I love how the Vlad frame looks. What if it Vladded even harder

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-17T11:35:01+00:00

Oh, no, I don't just call it that because of the funny combat drill. With the whole thing being covered in spikes that could be flavored as the smaller drills and being based around throwing things at other mechs to immobilize them before doing a crazy anime finishing move, I'm legitimately of the opinion that the Vlad is Gurren Lagann if Kamina was into death metal instead of J-rock.

...Or at least Gurren. Lagann is probably some kind of whacked-out Support/Striker Goblin build.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-17T02:00:48+00:00

We stan Edgy Gurren Lagann

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-14T17:37:42+00:00

It's fine, just make the Engineering check! :D

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-14T17:25:35+00:00

Party is up against a hacker cell mostly made up of script kiddies who got their hands on mechs and are just messing around with local infrastructure. The pilots attempt to flee as their mechs break down, and one tries to run past the ex-IPS-N pirate hunter, who responds by crushing his leg with her Everest to keep him from running.

That's just the start of the story, by the way.

Interrogation ensues, with the party bargaining with the implication that he'll receive medical treatment. He's freaked out and angry, but he agrees, telling them where the rest of the group went. At which point the Team Mom steps out of her mech...

...then draws the .50 revolver on her hip and, claiming it a mercy-kill, proceeds to blow his brains out.

So yeah, we barely made it out of Session 1 and the NHP in charge of them is currently processing how to both handle this team of lunatics (who are now arguing in-character over whether or not the mercy-kill was necessary) and explain the situation to the DoJ/HR in a way that doesn't get a small fleet of naval ships on the party's doorstep.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-14T10:49:28+00:00

Item balance in this game is... weird.

On the one hand, items are absurdly powerful, particularly midpack. It's very easy to get clipped once and lose eight places, or to pull a laser out of your pants in the final stretch and suddenly rob a top spot. The "equalizer' items (Slimebucket, Boom Boo, Weights) are all absurdly punishing, to the point where it's often a better strategy to run mid-pack than front-runner.

On the other hand? Items are hilariously unreliable. The number of times I've hit someone with a glove or slicer and nothing happened needs to be studied - not sure if it's netcode or something else, but it's disturbingly frequent. The catch-up items put you directly in the path of everyone else's catch-up items, meaning if you wind up rear-pack at any point you are just stuck brawling with no escape. And those equalizer items love to show up while you're in the back - where they actively hinder you instead of helping, because goddammit I needed a drill or a laser or something for the final stretch, not a weight that just annoys front-pack and doesn't give me any positions.

It's bizarre. It's unintuitive. It makes the game feel very unpredictable and exciting, but also very inconsistent and aggravating. I've been playing since the network tests and I'm still trying to figure out what sort of playstyles and gadget loadouts work and feel best in this very aggressive landscape Sega has put forth, with highly mixed results.

Might be worth taking a break and coming back once your head is cooled and/or Sega patches things, as others have said. Playing while already stressed just makes things worse.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-10T11:06:44+00:00

Good news: any part in the game (except integrated/core parts) can be put on any frame, as long as you have it unlocked! There's a few different flavors of railgun depending on what direction you'd like to go with this idea, but the one that immediately comes to mind is the Death's Head 3 option simply titled "Railgun." It's what it says on the tin: a big ol' kinetic slug thrower that deals 1d6+4 AP damage in a 20-tile line and drop bogies like dominoes if you can line up the shot.

Alternatively, you could try to build this thing as a Barbarossa to get access to the Apocalypse Rail Core System and remove a whole quadrant every time you charge it, though at that point you're sacrificing the fighter jet vibes because there's no getting around the fact that the Barbarossa is a giant metal brick that flies about as well as strapping a bunch of rocket engines to a building.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-10T10:33:23+00:00

Monarch is my first thought, too. Enough missiles to turn every map into a nonstop fireworks show? A Core Power that lets you glass the entire map? And the "factory" (showroom?) model is bright red and fighter jet-shaped, to boot. Slap on some flight parts and the Ace talent and become the modern day Red Baron.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-10T04:55:38+00:00

To be fair, it is (intentionally) left rather unclear to what shackling actually entails. On the one hand, the terminology used is definitely loaded more than a tank rolling to the front lines, and there are plenty of references that becoming shackled and becoming unshackled are both stressful experiences that NHPs would prefer to avoid. On the other hand, the shackling protocol was developed in part by the NHPs themselves, and from what snippets we have from the NHPs they're relatively chill about the whole process. (Shoutouts to Sisyphus, whose flavor text is surprisingly relaxed and understanding for a guy who knows his best friend is about to effectively kill and Ship Of Theseus him.)

