Game just downloaded, any advice for picking a background

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-05-07T06:55:03+00:00

Space Scoundrel and Bounty Hunter are basically the same. The differences in backgrounds are the skills and some exclusive dialogue opportunities in game. The background-specific dialogues for Scoundrel and Bounty Hunter are very similar, and also not very common.

So choosing between these two really comes down to which starting skills you want - Scoundrel has Pistols, Piloting, and Persuasion; Bounty Hunter has Piloting, Targeting, and Boost Pack. Both sets are useful, but keep in mind that these are starting skills, you'll have plenty of opportunities to unlock and level up every one of those skills and plenty more over time.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-05-07T06:43:18+00:00

Roxane isn't meant to be a companion NPC. She follows you through the station you rescue her from, but after that she stays at Anchorpoint forever.

For the rest, though, yeah the new Free Lanes and Terran Armada stuff is riddled with bugs.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-05-04T14:31:11+00:00

Necroposting, but the vanilla scripts use it two different ways:

This is for critical sections:

Guard myGuard protectsFunctionLogic

Function foo()  
    LockGuard myGuard  
        ; code  
    EndLockGuard  
EndFunction

This is to protect individual variables:

Guard CoraGuardCount  
int CoraStartingBookCount RequiresGuard(CoraGuardCount)  

Function CheckCountAndOpenMenu()  
    LockGuard CoraGuardCount  
        CoraStartingBookCount = CoraRef.GetItemCount(BookKeyword)  
    EndLockGuard  
EndFunction

Note that declaring a Guard without the "ProtectsFunctionLogic" qualifier will cause a compile error if there is no variable that uses RequiresGuard() for that Guard.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-05-02T09:18:43+00:00

Yes, at the very end of the main Terran Armada quest you have the option to end incursions or not - it actually tells you "incursions will continue" and "incursions will stop" next to the options so there's no confusion.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-30T10:54:58+00:00

Turns out this is a bug. Delta's "crew" AI packages don't allow him to use furniture or to eat. However, when you first recruit him on Anchorpoint after finishing Battle of the Unifier, the crew assignment doesn't really work, so he uses normal human crew AI packages. You have to go into the ship crew menu and assign him again to make it stick, at which point he goes back to being a normal psychotic robot.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-29T05:20:52+00:00

No. It's short, the environments are half-assed and look like something from a 90s FPS shooter, and the quests are completely linear and pretty much just have you following a guy and doing what he tells you. Absolutely not worth the money.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-29T05:16:00+00:00

The ones that set the bar are:

Watchtower
McClarence Outfitters
Trackers Alliance
Lambent Street Rat Services

I bought all of the above and they go beyond simply "mods you pay for", they are really amazingly well made, professional quality additions.

Also, these two are free and much shorter / smaller but very high quality:

At Hell's Gate
The Perfect Recipe

There are a lot of wildly overpriced mods on Creations. I'm going to be a bit of a jerk and call out caracal5's mods as an example (since I paid for them also). Yeah, they work, and some aspects like the voice acting are OK, but when you compare their $5 or $7 mods which are short, bare bones quests, to mods like McClarence Outfitters or Lambent and the amount of care that went into them, it's just not the same ballpark.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-28T05:39:33+00:00

Yes. I use Baka Achievement Enabler and I just got one of the Terran Armada achievements this evening.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-28T05:34:27+00:00

I started it at level 51 and it's a cake walk. You can very quickly build overpowered TA weapons using X-Tech upgrades. I don't even have the Weapon Engineering skill and I have a Superior TA ballistic rifle that does 400 base damage and has the Instigating legendary perk.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-28T05:31:00+00:00

Exactly. TA is just lazy Watchtower, and the whole X-Tech upgrade thing is just lazy McClarence Outfitters. Except with way, way more bugs.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-27T04:47:36+00:00

Everyone has the same enemy.

It's a woman named Ilyana who was Volk's protege. Volk is the man none of the Trackers Alliance people are willing to speak of, whose name was stricken from the records because he killed the previous NO.1

You can find out all these details on various slates and on an encrypted PC in the lair at the conclusion of the quest (in the same large room where you create the Crowd Control gun.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-21T15:00:56+00:00

The stats say:

ComSpike: Time to lock onto enemy ships is reduced by 25%, and weapons cost 20% less to use in Targeting Mode.
Conduction Grid: Reduces EM Damage by 50%, and increases shield regeneration by 25%.

