revealed at all (by destroying information it needed). It's not clear to me why this wouldn't have worked, and certainly not why they wouldn't have recorded the reason for abandoning the plan.

This kind of story really twists my brain into a pretzel. Much like Ticon's crew, I have no idea what happens now. After this, it simply states

'End Report
CTO Ana
Director Kami'




I don't think any of us understand, but I'm quite sure Ticon doesn't.




It's worse than I thought. They were doing a search for the Holy Grail thing. We're not here for the greater good of humanity, or to save the galaxy, or any other such noble purpose.

We're here for plain, old-fashioned greed. The self-awareness in this statement is unfortunately equaled if not exceeded by its breathtaking arrogance.







Uh ... how do you know this? Previously we never knew what was in a system until we got there (except for in the Prologue). It appears that by visiting the Origin World, we have triggered a massively worse situation




3











So not only are we basically screwed, but we're going to invite some brave/suicidal soul to join us, in the hopes of getting a message back to GalCorp who of course will assuredly know what to do :sarcasm:. Do I have that right here? Is this really the plan?







I think I'm going to be sick.







Just? Unless you think humanity deserves to be destroyed, how exactly is it just??




HIS NAME ISN'T TICON!!! sigh ...










They're enthusiastic about the situation, gotta give em that.




This is up next for our band of misfit morons. It's worth noting that after this is only the Epilogue, so Duty figures to be the last gameplay mission of the Story.

Personally, I'm torn on whether to be cheering for the Particulate at this point. Is that wrong? Also we seem to have some CW3 reactors making an appearance - perhaps to power Berthas (or as one person put it, FUCannons). This whole reusing-assets thing was kind of cutesy at one point but at this stage it's frankly getting on my nerves.

I still am curious to see how things don't at all wrap up. The CW3 finale half-broke my psyche; am I due for a repeat? We'll find out next time.

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Just caught back up. I'm glad I didn't miss the finale. I'm looking forward to you eating your words on this next mission.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Duty & Epilogue (56:34)


I tacked on the Epilogue here mostly because I figured it wouldn't be long and I just wanted to see the finish. I'm glad I did so, but for completely different and definitely worse reasons.




Even from this vantage point it's easy to see the map divided into good and bad halves. What stuck out most to me though was the fact that we have a 'Custom' objective. It's not destroy everything.




'Numerous Abraxian ruins'. You could knock me over with a feather.
















'We need to get out of here now'. Everyone sits there and does nothing.







That which we now know, because of the Codex, to have been destroyed by this point in the timeline has decohered. My brain hurts.







The commander of the fleet can't see it on his screen, which only presently covers the middle of the map. But you know, everyone who doesn't actually need to know where it is can see it on their non-existent screens. So at least we have that going for us.

1


I don't even want to know how that supposedly works.













*Thud*. There aren't enough Picard double-facepalm memes on the whole of the internet to cover this. In the very first part of this campaign, the Prologue, Varro Hale led Hale Corporation to an Info Cache, sending the info back at the cost of the entire corporation. I've been assuming that Ticon Corporation received that message and therefore ventured out into Redacted Space. But no, it's the other way around. The message we want to send is to lure Hale out here for that.

The Prologue hasn't even happened yet. The purpose of the Ticon's mission, in terms of progressing events, is to set up the Prologue.

We're using a very flexible, non-standard definition of 'prologue' here, since the term usually denotes something which precedes the other events to be described later. But also, this means there's no way - although to be fair, the die was already pretty well cast on this - that the Story can be resolved in any comprehensive way. Ticon and crew are doomed, and they'll send back a message bringing Hale Corp. out to their doom, and ...

If you haven't played CW3, you don't even know that this entire GalCorp generation is doomed. But even if you have, nothing's going to happen here which explains how that happens. So we have a campaign which describes the struggle of two corporations against the Seloi-invented and deployed Particulate, their discovery of various history relating to the corrupt GalCorp, which will end with no resolution whatsoever of the events before or after Ticon's mission. I.e., how this particularly civilization met it's demise, what happened when GalCorp got Hale's message, etc.

What the actual ...




Here's where we need to get, what Ana was talking about. This is the far right of the map. Well, let's just try setting down there ...




Destroyed, by the struc it turns out not the other strange devices, the instant it sets down. Interestingly the HQ doesn't even has time to materialize, but Ana still gets almost five words out of her mouth.




Just in case you didn't get the point from the briefing, in this map only losing the HQ is fatal.




Let's get down to business. Amp Gems at the bottom, a nice defensive plasma web, a ton of pods for energy, some land ... and lots of bad stuff further out.




Having done this level a bit before noting the old PC was having speed issues, I had an idea of how to handle it. Basically get everything going as quickly as possible is vital. The starting tech investments here aim to keep the economy afloat when storage runs out, get the free firepower from Omnis, and add the vital Benign Emergent into the fray.




It takes about a minute and a half for the hostilities to start crashing through the plasma barrier. The lighter warships are almost ready to start fighting, with a Wolf on the way.




I'm trying to spread out Omnis here as much as I can, but their Berthas start making their presence known. With a trio of Reactors powering each of three emplacements on nearby islands, they are well-positioned to slaughter us in our cramped starting position.