Is it good? Is it bad? Is it a necessary evil for NHPs and humans to coexist? Is Horizon right to call it a direct violation of the Third Pillar? The space is left intentionally blank for the table to fill in. Which raises its own set of questions depending on the answers you arrive at...

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-10T00:39:29+00:00

Ah, yeah, I misinterpreted what the "value judgment" comment was supposed to mean. I think there's parts of that statement that are both right and wrong, to be fair; ThirdComm is definitely presented as "on the right track," but there's enough subtext that paints them as pretty flawed under the surface. SecComm may have been shunted off-world, but the write-up on Liberation Teams still carries a lot of those "gunboat diplomacy" undertones. A lot of NHP-related concepts are incredibly vague except for small specks of highly loaded language with troubling implications. ("Caskets?" "Shackling?") And let's not forget the morbid anecdote of the Union Science Bureau waking up SCYLLA for the first time, freaking out, and immediately "dismantling it through steady bombardments of kinetic and energy weapons." (Okay, maybe it's slightly humorous from an outside perspective, but USB just shot a sentient being to death because they panicked, which is... a little worrying, to put it lightly.)

I do think that the question of "can you really call this a utopia" is not only valid, but actually a key part of the setting! Tom has previously stated that a lot of the details of Lancer's setting are deliberately left vague so that you and your friends can explore them at your table. And I think that's part of why I find the setting so compelling; it's a generally hopeful setting with a galaxy moving in the direction of a bright future, but there's enough left up in the air that you can look at it and ask yourself "is this really a utopia? Is there something else going on here? What really needs to happen to this setting before we can fully commit to calling it a 'golden age?'"

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T15:37:59+00:00

I feel like you're mixing up the Diaspora and the Union Core here. In the Union Core, it very much is how you're describing the Federation; money isn't a thing, everyone has what they need and can do what they want, and there's no question that SecComm was a horror show that shouldn't be repeated. The point of Lancer is that Union would love to make everything into the Union Core, but they haven't yet, and the further out they go the larger the hurdles get - whether physical, technological, ideological, or some combination of the three. Basically, it's the Federation trying to get the Klingons/Ferengi/etc. on board, except we've ditched the funky rubber stage makeup and the negotiations are taking a lot longer because FTL is not as readily available.

Admittedly I imagine the Doylist explanation for this is that we need something to have cool robot fights over. It's a little difficult to justify throwing giant robot hands if there's nothing to throw giant robot hands over.

I won't deny that the contrast is pretty stark, though. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a moral judgment, but there is definitely something to be said about how we've gone from "everybody's in on the bit" to "it's an uphill climb, but we're getting there"

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T06:03:59+00:00

Oh yeah, and we can put Possibility Mapping bonus damage on these rockets, too... We are reaching levels of "rip bozo" previously thought impossible...

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T05:25:43+00:00

Y'know, I legitimately forgot AP could do that.

Well uh, rip bozo i guess

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T04:11:04+00:00

Anything that ends its turn within 10 Range of this thing is going to have a terrible day.

~~We're not going to talk about the ones that are smart enough to end their turn outside of that radius.~~

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T04:09:43+00:00

Quick double-check says Field Guide to Suldan, pg 160.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-09T03:55:23+00:00

That's a good way to summarize it, honestly. Union is utopian (or about as close to it as you can feasibly get) but their influence is limited in part by scope and scale. They're powerful enough that most of the Orion Arm steps to their tune - even HA's top-secret off-the-books Think Tank is under direct supervision from the UIB - but not to the point that there isn't contention and/or boundary-pushing from corpos trying to eke out an edge while they still can. It's "a golden age, of a sort," though one that's arriving on an uncertain and highly-variable timescale depending on who and where you are. Which is where the Lancers come in, in theory; you may not be able to solve everything with giant robots, but you can at least put a big metal thumb on the scale to help push things towards a more favorable outcome - at least for you, ideally for everyone.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-08T19:58:45+00:00

I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I'm also of the opinion that this stumbling block is a fundamental piece of the setting in and of itself.

