#Armored Core General!

37173 messages · Page 38 of 38 (latest)

glad sierra
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Wasn’t ready for the damn thing to whip out a kamehameha

serene kettle
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it's such a good fight. I think it took me more tries than the final bosses lol

glad sierra
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I died about 4-5 times. Mostly cuz i was trying to kill with the sword for cool points

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Unfortunately had to quit during the subsequent mission, which I’m just gonna assume has no checkpoint. Which means i’mma probably have to do all that all over again

eager vector
late jay
feral niche
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Haha.

glad sierra
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Part of me is a lil disappointed. Cuz I wanna fight that thing again

eager vector
glad sierra
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Nah. Didn’t finish the mission after the fight yet. Still gotta do that

eager vector
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What I mean is that any mission you’ve completed, you can play again whenever you want

glad sierra
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Oh. I know about that. I just sorta meant i wanted to boot the game up and have that be the last checkpoint loaded. Don’t even wanna deal with the Arqebus guys. Just gimme the Cel 240 all over again

paper ferry
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Thank you pre-nerf Zimmermans

waxen nest
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????

distant forge
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what the fuhhhh

feral niche
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The warrior.

radiant birch
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(spoiler: the game in question is AC6)

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i like some of the side to side comparison but there's something really funny about going with "it's like Elden Ring!" as your hook

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like gee, i wonder why

late jay
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Kinda reminds me of how Elden Ring's DLC I feel has some parallels with AC6's NG++ ending

radiant birch
late jay
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Mainly with the steps to godhood

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I think it's something like you need "a lord, a vessel" and something else

late jay
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My brain is kinda mush, so idk how to articulate it

waxen nest
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GOT A JOB FOR YOU 621

royal atlas
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SEVEN THOUSAND

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HELIANTHUS MACHINES

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KILL THAT GUY

paper ferry
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Man, I’ve been sleeping on the Explosive Thrower

radiant birch
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It's fun

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I stuck it on a midweight quad build the other day, p solid

solar sinew
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I love that thing so much. So cinematic

paper ferry
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I put it on my heavy RJ and it actually made it competent in PvP

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This build. I swapped most of the weapons to make it work better in PvP. Now it has the Attaché HMG, the Explosive Thrower, the Earshot, and the 12-cell vert missiles

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And also I swapped the generator for the Joso

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Mostly for weight reasons

radiant birch
covert chasm
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i dont think AC has ever been stomp personally

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if it ever was, it was a strikingly long time ago

covert chasm
feral niche
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But my knowledge is limited and of poor quality.

ember carbon
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I think 3 and back were more stomp then zoom and 4 onwards it started going towards zoom

deft pelican
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Bhopping was an integral part of first gen from my experience, and even walking is pretty quick, faster than AC6's walk by quite some margin

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Definitely feels more zoom than stomp, and it only got faster in gens 2/3 afaik

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The clunk factor comes from turn rate and aiming which I found to be pretty cool, though I could personally stand to see the player camera decoupled from mech aim because arena fights against lightweights could get very annoying

paper ferry
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Is 5/VD stomp?

serene kettle
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No, they can be quite fast. They're just perceived as being slow because 4/4A was in recent memory

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Tanks were on the slower side but that's what you expect when you're playing a fuckin tank

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V/VD actually have very nice movement, but it's highly terrain-dependent rather than free-flying. You're parkouring more than anything

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the big thing is you have dramatically less native vertical movement - you need to walljump and climb to gain height

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Your boosters really only give you a jump about one body-height off the ground on flat ground

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They're more for gliding

polar osprey
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tbh i'd say that makes ACV/VD more stomp than zoom

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going off the image, all the zoom mechs can fly and the stomp ones can't

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there's levels to it rather than just speed being the key factor

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it's more of a freedom of movement thing

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older armored cores were slower and flying wasn't so much a thing sk they were stomp

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AC4/FA goes insane on speed and flight so it's overwhelmingly zoom

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ACV/VD is faster than old gens, massively slower than AC4/FA, and can't fly so it's stomp, while AC6 picks up the speed andflight again and makes it zoom

serene kettle
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Okay then stomp is a bad descriptor, because when you say that I’m thinking mechwarrior

polar osprey
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i mean i feel it's more of a sliding scale

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ACV/VD isn't massively stomp but it's also not zoom

serene kettle
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There is not a dramatic difference in feel between verdict day and ac6 except for ease of gaining elevation with no terrain around

polar osprey
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i mean i think that is a pretty big difference but maybe that's just me

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3d spatial maneuvering is pretty significant

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it's not like Mechwarrior doesn't have the Highlander burial

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flying is a whole nother thing though

serene kettle
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Yeah, and that’s defined by the weight of it

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Like, you’re not a plane but you can fuckin move in vd

polar osprey
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i suppose so

serene kettle
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it’s significantly boostier than oldgen

