Well I hope that you all enjoyed the vallhalla re-run. I kind procrastinated until the end to do my farming, but I finished grabbing duplicates of the collab dolls and also some extra copies of Kord and M1895. I'm not sure if I'll end up really using most of the collab duplicates. Jill and Dorothy are the most likely ones to be used just because of their tiles, I kind of doubt that I'll need to use a second Sei or Stella and I've never had to use my original Dana or Alma.
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KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
We're finally getting the new client.
No more scrambling on the combat simulations among other improvements.
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KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
Also, if you haven't done so already, make sure you bind your account and are not using a guest login.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
I guess my delay is proof that life is has busy for me during yet another major story event. I'm only done with two chapters so far. I hope to get through the rest soon and then get my ranking runs in. Historically just completing ranking should be enough to score well. I need to dust off that dumb chip calculator to actually setup chips for my lesser used HOCs. I guess it's been apparent that I've been lax on chips.
Good luck to everyone during the event, and good luck towards getting Summer Architect. I've seen her twice now but she got away both times. My stash is good enough to secure her though. I'm a bit anxious about all of the other seasonal ringleaders though. I don't think that my stash can survive all of the upcoming seasonals if I encounter a string of bad luck.
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KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
Remember that the SPEQ and one copy of the fairy are through cumulative points now and not just total rank.
That is true, but there the "e-Peen" factor to consider. I've been getting the e-peen rewards from all of the ranking events since the start. I have AK-47's bling scopes somewhere in my armory. I don't want to break the combo. I guess people re-playing turn 1 to just farm cumulative score might help prop up the ranking percentages for the people that are seriously playing the ranking battle.
It's just really tiresome to plan out 10 (no wait, 14 now!!!) echelons, equip them all with gear, and then play through a ranking battle. I've also been really lazy with my HOCs. I think that I've only ever bothered equipping the first 4 with min/maxed chips and I've wasted a lot of HOC data since I just didn't want to bother with it for the others.
I also think that I presently can only deploy 2 SF echelons that are serious combatants. I'm kicking myself a bit for not rolling more on one of the earlier banners that had 5 manticores on it. I might be able to get a 3rd of even 4th SF combat echelon online as a serious formation if SF resources weren't scarce to the point of me trying to treat them like phoenix downs. I don't feel like I have enough petri-dishes/SF skill data to afford to do much investing into SF units unless I 100% know that the formation is solid. At least in many cases the SF echelons often just act as fancy dummy echelons or budget HOCs. At least I've been pretty lucky with ringleader RNG.
I've just been tired a lot recently. Lots of overtime at work. I'm skipping War Thunder's operation SUFFER event which is going on during this time period too, and I kind of want that Leopard for my german lineups.
I hope everyone had a good time with the Mirror Stage event. I stayed up last night ranking and my combined score between the two maps placed me just shy of 2.67 mil, which is 3% territory right now. At the end of the day, I ended up liking how this particular ranking map was setup. Big enough that you could use all of your dolls, but each segment was small enough that a small handful of flagship echelons could do all of the fighting. Top 100 aspirants could minmax 14 full echelons to sidestep ever retreating an echelon, while people simply shooting for the flex fairy could budget the point loss to withdraw their flagship echelons from previous zones for re-use in future zones.
This has highlighted that I need to redouble my efforts to get my SF echelons online. The re-work to daily tasks should help with that, since initially I was missing out on a lot of potential runs of SF dailies since I would generally only log in once per day. It also became apparent that I was neglecting the kernel shop, which would have given me access to some dupes of some 2* units (apparently I've missed out on at least one manticore!!!) as well as petri dishes/skill data. Also, while I despise corpse dragging, I guess I should start running some SF corpse dragging with friendly Destroyer/White Nyto squads providing the free DPS.
On that note, I'm trying to casually grind up 10 million cumulative score so that I can siphon the last of the SF resources out of the ranking rewards. If you chase hidden achievements, don't forget to re-run the puzzle map where you have to solve Griffin's dumb combination lock. The opposite win condition is setting all of the characters to the opposite of the one that the map asks you to set them to.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
I got a 820k hole 1 map despite a semi-weak start of having to go left first because that's where all the crates spawned, but then i got 2 staggeringly good turns of 4 crates + fights
i still need to do hole 2 but I barely have the energy to set up 14 echelons now on top of HOCs
How does your SF echelon stable look like? Do you have multiple manticores? Alchemist? I know you have the big chungus. What about DPS units or tanks like Nemeums/swap strikers or swap aegis/ripper/dragoons?
