Heh. Wait 'till you see the finale. I'm alright at GH, but... troubles plague me too, sometimes (!!Fire,!! what?). I'm just really familiar with farming low-rep missions for cash, parts, and XP. The only roguelike I'm able to win with an sort of consistency is Incursion, and the only other victory I've pulled out of any of them was Furyband... once. Crawl eats me alive and ADOM... I still remember this one time, I step into a dungeon, walk out of the first (empty) room, and about five steps into the corridor I get instakilled by an acid trap. It was the first thing I did that game, outside of walking to the dungeon.
GH's just not that bad early on, before the RNG starts slipping you mickys. Later... yeaah. Later. Anyway, I'm awake and vaguely not-as-sick as I started this morning, so I'll get back to getting a parts supply... and making that bloody merc (needed cannon fodder... badly.) something not utter crap. Honestly, I'm half hoping something kills the dude; his stats are horrible. Who do I pass the save to next, anyway?
EDIT: Mini-update for great choiceness: Rishiri's contact for the episode's offering entrance to the Rocket Stars. Can we get a yay or nay? I'd probably throw down on nay, again; if I go for a lawful faction, it'd probably be the Knights for the eventual rockin' armor... but the Stars aren't really bad. I vaguely remember them having fairly decent mecha. Eh. Point's moot, went ahead and finished the episode which... might have hit a deadend. We'll find out, I guess?
Anyway, here's the last bit of text dump. Enjoy, I guess. Though, uh, fair warning, most of this is written under the effects of burgeoning sickness, so it's a bit disjointed.
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... round three starts poorly. Gaunt gets immolated by a bloody missed sliver gunshot setting the ground on fire; 483 damage straight up, torching the right wing and body and wrecking the machine. Bloody wonderful. Talk about anticlimax. Death by freaking tree.
Well. Drake ejected, so that's something. Moving some spare weapons onto the Chameleon; swapped the shield for a beam, added an ECM and Haiho armor, slipped a mount on and stuck a 'bluss innit, and lastly managed to install one of the Haiho's acts into the thing. Flimsy little thing, but 0/-1 is 0/-1.
Anyway. Icewind, urban buru, space fight, manage to winnit, but with damage. Had to install a mebsy's space jets inna' cham to get out there, was bloody slow. Slipped the Urban's (I think) swarm missiles into the Chammie's leg -- might as well use that +2 sensor score -- and ripped out the Starwarrior's hoverjets to stick into the cham for extra space speed.
... and there went the Chamelon. Aced -- one shotted -- by a Wraith's vulcan. Hmm. At least that's a worthy weapon to be killed by. Vulcan's got some pretty high damage potential, if you can get it into range... and actually land a hit.
Well. Bugger this for a gamea' soldiers, whatever the blazes that means. Drakey needs cannon fodder, so I hop back over to Clund to pick up Ip the Unpronounceable, who's piloting an Urban Buru... and has utter crap stats. So... yeah. Training montage, I guess. +4 combat skills and 11 as his highest stat isn't going to cut it. 20k for this? I got jypped.
*insert cleaning out Gaos's pirate problem here, with listage. Add Kosaka to the pirate cleansing after the Masks clear out of Gaos.*
One forgotten fight: Was Icewind and some Buru variant, I think.
Buru: Assault IV (#4 ditches. Turns out the Assaults have some down-massed actuators I hadn't noticed, so they get stripped out and stored, along with the 60 pack of light rockets. The remaining machine gets sold.)
Urban III (#3 ditches. Sold.)
Base VII (#5, pilot ditches. Pretty much useless, sold. #6 is from a thief; has a skybolt rifle. Not the best, but haywire is deadly, so a nice addition. Thief died, though. Eh.)
Heavyarms VII (AHAHAHAHA! Loot from the fight with #5 and the Gorilla gets us over the 1 mil mark. I am now content.)
Shard II (Ip Unpronounceable gets piloting +5 here off #1.)
Mebsy III (#3, pilot killed, sold. Drake and Ippie both get a point of gunnery after that fight.)
Wraith I (Ip U. gets another point into piloting, as does Drake, who's at +9.)
Icewind: 87b III
Eyre II (Themed thief in #2. Mech got aced, but pilot ejected. Got a thunderbolt rifle out of it; more haywire never hurts. Ipi gets piloting 8.)
Haiho IV (Ippy goes to +7 piloting off #1. Next is a point or two of gunnery; dude keeps missing... everything. #4 ditches. Already got a spare Haiho, so I strip it of useful parts and sell it.)
Skull I
Galah I (Killed the pilot! Finally, a vaguely -- very vaguely -- decent spare mech.
Gorilla I
Total: XXXIX
Ooh, Kosaka's got a mine. Free industrial mech! After I get some antidotes. Freaking spores.