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Just less so than 4A where your legs are essentially aesthetic

polar osprey
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i played an Ultra heavyweight and even i had basically indefinite flight in ACFA

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i do feel like that is a bit of the difference but maybe that's just me

serene kettle
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Meanwhile in oldgen if you fell off a bridge it’s like fuck, how do i get back up

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(You can gain height in oldgen with similar ease to ac6 in theory, but in practice it burns your generator out really fast)

polar osprey
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mhm

serene kettle
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(The shitbucket you pilot in the ac6 escape sequence is actually a pretty good approximation of earlygame AC1 lmao)

polar osprey
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luv muh shitbucket

peak prawn
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Chirico drifts his mech like a sports car countless times

floral wharf
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Tbh I think mecha is just really hard to put strict categories on.

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They're not a vehicle that exists in real life so every mech series has different ideas of what "feels" right for movement for different things. Even battletech has the LAMs.

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In older ACs, you could maybe sorta fly if you put every effort into it, but most of the time boosters were for hopping around, just because you couldn't fly in AC1 didn't mean you had to stay on the ground a majority of the time.

covert chasm
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i cant really take describing 5th gen AC as not being zoom very seriously, that game is oftentimes faster and especially faster paced than the 4th gen games were in capable hands

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i think for any AC game to be stomp you need to deliberately play it that way

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moving quickly and efficiently is a big part of more advanced play in Every AC game and there's not really any getting around that

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and as for the oldgen games, the same largely applies to them. as mentioned by someone else here earlier, bhopping is a common technique deliberately designed to let you squeeze as much zoomy out of your machine as possible and anything lighter than heavies can walk around at a respectable running speed. I was once a comp player for a moderate time period of a couple of the 3rd gen titles, some of the shenanigans people got up to with OB usage was (and still is) insane

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with all this said, in many AC games you totally Can play them more stompy if you want, especially in the oldgen games. I'm not sure if the criteria here is that you Can play zoom or stompy or it is generally optimal to do either. i do kind of think its a bit of a silly dichotomy personally, much like "real" or "super" robot is

deft pelican
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yeahh the meme putting gundam into 'stomp' means absolutely jack considering the series runs the gamut of zippy as shit fairy mechs to slow(er) 08th ms team stuff

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if that's zoom, all of AC definitely sits comfortably in zoom

serene kettle
polar osprey
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lol

serene kettle
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(Verdict Day is one of the best games in the series, but that got old pretty fast lol)

solar sinew
wooden nimbus
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I am once again imagining highly vertical multi layered levels with ACVD movement tech

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Imagine the Xylem with that

serene kettle
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You would need to redesign some things to have more terracing and walljumpable greebling scattered about but it’d be cool yeah

covert chasm
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idk if i posted the first iteration here at all but i recently reworked my main pvp build a bit and figured i'd show off the drip

late jay
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Hell yea

eager vector
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Whoa I’m playing ac3 on an emulator using a mod for dual stick controls for the first time and it’s amazing yall

paper ferry
covert chasm
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thank you!! i am Very proud of the decals

late jay
late jay
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Anyone still alive here?

serene kettle
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hi

polar osprey
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yahallo

late jay
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O

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H
ewwo

solar sinew
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Still around!

eager vector
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ac6 dlc any day now

solar sinew
radiant birch
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When's the next big games show

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Announcement then for sure

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100%

distant forge
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it would be really cool to have an Armored Core 6 Answer

covert chasm
late jay
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Armored Core 666

radiant birch
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Armored Core 6 And Violence

paper ferry
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Who up armoring their cores?

late jay
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Thinking about it

solar sinew
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We will be this weekend!

late jay
radiant birch
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tweaking some PVE builds today

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still need to see how they do in missions proper, but they're pretty reliably wrecking my go-to arena punching bags (i.e. Freud and Volta)

solar sinew
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Looks solid on paper. Cant really go wrong with any of these parts

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The thing about player agency no one tells you about is that sometimes youre preparing a battlemap and a whole string of What Ifs for an ALLMIND mission that your players can and probably will.. just walk past lmao.

Mission Im talking about is Coral Export, their first proper ALLMIND mission.. if they want it.

After the PCA hit the Wall, all the corps are flailing and put the missions on hold for a while. Im thinking Ill offer them a choice between a downtime action and an ALLMIND mission.

Meaning I somehow get to prep both the esoteric payoff for taking my PCs neural sample, AND my ice worm equivalent. I love setting small and achievable goals for myself.

radiant birch
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Yeah, that's always the thing with TTRPGs, you either gotta herd the players to the setpiece or be able to improvise a range of outcomes

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And with crunchy high-prep tactical games, improvising is... difficult at best

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Are you running this in Lancer?

solar sinew
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I do have the occasional setpiece, but they usually get a series of missions to pick a selection from and I work with what they choose. Wallclimber was a setpiece ofc and the Iceworm equivalent will be too, but the hows and whys are up to them.