After playing my ranking run of hole 2, these were my most noteworthy echelons from hole 2 and I think I can clear it with them alone in combat roles.
Scarecrow is what I used to sweep zone 1 when I was following the script of the guides. Once I went offscript, I replaced her with destroyer. Maybe Dreamer would have been better in this echelon. They handled most of what paradeus threw at it, but they would be wounded by pens/gunners when gladiators acted as frontline shields.
Dreamer team is just a "LOL, manticores" squad. They basically only feared hymnal organs
MP5's ARSMG team's role was to camp the triple hymnal organ spawn in zone 1. Nothing special. Any ARSMG team should do
Double Jupiter to sweep zone 2. Pure M4 exodia might be better. I probably could have just used Alchemist to sweep every zone...
RFB exodia to kill narcis. Kind of overkill since ARSMG with contender should be good, and sniper fairy can do it by itself if you simply tank narciss long enough
Alchemist+big chungus tanks the world. Nemeums were the most effective supporting DPS. I was basically filling DPS with what I had on hand. She's #6 on this list, but by FAR she was the greatest MVP on the battlefield and feared no one. Big Chungus was just too superb at drawing fire from the Gunners and Hymnals that would normally threaten her.
Unlimited Shield works echelon. The shotgun frontline was basically undeadable. Don't forget flash shells for the shotguns. Keep them away from gundams since I wasn't able to reliably kill the gundams before they attacked the backline. Everything worked great if the enemy could be clogged up with targeting the shotgun frontline.
If you have four manticores, you can probably get away with two "LOL MANTICORE" teams.
I followed this youtube clip for help with pathing, and would recommend the following deviations for an easier run that isn't aiming for top 100: https://youtu.be/d4La9eS6cDM
Zone 1, Turn 1:
Spawn a paradrop team on the HQ. It can be a dummy, or maybe it can be a squad that you deem worthy of fighting one battle against Uhlans later. Paradrop it forward one space to capture the closed helipad for more AP in the future. This should give you enough extra AP to afford to redeploy Alchemist to sweep zone 2 if you want, or you could simply spawn the Double Jupiter team to clear zone 2 like normal.
Just use Alchemist to sweep the bottom row of zone 1.
Zone 2
You have an AP surplus on some of the later turns of zone 2. You can spam dummy echelons during those turns to grant yourself an AP budget to retreat/redeploy your badass teams from the earlier zones
Zone 3
Just use alchemist to sweep everything. Ignore the patroler deathstack. It isn't worth enough to be worth your time.
Aside from that, the helipads all spawn the same enemy that initially is standing on them. Keep each echelon away from helipads that spawn enemies that look threatening (IE, keep infinite shield works away from gundams, and the SF echelons might want to steer clear of hymnal organs).
When using double jupiter against pens, delay your skills until after the 8 second mark. The pens dispel your buffs at the 8 second mark.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
i have 2 fully upgraded mantis that i used to basically mindlessly blow through the story with Alchemist lead
I have mostly 1-2 of each mook unit
i have Alchemist, Scarecrow, Destroyer, and Hunter maxed iirc, and some of the others hovering at 90. i don't think setting up for it will be an issue, just tedious
Oh man, one of my in-game friendslist friends just sent me a message about his two modest ranking runs. The combined score is just below WA's SPEQ. I sent him a reply but I'm anxious that he won't see it in time.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
messed up a turn in area 2 due to missing ap from losing 1 echelon last second in area 1, but still good enough imo
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KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
Looks like they're re-running the Singularity ranking map and theater is also coming up next month.
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KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
And you thought you would get a break. Theater is out. But it's also just for PP-93.
Somehow I completely forgot about Halloween Inturder and assumed that Destroyer re-run was the only thing happening with this next banner. I don't have regular intruder, so I burnt all of my naturally occurring EMP charges to try to get her. That was a failed effort, and now I'm down 14 potential rolls for the Halloween Intruder banner!!! Oh well. I've been lucky enough times this past year that my stash should hold out. Best of luck to everyone's rolls. Also, don't forget about re-rolling Destroyer's banner every couple of days. You might luck into a copy of Destroyer, or perhaps some of the brand new SWAP Jaegers that are making their debut appearance in Destroyer's pool.
edit:
oh, and don't forget the crafting rate up for the new dolls. It looks like it's during the middle of the week this time.
