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THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

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Information, especially locations, is power. Let us hope Arachne remembers this fact for the future.

...Because from the number of sims she ran you'd have thought she would have known that to begin with.
 
[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[X] ISHTAR//WRATH. Till the end she screams defiant, the gouges in her flesh mere adornments of her wrath.
Too bad we're fighting him. Let's try and make up by giving him the coordinates of any six-digited starships.
 
I assume the friendly unit choice can include the HYDRA chassis itself? I do wonder if the ISHTAR//BLOOD hit point restoration lasts beyond the end of combat? If the Hydra finishes off the opponent, and are at full hit points because of that, does that mean repairs are unnecessary?

[x] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[x] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.
 
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Zaealix said:
Dagnamit if I had realized Arachne had gone herself I'd have voted and argued for caution. Baaah!
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I disagree, this justifies Courage. Imagine if this happened while we still had to deal with an entire Swarm of AXIOM Drones, it'd be a disaster. Well, even more of a disaster.

[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.

Regen is good.
 
A summary of my thought process as I read this: ISHTAR-SENPAI! OH FUCK! ISHTAR-SENPAAAI!!!

In conclusion: we are all Arachne and her baby crush on the first person she knew existed.

This seems the most vital to avoiding further damage...

[x] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.

As for the other vote... Not sure what's best, so I'll leave it blank for now. I do think either Storm or Blood would be the more immediately useful right now, though.

Edit:

[X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.
 
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[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.

[x] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.
 
The perk really depends on if we can select the Hydra-Ishtar Chassis as the friendly unit.

Wrath at least let's us choose a drone swarm to charge in as a suicidal berserker. I think Blood or Storm work best on Arachne.

Edit; with the clarification, I'm changing my vote a little.

[x] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[x] ISHTAR//STORM. Weep and wail but there will be no safety for those who stand against the storm.
 
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[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[X] ISHTAR//STORM. Weep and wail but there will be no safety for those who stand against the storm.

Pretty sure this is a bullet hell run now, I doubt we have the capabilities to take another hit even if we were at full health.

Go full offense.
 
[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.

This one is too important to lose. Even if we couldn't hurt DH with it...

she can.

[X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.

At your battle-cry, my lady, the foreign lands bow low. When humanity comes before you in awed silence at the terrifying radiance and tempest, you grasp the most terrible of all the divine powers. Because of you, the threshold of tears is opened, and people walk along the path of the house of great lamentations. In the van of battle, all is struck down before you. With your strength, my lady, teeth can crush flint. You charge forward like a charging storm. You roar with the roaring storm, you continually thunder with Ickur. You spread exhaustion with the stormwinds, while your own feet remain tireless. With the lamenting balaj drum a lament is struck up.

—the Exaltation of Inanna, 20-33

Hail to the Queen, baby.

Let's rock.
 
Zaealix said:
[X]Cornuthaum
Dagnamit if I had realized Arachne had gone herself I'd have voted and argued for caution. Baaah!
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No plan votes!

CornyBones said:
:mad: well that was a disaster.
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Not really that bad all things considered! Could have been worse :p

Hunter20t1 said:
I assume the friendly unit choice can include the HYDRA chassis itself? I do wonder if the ISHTAR//BLOOD hit point restoration lasts beyond the end of combat? If the Hydra finishes off the opponent, and are at full hit points because of that, does that mean repairs are unnecessary?

[x] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[x] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.
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1. Yes, it includes the HYDRA chassis.
2. The hit point restoration will only give you a -1 if you are still at 5 hitpoints when the battle ends. Otherwise whatever hitpoints you have at the end remains - so don't worry about being mission-killed automatically if ISHTAR's effect wears off and you have 2 HP.

DaLintyGuy said:
Information, especially locations, is power. Let us hope Arachne remembers this fact for the future.

...Because from the number of sims she ran you'd have thought she would have known that to begin with.
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Unfortunately simulations, especially the ones she had, didn't really prepare for this. Even if she had started to wind up her transit drive it probably would not have mattered because voters chose not to prioritize sensor arrays and her sensors had been damaged during the fighting. That is not to blame people; I think the choices made were all very good. But it is a consequence that there was a choice to jump into battle without sensor knowledge of the surrounding hexes.

Jensaarai said:
The perk really depends on if we can select the Hydra-Ishtar Chassis as the friendly unit.

Wrath at least let's us choose a drone swarm to charge in as a suicidal berserker. I think Blood or Storm work best on Arachne.

[x] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[x] ISHTAR//WRATH. Till the end she screams defiant, the gouges in her flesh mere adornments of her wrath.
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It only works on Arachne. It would be a giant waste on a drone swarm as it's an incredibly powerful advantage.

And do not sleep on Wrath. It allows you to gain +1 to every single stat per point of damage sustained. That is up to +3 to every single stat at 2 health. That said, the others are obviously quite powerful too. A given element has 4 hitpoints of damage, and Don Hidalgo is fully healed, so you can drain up to 3 hitpoints from him even before mission-kill with BLOOD, and STORM can win the encounter if you can survive long enough to build it up.

Sivantic said:
Pretty sure this is a bullet hell run now, I doubt we have the capabilities to take another hit even if we were at full health.

