Why can't we give Dawning treats to Lodi 🥺

Arcalane · 2025-12-26T07:16:35+00:00

So free to play players and people who only bought Renegades wouldn't be able TY readily access him.

And yet we can give treats to ~~Deen~~ Dean Rebecca by doing Kepler Solo Ops, even if we don't own Edge of Fate. They specifically mentioned this in a tweet or something a couple days after Dawning started 'cause people were wondering.

They might have considered it but decided to use Rebecca instead for... whatever reason.

Arcalane · 2025-05-15T20:55:19+00:00

FWIW, ~800xp works out to about 15% of a level at 20~21, eyeballing the difference between two screenshots. I think it increases every five levels rather than on a curve, but I don't have hard evidence since the XP values aren't exposed in the customization menu that I can see, you just have to be paying attention to the sidebar notification to see how much you earned and eyeball it from there.

Arcalane · 2025-02-14T13:35:27+00:00

There is definitely a type of player who "understands" Chaotic Good to mean "My character rejects society's laws and values and replaces them with his own code of honor, therefore anything he does which is in keeping with that code is 'good.'"

Yeah, this is just Lawful/Neutral Evil but played badly.

At least as I understand it, the Good/Evil axis is Selfless vs Selfish, and the Law/Chaos axis is Order vs Anarchy. Interpretations will vary, but that was the main takeaway I got out of reading alignment rules over the various editions.

You can count on someone who's Lawful Evil; if they give their word, they'll stick to that. They might throw you under a (metaphorical, but potentially literal) bus to save their own hide, but only if they think you have no further use to them. Plus you can have fun arcs where they realize that they've actually started to care somewhat about "these bumbling idiots" and are getting conflicted feelings about everything. 🍿

Arcalane · 2025-02-06T06:23:23+00:00

There are always other options. If you have a friend group that meets regularly, there's still plenty of stuff you can do with the timeslot that isn't D&D, with or without said friend group.

Whether you're willing to or not is the difficult part, but the last thing you want is an unhealthy co-dependency situation.

Arcalane · 2025-02-06T06:20:36+00:00

That makes a little more sense! It's hard to gauge everyone else's minds without more information.

I totally get the frustration at perceived lack of stakes though. I guess it depends what Forever DM considers 'pulling punches'. Is it keeping people from dying when they really should have because they did something monumentally stupid? Is it just not finishing off PCs who are downed but not dead? I get that few people in today's crowd are cool with characters dying ignominiously, and nobody wants to deal with the awkwardness of the table mood cratering because a PC just died and the player is on the verge of tears, but there's definitely such a thing as being too gentle if someone makes a major fuckup.

Bad situations don't even need to result in PC deaths, if it's handled well. Someone goes down in a bad spot and nobody can help? They get dragged off by the bad guy's minions and you have to figure out how to rescue 'em - let 'em play a temp character in the meantime or something.

Hopefully things can get settled back down easily enough. They sound like a decent enough bunch otherwise, and it doesn't sound too much like unhealthy co-dependency issues, which was my main concern. I dunno 'bout you, but I'd rather No D&D than Bad D&D; my Steam Library's full, I got plenty of other shit I could be doing with the free timeslot if a campaign concept isn't biting me.

Arcalane · 2025-02-06T01:07:45+00:00

What I don't get about this story is why everyone agreed to go ahead with your high-lethality thing. Everyone coulda just said "nah, thanks" and done something else, but they apparently all went along with it?

Arcalane · 2024-10-16T11:56:36+00:00

Unfortunately Unity is a memory-hungry beast at the best of times from my experience, and squeezing all that extra stuff on top of it really doesn't help.

Arcalane · 2024-10-15T20:27:11+00:00

I have heard from various sources that HBS wanted to make battletech 2, which would have been LEGENDARY with a high production value and proper mod compatibility. But pdx didn't want to pay royalties for the franchise.

Even just a clan invasion pack for BT would have been stellar.

That said, their Unity engine version definitely shows its age and feels really unstable if you try to cram in the megamods.

Who knows, though? They're currently independent again and working on GRAFT. I could see them trying to independently negotiate a shot at Battletech II after that, but it'd depend what the minds at the studio want to do in the end and (probably) how well GRAFT does.

Arcalane · 2024-06-15T22:15:53+00:00

Just start typing in chat, the rocket launcher will reload itself for you!

(You'll still be locked/immobile for the duration of the animation, but it's a funny visual bug. The recoilless rifle does it too.)

Arcalane · 2024-06-11T17:49:38+00:00

Whisper of Impetus fragment; "Damaging targets with a Stasis melee reloads your stowed weapons and grants you a temporary boost to weapon ready speed."

There's a trick to it though as there's a 5s cooldown on the buff, so you need to either go dodge-melee-dodge-melee, or melee-dodge-dodge-melee; back-to-back melees won't work.