General_Armchair on
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
Poincarre Recurrence started 2 days ago
the map ui this time around is absolutely dogshit for the stuff you want to do during main story events, holy shit, who approved this
I hate the UI too. That rotary phone is annoying. As for crate farming, a farming map opens up if you can push through the story and complete chapter 2. Then some clock hands appear to the right of the mass of dials and you can click on those hands to bring up a display for the infinity farming maps where you can farm the new limited dolls.
I decided to get my ranking run out of the way early. Clocked in at 1,934,780. I made a few obvious mistakes like fumbling the Bramdbe fight, and some teleporter missteps caused me to fall behind schedule on some de-clogging and setting up the radar posts. Being this close to the present top100 list is tempting, but I think that this scored has secured my clown hat. On three occasions my Alchemist team failed the DPS check against the gladiator bots and I had to wait for Architect to (very) slowly whittle them down.
In other news, it wasn't until I was setting up my ranking teams that I realized that I forgot to enhance MG4. This whole time during the story portion of the event I was thinking: "Wow. People had been telling me that MG4 is good now, but she's still kind of lukewarm". Turns out I was just dumb and she's great once you actually enhance her.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
i cumulative farmed SPEQ and witch fairy so i just went in with a mindset of "let's just do whatever's comfortable and see what happens"
should still be an easy top 5%
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
oof. Always hate to see that. On the bright side, it looks like that isn't possible with the current ranking event? If I'm reading everything correctly, the only competitive prizes this time around are the top 100. The rest of the prizes are all just personal effort.
I'm trying to make heads and tails of the ranking maps themselves though. Apparently there's 9 maps split between three stages, and you pick your maps like a choose-your-own-adventure book by completing certain objectives during the maps? Best cummulative score between the 3 stages is your score. I wonder how challenging it is to get the hat and extra fairy. It's a bit intimidating that such a score would put you in top 100 at present, but I guess that's just because nobody ranks prior to the last 48 hours?
I decided to make a poor decision, and ranked on the SF map instead of the G&K map. Fortunately I manged to hit 1.7M (not pictured: my map 1 and 2 scores). It took me a while to figure out how to kill Nemhran with SF units. Apparently the solution was to adopt the Zapp Brannigan school of warfare by throwing masses of dinergates of all things at her.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
edited February 2023
i am skipping the ranking this time around; the energy and time i'm willing to devote to gfl has been shrinking and tbh this event sped things along by a lot
the puzzle maps this event felt particularly dumb and bad and mica keeps sticking to the tradition of "oh, our players are doing too well handling things? time to introduce more units that are just a kick in the teeth to deal with!" ; it's also tiring to progress with a story that is split up into 40 different tiny story chapters when they won't even let you turn up the auto speed to instant for speedreaders
i finished the story on UX, got all the drops, and will farm cumulative points but that's about all i'm willing to do
I felt a bit of what you were feeling about ranking. Honestly I think that this story event came a bit too close on the heels of the last one.
I heard that a lot of the deathstacks on the G+K map were painful, which is why I went the SF route. I was hoping that the SF route would be easier to get 1.7M but would be inferior to getting a high score. Since I didn't play the G+K map, I don't know if that was true. I can say that the fights on the SF map were relatively easy in that they didn't require very much in terms of fancy kiting or endless resets if I brought the appropriate team to bear, but the margin of error for getting 1.7M points was thin and I never managed to get RPK to spawn as a boss. Halloween Intruder surprised me by how good that she was at the boss fights. The Sniper Nytos were a huge pain that most of my echelons struggled to deal with. Dreamer was the only one who consistently could clear those guys, but Summer Architecht and Destroyer sometimes could too. The SF map was a bit easier to chew on the number of permutations of moves that I could make since the echelon limit was 8 SF echelons and 4 HOCs vs IIRC the G+K map was all 14 echelons and hocs, which is altogether too many units IMO for plotting movements and swap daisy chains on an xbawks huge map.
For the puzzles, the main puzzle that I disliked was the one on the map titled "Traitor". I had to look up a guide for that. I hate puzzles where you don't have sufficient information to solve the puzzle until after you've failed a few times.