The compromise I found was that for the hypothetical encounters off the beaten path I either find a map or make one I can reuse if they dont see it. Cuts down on the amount of "useless" prep in an already overambitious campaign

radiant birch
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Seems like a good approach!

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I imagine with the way Lancer NPCs work it's not that hard to mix and match as needed to build out encounters?

solar sinew
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Yeah, even though I spend a silly amount of time preparing encounters. I only have three players, but theyre all in strong builds, and theyre smart, so they consistently punch above their weightclass. Its fine, but given I name all of the NPC frames in case they turn into a campaign long rival turned friend turned quest giver turned fall guy they kill again.. it still takes a good amount of time out of my day

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For jobs I send them a list of 6-7 of those, they give me their three to four favorites, and which they want to do first, and they pretty much leave the order from there in my hands. Means I do have a pretty good idea of roughly what theyll be facing. Months of preptime help naming C-weapons lmao

Screenshot_20260529_070744_Discord.jpg
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As you can tell quite a lot of these are stitched together from game missions too. Canon is a vague suggestion at this point

radiant birch
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Getting to mess with the plot of the game sounds like a lot of fun 😁

solar sinew
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Its been a long and very fun half year running this, yeah xD
How will we justify rebuilding the Vascular plant without PC interference? Who knows. Knowing them, theyll be the ones to propose ramming the ghing with the Xylem before its built. Kind of sounds like their problem to solve, not mine lmao

peak prawn
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I learned earlier that Woolie of WoolieVS only ever did one ending of AC6
How,

radiant birch
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Man's got a lot of video games to play

solar sinew
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Tbf the game doesnt exactly advertise its got three endings. I could see someone getting Liberator and thinking that was it

paper ferry
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@solar sinew I was thinking about how you could run bosses in AC6 that have an obvious weak point like the Ice Worm or the Cataphract. You could just beef up their armor (up to like 5 or 6 maybe) on the sides and they could maybe get a special reaction to turn their armored sides towards an attacker., requiring the players to keep moving around it.

solar sinew
# paper ferry <@683094853914984460> I was thinking about how you could run bosses in AC6 that ...

Yeah, its really tough. The juggernaut got an innate reaction from me that essentially read "if unit moves in front of it, the juggernaut must charge it (knocking prone, not dealing damage), otherwise it activates its canons at the end of the round, designating three safe zones and blasting the rest the following turn". that was already annoying enough, even with mandatory first turns for the thing.

I like your idea of an armored reaction (heh) a lot better. Given I booted the Iceworm and replaced it with.. essentially a small answerer stacked on top of a small spirit of motherwill (The RRI called it an observatory. lol, sure.), the "weakness" is gonna be removing all the bloody ECM fog from PCA outposts, so its more of a "you can fight this now, or you can make the fight easier by doing X" than an actual boss mechanic.

The Cataphract and I have been staring each other down, because its such a fun fight in the game, but making it work in Lancer is so tough between tech attacks and gestures vaguely at my Hydra player

eager vector
solar sinew
eager vector
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If I was running this, seeking would work normally and not interact with this

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seeking ignores cover right? Maybe I would replace armor with heavy cover

paper ferry
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Or! Give it a “blind spot”, basically a space or two in front of it where it’s weapons can’t overlap fire. If a unit remains in that spot at the end of their turn, the Cataphract charges. That way, players don’t linger in its blind spot.

solar sinew
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Ohhh thats a fun idea. Maybe the Cataphract will find its way into their next mission. Iguazu hasnt eaten shit in way too long and hes long overdue

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Great suggestions, thanks :D

paper ferry
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Artist’s rendition

IMG_7905.png
solar sinew
paper ferry
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I think a player could move through the field of fire, triggering an attack reaction from the Cataphract. The player can continue to move through (potentially taking damage) to attack its weak spot, but must leave its threat range or the Cataphract will charge.

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Basically make it a spicier Juggernaut

solar sinew
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Hm, I could see the possibility for fun setups where the Hydra baits the charge or reaction with a drone to let the cata charge directly into the Lycan. Will it happen? No. Do I look forward fo finding out what does? Yeah. Consider it done!

peak prawn
solar sinew
radiant birch
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@solar sinew Operation Winter Scar has the MBT NPC template, which is a large battle tank that includes systems for a heavily armored facing. you might want to take a peep at that and see if it's something you could use/adapt for Cataphract

solar sinew
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My players successfully voted to throw me for a loop and go explore the Xylem instead of dealing with the Iceworm. I absolutely sunk the Xylem underwater, time for an underwater session!

paper ferry
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The EVA module actually gets some use lol