After a few weeks of general purpose low-grade villainy, () and almost universal obsession with cake...(), our little gang of Villains, so recently thwarted in our attempts to usher in an age of demon-fueled apocalypse, have at last got a new gig! This comes in the form of the second of five Strike Force chained story missions, The Pirates of the Sky. A tricky thing to sort out, as it isn't just a case of strolling up to the usual NPC and going 'HAI! I CAN HAZ LOLCATACLYSM?', as you do.
No, for this one, you need a Mission Computer, or Oracle. And to have those, you need a Supergroup Base, which needs a Control Room, with a Mainframe or Mystic Axis. All of this of course, requires a Supergroup, so I'm not quite sure what you're meant to do if you're a pathologically sullen loner, as I usually am in these games - skip this one entirely I guess.
The base is free, and requires only that you have an SG at all, but the various extra rooms and items that go in it, cost Prestige, a kind of secondary currency earned by members of an SG while in 'Supergroup Mode', at the cost of potential 'Infamy' earnings - the personal currency used for the Black Market. We'd had a bit of a head start, in the form of a free bonus payout of Prestige given to the SG whenever we sign on new members, so a variety of alts ended up in the group, although I'd like to think this was mostly just us all wanting to try out different archetypes, rather than an outright exploitation of the sign-on bonuses. A large portion of the required prestige was actually earned properly though. I forget the exact total, but it's somewhere around 200,000 Prestige needed to get the basics up and running, to the level where the second Strike Force becomes available, aimed at four or more players, level 20-25.
To get the Mission Computer or Oracle (Two items, one 'Tech' style and one 'Arcane' style which both do the same thing), you then have to build it, using Base Salvage, and a Forge workshop item, (or it's Tech equivalent). I'd set up a communal storage rack for this salvage, so everyone could contribute, but to be honest, the necessary junk is so cheap and plentiful on the Black Market that its no real hardship just to go shopping for it all if you want to get on with it all in a hurry.
A novel system, if a bit grindey, which allows everyone to contribute toward the end goal, and it even makes the otherwise largely cosmetic Secret Base Playset Guildhall relevant to gameplay somewhat. There are all sorts of other bits and pieces for the base, although many of them are PvP Raid specific, an aspect of the game which isn't of huge interest to me, and is apparently broken anyway.
Anyway, we finally managed to build, place, power and control an Oracle, the Arcane variant of the required item, which looks a lot like a large cauldron of soup - curried broccoli or pea & ham, I'd say, although I suspect drinking out of it would be both heretical, and fatal. This object now acts as a dialogue driven 'NPC' of sorts, with two options. First is the now-defunct opportunity to visit the Cathedral of Pain and steal an Item of Power, the reason Hero Supergroups would want to visit your base and destroy it, and you; no thanks! Seems this place was broken, and contains an exploit that functioned as some kind of 1-50 Insta-Level Button. Oops!
The second is a message from the Silver Mantis, an extremely psychopathic bint who is the right-hand woman of the Black Scorpion, an Arachnos Bigwig of Great Prominence. She has work for us that will greatly improve our position in the incestuous and treacherous society of the Rogue Isles, and the murderous Arachnos Empire itself.
Also in the Rogue Isles, there is a lesser organisation known as the Sky Raiders. A kind of paramilitary mercenary outfit, noted for the extensive use of their characteristic jetpacks and 'sky-skiff' light fighter craft. These flyboys, like many other gangs, factions, cabals and corps, are permitted by Arachnos to go about their business on the Isles, as long as they don't get too big for their boots, or present any kind of real threat to Lord Recluse's power.
Lately however, the Sky Raiders have been getting more daring and organised, and have overstepped the mark, with a planned series of audacious thefts, which if successful, would make them more than a minor annoyance to Arachnos, and upset the evil status quo of the Isles. The Silver Mantis, using her bowl of mystic gazpacho, has recruited us to put the Sky Raiders back in their place. Our newly formed punishment squad was designated 'Strike Force Scalpel', and off we went! This soup will self-destruct in five seconds...
