Well, we made it into Hall of Fame. I didn't expect that at all. Thanks, guys.
Now how to celebrate this event? Hmm, how about we skip jungle and winter tests and instead take out Santa Claus as a team? That fat jolly old man is dangerous. His super science, global hyper effective spy network, and massive production facilities are not only a major threat to various forces, but also very lucrative opportunity for the Company.
-slightly envious grunt-
Congrats, and that Santa onslaught sounds fun. I don't think I'll make it to that party though. Worlds to infest, stars to eat, black holes to harvest. You know how it is. If I couldn't fiddle around with time, I'd be pretty busy.
If I recall you still had one representative on Earth, but that indeed may have changed.
No. I prefer PvP to co-op, and one test is not a sufficient data sample for Company.
It's not like you'll be the one fighting there.
Also, I'm entirely for fighting Santa's army of ELVEs (Enchanted Living Vivisection Engines), but how about we use that as round 3? Wasn't the third round supposed to be in the arctic anyway? A round of jungle combat sounds too interesting to skip.
Except I need to complete this game soonish. Longer I spend working with one game, harder it becomes to focus updating it when new ideas start eating my time and interest. I set the strict deadline for sciencing part for that reason. What I'm thinking is skipping jungle test entirely, or rolling hundred dice and interpreting results based on how this test goes. Then Assault on Santa would be the third arctic test as planned.
pursue firing the anti material rifle and particle cannon and bombard them with the white phosphorus grenades.
Keep all drones uncloaked just long enough to fire before quickly cloaking and moving away in an erratice patterm
Particle cannon drones drop down into cover and fire at the retreating bots, work to just absolutely fuck up them and their cover...heh cover I like that they think it can save them now
Have any mortar drones with grenades remaining bombard the robits too.
If they are confirmed dead move south and west as fast as I can.
If not just move into cover and fire where they were last heading again.
The concealing dust cloud if completely blocking your line of sight so you have to rely on drones to get your own aiming right. First shot from your own cannon through the cloud seems weaker than usual. You have no idea why, though. Perhaps the Doctor Meshanblov could explain. Any way, you swing out the anti-materiel rifle and fire few rounds randomly into developing cloud of concrete dust and launch your remaining phosporus grenades into the mix. Drones fire their loads wildly into the fray and cannon drones happily add their two cents further increasing destruction radius. Cannon drones also report their hydrogen reseves falling below 50% mark. Nonetheless you keep shooting particle cannons into where robots where seen. There's no kill like overkill and those robots seem to be durable type.
When you have exhausted all your damaging grenades and all ammo on SMG drones you stop for a moment to examine the situation. And by examining I mean jogging through their concealment cloud onto the biggest road here and watching rather major cloud of concrete dust from its edge. Optical sensors, including IR and UV, tell you nothing beyond that you could boil eggs inside the cloud. Your overwhelmed sound sensors are recalibrating themselves for lower noise volume and detect nothing. Your nose substitute detects nothing beyond some unknown chemical traces. Magnetoperception doesn't tell anything useful. There's some magnetic objects, but then again magnetic fields of same intensity register basically everywhere whole time, so it means nothing. Radar is basically only useful thing here and even it has troubles penetrating the cloud, but basically this clouded area in front of you is a wasteland of hot mess.
Confirming whether they are dead or not would require you walking in there and doing more detailed examination which is probably not a good idea considering very uneven and possibly unstable ground there. Nothing is moving around, except some civilians fleeing from some buildings around. Not from the closest ones though. Everyone within 50 meter radius must be dead already. But people in futher away seem to think their chances of survival are higher elsewhere regardless of the risk involved traveling in middle of war zone.
Hmm, better not risk it in case they survived and are playing dead under the rubble. Perhaps situating few drones on edge of the cloud frequently checking in with radar would be good idea? Keep watching a minute weapons ready. If nothing happens, then you can call it another score. If something does happen... well, you can just shoot it and update the score regardless.
Oh, group of seven mutants comes out of the cloud behind you. Looks like your destruction have gathered some attention. Being invisible robot overlord this is not your concern at the slightest, but they seem to take interest in escaping civilians. You suppose the problem of witnesses will solve itself this way. And three cars stop in intersection in east facing your direction, possibly wondering whether they should scout the area or leave the city entirely.
