Part 3

hypern posted:

Target California and then push Eastso that you can recapture all the lost Southern States. You need the oil to power your Industry.

We'll target California, especially since, at least according to the story, they're the first group to attack us.



Equally, is it wrong that I would have sex with that very very creepy looking blonde from the first cutscene? It's her hilariously inappropriate scarf, I think. Oh well, she's already dead.



Before we set out, I decided to spend some of our money on a few extra units to help us along the way. You can only attack once per turn, and any units you commit to an offense are not available to defend with for the duration of the turn (even though you can defend with your leftovers as many times as you'd like - and can even purchase one time defense units at a reduced cost). I bought two of our special heavy tanks, FCS Stuarts, which are very very fast, very effective infantry killers that can travel all over the place - they're just a touch less effective than the abrams at anti-vehicle combat, but these guys are worth every penny as with their incredible range, they can, technically, get as much distance as your average artillery piece. I bought two of them to go in our assault forces. If I ever get enough money, I'll gradually replace each and every tank we have with them. For now, I have to make do with our starting units.

Equally, if you've got a better reputation than whomever is attacking you, you get a bunch of weak partisan units who will gladly sacrifice themselves in service to the glory of your cause. They're basically civilian vehicles, mounted with 50 cals and covered with plate armour. They don't tend to last very long.



I equally bought one of these to give us some air cover; air cover is very, very important and losing it can result in a lot of quick death for your units.



This pair of engineers are the next guys I bought. They're hopelessly crappy units against just about everything, but they do have the special power to lay mines, dragon's teeth, and barbed wire, which means they'll sit in our defensive army while I draft the rest of our infantry into offensive roles where they can be used to do some good.



This is the European Union, which got attacked twice before we had a chance to do anything ourselves. The little bars off to the side show an estimate of our overall power compared to them - they've done remarkably well, considering they were hit twice in a single turn, once by the Confederacy and one by the New England Alliance - since all of their stuff is crammed into one single space and they didn't attack themselves, it means each and every one of their units was committed to defense.

Since New England and the Confederates have enemies on all sides, they didn't attack with everything they have, which means their token forces most likely got annihilated.



This is the Northern chunk of California, featuring such towns as Sacramento, San Francisco, Reno, and pretty much the entire setting of Fallout 2. You'll notice that blue rectangle with a sharpened bit at the bottom in the picture, that represents our direction of attack - on maps where we border our enemies on more than one side, we get the option of selecting which side we think offers us a better chance at victory.



Here's the loading screen with some flags. Can a pine tree kill a bear being inspired by some sort of demon star in the sky?



This is a list of the objectives in the region we're about to attack, with each of the respective cities being worth that many points should we capture them. If we can take and hold 120 objective points for two turn, we automatically win; if the defender can last 13 turns without losing those objectives, they win and we retreat back home with our pine branches between our.. uh, trunks? Equally, if we kill every unit in the area we win, or if we beat the enemy to the point where it thinks that the units it would otherwise lose continuing the defense aren't worth the territory, it can resign and we will take the objective.



Here's the same map we saw before, overlaid with objective information. Those little yellow squares are the "industry" of the area; Northern California has an aircraft plant, which makes it 5% cheaper to purchase airplanes, and a military base which makes it 5% cheaper to purchase infantry. Those bonuses will stack with the ones I listed before, making it even cheaper to do the dirty deeds - the aircraft plant should be particularly helpful since those things are expensive as all Hell.



I took a few minutes to muck about in the deployment zone in order to show you some of these things up close. Here's that aircraft parts plant that I mentioned before (don't worry about that tank, I'm only allowed to deploy within my red attacker zone you saw before). I'd really like to find a large tank factory though, or five of them, because we have no discounts toward them right now and those are the things we'll be buying and losing the most.



And this is the military base that will end up giving me even cheaper infantry, which is a shame, since I have quite a few discounts on infantry units already and infantry units virtually suck with the exception of some you get for special powers.



This is my main deployment zone, which I decided to fill with the main thrust of my attacking force. Most of my heavy armour is here, though I did deploy some of it off to the side to take our Reno and Sacramento, but they're still close enough to reinforce Sacramento should the enemy try to block is there, or alternatively push on in to San Francisco itself and steal out that gem of points.



