Messages

601

General / Re: Crawlers / Death Stalkers

« on: April 29, 2018, 05:26:05 am »

Sure, stealth and high initiative might be able to help to a degree but that leaves only one viable character build.

Nah, there are plenty of builds that work fine on Dominating.  You could put a measly 15 points into Guns and pick up Gunslinger and walk around with a pistol equipped, switching to your main weapon once combat starts.  That's 7 effective Dex/Agi worth of initiative. You could get Paranoia for 5.  Or you could tank up properly. I had no trouble tanking Death Stalkers as a super heavy sledge character in triple-plated armor. Regen Vest will heal you up without triggering that poisoning effect; Sturdy Vest will get you to health numbers high enough that you can just take the hit and fight back. You don't have to use a sledge to use heavy armor, no reason you couldn't have gloves/knives as well.

And all that is just assuming you want a Dominating viable melee build, there are obviously a bunch of others, and many of them don't need initiative to get through the Death Stalkers.

Good constitution, good armor, evasion and dodge do close to nothing on higher difficulties. You still die in 1 turn (if not in one shot) just like you would with any other character build. There's no such thing as tanks in this game (on normal and above, never tried easy).

Evasion and dodge may not do much, but you're just wrong about tanking. I don't think you could tank everything in the game (offhand, I imagine Emporion/Harpocrates, IRIS/ARKE, any place with lots of psi goliaths, and of course Tchort would all be tough or impossible to just straight up tank) but you can tank most things on Dominating if you want to. Get that resist up to 90% or so, walk around with a nice low-frequency shield, and there's not really much that'll bother you short of psi enemies or special encounters.

602

General / Re: Post your experiences with the new Dominating difficulty!

« on: April 23, 2018, 10:04:39 pm »

How tough are the Lunatic levels

Not at all if you have decent stealth ability and come prepared.  Probably need a couple grenades and perhaps a few traps unless you just want to stealth past most of them, which you can do.

If you do fight, it can be a little tricky.  There are a lot of Lunatics on Dominating, but as long as you've explored around enough to be properly levelled you shouldn't have too much trouble.  Might need a couple reloads, especially if you don't know the area layout.

603

General / Re: Crawlers / Death Stalkers

« on: April 22, 2018, 12:11:00 am »

Be honest here, did any of you beat death stalkers the first time you met them in each area where they lurk? Like anyone, ever? I bet not. So the only way to beat them is basically "save scumming" after you know they're coming for you.

how do you beat 3 death stalkers+1crawler at level 13 without reloading till you meet them 1 by 1? Is this the "hard" you were aiming for? Hard to load into the right situation? And this is just one of the over the top enemies. How about those machinegun auto-turrets at level 8-9? Unless you hack them, I'd like to see you dispatching them with a melee character. 5 bullet bursts with 60% armor penetration and each bullet hits twice. Not to mention the increased mechanical threshold.

I did die the first time I got ambushed by Crawlers, but every group after that I was able to handle, without prior knowledge.  There are lots of environmental clues.  Part of UnderRail is being good at combat, but part of it is being good at reading what's around you and making good decisions based on that.  So, yeah, on Hard and even on Dominating, Crawlers/Death Stalkers aren't too much trouble.

Use traps and grenades.  Simple bear traps, which require 0 skill, are super useful against crawler-types.  Molotovs are amazing.  And if you're playing on a high difficulty setting, then when you come to an area where there are skeletons laying around, maybe pay a little extra attention.  You don't need optimal placement, you just need to use all the tools at your disposal.