This island was the first big battlefield. I kept building omnis and throwing them at the thing, while in between waves of that particulate accumulated at the right of it in opposition. Badly losing the emergent battle at this stage didn't help matters either.




That last wave above was big enough to turn the tide though, and our effort expanded to the first bertha placement. Crucially, I'd bought enough time to get much of the fleet operational. Emitter Control was used to get a stream of friendly particulate to help out.




I expected the reactors to be destroyed like the ore deposits on the moon in the last mission, but instead it appears that we captured them. This is no small boost to our economy.

One less cannon blasting away at the fleet doesn't hurt any either.




Grabbing the group of additional amp gems helped, and we gradually took down the other two berthas. Each of the other two have an additional gun around to defend, which didn't help us out any, but eventually we got it done. At this point, the battle is really strategically won, though there is much left to do.




At over 100 energy income, we had no trouble reaching full mobilization as we cleared out a trio of emitters just this side of the central struct/plasma defensive barrier. On the other hand, the far side isn't friendly either.




Plowing through the struc was no issue. Once on the other side things get interesting though. The main reason is that those space stations - there's one on the bottom as well - are a lot more powerful than I initially thought. They definitely seem to be stronger than the one by the origin world moon, perhaps enhanced firing rate or something? Anyway, they easily tore up most ships while doppels and particulate joined in the fun.




That's a LOT of missile spam. You can see the stub remains of my wolf there on the left. I think just about every ship died at least once.




Ultimately I ended up just parking the Hammer almost on top of it, then pounding it from range with everything else. Not subtle, but it worked.




It wasn't without even more casualties, but I knocked out the entire top flank so that the rest of the defensnes this way couldn't interfere, then started pushing in closer to the goal.




Rather that mess with the second space station and all its escorts, I cleared a path and moved in with the HQ. After all, just sending the message is all we're after.













The green things move over the ship from right to left, doing ... something? Then, with a flash of light, the Info Cache vanishes.







You don't say.




Of course it did. The same Rift Space which is simultaneously previously destroyed and decohered. Nothing could be more sensible.







Rift space has ruptured. Yet Hale Corp is going to jump through it to get here anyway on their suicide mission.

*Slams face into desk repeatedly until a slimy ooze emanates from random orifices*










Arrogant much? Also, wouldn't this take at least 10 seconds just to say?

Particulate attacks increase the resistance in the system from about 300 to almost 700, but we're fine for now.










Figures that Ogun would get the last word. I'm going to assume he doesn't really mean that the particulate is inbound to Valhalla. I think that would be bad.




Things very soon start blowing up all over the map. Bad things are happening. I've read that technically it is possible to withstand this forever ... I assume by hunkering down on the left side and clearing everything out first, etc. But I mostly just watch Ticon Corporation burn.

Once everything's been destroyed - which doesn't take long - the familiar fade from the prologue commences.







Overwhelmed by particulate everywhere, we have achieved 'victory'. By dying. Not by sending the message ... you have to be destroyed to trigger the win.




And now begins the big finish of the Epilogue.




Lakshmi. We hardly knew ye.




He's not even surprised Ticon is in Redacted Space. An act punishable by various terrible things including corporate forfeiture etc. according to the early missions.




And that's all folks. The Epilogue is a big fat nothingburger. Aside from that this version of Varro Hale is either insane or an idiot, it tells us nothing we didn't already know.

Why did they bother even putting it in? I think we'd have been better off without the epilogue.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the Story ... or at least tolerated it. Bonus content is up next, though it turns out there's one stock ship that we haven't seen yet so the Ship Editor stuff is on hold until we run into that (which I assume will happen at some point in the official missions).

I think there's one lesson to be learned from this: never trust an Abraxis. Even if they don't call themselves that.

Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Jan 8, 2020

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!
Did I mention I thought the plot of this game was completely hilarious?

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

Rifts fall, everyone dies

KazigluBey
Oct 30, 2011

boner

The story continues to be this series' clown-shoe-wearing Achilles Heel.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

lmao that was it?

the beginning was actually... THE END. Dun dun dun! also nothing happened.

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
The one mission where losing the HQ actually causes you to lose the mission.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...

General Revil posted:

I'm looking forward to you eating your words on this next mission.

Which words do I need to eat? The one big thing I can recall being dead wrong about is Ticon being Platius, though I'm sure there are many others. I need this information so I can get the right kind of ice cream to go with my a l a mode humble pie. Also, as a programming note, an eagle-eyed viewer pointed out that the missing stock ship? Well it was there in the final mission of the Story (Duty). I just never got it. The next episode is already up without it, but after that we're going to see that bit of missing material and delve into some ship editor stuff, after which it'll be back to the bonus missions.

synthbuttrange posted:

the beginning was actually... THE END. Dun dun dun! also nothing happened.

I cannot improve upon this succinct plot synopsis.

Fangz posted:

Did I mention I thought the plot of this game was completely hilarious?

Yep. You weren't wrong either.

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous
and this... is... to go... even further... beyond...

:bang:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA:bang:

this is unreal, how is he generating that much stupid

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

I remember during the CW2 period where people discussing the game were convinced there was deep meaningful lore in the series if you could untangle and match up all of the pieces.