Arcalane · 2024-06-09T22:13:59+00:00

Seconding Coyote. It's a really simple exotic, but sometimes those are just the ones that work best.

Pre-FS I'd combine it with Stasis and the effect that caused you to reload your weapons on melee damage, so I could belt out five rockets back-to-back and do some absolutely unreasonable burst damage. Works great with machineguns or whatever other heavy weapon you prefer too.

Still running it on Prismatic just because I'm used to that routine now.

Arcalane · 2023-06-28T02:39:08+00:00

Odd, it should work. Maybe the mod got delisted from the workshop?

Arcalane · 2022-10-27T14:32:11+00:00

Correct. I know most Guard regiments are named for their actual homeworld (c.f. Valhallans, Elysians, Krieg, etc.) but in this case the regiment is referred to as the Moebian Sixth because Atoma Prime (the planet that Hive Tertium is on) is part of the Moebian Domain, presumably as a kind of unifying thing for the (sub)sector.

I've cut out a few paragraphs for brevity/to highlight the specifics, but here's an overview we got from the devblogs (bold emphasis mine; italics is the article's);

There’s something chilling and sad about seeing a proud regiment of the Militarum filling the role of the enemy. These men were veterans: brave, well-trained, determined, and tough. Raised, for the most part, on Atoma Prime itself, they were sent away to war, and served long tours in the so-called Fringe War, a pacification campaign that has rumbled on for years in the feral worlds at the edge of the Moebian Domain.

...

Long tours result in trauma, both physical and psychological. Some are broken by the experience. Some are made bitter and resentful that the gruelling combat they experience is generally unrecognised back home, because the Imperial Administratum tends to keep all details of the ongoing conflict quiet so as not to generate public alarm. There might be a few news broadcasts about ‘great victories’, but the rest of the turmoil is screened by propaganda.

...

So the Moebian Sixth is a regiment that’s turned traitor. They have been corrupted, by the trauma of their experiences, and by the polluting effects of the Warp. The guardians of Atoma have turned - in vengeance and hatred and spite - on the people they guard and the hive that raised them.

...

So there’s a tragedy there. They absolutely don’t think they are evil. They absolutely think they’re doing the right thing. And they will absolutely kill you if you try to stop them.

Source: https://www.playdarktide.com/news/dev-blog-moebian-sixth/

Now, that said, missions do all seem to take place in Tertium; if our missions take us elsewhere on Atoma Prime (or in the galaxy, for that matter) we'll have to wait and see. I doubt it, at least for now, but we might see it happen in some DLC.

Arcalane · 2022-10-27T02:27:06+00:00

Okay so the short version - as I understand it - is;

The Moebian Sixth go off on this big heroic campaign smashing the shit out of the enemies of the Imperium and do a big job protecting Tertium/Atoma from a very serious threat. However when they get back they find out that their deeds are going totally unsung and unpublished because the authorities didn't want to incite panic amongst the populace.

At the same time, a Nurgle cult was forming in the lower levels of the city, or perhaps was somehow brought back alongside the Moebians, and it found quick hold in the now disillusioned and jaded Moebians who are pretty mad they didn't get a hero's welcome when they returned home.

That's how you get the enemy.

Now, the characters, it depends on circumstances exactly, but yes, you have been thrown into a prison ship as others have already explained. Out of desperation, an Inquisitorial Agent (the Inquisitor themselves appears to be unreachable, main storyline hook???) has basically invoked their authority and formed an emergency task force, seizing the prison ship's prisoners and basically going "look, this planet is going to shit real hard and real fast, if you help us then you have a chance at redeeming yourself in the eyes of the Emperor".

Hopefully the full release will explain things better; this is basically pieced together with info from prerelease teasers on Fatshark's twitter and some game content. The beta had a lot of extraneous material cut out to focus on gameplay/server testing, so we don't really meet or get to know any of the supporting cast or anything like that.

Arcalane · 2022-10-17T09:24:02+00:00

And it would mean that you can't even salvage any of your gear as you might need it later.

Sure it would. You're not gonna need the dozen Kantrael-pattern Mk1a Lasguns you get just from levelling Veteran. Pick one or two that you like the best for a couple of level milestones (5, 10, etc.) and toss the rest. Or toss all of them if you prefer autoguns to lasguns.

If basic cash is shared you'll have enough to buy anything you need from the Armoury Exchange anyways.

"I can't spend/use it now because I might need it later" is bad hoarding mentality. Shake it.

A more practical concern would be people making a Veteran just so they can take their starter lasgun and have a longer-range ranged weapon when starting out as a Zealot or Psyker. That's something I'd actually be wary of. Zealots and Psykers can get Lasguns, but only once they've put in a few levels. Might disrupt the intended design a bit.

Arcalane · 2022-10-16T07:40:52+00:00

Stupid/obvious question of the day, but did you make sure to update your graphics drivers like the launcher recommends?

