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[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, that works, but it's too simple. I was thinking something along the lines of a fast food or coffee shop chain name pun.
(All I thought up at the moment is the horrible "Klimb in, Find Candy")

[Pandarsenic]

Oh, another thing. You'll notice I gave our Elite a slightly different weapon as compared to the normal Elite sprites. If you put him on foot his weapon will be using the Thaumic Driver's 1 range modifier.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Speaking of the Elite, I'll rephrase my previous suggestion as a question. Is it possible to give this Elite Hero the ability to increase the Magic stat of the units in his squad, and/or provide mana recovery in combat? If it's possible, I vote for that.

[Pandarsenic]

If people vote in favor, I can balance that, yeah.

[adwarf]

Speaking of the Elite, I'll rephrase my previous suggestion as a question. Is it possible to give this Elite Hero the ability to increase the Magic stat of the units in his squad, and/or provide mana recovery in combat? If it's possible, I vote for that.

I also vote for this since we can use that hero to augment our Thaumatank, and Elite Squads in difficult battles.

[RAM]

I am wondering if magitech interfaces should be a different doctrine, possibly mind control... I have just been following the idea and it seems to me that, well, there are a couple of things...

We want heavier weapons for our troops.
Heavier weapons require more magic and therefore require more from the operator.
Increasing the number of operators limits the benefit gained from heavier weapons. There are still advantages in terms of the potency of individual attacks, but the total damage output of the group may actually decrease due to fewer weapons...
Heavy-weapon soldiers should have additional magic, possibly thaumic batteries to be used like ammunition magazines or personal thaumic generators to increase the effective magical output of the individual.
Personal thaumic generators are, reasonably, going to be quite heavy, possibly too much so to be carried on foot.
Vehicles can obviously carry thaumic generators.
If you are going to have a personal vehicle it should be, well, very 'personal'. So as to replicate the advantages of infantry.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Officer" Personal Vehicular Armour: This Magitech vehicle/armour, which you absolutely did not yet give a name, increases the efficiency of officers and can be used for mass coordination of infantry. Requires a 'Driver' and grants 'driving' EXP. Created using some Parts and Equipment.
-Stats
 = Attack: 2x shoulder-mounted defensive miniature thaumic drivers, 1x personal mana cannon, 1x empowered personal thaumic driver
 = Defense : lots+driver
 = Movement : driver
 = Magic : ...
 = HP : lots then driver
 = Morale : driver plus some
 = Mana : lots+driver
-Traits
 = STYLE: Magitech (lots of things)
 = DOCTRINE: Imbued nature (accuracy of defensive weapons that act according to their own nature, attacking any large, fast-moving objects on a trajectory that passes close to the vehicle)
 = DOCTRINE: Mobility (probably, depends if walkers are included in mobility)
 = DOCTRINE: Body over mind (Interacts with the driver's mind to add to data storage, allow unfamiliar sensory input, increase entity tracking capacity, and provide support for simplifying concepts)
 = DOCTRINE: Superior ranged combat (has guns)
 = Vehicle (Hit twice at doubled Attack value by Explosive damage type, mild size debuff to its chance to be hit)
 = Officer support: increases the bonuses provided by the driver.
 = Power Transfer Units (The driver may use its Mana for their abilities or to increase their own mana reserves)
-Abilities:
 = combatant Mana Barrier ( Mana per turn, Action to activate, activates automatically if attacked with sufficient mana, preferably negates enemy Armor Piercing while active)
 = Teleport
 = Mana Discharge (heavy damage to anything that makes physical contact)
 = Personnel Antigravity (negate vehicle penalties)

It will eventually reach the point that we are transferring the pilot's consciousness into the vehicle and leaving their corpse at home. When that happens, I think we will have to honestly appraise the situation and decide that mobility was never intended to include that...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We will need something similar to imbued nature to give the appearance that we are developing artificial intelligence so that nobody will question it when we fuse several consciousnesses into one machine and use it them as research assistants and administrative staff and vengeance weapons...
Consciousness transfers and spare corpses will work wonders for our immortality...

[Pandarsenic]

I have no idea what exactly you're getting at with Body Over Mind, but that Imbued Nature thing is pretty much entirely covered under Style: Magitech.

More powerful weapons generally require improving the underlying tech (related to why so much stuff on everyone scales with your Magitech levels).

To elaborate on some of that stuff, this game is balanced around straight-up Infantry being the meat of an average army. Most other units are intended to fulfill specialist roles in small numbers, provide support, etc., not replace them outright.

Also, no chance whatsoever of a way of neutralizing the Vehicle Trait's disadvantages. Its boosts are too strong and the defense of vehicles too high without that weakness.

[Sean Mirrsen]

For the "personal vehicle", I think he wants some kind of high-mobility power armor. Stands to reason it'd have no serious penalty against explosions like normal vehicles do. I think if we put our mind to it, we could minituarize our reactors and hovertreads sufficiently, in addition to developing mana-barrier based strength augmentation, within a month or two. The thing would require highly specialized parts though, we might need to have more qualified workers (i.e. scientists or lab technicians.. or wizards) working on it, limiting the amount we can manufacture.