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Thotimx posted:

Which words do I need to eat? The one big thing I can recall being dead wrong about is Ticon being Platius, though I'm sure there are many others. I need this information so I can get the right kind of ice cream to go with my a l a mode humble pie.

Actually, it's the one about how your HQ can never be destroyed as it just jumps out. You said it on the second to last mission, and on the last mission, the HQ can be destroyed causing you to lose and having to restart if you hadn't saved.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
The Melt (56:41)




Before we get into today's frivolity, I take a look around at some of the now-unlocked extras.




The Simulacrum is your basic procedural random mission generator thingamajig. It has a fairly dizzying amount of options that I'll be not delving into further.







The familiar-looking collection of maps by other players. This is the Grid view, it defaults to the Carousel which just shows one at a time with arrows to cycle through them, like the other PF screens. We'll be getting to at least a few of these in the future. Also worth noting is there aren't quite as many of these available as for the previous games, likely a reflection of the fact that this wasn't quite as popular as previous iterations of CW.




I briefly looked in here and it seemed the available options were robust enough. Not something I'm going to spend any more time on though.




There's no escaping Ticon Corp. The ship editor is clunky but functional, and we'll see that next time out.




This is where we're headed though. The description implied, at least to my mind, a sort of prequel story would be involved. A potentially sensible one.




And here's our first Inception mission.




No story, at least not here. We're just dumped in. Which you could argue is a positive change. I've seen the Inception missions described as being moderate in difficulty. If so, I am at best moderate in skill, because this one stalemated me for a while.

The advice given here is right on point.




Left-to-right we must go, with a limited fleet. No carrier, C-class, Varro, etc.




Just over a minute in. Particulate resistance appears to be ... significant, you might say. They have 1600 at the moment. We have 90 from our emitter.




They have a surprisingly hard time getting through the initial defensive line of land though, and it wasn't nearly as difficult getting our relatively limited fleet going. Wolf and Big Nose are our only real heavy-hitters, Marauder and smaller ships for crowd control.




I ended up using ships to advance on the top and bottom flanks, Omnis in between on that one good-sized island we have.




It took a bit of finagling to get the Grabbers properly positioned to route our particulate through the strips of land at the outer defenses. Clearly we'd need to seize the next couple of islands to progress, and both ships were needed to get the benign blueness on target.

Regular Marauder-Doppels and copious amounts of stunners were naturally on hang to complicate matters. No emergent though, for either side. I miss benign emergent. I like benign emergent.

Benign emergent have become my security blanket. I don't feel right without them.




Things might have actually gotten harder once I took the next island here, and I think I misindentified why at the time. A lot of particulate was bottled up behind them before ... now it had a target. I had to use every last omni with cannons on and every ship I had to hold it at bay, and still had to retreat in between the surges. I was always able to be secure behind the strip islands for the most part, but there was a lot of stuff blowing up and it wasn't always hostile.




The better part of ten minutes past before I could conquer the second island, and as you can see the enemy was far from pleased. All we'd really eliminated so far was a couple of energy mines and some land. That's good, but actual particulate production hadn't been touched and the mission was 20 minutes old.




Here's where our pushback started gaining momentum. The mass of particulate looks dangerous ... but we've managed to repair enough plasma to actually start turning the tide. As more and more of it was stabilized, the incursions were slowed more and more often and the fleet could be posted more aggressively.

That amp gem and the struc-protected emitter were the next targets.




Knocking that first emitter out took down enemy levels to only maybe 200 below their peak, still around 1400 hostile. And it was more difficult to make further progress than it looked, mostly because of that thing with the star on the right here. Turns out that's a Regenerator, which regenerates struc at an alarming pace. We were forced to go around.

Gradually advancing our plasma field seemed the only way. It was slow progress ... slower because the stupid doppels kept spawning right on top of where the big nose was, and knocking out its MK 7 module.




Eventually our HQ starred in eliminating the doppel structure while a bunch of their particulate milled about further back. Progress.




After getting that next emitter via a couple of lathe suicide runs, I decided to clear out one flank at a time. Here's me charging along the top, and failing spectacularly as built-up particulate at the back of the map put a few of its cents in. If you watch the video, you get to see repeated such bashings with time-skips to avoid all the rebuilding that happened in between.

Short version; I was never able to make it happen.




Eventually I just went after the regenerator, holding back just enough not to trigger all the enemy masses. In a strange conclusion to the mission, everything else apparently went boom when it was destroyed, because the victory screen came up immediately.




Next update will actually be covering the ship editor. After you see the dumb things I made, feel free to chime in with your own ideas. And then, Fountains of Beleguese will continue the Inception campaign. If The Melt was any indication, I'm up for stiff resistance in this series of challenges.

Regallion
Nov 11, 2012

There are 2 more reasons why there are fewer maps:
1. The scripting for PF, while improved from CW3 (there are several scripting tools available there that would have been real handy in CW3) is also complicated by the addition of ship-related commands.
2. Since a player can bring a custom fleet into your map, you either need to design maps around a pre-set fleet (trickier than it sounds) or make it in a very generic, possibly unfair way to counter the absolutely busted designs one can make.