Go full offense.
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To an extent, absolutely. You started with 4 hitpoints. If you choose the option to not lose one, you'll have 3. If you don't, you'll have 2. If you go down to 1 hitpoint you're mission-killed.
 
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[X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
[X] ISHTAR//STORM. Weep and wail but there will be no safety for those who stand against the storm.
 
CornyBones said:
I guess I find it discouraging to take 90% of the combat upgrades, pick the most unpredictable strategy, and still get spine sniped on babies first combat mission.

:/
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I think that's the wrong way of looking at a setting like Tapestry. High risk high reward is the only way to get the big bucks. Repairs will be relatively simple to do if you survive. You completely wiped out the AXIOM drones because you had some good strategic choices.

You already got a reward; you picked all the right options to trigger ISHTAR's perk, which is a very powerful combat multiplier, especially early on. If you can win or force Hidalgo away (depending on how well you do there) you will get some other very nice rewards. You should be prepared to take on a lot of damage a lot of the time because it can be recovered more easily than in other settings.
 
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Paracausal Shrouds
  • Informational
    • Cetashwayo said:
    Communications cuts off. On the edge of your sensors, a voidcruiser materializes from nothing, its paracausal shroud lifting. It is an angular killer of a vessel, an immense golden dart twelve kilometers long that bristles with disguised weaponry, emerging from antique portholes and camoflauged weapon decks. It is a deliberate anachronism built and altered to specifications that defy any Imperial schema.
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    So the most infallible form of stealth is not existing in the first place to be detected, and paracausal shrouds help with that. A voidcruiser with a paracausal shroud is capable of effectively exiling itself from the universe into an alternate spacetime, only interacting in the weakest possible fashion with the universe at large. In that dimensional bubble, timeflow manipulation is trivial enough that they can also benefit from speed acceleration. As a result, they're nearly impossible to detect - and Arachne, with her sensors damaged, had no chance at it. Unlike lesser forms of stealth technology, they have to actually drop their stealth to make use of most of their sensors or any of their weapons, but they can achieve pretty vicious ambushes.

    The shroud-weaver systems are size-constrained to a fairly significant degree, and take up a significant amount of a voidcruiser's resources to run. They're large enough that most drones can't mount them, but they're harder and harder to implement the larger the shrouded object is. And there are significant disadvantages to the paracausal shroud that must be worked around - the system has only a limited stable endurance before requiring reformatting and reconfiguration, and an unstable paracausal shroud can cause undesirable systems behavior, such as catastrophically triggering the universe's chronology protection conditions and erasing yourself retroactively from existence. The sheer amount of resources needed to maintain the shroud-weaver require significant defensive sacrifices, and its complexity greatly reduces the voidcruiser's ability to self-repair when it is damaged.

    Because of how central a paracausal shroud is to a voidcruiser, and the significant design compromises needed to fit one, voidcruisers with paracausal shrouds are generally built around the style of combat they encourage - sudden, vicious alpha strikes. Weapons systems on a paracausal shroud voidcruiser are likely to be long-cycle, high-burst-output systems, with the intention of putting out devastating firepower and then immediately returning to stealth, but that results in a significant sacrifice in sustained firepower.

    Something as large as Don Hidalgo shouldn't normally mount one - the existence of the shroud suggests that his chassis is a very high-end prototype design.
     
  • Informational
    • [X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.

    This is on behalf of @Magery, who saw "ISHTAR... thirsts..." in the same line and was sad that they couldn't vote for the option twice

    But this sort of self-sustaining ability is very useful if we're planning on long space-road trips. (We are probably planning on long space-road trips). It's not as offensively minded as the others, but sometimes the best offense is a good defense.

    And in this specific combat situation, the ability to outlast the enemy is a huge strategic advantage. Hidalgo's endurance-limited, Ishtar isn't.
     
    [X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
    [X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.

    Raw matter is cheap.
     
    [X] You did not sustain critical damage to your infowarfare suite.
    [X] ISHTAR//BLOOD. There is no limit to the hunger that she feels, the lust for blood she thirsts for.

    Arachne is going to need healing on the road. Also, enemies are now the health kits, ala Doom.
     
    All things considered, I don't think this actually that bad of a situation. I think it is more likely to show off what Ishtar can do with a HYDRA chassis when the chips are down.

    As noted, Don Hidalgo has no idea about Ishtar or her capabilities. As it is, he's using surprise and as many advantages as he can get (Axiom drones, support fire from outside of the hex, and a surprise attack from stealth). Now, perhaps Don is simply super cautious, or perhaps Don didn't think he could take Arachne solo in a fair fight. That was Arachne, a newly reborn AI with no combat experience, serious social issues, but simply controlling a WYRM-class Weaver//Builder chassis. The Ishtar perks strike me as very powerful. Not to mention Ishtar's combat skills haven't even shown themselves. She was merely advising Arachne.

    The quest did in fact choose a bunch of combat focused options. We haven't even begun to see what they really can do yet.

    So I think the question everyone should ask themselves is: Is Ishtar trapped there with Don Hidalgo, or is Don Hidalgo trapped there with Ishtar?
     
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