This story event got me wondering if perhaps RPK might be playing the role of a triple agent to get someone close to William? If so, I kind of feel like it might be some plan orchestrated by russia's StateSec forces and that they might not have clued Ange into the plan.
edit:
There are also some fan theories that Grig may prove traitorous since she mostly only ever exhibited loyalty to Grey, and is feeling betrayed by Morridow/Paradeus/William since they failed to save Grey.
On top of that the index entry for Morridow states that she hasn't noticed that her cognition image has been edited, so perhaps Morridow is compromised by M4 in some way. Maybe M4 is a sleeper consciousness within Morridow? I saw some people postulate some theories that had something to do with alleged changes in eye color when M4 is controlling Nimogen's body vs Dandelion controlling that body, and claims that Morridow's eye colors changed. But I haven't seen that or maybe I've just been looking at the wrong reference images.
Also, FWIW, I don't see an entry in the enemy index for RPK. I never got a chance to directly fight her though. I never managed to get her to spawn on the SF ranking map.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
I felt a bit of what you were feeling about ranking. Honestly I think that this story event came a bit too close on the heels of the last one.
I heard that a lot of the deathstacks on the G+K map were painful, which is why I went the SF route. I was hoping that the SF route would be easier to get 1.7M but would be inferior to getting a high score. Since I didn't play the G+K map, I don't know if that was true. I can say that the fights on the SF map were relatively easy in that they didn't require very much in terms of fancy kiting or endless resets if I brought the appropriate team to bear, but the margin of error for getting 1.7M points was thin and I never managed to get RPK to spawn as a boss. Halloween Intruder surprised me by how good that she was at the boss fights. The Sniper Nytos were a huge pain that most of my echelons struggled to deal with. Dreamer was the only one who consistently could clear those guys, but Summer Architecht and Destroyer sometimes could too.
For the puzzles, the main puzzle that I disliked was the one on the map titled "Traitor". I had to look up a guide for that. I hate puzzles where you don't have sufficient information to solve the puzzle until after you've failed a few times.
This story event got me wondering if perhaps RPK might be playing the role of a triple agent to get someone close to William? If so, I kind of feel like it might be some plan orchestrated by russia's StateSec forces and that they might not have clued Ange into the plan.
edit:
There are also some fan theories that Grig may prove traitorous since she mostly only ever exhibited loyalty to Grey, and is feeling betrayed by Morridow/Paradeus/William since they failed to save Grey.
On top of that the index entry for Morridow states that she hasn't noticed that her cognition image has been edited, so perhaps Morridow is compromised by M4 in some way. Maybe M4 is a sleeper consciousness within Morridow? I saw some people postulate some theories that had something to do with alleged changes in eye color when M4 is controlling Nimogen's body vs Dandelion controlling that body, and claims that Morridow's eye colors changed. But I haven't seen that or maybe I've just been looking at the wrong reference images.
Also, FWIW, I don't see an entry in the enemy index for RPK. I never got a chance to directly fight her though. I never managed to get her to spawn on the SF ranking map.
yeah, traitor was the puzzle map that was really dumb and a waste of time because the optimal solution to that map involved blocking off enemy spawns that you would 100% lose against otherwise but how would you know unless you watched a video guide of someone else doing it or trial and errored to fail it at that point? it's just bad design to have a puzzle map that starts off with the player having incomplete information and with little to no room for recovery if they make a wrong move
sniper nytos are probably the dumbest paradeus units they've introduced so far because the normal tricks for avoiding damage simply don't work because even if you retreat the primary target of their snipe i'm pretty sure anyone in the path of the snipe still takes damage (see: your backline, the units you want the least to take dmg) and so your only choice is to....kill them before they have a chance to snipe? when they often come with huge frontline presences and a command nyto that shields/buffs them. and if you fail to kill them in time they hop out of range and...keep sniping you even though they're theoretically out of their own engage range! 10/10 design to get people to quit in frustration.
imo the plot is also getting dumber as more and more info about paradeus
so about William
like ok, there's a boy genius scientist with a sister complex that's singlehandedly capable of creating the most technologically advanced faction that hides their main base in a radioactive wasteland who can churn out entire armies of androids/cyborgs from experimenting upon kidnapped, possibly zombie plagued people without nations just showing up to absolutely obliterate it?
even if his dad is some big shot in one nation's government that seems absolutely ludicrous that he would be allowed to develop paradeus to the stage it's at in the story
Personally I have doubts that the "William?" character that we've seen is actually William. I wonder if it's some kind of proxy? But even then, he can't be that much older since he was supposed to be a member of 90Wish alongside Persica and Lycoris. The tech advantage can be explained by William reverse engineering alien relic technology that most nations don't have access to or don't understand. I wish that the stories would delve more into the relics, but we know next to nothing about them.