Turrets are pretty easy - the only real threat is that they can often see you and ruin your sneaky surprise plans.  But every single turret that you could possibly encounter by level 9 (unless you're holding on to levels like SubterminalOptimization in his challenge games) is placed where there's an easy LOS break.  So while it's slow, if you've planned badly enough that you're staring down two auto-turrets and you have no EMPs, no ranged weapons, no psi, and no taser, then you can just dance in and out of LOS and land hits one at a time.  That would suck, but if you come to a fight unprepared you may occasionally need to either run away and come back with what you need, or else accept that you've got limited choices at the moment.  Also, you don't actually need to fight any turrets in the early game, even without stealth.  The one in the Junkyard Mutie map can be run past once you've killed the muties and dogs.  The two in the Depot map with all the dogs can be hacked or you can find a secret passage to bypass them or you can take another route into the back part of that map.  The two in the junkyard map with the robots can be skipped entirely - there's no need for you to ever go in or through that room unless you just want to.  And if you want to, then you're volunteering for whatever trouble they cause.

We could give you more specific feedback if we knew what build you were playing.  Melee, you've hinted?  Is that knives? Sledge? Gloves?

604

General / Re: [Minor spoilers possible] Psi combos

« on: April 10, 2018, 02:28:07 pm »

What is the forcefield for?

<cue music>
Stayin' Alive.

605

Suggestions / Re: Combined Weapon Feats

« on: April 10, 2018, 02:27:21 pm »

why throw hammers when you've got spears?

Because we don't have Balor's Spear, clearly.  What else would that feat be for but hurling Balor's Hammer like some drunken, tweaking Thor spelunking through the Yggdrassil?

606

Suggestions / Re: Combined Weapon Feats

« on: April 10, 2018, 12:28:17 am »

Some of those feat names are great, Caber Toss in particular. 

Some of these seem sort of duplicative, specifically Rifle Bash.  With that much Melee, you may as well grab Dirty Kick.  And since hit is opposed, if you have low Melee anyway, you're going to need QT to bear trap so you can automagically hit.  Unless you envision Rifle Bash hitting based on Guns, which seems a tough sell.

Things like Chemical Injection and Dynamic Duo sound like you just want another Execute so you don't have to sit out the cooldown.

And things like Caber Toss, Leg Sweep, and Emergency Buckler actually sound like you're trying to give those weapon users reason not to specialize into other weapons, but rather to increase the versatility of their existing weapon of choice.

Of course to some degree I'm hoping to see Expedition before the sun goes nova and don't want to distract the devs, but while your sentiment seems a good one, the suggestions here seem more like you're asking for a reason to sink an arbitrary and small number of points to get access to even more specialized feats for a single weapon user who doesn't have much reason to carry anything in the other hand.  Of all those feats, only Chemical Injection sounds like it actually would require high skill in both to be effective - the rest are just token point dumps and a tchotchke (or nothing) in offhand to be more awesome at your mainhand.

607

General / Re: Post your experiences with the new Dominating difficulty!

« on: April 03, 2018, 01:41:26 am »

And just like that, squadrons of deadly robots mysteriously materialize in the expansion and on the critical path of the base game for the next update.

Talk about hoist by me own petard. Cue the "Augh!" moment from Charlie Brown comics    So you're saying the new layout for the Newton rescue mission is multilevel?

Dreadnought_Factory_Floor.map
Dreadnought_Testing_Room.map
Dreadnought_Annealing_Chambers.map
Larger_Prototype_Dreadnought_With_Overclocked_AI.map
Just_Blatantly_Ripping_Off_WH40K_Emperor_Titan.map

608

General / Re: Post your experiences with the new Dominating difficulty!

« on: April 02, 2018, 05:12:45 pm »

I haven't tried a Hardcore/Iron Man/Deathless run as another poster is doing, but I strongly believe that such a run could be done reliably (probably in 90%+ range).

FWIW, I am 100% sure that a full-game-clear (except the Carnifex fight which is uncontrollable with sufficiently bad RNG) stealth Psi run can be done on Dominating with no reloads.  I haven't done one yet but that's just because I don't much care about that sort of challenge (and as you noted, am sort of waiting to see if ShreddedCheddar has success).  Without stealth, I got to Emporion with Psi builds without dying.  Nothing on the critical path was even substantially dangerous before DC, and having a 4-turn Force Field to hide against a wall behind while you LoC Bilocate/Enrage or wait for buffs to drop off enemies pretty much just breaks everything.  Psi even makes the otherwise scary Death Stalkers quite safe to handle in groups.