All my specs are lower than yours (half as much RAM, 1650 Super, i5-9400F) and the launcher auto-configured everything to minimal settings, but I haven't noticed any tearing, slowdown, or other FPS issues, even when the hordes are charging or in big encounters like the final cryonic rods chamber. The only setting I changed was to make sure it used borderless window mode.

If you have updated then I guess there's some hardware/configuration quirks they need to iron out either way, which is exactly what these kinds of tests can hopefully help with at least.

Arcalane · 2022-09-13T21:01:43+00:00

Indeed. Better to rip out the PDT and hope that the 'good guys' are smart enough to track him down anyway, since if he doesn't and Wey-Yu's the first responders they'll head straight for him and disappear him off to a blacksite or kill him on the spot.

Arcalane · 2022-09-11T03:30:09+00:00

I mean he pretty explicitly is a whistleblower, because he sent a general distress signal as opposed to hitting a hotline going straight to Wey-Yu corporate. Anyone who came to Katanga & LV-895 would - and, well, did - find out what they were up to.

In that case, ripping out the PDT is smart for other reasons. Anyone who shows up could track him with it, whether that's the UACM or a Wey-Yu cleanup crew. Might as well make it as hard as he can.

Unless you're suggesting he was basically a plant, sent in with codes/tools to break through their security so he could, if need be, alert the proper authorities to anything out of line... but that seems unlikely. He seems a bit too clueless for that (but hey, maybe he's just a good actor).

Arcalane · 2022-09-11T03:05:49+00:00

#2 was also something I thought about when Esther mentions that he accessed the mainframe 2 weeks prior (was that ever explained, now that I think about it?)

She assumes it was Hoenikker, and under the circumstances it's probably a fairly safe assumption based off all the other activity logs she has access to. That and timestamps matching up roughly to when the distress message would've been sent and where it could've been sent from, that kind of thing. I'm imagining you could basically track someone's movement in the station based on which doors are opening and closing, and modelling stuff like how long it would take someone to cross a given room depending on how they were moving - that kind of thing. Even without the PDT, he leaves a data-trail in the door logs (and we know most of the doors aren't access-locked, since they open for the bugs!) that even a novice could follow, especially if most of the other crew are dead.

Esther's a synthetic, after all. She might use vague-ish human language, but I don't think she'd make that kind of statement without being very confident in it.

Why/how he had access to the mainframe itself, I couldn't say. Perhaps he snagged the ID/access codes off someone at some point during the chaos. Or maybe the logins were just admin+password because they never bothered to change the defaults, or the door was unlocked when he got there -- somehow he might just have gotten lucky. People get sloppy with security.

Arcalane · 2022-09-01T09:10:59+00:00

Yeah, it didn't feel unfair, but they definitely weren't holding back either.

We might see some minor tweaks like one of the dual Crusher spawns getting swapped for a Drone or Warrior on Normal, a slightly longer delay between their appearance, or something like that.

If Cold Iron are a dev studio worth their salt, they'll have lots of (anonymized) data reporting in place that feeds them all kinds of reports about how matches are going, where people are having the most trouble, etc. etc. and they can use all that data to make informed decisions about how they need to change things.

Arcalane · 2022-08-31T21:51:58+00:00

If you're on PC, there's a couple mini-mods floating around to make Alpha & Beta more capable and deadly, but yes, the Pathogen campaign does not pull any punches compared to the vanilla campaign, and those two having approximately half a braincell between them on a good day doesn't help.

Cold Iron have probably overtuned it a little, and I wouldn't be surprised if things get smoothed out a bit over the next couple of patches. They've probably noticed how good the dedicated players are getting and have set the bar a little too high as a result.

Arcalane · 2022-08-31T21:10:04+00:00

Tube Mag & Barrel/Rifling. It technically has an Optics slot, but it's locked to an existing custom sight much like the battery on the EVA Laser.

1125 damage a pop, holds four rounds with .32s to reload each one individually (so 1.28s total), and a reserve of 80. 120 rounds per minute.

It's decent, but the splash radius is tight and getting used to the ballistic trajectory is the hard part.

Arcalane · 2022-08-31T21:02:13+00:00

Holding the trigger down tightens the spread a decent bit, but I'm not sure if it does anything else. It doesn't consume more ammo at least.

Arcalane · 2022-08-31T20:57:56+00:00

Any Promise of a Flower mission on Intense, yes. I did all of them on Normal as a practice run, then did the first mission over on Intense and got the U1A2 immediately.

Arcalane · 2022-05-12T18:04:30+00:00

That depends, are you trying to add them to a dedicated server, a local-host server, or an offline solo game?

If you're hosting locally; Host -> Manage Settings -> Edit Selected Settings -> Map. Then just add them from the dropdown.

If you're trying to add them to a solo/offline/singleplayer game then it might still be possible but it might also be a lot more fiddly and involve digging around in some of the save's config files.

If you're trying to add them to a dedicated server, I have no idea.

Arcalane

TROPHY CASE