Ponderplanned, my 0.88 outpost continues.
I've lost some progress in the game, because I didn't copy the region1 directory properly. I ended up at the end of 2 Steel Ranger ambushes. This time Whiplash kills the last Steel Ranger, and gets a bruised lung in the process.
This time around Checklist makes not pants, but a tough leather dress and becomes a legendary leatherworker. Brass still gets it.
We find an Earth Pony in one of the cages and take him inside. He looks awful and his cutie mark is burnt away. We decide to make him a second class citizen. Ham goes about educating him in the ways of our stable. The new guy is scared and it doesn't work, so Tasty Scraps tries next. Checklist tries for the third time. She fails as wall and since the servant is getting thirsty despite standing on a drink stockpile, he is allowed to roam freely. I think they can only drink water.
Trumpet is now an adult. He would make a fine soldier, but his special talent is music. We could use a theatre and some entertainment in the dining hall, so he is told to compose some music.
Brass and Library Card become a Master Sawpony.
Another Minotaur comes along. Civilians are ordered inside and the gate is locked. Those things are fast, but fortunately he came from the south, which gives us some time. Everypony save for a war wolf and a war dog make it inside and the security is told to go over the gate and shoot at the Minotaur. The dog flies through a fortification and the Minotaur follows it. The Reaver then kills the wolf and stops in perfect view of the gate, as if to spite us. After getting shot a few times, it moves closer to the wall and under the fortifications. Then into the trader path. It continues moving around, making shooting it more difficult. Eventually he comes right where we want him: Over the cage traps and in view of the rifleponies. Unfortunately it doesn't fall unconscious, even for a moment.
Meanwhile a wastelander caravan arrives without their wagons. The Minotaur runs to intercept them. One of the merchants is slowly strangled to death. The rest of them die quickly. The gate needs to be opened to lure the Minotuar where we can shoot at it. It turns out unnecessary as the Minotaur finds a Steel Ranger ambush to play with. Needless to say, they are quite surprised. Good, maybe next time they'll think twice before coming here. They die in no time; Power Armours, chainsaws and miniguns don't help them much.
As we are luring it closer to the gate, the lever is pulled too late and the Minotaur makes it inside. All security, including trainees with no shields, it told to engage. The losses are going to be catastrophic and this may very well be the end of Ponderplanned. Ham is the first victim. He won't live to wield an AMR, which is a damn shame. He is almost followed by Marble Statue. Whip Lash wounds the monster with his chainsaw, but gets wounded himself. Saber kills the Minotaur ripping it's heart apart with his **Steel Chainsaw**. All in all the fight went quite well. Ham died, Marble Statue is severely wounded and Whiplash is wounded.
I quit for the day, then load. My save got corrupted and the best I can do is revert to a few months earlier one. This is quite an inconvenience, so I'll probably just play around with it and quit for good.
#clean all cleaned over 3000 contaminants and upped my FPS by 5%. This is the first time I used it in this fort.
I wall off the northern part of the cavern. It goes without any trouble, save for "trees" being in the way. Also, cutting trees in the caverns and on the surface at the same time is a bad idea: salvagers will go up and down the stairs too much, which wastes time.
A Steel Ranger ambush comes along. I order all battle-ready squads to engage. Oh, and the security baton squad got their AMRs, but with no skill to wield them and I forgot to assign them ammo. Library Card and Apple Leaf get there first and are greeted by minigun fire. Before the enemies are even engaged, a second squad of them comes along. A moment later, the slaver caravan shows up.
The Rippers prove to be quite effective at piercing Power Armours, but don't do much damage. Library Card just stumbles around, playing with her Stealthbuck and SATS and not landing any hits. Three rifleponies stand at the gate providing covering fire, while the AMR ponies run to the ammo stockpile. So far it seems that we can hold the ground against Steel Rangers.
Library Card joins the crowd where other ponies are fighting and attacks. Her **Steel Chainsaw** is often deflected by their Power Armours, but when it hits, it does more damage then the rippers. Vet Redheart falls unconscious. Meanwhile, a Stray Wolf bites an unconscious Steel Ranger, but can't get through. Brass finally makes it to the gate and sprays the Rangers with minigun fire.