Given how powerful you've shown AR builds to be, it seems you surely could do it with an AR as well.  I just know Psi better than any other build and only know how to win all encounters with it.

609

Suggestions / Re: Core City Residence

« on: April 01, 2018, 04:00:28 am »

I think you need to go back and talk to the dude who sets your house up.  There's storage in each of the occupiable rooms, and plenty of it.  It does cost a few hundred charons, but you get shelves and barrels in the tailor/tanner room, shelves and electroshelves in the electronics room, and a whole bunch of stuff in the medical room.

610

General / Re: Crawlers / Death Stalkers

« on: March 24, 2018, 09:19:45 pm »

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned here but if you *know* there are Death Stalkers ahead, setting several bear traps to make a wall (outside of combat) and waiting for them to come to you (or throwing a grenade or using TNT to attract them) is basically a 100% autowin.

Yeah but there are a bunch of tools that you can use if you've got metaknowledge.  I know you haven't played much psi yet, but my favorite example of meta breaking the game is that Force Field reveals hidden units anywhere.

611

General / Re: Post your experiences with the new Dominating difficulty!

« on: March 24, 2018, 07:38:44 pm »

What is the actual difference between hard and dominating now, other than dominating having higher stats?  Are the numbers and types of enemies different too? 

Yup.  For example, on lower difficulties there are no Goliath Psi Beetles on Silent Isle; a whole lot fewer Lunatics in the Mall and Station; regular Coil Spiders instead of Greater ones in several locations.  SO aside from enemies being harder to kill, there are more of them, and sometimes a wider variety.  However, I don't think there are any Dominating-only creatures (though there are several Dominating-only NPCs, like the named Lunatics in Emporion or that extra, high-health guy east of Foundry in the gang), so you'll still see Greater Coil Spider, Goliath Psi Beetles, and Hunchback Mutants, just later in the game and in smaller numbers.

612

General / Re: [Spoilers for potentially everything] Minimum Level To Complete Dominating?

« on: March 22, 2018, 12:53:31 am »

I was thinking that Level 8 AR could probably still output something in that range (at least at melee distance) ~500-800 a turn at Lvl8 and Lvl9 (I doubt there's actually THAT much difference between these two Levels).

The biggest difference there is that 800 AR damage is just that, 800; but 500 psi damage is splashy so if you can get tight groups it's well into the low thousands.  Psi does really well handling groups, and Dominating throws a ton of groups at you, so psi scales super well into Dominating.  And none of my suggestions for you require anywhere near the luck of nine consecutive crits so you can probably either succeed or rule out the Psi build fairly quickly if you choose to try it (at such low levels the damage curve is basically flat with a quick jump to a plateau when you pop Trance).  Anyway, whatever you decide to try, have fun with it 

613

General / Re: [Spoilers for potentially everything] Minimum Level To Complete Dominating?

« on: March 21, 2018, 11:24:07 pm »

If your spike damage number is correct here, that will be key:

Well, the number is correct but i may not have made it clear that I was talking about maximum possible skill for a max psi level 25 character.  ThermoD does 50% + 1% of the targets health per skill, so you need to get your Psychokinetics up to ~300 to turn the tentacles into 3.5k AoE.

For the 3 Will level 8 build you can only get 99% (I guess 105% if you use a Tchortist Noble Robe but that's probably unwise given how lean your margins are) of the targets health at the time of application, so for you, you should assume that you'll be damaging the tentacle/tchortling some, then applying ThermoD and bursting the target down with grenades mines, and whatever else you've got at your disposal.  It's going to be hard, not going to lie.  You should expect to be able to do 400-500 damage in a bursty turn at level 8 so figure 600-750 target health is your safe(ish) window to apply ThermoD.  This still needs a fair bit of mine and grenade work on the Eye but you can accelerate your kill by probably 50%+ over strictly using mines and grenades like you had been briefly considering with Tygrende's level 4 notion.