Your ammo situation: 13 standard mortar rounds, 3 biohazard rounds. 7 smoke grenades, 3 concussion grenades, 3 pike missiles, 3 chaff grenades. Particle cannon at 60% hydrogen capacity. 2 flying particle cannon drones at 30% hydrogen capacity. 2 SMG drones: out of ammo. 4 grenade launcher drones: grand total 2 concussion grenades left.
Plus your assorted pile of other modern weapons: unspecific amount of ammo left.
((We can't really tell when you don't post, though. I mean. We can tell when you're not posting, but not when you're not going to post in time for the update. Some advance warning, maybe, if it's something you can control?))
Henry's Deafsquad:
Can't stay still long. These walls are not protective. Even if he can't find us with those cannons he just has to keep shooting.
The plan got reversed. Assault squad should be on the way to flank. We're bait now.
Need to hold his attention. Can't fight on the move, won't survive direct confrontation. Decoy and ambush?
TOC smoke is effective on his sensors. One of us running with active grenades could create a concealing trail while the rest find an ambush spot.
Either way he must be taken down. Focus on the flying cannons whenever you can, his regular armaments are comparatively harmless.
Gunther's assault squad:
Support squad will be leaning westward, back the way they went. An approach from directly north would split the enemy's attention.
Don't take chances against that weapon system. Smoke grenades are worth less than our continued existence. Smoke'em while we got'em.
We won't get more than once chance at surprise. If we can see the enemy where he can't see us, we must go all-out and deal as much damage as we can. All weapons ready.
Also, I'm entirely for fighting Santa's army of ELVEs (Enchanted Living Vivisection Engines), but how about we use that as round 3? Wasn't the third round supposed to be in the arctic anyway? A round of jungle combat sounds too interesting to skip.
Go with all of this its a good set up
Henry's retirement home: Don't you just love when your fears proves right? You may have two concrete walls in between you and the cannons of ultimate destruction, but it doesn't particularly help you when said walls very suddenly explode violently generating horrible amount of shrapnel breaking almost all auxiliary cameras on your armor and very powerful shockwave in confined space. Well, partially confined space, thanks to open front wall and few windows on floor above. Building is constructed poorly enough to make ceiling go up by one floor very effectively killing anyone inside (if there was anyone alive in first place) and then entire two floors worth of broken concrete falling back on you. Everybody shares fate with David and gets their passive radar antenna broken. Active radars do not take falling concrete boulders kindly eighter.
If you were human, this would be very shitty day for you. But being as heavily protected as you are, means internal damage is non-existant, though amount of dust in your lungs means cooling is starting to fail. It won't be a problem for a half hour, but it definitely will become a factor soon. That would be bad enough, but the bastard just doesn't stop shooting. Being covered by concrete boulders doesn't help either when shit just keeps exploding, totally decimating your poor outer sensory array and actually destroying the clips keeping your outer armor on you.
When it finally stops, outer temperature is considerably high. In fact too high for myomer weave in your skin. External armor plates are still protecting you, but as soon as you move out they will fall off, leaving your original skin exposed and mildly damaged. Erik and Felix are not responding for check up calls. Moving anywhere seems like a bad idea. Maybe you can play dead here for a minute. Perhaps enemy will come close enough to check if you are dead or not.
Gunther and companions: You spear right south listening endless barrage of thunder threatening your ears and eyeing pillar of hot air and ever expanding cloud of dust rising around where Henry's squad probably is. The road ends too quickly, joining one leading east towards the roundabout where the other squad of supersoldiers is camping. At the moment it seems safe to cross the road, so you do so, breaking into building on otherside and to other side, to the major roughly southwest/northeast aligned road. It goes between TOC cloud and very much destroyed buildings in west, apparently target of the barrage. You are also just barely in range of Henry's squad, so you learn their situation quickly.
Let's see... Civilians are escaping from all buildings around the destruction. It seems like their tolerance levels were finally passed. Group of seven scaled mutants emerges from the TOC cloud eyeing hungrily running civilians. In south and little east is three cars stopped, all full of the local military people. They seem like they would like to join escaping civilians. Passive radar picks up very frequent series of pings, roughly around and above where Henry and boys are.
And right on edge of the concrete dust cloud is something very fancy happening. You would have missed it if not for your heightened focus. You see an area where swirling dust enters, disappears and reappears on other side. An area where dust does not seemingly exist, yet appears to pass through normally. About two and half meters tall, not very wide except a three meter long horizontal protrusion about a meter from ground. Extremely unusual, you would say.