In general, due to how the fleet system works and how unpredictable ships are, it's harder to make a good map here. In cw3, for example, i know EXACTLY how far a mortar can shoot and where you can place it, so it's easy enough to measure out the placements. Here, it's less so.
Furthermore, the particulate, doppels n such are way harder to predict and test than creeper, due to them posessing a rudimentary AI, as opposed to creeper's fluid simulation. That does not make things any easier.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
PSA: Recently a kind soul on the Arcen discord took it upon themselves to inform me that the first four letters of my previous name were ... unfortunate. I was unaware of the derogatory term/slur I was implying, and so today I am undergoing a 'rebranding', if you will. Henceforth I shall be identifying on teh internets as Strategic Sage which I hope will prove simultaneously more descriptive of my particular schtick as well as less offensive.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Varro & the Ship Editor (36:31)




To begin with, some unfinished business. The final Story mission, Duty, held a ship that I should have used but didn't ... because I forgot about it. Naturally it's called the Varro. I just rushed some lathes to the upper left to acquire it here and see what the crew had to say. If not zoomed in on this location, it's easy to have this part of the map covered up with the UI, and I was focused on the amp gems opposite this location in the bottom-left early on. Then I just totally forgot it was there.

That's the best semblance of an excuse I have - I definitely regret missing it in the course of completing this the first time.













It was clear a long time ago. Skarsgard has plot armor, even when it is thought his house has fallen.







And thusly, the final mission gets its name as well as the final ship.




Larger and more expensive than any other ship in the stock, corporate fleet, the Varro boasts triple MK7 modules, the big gun that the big nose carries but one of. That would have been highly useful against those space station things that caused me so much grief.




So on to the ship editor. Bizarrely, you can access it in two places actually and it works differently in each. This is the screen you see if you try to use a mission with a custom fleet. We'll get to the editor itself in a bit, but in this version at the top we have the current fleet value of ships that have been added to the mission, and the Max Fleet Value which you can set as a parameter. On the right, we can choose from the Stock ships, custom (i.e. those I've made and saved), and Online (creations uploaded by others). Here I've just searched for everything named Thor, a rather glaring omission from the campaign.

There are several of them, but only one that actually looks close to the actual Thor. Most are just a box with a bunch of everything thrown on them, more or less.




This is pretty good, just not absurd enough. It actually costs slightly less than a Varro. It's got all of the major weapons systems though, but it's just ... fairly underwhelming to me. Not the massive, point at things and they get quiet in a hurry type of thing we might expect based on the game versions from CW1 & CW3. But the shape of the ship is pretty close, even moreso than I expected.




So going back to the ship editor from the main menu, we come to this. This is the entirety of the functionality of the screen - we can't look at online or stock ships from here. Dumb Thing is a default design, almost as barebones as it gets. If we want to make our own ... well that gets a little iffy. See, you'd think you would just click Create New Ship there in the upper-left, but that actually does nothing if you haven't put in a name for it yet. The main area, under the Ship Modules section, is your basic grid where you can place different things. The white space is just plain hull with nothing on it, and single module on there is the Cockpit. Every ship has one and you can't remove it - if it's blown up, the whole ship is destroyed regardless of what the condition is of everything else.




The Edit Hull button brings up this, which you can use to put square, diagonal triangle, or smaller triangle sections on or remove them. The armor displays as grey and naturally makes it harder to destroy - all of the stock ships have a row of armor surrounding the ship, the Hammer is basically all armor which is why it lasts so long, while you can notice the Thor example showed earlier had very little esp. in the front. The Shift arrows just move the entire ship around the design box.

Also worth noting are the various cost metrics at the bottom including total energy required to produce it on the right.




Simply removing the extra hull spaces from around our Cockpit there results in the cheapest possible ship. It's also useless for anything other than very briefly absorbing damage, but hey; cost of 14.




I started doing some time-acceleration for the design process at this point because otherwhise the video would be extremely boring and annoying. Naturally going to the other end of the spectrum, I set out to design the most expensive ship I could make. I give you Monstro. The Apply or Cancel buttons there are how you save changes you've made. And every once in a while, they plain just don't show up which is all categories of awesome.

This is maximum size, 35*25, with Particle Beams everywhere. That's because they have the highest cost-per-square of any module at 15. Others are more expensive, but bigger. Note that just building the frame would require almost 40 minutes of gametime here. This thing would also move super-slow (no engine) but would be the ultimate plasma-rebuilder. Some of these weapons wouldn't be able to fire all that far beyond the actual boundaries of the ship itself. It's absurdly impractical of course, but the upper limit in cost comes in at 18.6k.

Putting the hull on isn't too bad, you can 'paint' it although there's no fill or brush tool. Modules not so much. Every.single.one of the 866 required clicking on a specific location to place it. This was naturally joyous fun.




I had trouble saving this at first so I got to remake it, but this is the first potentially-useful thing I made. Waiting for lathes to work was definitely an issue at times, so I made this BiLathe. An engine, a couple defensive lasers, and two Lathes instead of one to make short work on any targets. And of course armored on the front and sides to handle the inevitable hostilities from working in hostile territory.




I like the fighters ... this SuperCarrier fulfills the need for MOAR. The weapon positions jutting outside the armor seemed like a good idea at the time. More expensive than any stock ship, I didn't invest any in energy modules so it'll need to stay within standard operation range, but should provide considerable combat power.