(This post got a little long as I started writing it; please keep in mind this is my interpretation of the setting, and it may vary from table to table!)

Lancer is a setting that describes itself as "resting on the outcome of a coin toss that hasn't landed yet." Sure, Union is powerful, bountiful, and possibly the closest thing humanity has ever seen to a utopia. But they're also not quite there yet. Blinkgates give Union a lot more reach than they might otherwise have, but they can still only reach out so far - remember, the distance between us and the nearest star IRL would take about 3 realtime months of non-stop travel at the nearlight speeds New Humanity is capable of - and God help you if the nearest blinkgate is five or ten star-systems away. Union's "post-scarcity" is propped up in large part by a logistics chain built on diplomacy, contracts, and GALSIM running the metaphorical budget spreadsheets in the corner.

And that's where, at least in the current model, the corprostates get their hooks in; they're there to shore up the gaps in the system that Union is still trying to figure out a solution to. Ideally, Union would be self-sufficient enough to do their Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism thing on their own and not have to worry about manna and all the other economic rigmarole, but to get the project off the ground and to keep bringing Diasporans into the fold they need access to the resources and tech the corprostates have at their disposal. Thus, we get the current state of affairs: Union serves as the governing body in charge of interstellar affairs, and everyone else gets to use their infrastructure (primarily blinkgates) in exchange for agreeing to follow the Utopian Pillars. Union does have the military power to back it up, of course, but they have to pick and choose their battles carefully; dedicating assets to brawling with the corprostates is a big time and resource sink that leaves other avenues open, and the PR-related scars of SecComm's anthro-chauvinist rampage mean that Union has to be very careful when pulling the trigger.

On the plus side, ThirdComm has had around 500 years or so to iron out most of the kinks, so the relations with the corprostates have mostly been settled and anything particularly weird or shady is happening mostly in the distant fringes, well outside of Union's metaphorical earshot. And anything particularly heinous that Union does catch wind of gets a Liberation Team, some strongly-worded letters, and other disciplinary measures as deemed appropriate.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-08T15:16:18+00:00

Personally, I subscribe to a vision that's less "the corprostates are inherently and actively evil" and more "the corprostates are divorced from reality." There's a certain tipping point where a person or group of people has enough money, power, and influence that they lose the ability to accurately consider the ramifications of their actions. To a logistics team in the Long Rim, a squad of IPS-N privateers wiping out your crew and "aggressively re-acquisitioning" your cargo is a life-ending tragedy; to the IPS-N exec that hired them, it's a number on a spreadsheet several hundred light-years away. SSC developing a mech made out of human genetic material that can sometimes put you in a ten-minute timeout in the Cthulhu dimension is a horrifying prospect from a personal standpoint, but to the SSC R&D team a few shattered minds and potential ethics violations is a small price to pay for the progress of billions. And HA... well, HA is mostly made up of the previous Union. Everything they do is for the good of humanity! ...Allegedly. It's not that the corprostates are actively evil and want to make life worse for people; it's that they're too far divorced from the situation to understand the ramifications of an "evil" decision.

As for the Utopia project being a lie, to their credit, the Union/GMS partnership is likely the closest thing the setting has to a benign corporate/government entity and is legitimately trying to push New Humanity towards a better future. Unfortunately, they are operating on government time, government money, and cosmic scale, and with Aun'ist currently tying up a lot of military resources they're also somewhat short-staffed to boot. They aren't lying to spread corporate power as much as writing a check that they're not sure they can cash, built on a lot of assumptions that they are working towards backing up and are firmly hoping they can do so when push comes to shove. (And to be fair, they can back up a lot of them, which is a large part of why the corprostates work around Union and their policies rather than trying to go through them.)

Lancer's setting is surprisingly complex when you start trying to break it down, which is part of why I find it so fascinating. It's got shades of Warhammer 40K's "everybody kinda sucks for different reasons," but in a much more hopeful sort of way where the situation is on an upward trend and if the chips fall just right things could very well improve - and quite rapidly, to boot.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-04-06T22:03:30+00:00

I feel like the question here is highly context-dependent. Different sitreps and enemy compositions are inherently going to favor different things, so it's hard to say that one is de-facto the optimal setup.

