Casey kept his head down as Alice raced around plumes of dirt and debris shooting up out of the ground. Whether it was a sudden turn or driving right over a mound, they were evading everything the Municans were throwing at them. It was times like this, when they were under fire and running for their lives, that Casey realized just how reckless the woman behind the wheel was.
“Ya didn’t have to jump that, did ya?” Casey pleaded as he bounced helplessly beneath his machinegun mount. If not for his helmet …
“We’re not taking hits, right? Feel free to complain when that happens.”
“Well that’s not fair-” Casey suddenly found his head firmly against the side of the scout car as Alice swerved to the right, narrowly avoiding another shell. Dust and smoke poured into the vehicle from the viewport and left Casey half blind. “That count?”
“No,” Alice called back, only sparing him a quick glance.
Casey tried to keep himself upright as the Municans threw more and more fire at them, but more than once he’d wound up on his back or dazed from smacking his head against something harder than his helmet. Wishing he had a seatbelt–and a proper seat for that matter–he put on his goggles and pulled his scarf up over his mouth before climbing back up to the gunner mount.
There wasn’t much for Casey to see outside at first, only the signs of battle behind them and the endless desert up ahead. Even so, he was relieved to not see any of their own nearby. That at least meant there were no casualties that he or Alice could confirm.
It wasn’t long before Casey noticed the lack of shells coming at them. Since Alice wasn’t driving like she wanted to flip the car anymore, he wasn’t getting thrown around like a ragdoll. The real question was what changed. “Why did they stop shooting us?”
There was no response. Casey smacked the roof with his palm a few times. “Alice, the shooting stopped. Think we broke through.”
Somehow.
“Time to call it in.”
“Wait.” Casey had to know what was happening, first. The Municans weren’t shooting at them anymore, but something was still coming in the distance. Like the first nasty surprise the 203rd received when they arrived, the next attack was coming from the air. He counted at least six drakes.
“I see them,” Alice called up to him. “We need to warn the Lieutenant.”
“Oh we’re gonna do more than just warn’em,” Casey said, grabbing onto his machinegun and doing a quick inspection. “Good, no damage.”
“We’re going to attack them?!”
“Just annoy’em a little. If even one breaks off and goes for us, then that’s one less for Rick to have to deal with.”
“Yes,” Alice half agreed, “but we don’t have a big enough gun to bring down a drake.” If one did decide to attack them, it would be all they could do just to stay alive. If they were doing this, Alice needed to find them some good ground. Her searching quickly went from hasty to desperate as Casey got the gun ready for ‘pester-fire.’
“There’s nothing out here,” she hissed. At least, she thought frantically, there was nothing she could see from such rough terrain. There could be an airport less than a mile from them and the only evidence would be the sounds of planes in the distance, along with the occasional low flier. They had to get higher anyway to get the drakes’ attention, so Alice brought them up onto another mound.
“Nice spot,” Casey called down, “Just be ready to move when one comes this way.”
Alice heard him, but said nothing, instead using their new vantage to search for something, anything that could help them.
“Heeeey!” Casey opened up on the formation of drakes as soon as they were close enough to see the bullets arcing toward them from the ground.
“Come on, come on.” Alice came up short in her search until, in a bit of desperation, she opened the driver side door and looked out behind them. Her eyes went wide by what they had missed on their way here. “Is that a village?” She wanted to take back those words immediately, noticing some of the buildings half collapsed, and others being little more than foundations. It might have been a village at one point. Now, it was a ruin. Even so, that ruin was just the sort of cover they needed, and it wasn’t too far away.
“Casey, there’s a ruin behind us. As soon we get their attention we’re going there.” She wondered if he could even hear her over his own manic shooting. She doubted it; she could barely hear herself.
Suddenly, the shooting stopped. Casey leaned over his gun and tried to gauge the enemy’s response, but the drakes were still flying in formation. When Alice shut the door and leaned forward to get a good look herself, she saw the whole formation enter a wide turn to the southeast. Toward them.
“Casey?”
“All six of them are coming?! What? It’s a 50cal, not a SAAM launcher! Alice get us out of here! The plan worked a little too well!”
“I noticed!” Alice got the car moving as fast as she could, and they nearly crashed driving off the edge of the mound. Six drakes, six armed drakes were coming straight at them with murderous intent. She didn’t like their odds with even one of those shrieking planes. “If we can just get out of the open we might have a chance,” she told herself.
All Casey could do for the moment was hang on as Alice evaded the drakes and tried to reach the ruins, the ruins neither of them could see anymore. There was one more thing he could do, Casey suddenly realized, something he should do while he still had the chance. He reached for the radio.
I got a lot of good material, and we were 9/5 on wins and losses. I finally scraped together enough xp to get the Daring, so that sidequest is finally finished. Not to mention, it was a fun night. 10/10, even with the lack of sleep today.
Here’s my best highlight:
(I have to stop recording at such a high resolution; these things are a pain to work with …)
Ships used:
Bourgogne
Shimakaze
Daring
Smolensk
Yoshino B
Smolensk
I only played this for one match, and I think I got away with more nonsense than I should have. The team was trying a hard B to A push on Crash Zone Alpha; the enemy team countered us hard positionally, but we still outfought them. I also swung around to grab C as things were winding down, just to make sure we were secure no matter what happened. C rightfully belonged to us anyhow.