The first act of brutality...er... 'prevenge'? involves foiling their own raid on the Tsoo, a very oriental inspired group of martial artists, samurai, mystic sorcerers and spiritual ancestors. Their big Super Villain 'thing' is magical tattoos which give the inscribed all manner of abilities more commonly associated with life-changing lab accidents involving Baryon Radiation, Mutated Meercat Bites and the like. The ink makes them a Force for Awesome, and the Sky Raiders, normally a very technological bunch, are desperate enough to dabble in this magical source of power.
Our job is to hit the same Tsoo warehouse base that the Sky Raiders are, at the same time, and kick an indiscriminate amount of backside, destroying both sides of the conflict, and while we're at it, Silver Mantis would quite like us to kidnap a couple of the Tsoo Tattoo Artists as well, for study, examination, and most likely, dissection.
A fairly standard kind of mission layout - the 'Warehouse' tileset, decorated with a few oriental knickknacks. A quite difficult mission however, with a great many souped-up versions of the factions involved; Sky Raiders that had a nasty habit of teleporting about the place with a great deal more accuracy than I can, Sky Raider Engineers that kept deploying AoE Forcefield generators, making the smackdowns a lot more time consuming, and some Sky Raider officers who were simply very tough indeed.
The Tsoo were the real problem in this mission though; the Sorcerers teleport and do all sorts of crazy AoE storm stuff, and almost all of their rank and file seemed to be capable of stuns, temporarily holding us in place, and most crucially for myself and the Brute Dude, turning our large number of very necessary 'toggle' defence powers off, making us easy targets, and in my case, removing my crucial invisibility. I'm far too fragile for head-on fist fights! A particularly troublesome over-aggro near the end even caused a team wipe at one point.
An extra, ahem, "challenge", came in the form of our Kinetics/Ice Dude and their new fun power, 'Speed Boost'. More on Kinetics, and what glee it is here, but from the 'Customer' perspective, frankly, it's a bugger, and I swear our Kinetics Dude knows this! It is indeed a great buff, offering faster power recharge and improved endurance regen - both immensely useful for a Stalker Dude like myself. It also comes with a suitable balancing "downside" - it massively increases your foot-speed. Runbuffs are helpful, to a point, and then simple things like Walking Through Doorways, Using Stairs and similar all become Quite Difficult. Quite lucky my invisibility prevented my out of control skidding about the place form aggroing every group I tried to walk near! Add to that the fact that our Brute Dude has a rolling 'rage' bar powering their damage, positively encouraging rampaging, and all the missions last night were extremely hectic affairs, conducted mostly on the seat of our pants, the edge of reason, boundaries of common sense, and the far side of, er, knowing what the hell was going on, most of the time!
We triumphed though, just about, and it was on to the next job. The Sky Raiders second heist was against The Lost, a band of sewer-dwelling Super-Homeless, with an understandably bad attitude. City of... is a dangerous place - even the bums have super powers! They're running some kind of hospital where they patch up their troops with bizarre and probably quite unregulated Alien Medicines. The Sky Raiders are out to steal those, so we're out to stop them, and steal the stuff for our evil Mantis friend, thus royally screwing all parties concerned. Evil; It's What's For Dinner!
The Lost aren't so bad as an enemy really, mostly consisting of Mutant Dude With A Gun, and Mutant Dude With A Sharp Thing, although you do have to watch out for the Mutant Dude With Mind Powers, who can paralyze you if left alive too long. Making those 'Primary' tends to stop that foolishness before it begins though, and despite the same difficulties with advanced Sky Raider types, we pulled off the theft quite satisfactorily.
Number three was a visit to the trashes offices of Freakshow, another super-powered gang of thugs. Their powers come from extensive and spikey cybernetical doohickeys, massive amounts of really quite dubious narcotics, and the music of the mid-seventies Punk Era. The Sky Raiders are out to plunder as much of this as possible, so we've to, well, trash everyone really, and never mind the b*ll*cks! Apparently there are also a number of Sonic Bombs on the premises, which are quite dangerous, to the point that even Arachnos doesn't allow the lesser gangs to have them, so Mantis is sending us in there (huh?), to destroy them (what?!) while were at it.