Another ship I just wanted to beef up a little was the standard Discharger here. Some others, like tankers and grabbers, appeared to me to be just fine as is and I like a lot of the combat ships like the multi-purpose Marauder or anti-emergent Wolf. But I've found sometimes that a single discharger ship just didn't pack enough punch for whatever deployment situation I had it in.




Here's my version, a third Discharger added in the front and everything else pretty much left alone. For only a marginal cost increase, I consider this a bargain.




And then finally I took my hand at the Thor. You can watch from right about the 20-minute mark on the video, this one I left the whole long editing process in just for posterity. Five MK7 modules properly eclipses the Varro's trio of them, the shape is generally correct, a variety of weapons to defend or attack with, reactors and energy tanks to supply itself for a limited time as well. Probably a very limited time since I don't know what kind of power draw this thing will have, but the point is it isn't helpless even with no outside supply of juice. And then the two shields. I did some research on that and there's diminishing returns with those in terms of their effect, so I didn't think more than that was useful. My starting goal was in the 2-3k range cost-wise, so I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

I may never actually be able to afford to build it, but I still made it.

I'll try to put some of these designs into play starting next update as we return to the Inception campaign. If there's anything else you'd like to see tried design-wise, now's the time to hold forth on further absurdities.

Regallion
Nov 11, 2012

"Ooops! All armor" seems like a fun ship to build. Like a souped-up hammer.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I'd thought about a ship like that but decided against it. So now I made one, which we'll see in a couple missions. Might be a while till I can actually use it though.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Fountains of Betelgeuse (44:43)

Back to Inception we go.







We start at the bottom on this vertical map. Once again there is a generous plasma barrier, though as will be seen it's not as useful as they usually are. It looks good for us initially - we have more territory than the Particulate does to occupy.

It only looks that way though.




Note the strange structure in the bottom middle. It offers a dozen amp gems, so we'll have plenty of those to play with. As it turns out, you slowly harvest them from there at the cost of energy. It's an interesting way of gradually giving more of them over time to the player.




45 seconds in. If you're more observant than I, or perhaps less preoccupied with building up, you can already guess the gimmick of this level. We've seen it before in CW3.




Another minute, and I figured it out. Initially I deployed the Grabbers - and you get a full dozen of them in this mission - for the purpose of pushing the particulate up towards the enemy and not wasting it. As you can see here, this ... doesn't work very well. Hence the 'fountain show', there is a downward force be it wind, gravity, handwavium, whatever at work on this map. Which doesn't make a ton of sense since we are in space and there is no 'down', but this being CW it isn't expected to make sense.

Meanwhile, hostile Lathe ships are patrolling the lower edge of the plasma barrier not far above.




Soon, the tide broke loose and it got worse. A lot worse. Within seconds I had almost nothing left but the grabbers at the bottom. I thought about restarting, but tried to salvage it. As demonstrated it's not difficult to get off to a bad start here.




So this looks bad. I need to warp the HQ back in, but actually as positioned the grabbers are producing a fairly safe zone with those streams aimed towards the middle of the map. Meanwhile the initial rush has largely been absorbed. This is actually surprisingly and satisfyingly salvageable ... it's just going to take some time.




Grabber Leapfrog is the name of the game here. After getting a few combat ships to aid in the defense, I start adding more grabbers to move some forward and push our particulate higher as can be seen on the left here. Off-screen to the right, a Marauder and Destroyer protect that flank. I'm also making sure to keep that exit at the bottom-middle of the map blocked with plenty of grabbers, so that any blue friendlies that float down that way get recycled upwards again.

In this manner I'm able to gradually move the front lines of this battle upwards, and start deploying more firepower. The big guns in this case are the C-Class, Wolf, and later Big Nose.




After a slow, gradual push we seize the next row of energy sources - I found Mine Cannons to be quite useful as a tech option here. Now it was time to work on reconstituting the plasma field. As you can see at the top here, it has long since been eradicated.

If I had it to do over, I'd definitely form a custom fleet for this with more particle weapons for this purpose. As it is, I spread out the cruiser, C-class, and marauder along the front as they are the ships I have armed with such capabilities.




At first I didn't get far, but as the plasma coherence improved the fountains effect was slowed down dramatically. Hostile particulate began to stack up on it instead of crashing down into my fleet, making things a great deal easier.




Then I started running out of grabbers, even with twelve of them. I'm not sure how much good it does, but I even started giving amp gems to some of them. At this point I began experimenting with reorganizing them. There's a certain art to placing them in reasonably optimal positions to get the most particulate up the map with the fewest ships you can, so that there are enough to push it along the front and support the continued snail-crawl advance of the fleet.




Half an hour into the struggle. One of the things about this map is there's no low-hanging fruit. We now have control of over half of it, but no production structures of the enemy have been yet taken. We have to pass this barricade for that to happen - there is still constantly about 1200 hostile particulate, not counting their ships and doppels. Energy sources are the only things we've yet reached.




Eventually reaching the top of the plasma field, I began placing Omnis on liberated sections of the land barricade. Inch by painful inch, we continued to push despite the particulate's stringent objections. Finally, things started turning harder in our direction, the doppel structure and then others falling. There was still plenty of particulate at the top of the map, so ...




I decided to deploy the SuperCarrier. Here's how it looks compared to some of the other ships. Only half of its runways are operational at this point ...