It's just all so close.  If you could do without the Int (which you maybe can't) you could have more Will and thus bigger ThermoD boom; if you could do without the Con (which you maybe can't) you could also pump that will.  If you didn't need every possible point of Agi to get over instant detect thresholds....etc, etc.  I can't personally theorycraft a Tchort kill on Dominating under level 8, but I wouldn't have guessed you could AR it at 10 so I'm not saying it's actually impossible, I just don't know the tricks.  I truly believe a near-perfect control will let a level 8 Psi kill Tchort - I'm confident about 14, and pretty sure about 12, but ThermoD can be abused quite handily so 8 may well be possible.

Sorry if those numbers got you all worked up thinking I was talking about level 8.  At level 8 you should expect sub-1k (non-crit) AoEs but that's still enough to blow the crap out of Tchortling packs and weaken other tentacles so you can chain ThermoD out and probably - probably - get the Eye.  If you're going to Cheat Engine the build and just fiddle around with Tchort, at least on one play try taking Pyromaniac as your level 8 feat - that burn will represent an extra ~100-150 pre-DR damage per turn on everything is catches and that might add up nicely, but I'm not confident how it applies and it may be that you can't overcome enemy Fortitude and get the fire to stick.

614

Suggestions / Re: Cloaking Device affected by armor penalty?

« on: March 21, 2018, 11:27:03 am »

Thanks for the response, but I need to respectfully disagree with you.
Besides, I don't think that the only intention for a cloaking device is to allow people with no stealth investment to reach instant detection thresholds, why wouldn't it be used by those with a moderate armor penalty for the same purpose?

That, as they say, is what makes horse races   You make some good points.  And I didn't mean to say that the only purpose of it was to clear thresholds, I just meant that was probably the best benefit of its several benefits.

There's a balancing concern, of course.  Already, crafting is so intensely and overwhelmingly powerful that you basically can't justify not using it, from a powergaming perspective.  Letting Cloaking Device bypass the penalties of heavy armor in effect means you can craft away the drawback that comes with using that good armor.  So I suppose a valid question is, do you think that the inconvenience of carrying a stealth set is so great that there should be a bypass available for no opportunity cost (since you invested into Electronics to make yourself a shield, obviously because holy crap are crafted shields amazing)?  I think that swapping items in and out of your quickslots is part of optimizing the game.  And, to be fair, if that 60% armor penalty is bothering you, don't wear a vest with ceramic plates   Seriously.  If you have crafting, use nanocomposite, or burrower shell.  You'll be glad you experimented.

Anyway, you make reasonable points, I guess my primary disagreement is that I think C.D. is more powerful than you think it is.  Nothing saying I'm right ^_^

615

Bugs / Re: Electrokinetic Imprint

« on: March 21, 2018, 11:18:46 am »

Found two bugs about this one:
1. The description says it should stun a target who steps on it by 2 turns but every human, critter, robot and anything who wants to kill me always gets stunned by 1 turn,

For some reason half of my post doesn't want to get posted even while trying to modify it.

2. Psionic Mania doesn't seem to affect it, I cast the imprint with the buff on it and gets consumed in the process but it doesn't crit at all.

The thing about it is an enemy has to walk across it, so on their turn they trigger it, get stunned for two turns, and end their turn.  When it's your turn, they then have only 1 turn left.  If it stunned for 1 turn, it would actually just end their turn and have no other effect.  Stuns like Electrokinesis or EMP/Taser stun on your turn instead of the enemy's turn, which is why their 2 turns is in effect longer than E.I.'s 2 turns.

Did you try to use a special character like ampersand?  Some characters can't be used in forum posts.

Yeah, your Psionic Mania was used to lay down the trap, but crit chance isn't baked in or else you could save the game then Mania, E.I., and see if it's a critical trap, since E.I. lasts a really long time.  That would allow for an excess of scavescum shenanigans.