Update 0: Introductions
Journal of Jacob ReidSaturday, Janurary 1st, 2067:Goddamn it. That's the last time I'm getting drunk.
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Well, maybe a little more hair of the dog won't hurt...
Wait a second. Plush Interior? Future-Retro Design? The Letter X? By gods, I'm an X-COM Commander! Damn it, I knew that that hooker was being too friendly!
Saturday, Janurary 1st, 2067: (cont.)Goddamn it! Those bastards shanghai'd me off to some goddamned frontier to lead a bunch of wet-nosed assholes! I did my four years during the Second Alien War, and this is how they repay me? They'll hear this from my lawyer! As soon as I find one, that is.
Saturday, Janurary 1st, 2067: (cont.)Goddamn lawyers! I hate them! They're all like, "Oh, you signed all the paperwork already," and "Oh, it was either this for life in prison, remember?" Bullshit! You'd think that I remember that I accidently drove over twelve people in a drunken joyride on a Marsec Stormdog, killing three people, giving fatal injuries to two and leaving four in a comma! It's blackmail I say! Blackmail!
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You know, this room is kinda swanky.
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Eh, I might as well go over the paperwork. I bet that if I'd left we'd all be floating inside an alien nutrient vat within a week.
Saturday, Janurary 1st, 2067: (cont.)Make that two days. This place is more terrible than a Fed. Korean cruiseliner! My sub-commander is a slimeball calling himself Herbert Mullar. Apparently his great-grandfather bled to death on Cydonia, or something like that. And his father fought in the Second Alien War, but I'm calling bullshit. I would remember if I fought along a bastard with the same stupid-ass face. Goddamn it, where's my whiskey?
Saturday, Janurary 1st, 2067: (cont.)Apparently it was right in front of me or something. Now where was I? Ah right, his sorry excuse for a dump.
Damn it, nobody cares! Get this stupid thing out of my face.
That's better. Now then I'm in the imaginitively named X-COM BASE 1. Seeing as I'm the bloody commander, the first thing I'm going to do is change that stupid name. To something like... uh... Echo-1. Or something. It'll come to me in time. We've also got three companies plying their trade on the frontier.
Hawkins Synthetics is, uh, downish from the base.
Cyberdig is upish.
And Tad-Tech ltd is to the left somewhat. And good old Earth is, uh... well it's somewhere. Probably north. East. North-east. Anyways my freaking job is to make sure that the goddamn aliens don't bust up these corperations for some reason or another. Probably money. Those bastards better be paying up. Oi, Herbet! Yeah, you, you stinking pile of puke! Figure out if those bloody companies are paying us for protection.
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What? Why the hell would it be for free! The bloody first rule of X-COM is to never do anything for free! Now move your godforsaken ass and get on it!
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Bloody slackers.
Now, uh the base is apparently near the Aquila system or something. I don't know. What I do know is that it's as basic as shit. Give me a second, I've got a list here... Ah, here we go.
It's got:
1 hangar capable of storing three interceptors.
1 living quarters for five pilots. They must be getting freaking suites or something.
1 cargo unit with 1000 space or some shit like that. Most of which is empty, might I add.
1 probe launch module. I'm surprised that they didn't add another one, since we apparently only need one to begin with.
1 standard downlink, which'll allow us to commuicate with the GSC. I'll get to those idiots later.
1 deflector shield generator. Apparently we can only house one of these things per base. Goddamn bureaucrats.
1 standard sensor module. It'll allow us to detect alien spacecraft. We can fit only one sensor per base, which is fine because these things have a 100% detection rate or something.
1 communications module so that I can yell at the pilots while they're out patrolling. Oh, and to give them orders too.
1 missile defences using, uh, X-Winder missiles. X-Winder? Really? Can't we come up with better goddamn names?
Oh, and we got a beam defence thingy armed with lasers, if anybody really cares.
Looking over the plans, we're missing two important modules. A training and a hospital module. Now in my day the only training we had was the live kind, and the only doctors we had was a warm glass of milk mixed with asprin. Still, the less time these idiots spend injured is more time they can get shot at. Plus I'd be damned if any shot-nosed pilots are going to lollygag around the base just because they don't have a craft to fly! I'm just going to ear-mark those modules... Damn. It's going to cost us a quarter of our budget just to build these.