Vet Redheart is still unconscious, while a Ranger is hammering her. Her Steel Combat helmet and 5 heavy carapace hoods protect her and he only manages to bruise her skin. The wolf continues being useless. Apple Leaf's ripper gets deflected more often than not. One of the wounded Rangers leaves his squad and goes for the caravan instead.
Apple Leaf and Library Card kill one Ranger each. One more wolf joins the crowd. The second squad of Rangers comes into a firing position. Brasses Minigun finally overheats and he charges into the fight proper.
The first squad of Rangers is killed, except for two of them. Vet Redheart is still unconscious and requires a diagnosis, despite having no wounds.
The escaping Ranger is pretty much done for by the caravan guards. It is time to fight the second squad. The last Ranger from the first squad is barely alive and has 24 pages of combat reports. Some of it is from the wolves, but the security can be sadistic too, when they want to.
This fight gets chaotic as the caravan enters through the gate, some ponies run around outside to fetch various items and the soldiers just stand around. The wolves and a sprite-bot engage the Rangers, with a predictable result.
When the melee soldiers engage, 4 Rangers are quickly killed. Only 3 now remain: one, which I'm leaving to the caravan guards and 2 outside the western wall... scratch that, there are 5 of them close to the western wall. They get fired upon by AMRs and BB guns. The combat-ready part of security is told to go stand outside the gate.
The Steel Rangers approach the gate and are engaged. Meanwhile another squad of them shows up. When they approach the gate, they are attacked and killed. We have won against 3 squads of Steel Rangers! The key to defeating them were steel melee weapons and sufficient numbers not to get overwhelmed. The AMRs only managed a couple shots, but those that connected were quite devastating. As a reward, the slavers keep pouring into out trade depot.
WTF? Why are the traders dying? Ah, Cobbler has cast a rage spell on one. Oh well, the game is unplayable at this point, but I'm still not finished with it. Hopefully the rage spell has been fixed, ans Lycaeon says.
Escort Mission turned into a ghost. Screw that. Oh and apparently only most of the merchants were killed. Some of them survived, are no longer our enemies and can leave. Walling off a small section of a cavern goes rather smoothly, considering that there was no block stockpile around. The trade depot gets covered in miasma. Ponies in the hospital get thirsty with nopony to take care of them, while Scalpel goes to his room to stare at the wall and FPS drops to 45. There are also 3 slaves in cages, that I cannot pasture. They will die then.
I sent the security to hunt down some yellow ghouls in the caverns. Oh right, I also tell the ponies to salvage everything in the secured section of the caverns. Ah, screw ghouls. Two Steel Ranger ambushes and a caravan show up. The joint forces of caravan guards and a few security are more than enough to repel the invaders. AMRs hurt quite a lot and I think that they should be cost effective against anything with good armour, despite the bullets costing 3 times the resources for normal rifles.
Some of our soldiers like to tantrum for whatever reason. We try to introduce some slaves into the society by pasturing them nest to a special workshop and setting a reaction on repeat. One Earth Pony changed his colour to green, but otherwise nothing happened.
It is time to review the training progress.
After over a year of doing pretty much nothing other than sitting at a terminal, Checklist got to 10 gunnery and gained some minor stat increases. She accumulated 9875 XP at 25 XP per terminal session. Since high skill speeds up reactions at a workshop, she presumably learned faster towards the end of it.
The Security Baton squad trained for a while and got to 4-5 in Mace and 3 in Shield User. They worked on their skills for at least 2 years, so it's not that impressive. It would probably be better to just give them hunting rifles from the start, so they'd at least learn to shoot.
The first BB squad trained longer than Checklist and got to 3 gunnery and shooting as well as 2 dodge, but no shield or Armour User or melee skills whatsoever. The second BB squad got to 4 gunnery and 1 dodge. They had some armour, BB guns and shields. They were told to use shooting ranges as well as train in the barracks with the rest of the soldiers.
The wrestlers after over a year of training got to 0-1 Wrestler, 1-2 Kicker, 2-3 Fighter, 0 dodge and 0 Armour User. Except for one squad that got 0 Wrestler, 1 Kicker, 1 Fighter, 1 dodger and 1 Armour User. They had no weapons and shields. The idea was for them to train Dodging and Armour Use, so that later they can get Shields, which slow down training of these two skills. Wrestling was supposed to toughen them up too.