As for their power level, I'm not sure how powerful that they actually are when compared to nation states. At times it seems like they have limitless armies popping out of thin-air to harass the Commander, but they've also consistently been shown going to great lengths to maintain secrecy as if they were some kind of clandestine terrorist cells.
I think that the world governments are supposed to be disorganized and are struggling to maintain a grip on their powers after the events of World War III. That each government is too preoccupied with maintaining control of their assorted White and Green zones to care much about what is happening in the Yellow zones or worse. We've seen that Germany is struggling with refugee problems and humanitarian aid issues with their border zones. We saw in the previous event that the soviets had essentially outsourced protection of their periphery zones to PMCs. With Paradeus predominately operating within Yellow/Red zones, they might simply be beyond the scope of what the governments presently care about. If push came to shove, I suspect that the nation level militaries could probably crush Paradeus if they could ever be roused from slumber and directed towards the target. We've seen the soviet military crush the rogue KCCO groups on two occasions with ease. I don't think paradeus would be that much harder. I think another problem is that key members of assorted intelligence agencies are compromised and are keeping alarms from being raised that would motivate the governments to mobilize the bulk of their military to act beyond their core territories.
I think a rough comparison can made between Paradeus and some of the Mexican drug cartels. The government military forces could probably crush the cartel forces in a straight fight. But the Mexican government, like GFL's German government, seems to be hampered by too many officials being corrupted and in bed with cartels/paradeus. Meanwhile the neighboring American/Soviet government military forces are either too busy dealing with other problems or simply don't have adequate casus belli to operate beyond their borders and strike at a hostile force within another nation's territory.
A lack of casus belli would explain why the soviets haven't sent a wing of bombers to level Paradeus to the ground and instead have only sent a loose cannon squad from statesec who can be burned and disavowed, and a PMC that's operating independently of the government but has received a few benefits under the table like them looking the other way regarding the existence of our illegal HOC heavy weapons teams.
I know that it's not going to last as everyone finally ranks during the final week of the event, and the players with 10 paradrop fairies crawl out of the woodwork, but at least for this moment I'm in the top 100.
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Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
No more scrambling on the combat simulations among other improvements.
Good luck to everyone during the event, and good luck towards getting Summer Architect. I've seen her twice now but she got away both times. My stash is good enough to secure her though. I'm a bit anxious about all of the other seasonal ringleaders though. I don't think that my stash can survive all of the upcoming seasonals if I encounter a string of bad luck.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
It's just really tiresome to plan out 10 (no wait, 14 now!!!) echelons, equip them all with gear, and then play through a ranking battle. I've also been really lazy with my HOCs. I think that I've only ever bothered equipping the first 4 with min/maxed chips and I've wasted a lot of HOC data since I just didn't want to bother with it for the others.
I also think that I presently can only deploy 2 SF echelons that are serious combatants. I'm kicking myself a bit for not rolling more on one of the earlier banners that had 5 manticores on it. I might be able to get a 3rd of even 4th SF combat echelon online as a serious formation if SF resources weren't scarce to the point of me trying to treat them like phoenix downs. I don't feel like I have enough petri-dishes/SF skill data to afford to do much investing into SF units unless I 100% know that the formation is solid. At least in many cases the SF echelons often just act as fancy dummy echelons or budget HOCs. At least I've been pretty lucky with ringleader RNG.
I've just been tired a lot recently. Lots of overtime at work. I'm skipping War Thunder's operation SUFFER event which is going on during this time period too, and I kind of want that Leopard for my german lineups.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
This has highlighted that I need to redouble my efforts to get my SF echelons online. The re-work to daily tasks should help with that, since initially I was missing out on a lot of potential runs of SF dailies since I would generally only log in once per day. It also became apparent that I was neglecting the kernel shop, which would have given me access to some dupes of some 2* units (apparently I've missed out on at least one manticore!!!) as well as petri dishes/skill data. Also, while I despise corpse dragging, I guess I should start running some SF corpse dragging with friendly Destroyer/White Nyto squads providing the free DPS.