Usual kind of thing to start; advanced Sky Raider troops to deal with, along with the Freakshow Dudes, whose Annoying Superpower is the ability to self heal, and the ability raise fallen comrades from the dead! Grr! Its like pushing down bubbles under wallpaper, honestly! I'm not quite sure what happened next however, but we'd found the first sonic bomb, and neutralised it by the delicate expedient of pummeling it, shooting it with bolts of darkness, and raining shards of ice on it, until it stopped humming, (which is a good sign, right?), and then all hell broke lose.
City of ... makes generous use of the Ambush - the scripted sudden arrival of extra thugs after carrying out key points of a mission - stealing the item, rescuing the hostage, and so on. Destroying the bomb set one of these of, but my god... they just... kept... coming... Literally dozens of Freakshow Dudes, in twos and threes, in an almost continual stream of carnage. We just about kept on top of it, with only a few KOs and no team wipes, and by the time things had calmed down a bit, and we could take in our surroundings, we'd somehow beaten our way back through the entire map, to the entrance again! Huh! Tricky stuff, but exactly what CoX is all about - not carefully balanced encounters versus one monster of equal or slightly less power than yourself, but dozens of disposable goons falling beneath your super powers!
Next is a Council base. The Council are a very big organisation, a kind of paramilitary army of evil, shock troops, uniforms, all that. They and Arachnos Do Not Get On however, and the Sky Raiders, trying subtlety this time, are trying to negotiate the purchase of some of the Council's Vampire Machines. The Council have invented machinery that turns people in the vampires, in defiance of thousands of years of collected vampire folklore which all broadly agrees that it doesn't quite work like that. Don't look at me...I just work here!
Anyway, this turned out to be a quite complex map, lots of jumping down holes, fixed gun emplacements, and very large multilevel rooms to get lots in, and gnarled up in the walkways thanks to the Speed Boost! Also they had Vampires! Nothing especially awkward in the enemy powers side though, and eventually we found and destroy all the mechanical coffin machines, and forcibly broke up the negotiations. Huzzah!
Then is was on to the Crey Labs. The Crey Corporation is a biotech giant of the more dubious sort, but the Mantis doesn't really know what they're up to, so in addition to the standard orders , (kill everyone, steal anything not nailed down, destroy everything else), she wants us to find out what the deal is. The Sky Raiders are after something in there, so it must be good.
More Sky Raider, er, Raiders on the way in, and then very quickly, we found out what it is that Crey do. In addition to the usual rent-a-cop security guard dudes, and the less usual men-in-black style enforcer dudes, we were soon being attacked by a variety of evil super-hero clones; Fire Tanker Clone, Radiation Defender Clone, etc. Turns out that during a recent war against the alien Ritki, Crey agent were busy looting the battlefield of dead superhero corpses, and Doing Science on them! Some careful Teleport-Pulling needed in the tight and multi-leveled confines of the high-tech Crey base, but one of the less tricky missions in the story overall, and once more, the Sky Raiders were foiled, and everyone bar us got the pummeling they so clearly deserved! Or didn't. Whatever. That's one of the nicer perks of Evil; the lack of difficult moral choices!
Having now thwarted the Sky Raiders at every turn in their quest for power and resources, the Silver Mantis now wants us to end this game of cat and mouse. Our next, and final, mission is to infiltrate the Sky Raiders' base of operations, locate Colonel Duray, the brains of the outfit, and defeat him, pausing only to destroy the base on our way out, thus demonstrating what happens to those who cross Arachnos. The Silver Mantis is looking forward to it, but then again, she is an unbalanced sadist and dangerous psychopath. I'm quite looking forward to it too!
Can the Sky Raiders avert the wrath of Arachnos? Are their defences up to the job of repelling Strike Force Scalpel? Will I manage to get the hang of movement under the influence of Speed Boost? Will our mission-giver double-cross us at the last minute...AGAIN? Will there be more Dudes? Tune in next week to find out!