The rookies with chainsaws after a year of training have 1 Sawpony, 1-2 Dodge, 2-4 Fighter and 0-1 Armour User. Except for 1 squad who have 2 Sawpony, 0 Dodge, 2 Fighter and 0 Armour User.
Library Card is at 12 Sawpony, 1 dodge, 19 Fighter, 4 Kicker, 1 Wrestler, 3 Armour User and 11 Shield User after 3 or 4 years of training with Brass.
The Ripper squad is at 6-7 Knife User, 0 Dodger, 10-12 Fighter, 2-3 Kicker, 1 Armour User and 3 Shield User.
Cocnclusions:
VR simulator is great if you have the luxury of having a lot of them. It seems that only live combat beats it in terms of learning speed.
Having wrestler squads is useless.
Shooting ranges aren't enough to gain any level of skill, except for ponies with rifle cutie marks.
Having 2-3 Recruit squads doesn't work for the first year or two. On the other hoof, assigning a recruit to an existing squad brings her up to speed. It seems that forming 2-3 pony squads, then splitting them once they get to about 5 skill, making each of them sergeants, would work best. Oh, and they should have access to VR machine and armoury in their free time.
Since the Rangers turned out to be such a joke, I send the security to the caverns. For whatever reason a lot of ponies go there when I open the airlock. One of them is carrying chitin to tan. I guess they are just collecting remains and such.
A webbing FB kills a pony. The security is told to deal with it. In a tight space has a tremendous advantage, until faced from behind. It kills a BB pony and a dog, as well as manages to further wound Apple Pie, a gunner. It gets killed by a lucky hit to its body with a ripper that damages its brain.
A group of green and yellow ghouls is next on the kill list. Short Bursts and Brass engage a single yellow ghoul. It emits bursts of toxic radiation, making them Dizzy, Nauseous, In Pain and covered in blisters. Ranged weapons don't work because of the tight spaces in the caverns. Melee weapons mean the pony is instantly weakened. Well, at least armour provides reasonably good protection. Even multiple hits with a chainsaw are not enough. A green ghoul joins the fight, attacking Short Bursts. Brass fights with the yellow one, looses his teeth and accumulates wounds. Another yellow ghoul joins the !fun!, while Brass tries to retreat. A wolf comes along, but instantly gets sick. It dies and Short Bursts looses his teeth too. Both soldiers are killed shortly before Libary Card arrives to their rescue. She is engaged by 2 yellow and one green ghoul. She avenges her captain Brass and hits one of the yellows in the head with the blunt side of her chainsaw, killing it.
Bloody Steak shortly comes to her rescue, but the heavy radiation makes them both sick. Library Card falls unconscious after severely wounding the second yellow ghoul, while Bloody Steak goes to fight a green one, but is knocked out as well. Chalice is next to engage a glowing one. His AMR is useless at close range. Bloody Steak dies to a green ghoul. Chalice dies as well and the wounded yellow ghoul goes after the workers, but is killed by a miner who drills into its head.
Next, a green ghoul chases and wounds the workers. It wounds Psalms and is killed by an AMR shot in the heart. Meanwhile another yellow ghoul comes too close, but at this point there is nothing to throw at it.
Buried Treasure gets killed. There are fewer and fewer soldiers and they come one by one. A large group might have been able to handle this.
More and more ghouls come along, while the workers go to the cavern in heavy traffic. On the plus side, green and yellow ghouls can be caught in cage traps and there are some protecting the stable.
Well, I don't want to play anymore, so this pretty much concludes Ponderplanned. I didn't get rehabilitating slaves to work. (how far does one need to be anyway?) I also didn't get more spells and didn't make any serious tests of AMRs, but otherwise I think I touched pretty much everything. Oh and I skipped a theatre too.
"wagon wood logs" are accumulating in my stockpile for salvage. This looks like a bug to me. What can I do about it?
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Topic: Fallout: Equestria (v0.30c) Pinkie Pie is Watching (Read 507897 times)