On that note, I'm trying to casually grind up 10 million cumulative score so that I can siphon the last of the SF resources out of the ranking rewards. If you chase hidden achievements, don't forget to re-run the puzzle map where you have to solve Griffin's dumb combination lock. The opposite win condition is setting all of the characters to the opposite of the one that the map asks you to set them to.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
i still need to do hole 2 but I barely have the energy to set up 14 echelons now on top of HOCs
How does your SF echelon stable look like? Do you have multiple manticores? Alchemist? I know you have the big chungus. What about DPS units or tanks like Nemeums/swap strikers or swap aegis/ripper/dragoons?
After playing my ranking run of hole 2, these were my most noteworthy echelons from hole 2 and I think I can clear it with them alone in combat roles.
If you have four manticores, you can probably get away with two "LOL MANTICORE" teams.
I followed this youtube clip for help with pathing, and would recommend the following deviations for an easier run that isn't aiming for top 100:
Zone 1, Turn 1:
Zone 2
Zone 3
Aside from that, the helipads all spawn the same enemy that initially is standing on them. Keep each echelon away from helipads that spawn enemies that look threatening (IE, keep infinite shield works away from gundams, and the SF echelons might want to steer clear of hymnal organs).
When using double jupiter against pens, delay your skills until after the 8 second mark. The pens dispel your buffs at the 8 second mark.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I have mostly 1-2 of each mook unit
i have Alchemist, Scarecrow, Destroyer, and Hunter maxed iirc, and some of the others hovering at 90. i don't think setting up for it will be an issue, just tedious
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
messed up a turn in area 2 due to missing ap from losing 1 echelon last second in area 1, but still good enough imo
edit:
oh, and don't forget the crafting rate up for the new dolls. It looks like it's during the middle of the week this time.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
the map ui this time around is absolutely dogshit for the stuff you want to do during main story events, holy shit, who approved this
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
In other news, it wasn't until I was setting up my ranking teams that I realized that I forgot to enhance MG4. This whole time during the story portion of the event I was thinking: "Wow. People had been telling me that MG4 is good now, but she's still kind of lukewarm". Turns out I was just dumb and she's great once you actually enhance her.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
i cumulative farmed SPEQ and witch fairy so i just went in with a mindset of "let's just do whatever's comfortable and see what happens"
should still be an easy top 5%
I'm trying to make heads and tails of the ranking maps themselves though. Apparently there's 9 maps split between three stages, and you pick your maps like a choose-your-own-adventure book by completing certain objectives during the maps? Best cummulative score between the 3 stages is your score. I wonder how challenging it is to get the hat and extra fairy. It's a bit intimidating that such a score would put you in top 100 at present, but I guess that's just because nobody ranks prior to the last 48 hours?
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
the puzzle maps this event felt particularly dumb and bad and mica keeps sticking to the tradition of "oh, our players are doing too well handling things? time to introduce more units that are just a kick in the teeth to deal with!" ; it's also tiring to progress with a story that is split up into 40 different tiny story chapters when they won't even let you turn up the auto speed to instant for speedreaders
i finished the story on UX, got all the drops, and will farm cumulative points but that's about all i'm willing to do
I heard that a lot of the deathstacks on the G+K map were painful, which is why I went the SF route. I was hoping that the SF route would be easier to get 1.7M but would be inferior to getting a high score. Since I didn't play the G+K map, I don't know if that was true. I can say that the fights on the SF map were relatively easy in that they didn't require very much in terms of fancy kiting or endless resets if I brought the appropriate team to bear, but the margin of error for getting 1.7M points was thin and I never managed to get RPK to spawn as a boss. Halloween Intruder surprised me by how good that she was at the boss fights. The Sniper Nytos were a huge pain that most of my echelons struggled to deal with. Dreamer was the only one who consistently could clear those guys, but Summer Architecht and Destroyer sometimes could too. The SF map was a bit easier to chew on the number of permutations of moves that I could make since the echelon limit was 8 SF echelons and 4 HOCs vs IIRC the G+K map was all 14 echelons and hocs, which is altogether too many units IMO for plotting movements and swap daisy chains on an xbawks huge map.
For the puzzles, the main puzzle that I disliked was the one on the map titled "Traitor". I had to look up a guide for that. I hate puzzles where you don't have sufficient information to solve the puzzle until after you've failed a few times.