Here's are the forces on the other side of the Sacramento river, slightly to the North of the city itself. I put my airbase there, you can see it on the right, as well as my infantry since I don't really expect the enemy to be defending Sacramento when San Francisco is obviously more worth defending - as you can see, I deployed some rocket-artillery and a medium tank just in case, along with it.

Now, the airbase is a very, very important thing, as all your fixed-wing aircraft go there. If your airbase is destroyed, you lose every God damned plane you took with you on your mission - that being said, the airbase is tough, a little too tough, and has some frightfully effective AA defense that can shield the troops surrounding it. It also regenerates its health slowly, and has a whole lot of hitpoints so it would take a few heavy tanks a few turns to destroy.

The point is to keep this baby safe at all costs, but the developers made them a little too strong so tyou can throw them down on your frontlines, especiall when you're on the defense, and not have to worry about it.



This is Reno, it's not worth very many victory points but it'll probably be undefended. It's the Biggest Little City in the world! I don't know why my Canadian ass knows that, but it is.



This is the main combat screen and I'll describe a little of what's going on. First of all, the boxes over to the left represent your special powers - I have the default Pacifica power, selected, which is a satellite survey that gives any one of your units a bonus 2 hex view. This is good for scouting units, as you can imagine.

The powers underneath it are Corrosion and Nanite Cloud, I believe. Red is EVIL and blue is RIGHTEOUS, as per the conventions of the Gaming Star Chamber who are notable for decreeing that all adventure and first person shooters must have sewer levels and crates as far as the eye can see. But no pallets. NEVER PALLETS. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A CRATE IF YOU DON'T HAVE PALLETS JESUS CHRIST.

I digress.

The numbers over those powers represent the number of turns before they become active.

The sword/shield represent how well the combat is going. I don't know why it's not in the middle right now, but I don't know much. It just doesn't make sense when you first start, okay? The flag lets me see the victory points on this screen, the plane lets me use my aircraft, the arrow means select next unit, and that bar with the FIRESTORM in it represents my collateral damage.

Each time you use a good power, you get good points.
Each time you use a bad power, you get bad points.

If your FIRESTORM BAR is more than half full at the end of the mission, you get 5 more evil points over all (and move toward more evil powers post mission). If your FIRESTORM BAR is less than half full at the end of the mission, you get 5 more good points over all (and move toward more good powers). Considering it takes something like 130 points to get to the next respective tier... and you can only get five points per mission, no matter how much of the world you burn..... well, most people who played the original on X-Box didn't get to see half of the powers in the game. Since I'm playing the PC version, I edited that so that you can move up 50 points per mission, which means we'll start seeing new powers sooner than playing the hole game and not touching any. Equally, the same applies to the computer.

It was a silly decision on the part of the devs. When you could only move five points, burning ten farms would net you just as much reputation at the end of the turn as, I don't know, firebombing New York City and then pelting the Statue of Liberty with artillery. Shooting up one village, by accident, in Vermont, would be the same as dropping the bomb on Chicago.

Oh well.



This is a closeup of our FCS Stuart and now you can see the hard numbers that make it work. What you don't see, however, are the weapon types and the terrain bonuses - each type of weapon does bonus or negative damage, in addition to the number you see there, to whatever it is attacking. The FCS basically has three large turrets on it, and fires unrelenting torrents of ammo into your opponents - so they get a natural bonus to shredding infantry units but lose out, even more than they normally would, in fights against heavy armour. Equally, certain types of terrian give defensive/offensive bonuses to different kinds of units.

There's also a small random number element that doesn't affect much, but does make it so you can't just crunch the numbers and state, with certainty, that X unit will be destroyed by Y attack precisely 97.141% of the time. Unlike Civilization, however, it's sensible in that there's no way your spearmen are going to shoot down my stealth bombers.



Here's a crappy picture of the hills from the corner. My units have the little orange blocks beside them. Equally, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge from here.

Edit:


And here's Reno with the victory points overlay on top of it. Notice how the sections of the city worth Victory Points are now blue? I just have to make sure there's no enemy units in the city, then keep a unit on any one of the blue squares for one full turn, and the city is mine. Notice the hummer in the city? Yeah, that's one of my scouts.

The first victory of the war goes to Pacifica.