In the shorter term, we can always refine the Paperback until it works. Upgrade the reactor, give it a more serious armor plating, a more powerful mana shield and some turreted machineguns instead of its T-Drivers - and voila, quick infantry support/command vehicle.

[adwarf]

For the "personal vehicle", I think he wants some kind of high-mobility power armor. I think if we put our mind to it, we could minituarize our reactors and hovertreads sufficiently, in addition to developing mana-barrier based strength augmentation, within a month or two. The thing would require highly specialized parts though, we might need to have more qualified workers (i.e. scientists or lab technicians.. or wizards) working on it, limiting the amount we can manufacture.

Would Scientific Techno-Wizards work?

[RAM]

Yes, the idea was for powered armour, and the idea is that you can turn on an antigravity generator and go from relying upon its mechanisms to support its weight to being able to carry it yourself. It would be a little bulky but should be possible to take cover, lie on the ground, hold a gun around an obstacle, all the things that basically let infantry avoid things that vehicles can't. The downside is that using it like that would burn mana and that to stop it from being insanely bulky the armour would have to be significant;y thinner than that of most vehicles.

It is meant to be body over mind, but mostly it is the science of specific mental/magical interaction, transferring minds from one body to another, housing minds in artificial constructs, augmenting minds with magical equipment, controlling minds with magical equipment, combining minds together into super-minds, erasing their memories, and providing an artificial framework to keep the result sane enough to work on SCIENCE!!...

[Pandarsenic]

Powered Armor is a different unit class than Vehicles.

[Pandarsenic]

You also need to designate what to do for the week, by the way.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Upgrade Small Farm to Large, rotate active squads again, give the Thunderhead along with its driver to Squad C. D makes a routine scouting trip around the wasteland, seeking out raiders. C drives south to the Arken-whatsit corporation's stronghold and scouts around, careful not to get seen. If seen, flee south until reasonably sure of no pursuit, then make a large circle eastward (or westward, depending on which will give us more distance), hugging the shore on the way north back to the Shell. Meanwhile, in the shell, get the reserve Elites to ask the refugees anything they know and/or might tell about the conditions inside the city the fled from. Put points in Knowledge is Power and Magitek this week, see if it's possible to use Magitek principles to perform long-range detection of living beings and inanimate objects. We'll need radar equivalents anyway at some point, now's as good a time as any to start. Have factories focus on Parts production, and make a Shithauler Magtruck as soon as enough parts are available.

There, I think that's everything.

[RAM]

The above has my support.

Why is powered armour a different unit class?
 I would like to know so that I can get an idea of what qualifies as a new vehicle type for future plans. Would giant humanoid vehicles be a different class from giant wheeled vehicles? How many different classes are there between fixed-wing aircraft, rotary wing aircraft, fighters, bombers, levitating tanks, powered armour capable of sustained flight, flying battle-ships, flying cities, flying continents, and missiles? Would a powered armour that is 50% taller than its occupant and cannot voluntarily change from a standing pose be classified as powered armour or a formal vehicle? What if the pilot was replaced and it was no longer armouring anything but the armour itself, would it still be classed as armour? What about a vehicle that is non-humanoid but can rapidly change its orientation, profile, and acceleration in a similar fashion?

[Pandarsenic]

You have 9 unused Equipment at the moment. Also, upgrading to a Large Farm would make you incapable of getting your Vehicle Part gravy while Salvaging; if you're okay with doing that, that's fine, but immigrants aren't a thing that has huge odds (I was actually rather surprised when it came up again so soon) so it might imbalance your labor.

A fair amount of behaviors are just a matter of what makes sense (e.g. velocity/inertia rules aren't explicitly attached to the Vehicle tag, but applied by me while processing turns; same for Vehicles being easier to hit with some things) and aren't explicitly codified.

Vehicle is a Trait tagged onto to refer to things which should be easier to hit with certain attack types and against which an explosion would be much more effective than small arms fire. If I said it wasn't derived from how original X-COM handled multi-tile units an front/side/back/under armor values, I'd be lying. They usually have high enough defense that most attacks will do only their AP-guaranteed chip damage if not for the explosion weakness doubling the damage (keep in mind anything tagged with Explosive has AP0). Aircraft will probably have the Vehicle tag (explosions against flying things = :I) as well as an Aircraft tag making them harder to hit. If I'm to be perfectly honest, a bit of it is the area being hit by the boom, how easy it is to aim, the fact that you're delivering a sudden large blow to the armor instead of many small ones, etc., and a lot of it is just straight-up balancing. When you get down to it, once you start eating rockets in the face it largely stops mattering how much AP you have, sure. But there's also an element of "this Vehicles occupies enough space to fit like 20 people. Half its AOE is being lost on it and it provides red-terrain-type concealment. Fire a 20-damage rocket into a crowd, it breaks their non-mana-barrier defenses with boom for like 14 damage each. Fire it at a vehicle, it does maybe 20, maybe 25 in most cases. If a powered armor group was classified as Vehicles and fired upon, you'd be doing around 23-25 or so to each of them, which is ridiculous.

Is that satisfactory?