But that's more than enough to put some serious hurt on the enemy masses. By the time it was done building, this battle was all but over.




Because reasons, this level decided to start a trend of not actually recording my victory time. It's as if I never played Fountains, even though I did. PF doesn't like me. Anyway, Daisy Chain is up next and there appears to be a least one ship I haven't seen before in the graphic here. And it's got a different author as well! We'll see what 'planetfall' has to offer next time.

Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

Strategic Sage posted:

Because reasons, this level decided to start a trend of not actually recording my victory time. It's as if I never played Fountains, even though I did. PF doesn't like me.

Is it possible the victory time doesn't count if you use custom ships?

Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

Carbon dioxide posted:

Is it possible the victory time doesn't count if you use custom ships?

There should be separate leaderboards for Default Fleet and Sandbox Fleet.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I think you're both right. Wasn't talking about the leaderboards though, but the display in the 'mission carousel'. Carbon dioxide gets the door prize for the in-retrospect obvious answer that didn't occur to me. The ones that don't have a time are only the ones that I used custom ships for.

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Missions 2 and 3 are my second and most favorite of the inception bunch. So I hope you enjoyed them. Also, it's a shame you changed your name, you were my favorite e-thot.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I'll take Things I Never Thought I'd Be Called for $400, Alex!

I liked the second one. Third one is honestly my least favorite Inception mission so far (out of four). But we'll get to that soon.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Daisy Chain (53:33)





So even the custom ships have customized parts in this adventure.




This thing is Regallion's fault. I wanted an armor ship worth about 1k, and this is what I came up with - essentially a backwards-wedge shape. Spoiler: this has flaws but it won't be making an appearance in this mission.




They ... they're back. Why are they back? I thought it was just a bad dream. Guh.

Today's question to not be answered in any way whatosever; why advanced weapons would be more susceptible to this interference than less advanced ones.







That was at least mercifully brief, if still typically nonsensical.




Upper-right is the required starting point pretty much, and there's a see-saw path we must follow. Various ships are available to acquire, and the mire spawners have a yellowish ring to distinguish them from the standard ones. Let's get to it.




The spacing on the initial ring of energy pods is unfortunate. It's easy to do what I did here, and actually park myself too close to the energy source to build a mine. Move outside the ring as I did a bit later, and the lathe can't reach it. So it's pretty much just annoying to maneuver the HQ into just the right spot.




We've got multiple threats early. Plentiful emergent from the left, particulate from below. I got a couple of Omnis up but they didn't last long against the emergent.




Getting both of our Jovens up - we have very limited fleet assets available, those are literally the only starting combat ships you get by default - helped absorb enough of the emergent to allow the lathe ships to turn this emitter our way. Now we're getting somewhere.




Our first ship schematic. I found the Sprayer module to not be useful at all really. This ship itself is only because we have limited firepower and it has missiles.




Here it is in action. Naturally I'm getting CW3 deja vu here. A concentrated attack on the emitters and energy source below here was clearly the next order of business.

Next, I wanted to acquire both 'fingers' of land with the aid of our, as they were so eloquently termed in the official level description, 'blue particles'. And of course Omnis. This took some doing.




With more territory under our control, the emergent spread out more - and we also gave them a regular diet of blue particles to the face.

Oh look, a hostile Cruiser. That's fun.




Another Grabber, our third, was available in this area. Also, one of those wonderful buildings storing Gems. So we'll get more of those .. in time.




Jumping over the 'divide', I was able to grab this a bit earlier than possibly intended.




I never did figure this out. I'm trying to use the new Booster to help in attacking the next emitter, but the flow of particles curves over to the left instead. There are some other circumstances where it does so, and I don't know why.

After succeeding in this goal, I tried directing a stream directly at the next finger of land ... which is larger than I thought. I eventually gave up on the idea and tried to go around it.




Here's a better indication of the scale - I tried to attack by redirecting particulate down and then across at the bottom (below this image). I'm going to spare you the concentrated fail that resulted. There are a couple of microtankers down there to encourage that path. It's fools gold IMO.

After having done it, I recommend an extended period of particulate barrage such as I'm doing now, aided by Omnis, then hopping across once things are thinned out a bit to flip more emitters.




25 minutes later. I didn't need to do it at this point, but I eventually noticed that you can just 'lathe across' the strip of land and gain more assistance earlier this way. I uh, definitely didn't do this level the right way, but I think this is pretty darn cool.




Omnis move along, spreading our influence by converting more emitters. Even at this point, there is still 2k hostile particulate on the map. We aren't done.










We're done ripping off CW3 concepts; we reach back to CW2 for this one.




This emitter in the extreme lower-left had been responsible for the ruination of many ships today. And even with a newly minted Maker leading the charge, it still put up a stern resistance.




The stage was now set for a particulate battle royale to finish it. 1.5k of the enemy still remains, and also that MK7-bearing enemy ship isn't much fun either.

I should note at this point that while I didn't have the gems to spare at the start, well before I figured it out going with the Emitter Control tech is pretty darned important. Really relieves the pressure on the Boosters & Grabbers.




Merely flooding the zone with tons of particulate only got us so far, reducing the flow to about 500. Aiming for the remaining land was necessary to overwhelm the impressive resistance and finally claim victory.




