Cogmind > Stories

I did a run for the first time in ~8 months

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Adraius:
...and it actually went pretty darn well!  I had remarkably smooth progress through Materials and most of the Factory.  I got my storage units up and running right at the start, found some nice explosive weapons right away, I was taking down patrols quickly and efficiently, my armor meant I wasn't even getting scratched, terminals were kind to me and I had threat levels under control, Programmers were taking the day off, and I was finding stairs unusually quickly.  It was great.  Unfortunately, I think my detour into Extension, however fun it may have been, may have cost me.  I broke out some AI buddies, and we tore up the place pretty good.  When I got out, I was in Research, and the patrols really ramped up, the Programmers made a late but strong showing, and there were no terminals to be found.  I had an epic explosion-fest outside a Garrison Access in which I was finally defeated.  GG.

Notes:

 - It sure felt like I was finding staircases quickly.  I looked up the stats - my last run that ended on -2 took 12,240 turns, this run took 9,003.  Then again, treads are faster now by about 20% if I'm remembering correctly.

 - Speaking of which, treads are now juuuuuust fast enough to avoid some patrols under the right circumstances.  They're not fast by any stretch, but they feel more mobile now.  I didn't know how exactly the changes to propulsion changed things, but I knew I liked the mobility, so I actually invested enough in propulsion slots to not be overweight this run. :0

 - More things sound the alarm now.  I got a jammer to shut them and all those pesky watchers up. =)

 - Guaranteed storage units in Materials, nice.  Kinda surprised you implemented that, btw, but I'm not complaining.  And with the changes to coverage, they last forever now.  I still had some of my original storage units from -10 when I died on -2.

 - Much of the credit for that, though, really goes to my armor.  I wasn't planning on using all that much armor at the start of the run, but I found some and threw it on.  Hot damn, it really made a difference!  Unlike in previous runs, where parts would fly off my 'bot whenever things got hairy, this time around that didn't happen.  I had what felt like record low parts churn all the way through the Factory.  I can see the changes to crits and the crit damage bonus in evidence here.  I wore as much armor as I could find the whole run, and I could really tell when I ran out - I started losing parts much, much faster!

 - Coverage is pretty different now, especially when it relates to hackware and other support utilities.  It took me a long time to find any hackware, but when I did it was a tasty Adv Hacking Suite, and that sucker served me well.  Behind my armor, it survived all the way to my final showdown, even though I couldn't take it off for combat.  I was wary of how that was going to work out, but my fears proved unfounded.  Low coverage also made my jammer stay operational long enough to feel worth it.  Hurrah again for armor.

 - What do you have to do to destroy a Garrison Access, by the way?  I fought my last stand next to one, and it ate ~6 Hellfire Missiles without seeming to care.  Do I need to target the 'G' part in particular?  Or when it starts blinking and its status says "Redeploying" is that all I'm after?

 - There seem to be more low-level weapons on some higher-tier enemies.  I was seeing Heavy Lasers even towards the end off some Grunts, and Hunters have Heavy Machine Guns now if memory serves.  Probably helps balance them having 3 weapons?

 - I think Extension gives you a chance to skip a level?  I had to leave my game and come back right around the time I entered Research (from Extension, which I had entered from the Factory), so my memory could be off, but I'm pretty sure I died on the first level of Research I saw, and according to the morgue file that level was -2.

Decker:
Good run Adraius!


--- Quote ---What do you have to do to destroy a Garrison Access, by the way?  I fought my last stand next to one, and it ate ~6 Hellfire Missiles without seeming to care.  Do I need to target the 'G' part in particular?  Or when it starts blinking and its status says "Redeploying" is that all I'm after?

--- End quote ---

They resist explosives. They're vulnerable to energy weapons by 25% though. So a plain nova cannon or an overloaded shot ought to do the trick. You just need to destroy any piece of it to shut it off.

Kyzrati:
Hey Adraius, great to see a run from you to compare from the early days.

You can analyze machines/environmental objects now if you have a Structural Scanner, and learn what their weaknesses/strengths are, if any. Getting in a fight near a Garrison Access is very dangerous, more so if you think you can blast them with explosives :P

Treads are quicker now, for sure, now that the stacking slowdown was removed. Propulsion got better across the board a few releases ago.

Guaranteed Storage, along with the other boosts to it, really helped improve the overall enjoyment. Some people simply want to regularly play with a bigger inventory, and it's not very fair to easily or suddenly take that away, nor is it fun to make those players have to seek out (or build) their storage every single game. So yeah, lots of tweaks to Storage. Now that you mention it, maybe under the upcoming new fabrication system, guaranteed storage units aren't so necessary since you'll be able to build them without too much difficulty... Of course, we'll see if/how the system is potentially abused in other ways first :P

Glad the new hackware coverage worked out for you, despite your concerns. It's similarly nice to have things like Targeting Computers last nearly forever--or until you lose all your armor ;). Combat builds do certainly rely on their armor a lot now, though more propulsion slots can help with that, as can a lot of weapon slots (assuming you have lots of spares for either), since they provide better coverage than utilities.

Hunters have gone through several phases of modifications, yeah. Now they have somewhat worse weapons, but are still quite deadly because they have that third gun, yep. I kinda like where they are in terms of difficulty now. (Grunt loadouts haven't changed, though; it's just that later in the game top-tier Grunt variants can be leading intermediate variants.)

Extension doesn't allow you to skip, no. There's currently only one place in the game you can skip an entire depth. You'll see that the score sheet now includes even more stats than it did last year, and among those, at the end, it shows the route you took through the world. I see from your sheet that you did go through -3/Research, just pretty quickly (only 544 turns).

Were you avoiding the caves on purpose? Or did you just happen to always find regular Factory exits?