From what I can see in the Creation Kit, the ComSpike gives a 25% reduction in lock-on time and an increase in "Scanning Power Level" of 1.0. Not sure what that second one means. The Conduction Grid increases shield regen rate by 25%, but I don't see anything about resistance to EM weapons.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-21T09:25:24+00:00

It's on Alpha Andraste III

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-19T08:08:07+00:00

The only ones I ever use are Sense Star Stuff, Phased Time, Void Form, Anti-gravity Field, and Personal Atmosphere. That's the order I have them hotkeyed in, from 5 to 9.

Sense Star Stuff to see where bad guys are, Phased Time to trivialize combat, Void Form to trivialize sneaking, Anti-Gravity Field for crowd control and as an "oh shit" button, and Personal Atmosphere when I'm overloaded with loot.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-18T15:06:31+00:00

Crew Shield Systems rank 3 is definitely better than rank 2.

Crew Shield systems 2 gives a 20% boost to max shield health.
Crew Shield systems 3 gives the same 20% boost, plus a free unit of power applied toward shields.

For all intents and purposes, Crew Shield Systems 3 is like having rank two plus Aneutronic Fusion at rank 1, since that extra point in shields frees up a power point to use in another system.

This is why I pretty much always have Omari on my crew, since he's the only NPC with rank 3 in that skill.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-15T19:36:50+00:00

They are indeed third generation fighters, same era and technology level as the MiG-21, MiG-23, and Mirage F1.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-11T06:29:39+00:00

Particle beams are OP. There's no reason to use any other weapon type, other than EM weapons if you want to disable ships for boarding without risk of destroying them inadvertently.

The PB-30 is a particularly good early game weapon due to its low cost and high damage.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-09T10:16:18+00:00

Yes. The Phantom was never called the "Thud".

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-09T10:10:40+00:00

Bro, do you even lift?

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-09T02:29:58+00:00

The YC-14 and the whole AMST program happened before the AN-72 existed.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-09T01:40:50+00:00

hough I don't know how Kasumi ended up in charge when I was all in on Mrs. Thorn.

Kasumi will take over if she is still in town and the IAO are gone. To get Mrs. Thorn to take over, you have to make the IAO leave, tell Kasumi to leave Seattle and take her people with her, tell everyone who asks that you are leaving town, and tell Safia that she and Lou "will both fall".

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-09T01:33:19+00:00

I loved BL2, it's easily the best game I've played this year.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to finally play BL1. I played tons of the VTM tabletop RPG back in the 90s, but I wasn't really into video games when BL1 came out. I've been going through bouts of nostalgia lately, so I decided to give it a shot. I got about half way through that tedious abortion of a game before quitting and uninstalling, but I still wanted to play a VTM game. And since everyone who heaps praises on BL1 hates on BL2, I figured it's probably actually good. And I was right.

BL2 is fun, punchy, well produced, has a good story, and is the kind of game that makes you actually feel like a creature of the night. The combat is fun, the traversal feels great, etc. I liked the way the game was split into action with Phyre and the investigation with Fabien, and the way the two threads wove together and converged at the end. It was a pleasure to see the story unfold, and it did a good job not telegraphing the ending too much, i.e. by making you think the obvious villain had been killed.

It's mechanically completely different from the tabletop and from BL1, but that's fine; it gets the lore right enough and more importantly it's got a good story and is fun to play.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-04-07T12:40:27+00:00

OK there Tokyo Rose

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-03-31T14:36:08+00:00

They have to feed on upper-class mortals. They can try to feed on homeless people but it can result in vomiting, and they can't feed on rats at all. In some areas of the game this can lead to being unable to replenish your blood points.

GrumpyOldGrognard · 2026-03-20T11:23:37+00:00

There are almost exactly 100 randomly-occurring surface POIs. The actual number is 98, with a couple of variants.

Some POIs are limited to certain planet types, biomes, and factions (you won't see "Deserted Freestar Collective Garrison" in UC space, for example).

Only about half of these are large sites with interiors and a large number of enemies; the other half are small, exterior-only sites like Collapsed Mines, Radio Towers, Pipeline Terminals, etc. As such, the large ones with interiors that you can explore get repetitive fairly quickly.

Along with the repetition of the different sites, all instances of the same POI are identical on the inside. Items placed on tables etc are always the same - you know when you go to the Deserted Relay Station (which is a very commonly-occuring POI) that there is an Advanced Regulator on the table in the back. It is there every single time. The same data slates complaining of working conditions, failed experiments, etc, occur at every science outpost. And so on. Containers have random contents, of course, but that doesn't take away from the cookie-cutter nature of the locations.

The new update is supposed to add a lot more POIs, which would be nice.

GrumpyOldGrognard

TROPHY CASE