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Damn it Mullar, can you work any slower! Get a move on you bastard!
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Kids these days. They ain't got no respect. Well, that covers the base. Eh, let's take a look at what else we can waste our money on.
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Goddamn it! Another interceptor is going to cost us another quarter of the budget! And it's factory loaded too! That's just going to cost us more money to replace everything! Gah, just give me a minute to see how much it's going to really cost.
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Is there another page or... no.
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Are you telling me that we have no better weapons and... armour and shit than the defaults? Laser cannons and X-Winders? Maybe we can manufa-
Goddamn it!
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I'm moving on. Now where I can hire more pilots...
Oh, good. They've actually screened the bastards beforehand...
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Sod this, I have no freaking clue what everything means. I don't even think that we have more room for pilots.
Yeah, we don't.
(Sorry to interupt, but since the dogfighting portions are all first-person I'm going to go ahead and claim a pilot for myself. I could let all of the pilots be claimed and just rotate through all of them, but I'd probably just get you shot down or something. It's safer this way, trust me.)
(If you were wondering, yes, you can change the name of the pilots. And the both the base and the three fighters too.)
(There we go, that's better. Now where were we?)
Bloody factory interceptors. I should probably talk rapturously about the wonders of laser cannons and X-Winders, but I just can't seem to muster the bloody enthusiasm. Now excuse me while I take another swing of whiskey.
Oh good, research. Now Mullar was just explaining to me about how this all worked. You see, somewhere floating around there is the GS... uh C. Galatic Science Corp. The standard downlink communicates with them and bounces information back and forth. The best part is that we're only paying to maintain the downlinks. The deal is that the GSC gets first dibs whenever the tech becomes declassified. Knowing how much we learned in the first two alien wars, the GSC stands to earn many a pretty penny. Of course we're getting the better half of the bargin here, since we don't have to deal with a bunch of stuffy-shirt scienists. Heh. Now looking at the plans of the station we can add another... two downlinks which'll cost us... another quarter of our budget.
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I need another drink.
Oh, and before I get drunk off my ass, let me tell you about probes. You can launch them, and they detect stuff, and... uh, that's it. Now I'm going to go get drunk off my ass.
Private Journal of Herbert MullarSaturday, Janurary 1st, 2067:Our commander came in today. I was expecting someone... a little different. Not this foul-mouthed, drunk, beat-up old man. He looks nothing like the photos from the Second Alien War. He is merely forty-five, yet his hair is completely grey, his eyes are watery and weak, and his gut is massive. I wonder why X-COM would consent to send such a... dried-up old fart here, but my associates back in Sol assure me that Reid is as sharp-witted as ever, when is isn't drunk that is. I will have to ask around about Reid's personal whiskey supply.
(This is the current situation. We've got 4.5 million dollars in the bank, which is little more than chump change apparently. A quarter of it will be set aside to build three more downlinks. That will triple our current download speed, which means that we can research stuff three times as fast. What I'm going to do with the rest of the money is up to you, I guess. Up to five interceptors can be launched on a single mission, so obviously we'll have to build another hanger and living quarters. We'll also need money to buy probes and hire pilots, along with a buffer incase one of the interceptors gets shot down. I'm thinking of firing one of our current pilots and hiring Anya Hess, who has the best firing/flying accuracy possible, and pretty bitching psionics too. Other than that I have no clue, so any suggestions will be welcome.
Research-wise we'll need to research tractor beam at some point, but that'll take months with a single downlink. I was thinking about researching advanced lasers first for some better weaponry before moving onto... something else. I don't know.
Anyways if you want to claim a pilot remember that you can submit a first name, last name or callsign. If you're wondering, a callsign is what your pilot is refered to during dogfights. You'll see what I mean next update. Our base and three fighter craft also need names too. I'll take the most popular name for the base, and the three most popular names for the fighter craft.
For the next update I'll need a research goal (or two) and a base name. Pilot/craft names, a list of things to buy and a general strategy would be good too, but I can't think of a better strategy than 'shoot down all aliens'.
If you have any questions ask, or take a look at the ufopedia. It probably knows more than me.)
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Topic: Let's Play: X-COM Interceptor: Flying Blind! (Read 22301 times)