This story event got me wondering if perhaps RPK might be playing the role of a triple agent to get someone close to William? If so, I kind of feel like it might be some plan orchestrated by russia's StateSec forces and that they might not have clued Ange into the plan.
edit:
There are also some fan theories that Grig may prove traitorous since she mostly only ever exhibited loyalty to Grey, and is feeling betrayed by Morridow/Paradeus/William since they failed to save Grey.
On top of that the index entry for Morridow states that she hasn't noticed that her cognition image has been edited, so perhaps Morridow is compromised by M4 in some way. Maybe M4 is a sleeper consciousness within Morridow? I saw some people postulate some theories that had something to do with alleged changes in eye color when M4 is controlling Nimogen's body vs Dandelion controlling that body, and claims that Morridow's eye colors changed. But I haven't seen that or maybe I've just been looking at the wrong reference images.
Also, FWIW, I don't see an entry in the enemy index for RPK. I never got a chance to directly fight her though. I never managed to get her to spawn on the SF ranking map.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
yeah, traitor was the puzzle map that was really dumb and a waste of time because the optimal solution to that map involved blocking off enemy spawns that you would 100% lose against otherwise but how would you know unless you watched a video guide of someone else doing it or trial and errored to fail it at that point? it's just bad design to have a puzzle map that starts off with the player having incomplete information and with little to no room for recovery if they make a wrong move
sniper nytos are probably the dumbest paradeus units they've introduced so far because the normal tricks for avoiding damage simply don't work because even if you retreat the primary target of their snipe i'm pretty sure anyone in the path of the snipe still takes damage (see: your backline, the units you want the least to take dmg) and so your only choice is to....kill them before they have a chance to snipe? when they often come with huge frontline presences and a command nyto that shields/buffs them. and if you fail to kill them in time they hop out of range and...keep sniping you even though they're theoretically out of their own engage range! 10/10 design to get people to quit in frustration.
imo the plot is also getting dumber as more and more info about paradeus
like ok, there's a boy genius scientist with a sister complex that's singlehandedly capable of creating the most technologically advanced faction that hides their main base in a radioactive wasteland who can churn out entire armies of androids/cyborgs from experimenting upon kidnapped, possibly zombie plagued people without nations just showing up to absolutely obliterate it?
even if his dad is some big shot in one nation's government that seems absolutely ludicrous that he would be allowed to develop paradeus to the stage it's at in the story
As for their power level, I'm not sure how powerful that they actually are when compared to nation states. At times it seems like they have limitless armies popping out of thin-air to harass the Commander, but they've also consistently been shown going to great lengths to maintain secrecy as if they were some kind of clandestine terrorist cells.
I think that the world governments are supposed to be disorganized and are struggling to maintain a grip on their powers after the events of World War III. That each government is too preoccupied with maintaining control of their assorted White and Green zones to care much about what is happening in the Yellow zones or worse. We've seen that Germany is struggling with refugee problems and humanitarian aid issues with their border zones. We saw in the previous event that the soviets had essentially outsourced protection of their periphery zones to PMCs. With Paradeus predominately operating within Yellow/Red zones, they might simply be beyond the scope of what the governments presently care about. If push came to shove, I suspect that the nation level militaries could probably crush Paradeus if they could ever be roused from slumber and directed towards the target. We've seen the soviet military crush the rogue KCCO groups on two occasions with ease. I don't think paradeus would be that much harder. I think another problem is that key members of assorted intelligence agencies are compromised and are keeping alarms from being raised that would motivate the governments to mobilize the bulk of their military to act beyond their core territories.
I think a rough comparison can made between Paradeus and some of the Mexican drug cartels. The government military forces could probably crush the cartel forces in a straight fight. But the Mexican government, like GFL's German government, seems to be hampered by too many officials being corrupted and in bed with cartels/paradeus. Meanwhile the neighboring American/Soviet government military forces are either too busy dealing with other problems or simply don't have adequate casus belli to operate beyond their borders and strike at a hostile force within another nation's territory.
A lack of casus belli would explain why the soviets haven't sent a wing of bombers to level Paradeus to the ground and instead have only sent a loose cannon squad from statesec who can be burned and disavowed, and a PMC that's operating independently of the government but has received a few benefits under the table like them looking the other way regarding the existence of our illegal HOC heavy weapons teams.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012