A bit of a foreboding title. What are the Particulate building now?

General Revil
Sep 30, 2014

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I'm not sure why the particulate curves around the second finger of land, but it does so until you destroy the enemy cruiser, then it stops doing that and flows forward freely.

DTurtle
Apr 10, 2011


That map was fun to watch. :)

Right at the beginning you went for land production over mine production - despite not having any land. And then ss you noted: not figuring out that you could simply lathe the emitters right across that tiny sliver of land (you had one lathe sitting SO CLOSE to doing that for quite a while) and of course not getting emitter control until very late (despite having so many emitters).

I will note that your futile attack across the bottom actually was useful - you killed that one emitter in the "hole", which helped you finally take the land sliver when you gave up on the bottom.

Your BiLathe has a critical design flaw which becomes obvious next video. A ship is destroyed as soon as the cockpit is destroyed. The cockpit has almost no health at all. You have the cockpit unprotected at the edge of the ship. So just a couple pieces of particulate coming from the wrong direction will immediately destroy the ship. There is a reason all other designs have at least some hull, armor or component (often the engine) protecting the cockpit.

The SuperCarrier has the same design flaw, but it stays in the back, so it isn't as bad there.

Also, it seems like getting energy always goes to the cockpit, while weapon range is calculated for each weapon individually. Would it be possible to build a really long nose or something and place for example a lathe or energy distributor/range extender at the very front, getting much larger ranges.

Something like this (photoshopped)

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I could … but that would be absurdly expensive for use in the early stages of missions, and I'm not high on the idea of having a lathe ship that I don't want to build until later.

DTurtle posted:

Right at the beginning you went for land production over mine production - despite not having any land.

You say that like it's a problem … I didn't even notice that. Definitely solidifies that Daisy Chain wasn't my finest hour.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Industrial Complex (57:05)







All that blue plasma looks inviting, but it really isn't. There's a Doppel structure there, no energy sources, and a quick strike against that structure is a really bad idea because of how fast this starts. The only real choice is the lower-left.

Not too difficult to see where the threat is - the jaws in the opposite corner boast a Regenerator, and I hate those things.




My typical cautious start gets me in trouble here. There is a thousand particulate on the map inside of 15 seconds, eventually peaking at 1.9k. This is almost three minutes in, and I'm already stalemated though I don't realize it. The problem is where to expand, though it also didn't occur to me to turn lathes off on my Omnis which I really should have done. A struc border constantly builds around the islands, and the lathes eat up too much energy. I have 14 income right now, which unfortunately isn't enough to take on that island with the three energy sources.

I tried, then kept trying, and then eventually restarted. It wasn't so much a loss as a definitive non-win. It gets more hopeless the longer you take, because more and more particulate builds up on the far side of the island.




After experimenting a bit, I come up with this much better plan; a quick strike on the emitter at the center of the island and a follow-up omni attack. I have full control of it about two and a half minutes into the mission, and now I have a foothold to much better combat the enemy. Then I take Omni Reactors with that nearby Amp Gem, reserving more energy for other operations.




It's still a bit of a flow build. While Omnis spread out on the islands above to increase our income, the fleet is gradually built, holding off the incursions and eventually working into the hostile plasma to the right. I clear out one foe in that emitter in the plasma field first, then head to that island in the upper-left of this image.




Then there's this one along the bottom, which brings us closer to another energy source. One that has lots of 'friends'. Default fleet options are a pair of Destroyers and a pair of Cruisers, along with a Wolf. And we don't have enough energy left for that last one. Cruisers do the vital work of gradually clearing out plasma.




BiLathe comes in handy again here dealing with this rather interesting struc defense on an emitter in the center of the map, after the Wolf aids in clearing out that energy source. I basically just ate away enough of this with lathes to get close enough. You can see that we're getting close to worse problems. Oh, and particulate is nearly at 3k. Yikes.




There ... uh ... are a couple-few Doppels on this map. And other Bad Things (tm). It seemed a good point to me to raid up into the friendly plasma zone and grab the schematics there - a Grabber and a Big Nose. Hard to see here but to the right of that plasma is the greenish area there is a modest benign emitter.




That took some while, and this next part would be no walk in the park either. Wherever possible I forayed forwards with the bilathe to eliminate 'blade emitters'. Short-lived Omni assaults on the island and gradual clearing out of the buildup above and below the landmass also proceeded. The further we got, the more resistance there was from all manner of doppels. We had enough to get the job done ... but not enough to do it anything resembling quickly. It was six to seven minutes before a foothold was established ... after that as usual things accelerated quickly. And I had an energy surplus now with the entire fleet deployed ... so I built something new.




In this mission, the RegSmash sees it's first action. 'Doppel Sponge' might be a better name. This was a slog at the end, and would have been a worse one without it. The main problem I had with it is that it's best at attacking along a narrow front ... and this is a wide one. It's easy to have something come in from the sides, where the cockpit has limited armor. But head-on doppel collisions like this one end very badly for the enemy. It can take a whole full-size doppel, Wolf variety for example, and yawn as it loses about 3% or so of it's hitpoints.

Also visible here is that the enemy fortress is basically ringed with doppel-generating structures. They come from different direction and getting a lathe forward to kill something is ... touchy while still protecting it because of the different directions they come from.