Adraius:
Right now I always seek an expanded inventory, but I dunno, guaranteed storage units in a game as procedural as Cogmind strikes me as strange. =P I look forward to seeing how the fabrication changes impact storage unit availability.

I was taking every stairway I came across - I simply didn't encounter the Caves on the run.

Adraius:
Okay, time for an after action report from run #2.

This run, after enjoying my slightly speedier treads, I decided to see what I could accomplish with a non-treading Cogmind that could pick its fights.  It felt so weird picking up legs instead of treads at the start of the game! =P Again, the game seemed to like me at the start of this run: terminals to hack, some armor lying around, found a storage unit cache on -9, and picked up a Mini Grenade Launcher that would last until it fired my final futile volley on sublevel 3.  Most importantly, I found an Imp. Sensor Array, which was soon followed by an Adv. Signal Interpreter!   Using it was a really eye-opening experience.  I got to see just how many patrols I would have blundered into as a treaded Cogmind as I quietly slipped around them.  There were a bunch of exhilarating close calls as I used my legged speed to slip into the next chamber juuuuust before a patrol entered the room, and even a couple short chases when they saw the tail end of me and I decided to run instead of fight, and about half the time I actually managed to slip away!  Things really hit their stride when I found an Adv. Sensor Array in the Factory.  It was a really, really different pace of game than I'm used to - a lot more lurking just out of sight for long periods to let a patrol slowly move past my location, and some really intense moments of using my newfound mobility and a little tactical wall-busting to slip past several patrols to reach my objective.

There was a bit of a learning curve regarding how to protect my scanner equipment from damage - my Adv. Senor Array and Adv. Signal Interpreter were literally invaluable.  The Adv. Signal Interpreter was small enough to be basically invulnerable when behind armor, but the Adv. Sensor Array wasn't, and I managed to get it a bit banged up.  It took awhile, but I managed to get it repaired.  Unfortunately, I lost my backup Imp. Sensor Array when I stuck it in to get it repaired too, and the repair station was disabled by what must have been a wildly stray shot from either me or the Programmer I was fighting. =/

I found an Imp. Transmission Jammer, Adv. Terrain Scanner, and Adv. Terrain Scan Processor in the mid-Factory, but I lacked the slots and power to run them.  I took them with me, and added them to by build as I gained slots.  There was a brief, glorious window in which I was running an Adv. Sensor Array, Adv. Terrain Scanner, and the Adv. enhancements for both of them.  Unfortunately, part of the reason I was able to fit all that was a symptom of a major problem I was encountering - a big lack of armor.  After the early Factory, I had no luck finding armor at all.  I considering trying to hack out the component inventory at a terminal, but they had also really dried up.  I got forced into a close-range slug-match with a squad of elite Grunts early on either -5 or -4, and they beat me up pretty badly.  It took me a loooong time to get through -5 and -4, and although I could dodge a lot of fights, the ones I did take hurt badly without any armor.  Propulsion was getting pretty tricky to handle.  I'd been using mostly legs with a couple short stints with wheels (fast, but hella fragile!), but increasingly I wasn't finding enough legs left over even after battles with Grunts to replace the legs I had lost, and I found myself hobbling around on my one "reserve wheel" from my stores post-battle to shoot some scavengers and fit myself out in wheels.  I forgot to swap out my Adv. Sensor Array one too many times, and it died, which marked the beginning of the end.  My Cogmind basically fell to pieces right as I found the exit to Research, and I exited while under fire from two Hunters, the Sentry guarding the exit, and a squadron of Swarmers.  I had run out of weapons and matter for ammo against the Hunters (I was aiming to use 50/50 kinetic and thermal, but I had seen a serious dearth of weapons lately and was down to just kinetics), and my remaining sensors got ripped to shreds as I made for the exit.  I was able to rebuild some once in Research, but couldn't find any sensors and (oddly enough) found only a bunch of treads for propulsion, and my half-baked combat-bot conversion succumbed quickly.

 - Advanced Sensor Arrays and Advanced Sensor Interpreters are my two new favorite items in Cogmind.  I can't wait until the Fabrication changes make fabbing your own easier!

 - Similarly, I can really see myself fabbing together some armor in the late factory in the future.

 - Hackware seems to be more rare than it used to be.  I only saw a couple pieces in the whole run, in the very late Factory.  I've yet to see any of whatever part now gives a boost to indirect hacking.

 - My bot really seemed to die when I kept getting utility slots... but didn't have the "correct" utilities to fill them.  The terrain scanner shenanigans was fun, but in retrospect probably not worth the two slots.  The transmission jammer was more worthwhile, but was also more vulnerable to enemy fire.  I really needed some armor to go in some of my utility slots instead, and secondarily, some hackware to locate and beeline for exits/goodies.  I actually had the hackware on sublevel 4, but I don't think I saw a single terminal between that point and when I died, so I never equipped it.

 - I haven't tried out any of the new trojan or brute force hacks yet.  Partially because a lot of the terminals I have found had nice hacks built in, and/or I needed to purge threat or find an exit at the time, but I really ought to try them.  I think I keep associating them with indirect hacks, which have that base -15% chance penalty.

 - Oh, and is it just me, or has the "pursuit" AI changed since early alpha?  I remember that bots used to follow you quite well even after losing line-of-sight, and using ECM to shorten that tracking period was crucial, but this run I was able to lose some Grunt packs simply by slipping their vision and going through a few doorways.  Or maybe it feels easier now because I could see them run off the wrong direction thanks to my scanners.

EDIT: you know, I really should have tried killing some of the late-game Watchers for a new sensor array.  I killed one early, saw them drop the basic scanner, and then promptly discarded the idea of getting items from them.  But I bet the late-game ones have the good kit.

I look forward to trying this sort of bot out again. =)

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