Daring
I didn’t get to do actual testing on Daring. This was an all DD comp with another hard B to A push that didn’t leave much room for figuring out the boat’s quirks in a ‘normal’ situation. So far I’m liking the Daring. It’s a nice balance of guns and torpedoes, though I’m not used to single launched yet.
Yoshino
She’s definitely my favorite cruiser at the tier. Basically an Azuma with torpedoes. It’s also really nice when you can get those 9-10k HE salvos. Mean but justified with all the radar cruisers roaming around.
This may come as a surprise, despite us mentioning throwing balance out the window down the drain, there are still changes that were needed for M.A.S.S. Builder’s combat to bring everything to a certain level that’s nearly the same. As mentioned time and time again before, our goal is to make everyt…
Melee build lovers, rejoice!
I think. 0.9.0 is still quite a ways off, but like usual it’s good news for the game. Vermillion’s addressing some of the issues melee builds have when dealing with bosses.
Bosses will have a longer wind-up time before some attacks, such as the first boss’ ground stomp, the multi-headed runner boss jump attack.
Bosses will now “fall” for a longer period of time to create a window for combo attacks to chain until the end. These windows of attack should also benefit slow firing weapons such as detonator and single shot weapons more.
Bosses will recover their stamina from melee attacks less.
*There’s something else planned as a big update coming to boss fights that both close combat and ranged players can utilize, which these changes will compliment. We cannot reveal them yet until its ready.
Bosses in particular are one of the main reasons I’m a shooter main and don’t really even delve into hybrid setups. Most bosses can knock you out in just a few hits so it’s usually not worth trying to muscle your way through all the AOEs and mobs to reach them and get in a few hits before inevitably having to run away again. The trade off with shooter builds is that doing this, you trade ammunition woes for HP woes.
The Dash attack is also getting looked at, but it was said this was just to make it slightly less spammable. It will have slightly less damage, and a longer transition from one dash attack to the next.
Some other good ideas coming include:
As mentioned before, increase melee attacks’ animation speed in their combo attacks. The deeper the combo is, the faster the attack is.
Certain defense nodes now have a passive increment to armor in addition to triggered defense increase.
There are now nodes that allow faster shield recharges and quantum break activation. We just had some time to code them in so now there’s more choice of nodes to help with your playstyle. Glass cannons ranged players can now regen their shields much faster with a single shield regen investment node while others can have a much lower downtime.
Quantum Break can now utilize “trigger at end combo attacks” tech nodes on every of their ‘nth’ hit. We’re still unsure what ‘nth’ will be.
I especially like the idea quantum break triggering from combos. I never use this mechanic because I can’t remember it exists for more than two minutes. I play this game on very hard difficulty when I’m not testing a completely new build, too, and that leaves a few more holes in gameplay aside from just not using melee on anything but lone mobs.
‘Overall’ these are great changes coming in the next update, and hopefully by the time it comes out I’ll have a few things to showcase. I’m not just covering this game’s weekly updates; I want to get some content of my own going as soon as possible. (See my Space Engineers material as an example)
I knew I would be too out of it to get much else done this afternoon, so before I went to sleep I spent a good chunk of the morning doing some series testing on that carousel style hangar on the Admiral Hipper. I also tried to enclose the entire thing in an airtight room.
I really really needed a modless solution to having an opening wide enough for the Cosmo Messer’s wingspan but I couldn’t get an airtight seal with hinged doors, rotor doors, or hinged fill ins + normal hangar doors like some of the ones I spied on the workshop. Some people like to use pistons for this kind of thing, but I won’t even consider using pistons on my ships anymore unless they’re part of a Clang drive, or a small grid fighter catapult.
They’re still too finicky for my taste.
I tried an extended hangar door mode for a quick and easy–and temporary solution, but as I was slipping into dreamland, something told me the only solution that will work for a combination of ship sizes like this are side entrances. This way, the Cosmo Messers can leverage their short height to get through the doors same way the do on the Prinz Heinrich. So I’ll be putting in side doors and making some tweaks to the hangar to accommodate, because with sloped LCDs being the one exception, I refuse to use any more mods on this ship than necessary.
Fleeing Victory
Part 2 is coming along, but I’m still putting together certain scenes relating to the one I’m on–the usual. It should be done Sunday, but that largely depends on when and how I wake up. Right now a couple of other things are higher priorities for me, including deciding between a Remnants story or an Artorius story.
Since Fleeing Victory is more of a long term experiment, the pace could pick up dramatically or the whole thing could go quiet depending on what else is going on. Either way trust in these words when you see them:
“To be continued”
Phoenix
As for me, it’s tougher now. I haven’t had much in the way of good and consistent sleep for pretty much the entirety of March. Too many things were lined up to push and pull me in every direction at once. Not to mention I was making a bunch of little changes in the way I do things, especially on P.R.
So I’m still adjusting, and while I don’t expect April to be much better than March was, it’s a phase I’ve got to get through.
This Arpeggio of Blue Steel event idea is evolving into more of a fun project now, so I’m going to need more than that initial few days I said to make it. It should be worth the effort though; I’m going to make this look as ‘official’ as I can get away with for posterity. For that I’ll need a lot more reference pics and the original ARP articles from Wargaming’s website.
I just wanted to mention that since this could take one or two more weeks on top of the other things I’m working on.