Here both problems and solutions can be seen. I've made a path up to the blue emitter so a grabber can send in a stream of benign particulate to help. Meanwhile doppels attack from all directions, but eventually we grind down the perimeter. At the end, the RegSmash completely blocks off one of two paths out of the enemy defenses, while the BiLathe takes down that Regenerator and it's over.

The sheer number of things to destroy at the end of this level is a little much, but I still thought it was overall a fun one. Up next is Square Land. Which looks like what it sounds like.

Kangra
May 7, 2012

I'd be curious to see how effective a 'deep strike' Lathe ship would be. I'm picturing something with a fairly thick armor shell around a core of a lathe and some energy storage. It wouldn't necessarily be for fully controlling nodes far from your zone of influence, but for taking some of the pressure off temporarily.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
I'll try something similar to that in a couple of missions' time. There's been a few people who've suggested a more armored version.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
Square Land (37:15)


The tour of new ships continues as we finally see the new Thor in action. Takes a while to get there ... but it makes quite an impression once it shows up.




No joke here, I was definitely amused by this mission description.




This is the only message we get. Lakshmi never did get enough screen time, so presumably that's the purpose of it.




There are big squares, and small ones. It's obvious already that miring these will be of huge importance, and resulting from that an Omni focus is paramount. There are only three hostile emitters, but they aren't wimpy. On the left is one of those Gem Harveters ... don't know the real name, but we can pick up more there. But it's all the way at the bottom behind that plasma band that we are clearly meant to begin operations.




About 2:30 on the clock here. Early Amp Gem investments include Omni Reactors and Land Production for evident reasons. We have a stringy benign emitter, but we aren't making much use of it yet. Meanwhile we're under a decent amount of pressure, and hostile Lathe ships are pathing through. Total hostile particulate count is more than two thousand.




After going Emitter Control, I head up towards the Gem Harvester ... and they are sending Marauders after us now, they'll be a few face-offs between ours and theirs. I want the additional energy and the access to more amp gems and land. This is an important step for us.

It makes mincemeat out of our Cruiser shortly thereafter, but we reach our target. Meanwhile we have other problems, as I've just started in on Benign Emergent, turning off Omni Reactors to get it. I felt that was necessary due to the fact that there's almost 30 hostile emergent about. Those are a very real and present danger to our omni network.




I've now got two of the big chunks under our control, and a Grabber streaming blue particles the obvious next target. Which is where most of those emergent are hanging out. At this point we have a respectable energy income of 25, but need to ramp up as the Wolf and Big Nose remain unbuilt. Long-term strategy is here to go all-in on energy to support our ultimate weapon.




I'm wondering if they automatically build something equal to the biggest thing you have deployed. Look in the upper-right. Meanwhile, as soon as our Wolf got in range, we began dispersing the nearest concentration of the enemy effectively. The gradual amp gem income has omni reactors back on as well as increasing our energy range.

Mire is now even, and in related news emergent are as well.




Taking down the first emitter does relatively little to stem the particulate tide. It does however give us access to more land, which I greedily snatch up. Then it begins; the long process of constructing the Thor.




This was to become the toughest and longest battle of the level - pushing in on a second enemy concentration here on the right. The omnis knocked out their shipbuilder so we don't have to deal with that anymore, and I gradually inched out towards this ball of hostility.




Two waves of omnis sent at the nearby 'asteroid' were required, four in each. The second group was nearly destroyed as well, but one of them narrowly survived to give us a foothold. Meanwhile the constant barrage has lowered particulate resistance from about 1700 to 1200, roughly ... but that's still a healthy amount for the ships at our disposal.




It took about 12 minutes to fully build the Thor. Once deployed, it was a serious energy hog and we went into deficit ... but it also was putting out more firepower than the rest of the fleet combined I think. Enough to turn this from a grind into clear superiority fairly quickly. Soon after this, the second emitter went down and our land empire was further expanded.




Eventually this was enough to basically equalize in terms of the economy, and have everything including the Thor firing at full strength. Hundreds of particulate still remained, but with this much support the BiLathe was able to knock out the final emitter.




That's ... that's a lot of hostile plasma in CEO's Landing.

Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

Any bets on which will be completed first: the release of CW4 or Strategic Sage's (dammit I wanted to abbreviate that SS but that sounds bad too) LP of Particle Fleet?

Regallion
Nov 11, 2012

Unless CW4 is in the finishing stages, should be PF.

Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

Regallion posted:

Unless CW4 is in the finishing stages, should be PF.

It's been "coming soon" for a year now.

Strategic Sage
Jan 22, 2017

And that's the way it is...
FWIW I haven't read anything official that sounds like it's coming soon. It was just last fall that that the man himself said the story missions hadn't been designed yet, the front end still needed to be done, etc. Based on what's been put out there, I'm guesstimating and planning on late this year, possibly into 2021 for CW4. So basically I haven't seen any reason to think I won't finish Particle Fleet and, even continuing doing one mission a week, have plenty of time left to do a healthy variety of bonus material before the new title is out.

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DTurtle
Apr 10, 2011


Watching the video it looked like the Thor actually can't receive energy fast enough to power all its weapons at once. The big guns simply need to much. Once it was in range and stayed there a bit only some of the big guns and none of the small ones were firing.

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