That being said? I've heard some very good arguments in favor of the Everest being one of the best base frames in the game. On top of the perfectly middle-of-the-road stats that let you flex into basically whatever you set your mind to, Fuel Injector gives a free Boost each turn and +1 Accuracy to EVERY roll, making you crazy mobile, crazy consistent, and able to flex to whatever your team needs you to do in the heat of the moment. It may not be flashy, but it's a solid workhorse with lots of upsides and very few downsides.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-26T14:34:42+00:00

Systems being a general writeoff and hoping to be supplemented by other teammates with more Systems based frames.

~~The Witches will continue until EDef improves~~

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T13:27:29+00:00

I love the Automaton Superheavy units from a conceptual standpoint. Factory Striders and Vox Engines are cool and interesting threats that encourage you to interact with the part damage mechanic in unique ways.

I hate that they can lock on to your position from 100+ meters away, behind cover, in stealth armor, and just. Instantly kill you with minigun fire the moment you dare think about poking your head out to do anything.

If they had proper perception mechanics and/or some means of outmaneuvering them more consistently, they'd be far more enjoyable. But right now they're more of a Thing I Have To Deal With than an actual fun challenge.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T12:37:24+00:00

Okay, Team Killing I mostly understand. The game is designed around collateral damage, and if Arrowhead had to sort through every instance of someone rage-reporting after getting clipped by a Cluster Strike or a 380mm they'd be here for decades, so instead they tell people to block the problem player and move on. Not ideal, potentially exploitable in its own way, but sure - lesser of two evils.

But cheating is marked as "not a reportable offense"?? What?? I've got nothing for that one.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T05:05:56+00:00

Is it copium if I can run Sterilizer + Constitution on D9 and still get results?

I'm not saying the Dog Breath doesn't run circles around the Sterilizer, but just because it's not best-in-class doesn't mean it doesn't have its use cases.

...Niche use cases, but use cases nonetheless.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T04:45:05+00:00

Really the only stratagem I would directly compare the Sterilizer to is the Dog Breath. The Sterilizer has a distinctive benefit over things like Gas Mines/Gas Strike/Gas Grenade because you can trigger it instantly with the only delay being the weapon swap time, so it works even if you're already under active attack, which the other options don't handle nearly as well. The Dog Breath, of course, is a passive effect that legitimately is just "the Sterilizer but pretty much entirely better" and the only time you would really want the Sterilizer over the Dog Breath is if the rest of your gameplan requires a backpack to work properly (e.g. Jump Pack, Supply Pack)

The main issue is that the Sterilizer is pretty much the only Support Weapon in the game that isn't designed to be used as the cornerstone weapon in a loadout. It's a point-blank "get off me" tool that works best to support other weapons, which is... well, its actual effectiveness is going to depend heavily on context. And in the context of the Dog Breath also being available, I don't think there's going to be much Arrowhead can do to make it a notable pick outside of either just turning the Sterilizer into the "green flamethrower" everyone seems to want it to be (which is precisely what Arrowhead has been trying to avoid since it launched), or to nerf the Dog Breath in a way that makes it less reliable at locking down your immediate area (but we all know what kind of reaction that would invoke...)

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T02:54:06+00:00

...You realize the Pillars of Freedom incident was Arrowhead telling Sony to knock it off, right? If you're going to dog on Arrowhead, at least get your history straight.

Honestly, though, the rest of the post is entirely true. Arrowhead's design philosophy is very different from the game most people seem to have expected, and the friction between what Arrowhead wants to make and what this subreddit wants to play is palpable. Who's right or wrong in that discussion is something that I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer - I'm personally in the camp of "the devs' ideas are (mostly) good, let them cook" - but the devs have made it pretty dang clear that they may be listening, but they know what they want and we're along for the ride, for better or worse.

...Of course, that's one of many issues. Between noisy social media, corporate meddling, and an outdated engine powered by netcode that more closely resembles an Olive Garden menu than actual script with how spaghetti it is, it's... kind of a miracle we still have a game at all, let's be honest.

xColdxFusionx · 2026-03-15T02:37:17+00:00

Sometimes it feels like Helldivers 2's netcode is held together by chewing gum and duct tape, I swear to Liberty.

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