Huh. Well, the charm focus didn't hurt. Mission to retrieve a stolen item let me talk the thief into handing over the goods, no fuss, no muss. Nets me a martial artist ally which... ... doesn't help much, really. Oh well. Really need some utility skills -- medicine/repair, maybe shopping -- or another (actually decent) mech combat monkey.
Ippo's Urban has become... strange. His primary weapons are in metro shields, for the sole reason that installing anything, anywhere on the machine dumps another point of MV/TR penalty on it, even something as small as a mount in one of the arms. Despite this, even several additional tons of carried or equipped items refuses to budge the base -4/-4 penalty. So the mech has a pair of machine cannons, one in each shield, and a light rocket 60 in one of his hands, to take advantage of an upgraded sensor. I can't fit anything else on the bloody thing, and for some ungodly reason the Buru needs a free hand to fire the 2.5 ton cannons. Bloody odd machine. Hopefully I can get some armor on it at some point, switch some weapons into that. But whatever; it's tougher than the Haiho I'm piloting, which is enough for me, for now. Later parts changes things up a bit, but it's still a bloody strange machine.
Getting around to checking the mine gives me a really nice surprise on level 4; a shiny rock, which has the absolutely delightful base value of 1.2 million. Obviously, it won't sell for that much, but it's still going to give a bloody delightful boost to our wallet. Not as much as if we had shopping, but still... later checking at the shop shows it sells for just enough to tip our funds over the million mark. Huzzah! Not selling it yet, though; sticking it into the storage mech, in the hope of selling it for more when/if we get shopping. If you folks afterwards have no interest in netting the skill, just sell the thing to a decently friendly shopkeeper. You should be able to get at least 160k for it; the mechanic (O dude.) in Kosaka'll buy it for at least that much.
Anyway, the mine nets us a Rusty Mod Haiho, which has a Buzzsaw and an Industrial Bolt Gun. Unfortunately, both pretty much, well, suck. The saw has pretty impressive stats (DC22, BRUTAL on the Haiho.)... but any melee weapon that's not, at the least, EXTEND is pretty much useless. Too much space jousting. The gun on the other hand...? Mason Burus carry that. Yeah. Well, mech's a mech. Better than nothing. Ooh, wait, it has armor! I can put that on the Buru, get some weapons outta' the shields! Congrats Haiho, your existence is validated.
Oh, and Ip's pretty decent at killing spaceworms with his combat rifle. I've got him set up for upgrading to a decent beam gun at some point in the future, though.
Anyway, 6 o'clock CST rolls around, so I'm actually starting on the episode material now. Off to Rishiri!
So there's a fleet outside of Rishiri, put there by the 'technocracy'. I go out to check the thing out and run into an inert -- or at least non-hostile -- battleship, a Chameleon, and some variety of Buru, both of which drop without hitting me. The battleship launches round two; a Shard, two Burus -- the non-themed is a Gunner, which is fairly nasty -- and a Mebsy, with an ace (Ixpop) in one of the Burus.
Ix gets haywired by Ipwa the first round he gets. Some hammering a while later, with the Gunner steadily stripping armor from Ips, their entire lineup's haywire, which makes the remaining battle... less difficult, anyway. The ace is the first to drop, heh, followed by the Gunner. The shard ejects, leaving the Mebsy as the last survivor; also the only one that actually manages to get out of haywire before we drop it. Not entirely surprising, I guess, as it had the lowest MV penalty of the lot of 'em. The Mebsy's pilot finally ejects, leaving the battlefield to me.
Plot blurb thinks it's mebbe' the start of an invasion. Of the crashed mecha, only an Urban's remains managed to stick around the map to loot. Meh. The Mebsy at least gets sold. For kicks, I upgrade Ipi's M.Fighting for the boost to shield blocking.
So... that's done. Whatshisname, the questgiver, offers to let us into the Rocket Stars... which, yeah. No. Money. 50k to go and a choice of next target; I pick brushing up on skills over in... wherever the plot send us. Game spits out a deadend error, but apparently we're heading to Galconde, maybe? I'unno. Whoever gets the save next might have to... do whatever it is you're supposed to do to jumpstart the plot. Eh.
So the tl;dr version: I farmed missions for a couple hours days (bloody headache), racked up a good sixty or so kills, and finished the episode content in... something like ten minutes, if that. On the bright side, the next fellow's got a good 1.3 mil cash, a few spare -- if unimpressive -- mecha, drastically improved combat skills, a fairly puny combat monkey ally that is in serious need of improved stats, and a possibly deadend plot. Enjoy, ahahahahaha!
EDIT: Just to be sure, I imported the save into 6.21 and redid the last bit of episode conversation. .21 doesn't seem to have the dead so... yeah. Would the next fellow prefer the deadend .20 save, or the, yanno', non-blocked .21 save?