For a record, only one of Gunther's squad is carefully peeking from doorframe. And the sniper you shot with arrow would have direct line of sight on you if you step out.
I'm fine with Whisperling or NAV taking over for me when I don't post.
Send an activate dazzle-mode command to the non-transmitting drone. My drones don't all look like the same bird, right?
Scan the area where the sniper shots came from with my drones. Snipe the sniper.
Like Sean said, it's hard to know when you are not posting. I usually collect quotes for processing around 16:00 UTC, so that's probably good deadline. Of course I always check for last moment posts before posting turn.
There aren't great many local birds big enough to fully contain the holodrone, so selection for useable bird variants is rather low. Sending dazzle command doesn't seem to do anything, so you are forced conclude its destruction.
Another drone in south sweeps over the area and discovers there was third sniper guy near the group of four in a dead angle you didn't spot earlier. This one doesn't seem to be in fighting state, however. She's slumped on her knees, holding her weapon in very unprofessional manner, barrel scraping ground, drooling blank expression on her camo painted face. Huh. Well, kill is a kill, regardless the state of your opponent. You move more into center of intersection, line up easy shot and blow her brains out.
Her being in so defenseless state probably means nothing important.
From far west you hear long series of thunder blasts. Six probably, one after another. Looking through drone cameras you discover new pillar of superhot dust cloud rising to skies over a kilometer away. Next road on south would take you there directly. Only two small bends along the way would prevent direct line of sight on ground level. Also, in south right next to the now dead sniper is a decent minaret, suitable for sniping. It's possible those snipers were using it, but abandonded it for some reason.
Snipers South, Origin, and Recon South that made it to Origin: Find cover, the enemy sniper guy's no doubt gonna try to kill us. Go inside the buildings they're in or something. If any shots come in, try to discern what direction they came from.
That One Unlucky Recon South Body: Set off all the grenades and mines and stuff I have on my person. Gotta take at least a few of them with me!
Drone Solo: Look for that fucker that killed many of my bodies. Keep an eye out for any 'birds' also. Lament the fact that I didn't ask for the drones to have guns on them.
You would love to do all that if you had enough mental strength to do anything beyond not drowning in your own saliva. However death of sniper south registers enough to shove entity named Zane Tolouse into simplest action well trained soldier is capable of: follow orders without thinking.
Orders are: Kill the enemy. Subtask is: Locate the enemy to kill. Instrument to complete task is: drone remote controls. Speculation: sniper's location must be where all four groups can be seen. Processing... Processing... You stare the screen blankly for ten seconds. Intersection next to recon north's slaughter house. Moving drone over. All the drone sees is a dark tube above light sand. No enemies found.
Your mind defaults back to idle mode, very slowly recovering mental capacity of functional human being. Long stream of thunder barely registers.
Ok. We were never told that we were being invaded by aliens. This could be a problem though. Anyone willing to truce until we're sure that the lizardmen are all dead?
kill the rest of the lizardmen
Brrrrrrrrrrrrt, says your machine gun. No need to waste grenades on these suckers, bullets seem to work well enough even if they take more bullets than avarage civilian. That however seems to aggravate the crazy people for some reason; they are climbing on roofs in hordes. Children and elderly, men and women, bloodlust in their eyes. Howling scary song like a demonic choir, two are actually screaming in poor english if you remembered to plug power cord into your PC, asking if your internet connection is properly established and describing how to open Windows control panel. All this having their face distorted in horrible rage and joy. It's a thursday night. Everything's normal here.
Except sound reminding a whip crack behind in east and long barrage of thunder in west, though those are becoming rather common too. Even your juryrigged nightvision goggles can see pillar of dust rising in west.
I wouldn't mind facing Santa Claus in the final test
Ah. Well. Same old same old then.
Yep. Thunder and destruction. Enjoy your vacation in a warzone. Bed could be better. Service sucks. Vistas are substandard too. At least dust have settled so you can enjoy of the stars.
#4 sees clearly how buildings in west-southwest blow up. Each burst of dust is followed by that ominous and familiar loud thunder until you are certain the area there is entirely leveled to rubble. Things seem to have habit exploding near you. Or maybe it is because your competitors are packing high explosives and tossing them around like candies.
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Topic: Roll to create a supersoldier! Bloody air resistance (Read 139220 times)