u/Dawn-Somewhere

Okay, so it's kind of a meme that Darius is trying to get you killed. He's very bad at gathering intel and often drops you in really suboptimal places. Like I don't understand his thought process, but it feels like he frequently wants to place my troops in valleys or at the lowest elevation areas he can find so as to completely waste the advantage of an aerial drop. You know, real Darius tactical genius.

I can forgive him not having complete info on enemy lances, but I decide to do a mission this morning. Attack an enemy base.

Darius chose to drop in a valley. In this valley is a river acting as a moat that will cut me off from the base, so if I want to advance on the base, I have to cross the river. The base is armed with six heavy turrets, all of which can fire on my drop point starting on the first turn, and of course they're shooting downhill at a bunch of mechs being slowed by a river crossing. The base was also heavily populated by enemy mechs, and there were unexpected enemy reinforcements in hills beyond, but the important note is that EVERYTHING was uphill from me, and thus had elevation advantages to kill my ass.

I tell Darius I'm bailing on this mission as soon as I land, and he marks my extraction point as being THROUGH enemy lines, because that's where he always wants to do emergency extractions from. My heavier mechs got trashed immediately, and the lighter mechs that got across the river in time still had almost nowhere to maneuver because they were obligated to run uphill into thicker enemy opposition.

If anyone had survived this drop - and nobody did - I wouldn't have held it against the team if they doused Darius in flamer fuel and boiled the man's flesh clean off his bones one limb at a time. There are "mistakes", and then there's Darius, obviously having been paid off by the Tuarian OpFor. I can only assume that after everyone in the outfit died, he found himself a cushy job sending their people on a one-way ticket directly to Hell, and I guess what I'm asking is: is there anything other than the Rougetech mod that will allow me to take this authority to kill my entire lance away from Darius and let me choose where I drop so that there's no risk of me dropping in objectively the WORST location in the entire map?

We were attacking a STATIC location. The base did not get up and go anywhere. The river valley Darius dropped me into to be murdered in was not moving around or acting as an unknown factor. That was 100% a Darius choice. Even if it had ONLY been turrets, it still would have been an attempted murder on his part. I could put that man on trial and any jury in the galaxy would convict him for this.

Don't get me wrong, I understand how it works mechanically, but I used to box when I was younger and everything about this game's boxing mechanics feels like electroshock therapy to defy all programming anyone ever taught me about actual boxing.

For starters, even the world champion throws punches by bowling his hands down to his waist to throw the largest, most amateur haymakers possible, and he does this while leading with his exposed face. What's funny is I actually find this to be the easiest to fight, because he throws his punches at about the speed I'd expect an untrained, out-of-shape, middle aged dude to throw a punch if we'd both had a few drinks and neither of us could see straight. He doesn't throw jabs so much as he mails me a card inviting me to a party for kicking his ass; "please RSVP in two seconds." It'd be a little more believable if the guy closed his eyes while he was punching, to really send home that sense of "I have won a lot of fights, but mainly because I weigh 500 pounds".

The fights I cannot believe, though, are the earlier fights, with guys like the twins. See, normally if somebody runs at you with their hands down, it's because they're excited their team just scored a goal and they want to chest bump. It's amazing the twins turned this maneuver into an entire martial art, but the game thinks it would work, so here we are. But what gets me is, the typical "counter" to a man begging to get punched in the face is, like, you punch him. In his face. That is where the art of beating someone's ass begins, for those not in the know. You punch them in the face, and then the face goes from an upright position to an ass-up position, and then you kick the ass.

But if you punch the twins in the two-week waiting period before their punch arrives, that's wrong. I mean yes, it's a long waiting period, and as the punch is coming you can count the hair follicles on their baby-smooth chins. You may start to doubt that the fight has started, or you could think they're hailing for a cab or something. You're given enough time to carve an ice sculpture bust of these dudes while they load a punch so lazy that even the guitarist nearby could finish his song and get out of the way, but you cannot punch them during the thirty-day free trial period. Apparently, in Cyberpunk, you cannot just kill a man while he gets his punch out of the freezer and heats it up in the microwave - you need to wait patiently for his punch to thaw, and then you need to wait for the punch to cool off for a minute because it gets too hot on the inside. The punch isn't ready for consumption right away, and it needs time.

Only when the punch finally arrives at the station, then you're allowed to "counter" the punch by holding hands with your opponent. If your hands do not touch, you have not shown significant affection to your enemy, and it's not a valid counterattack. You MUST be respectful and kind. The punch conductor will receive your ticket for violence, inspect it to make sure that your ticket is dated for this particular punch, and at last you are allowed to board for a single trip to beatdown town - destination: one of the twins.

But what drives me crazy is I tend to fall asleep while waiting for the twins to finish getting their punch ready, so I get rudely awoken because a man sent me a punch via snail mail and it only just got here after inclement weather, and I forgot it was coming.

I would kind of like to just throw a punch while they're dressing the punch up for prom and trying to match the punch to their shoes, but of course, if you punch a guy and then back up a few yards, he slides across that entire distance with his feet rooted firmly to the ground because apparently there is a magnet implant they only sell to NPCs and they can also get some sort of frictionless shoe that every shop in town refuses to admit exists when I ask about it.

I always lose the "easy" fights a few times because I can never bring myself to imagine a person would attack another person so slowly that we could've talked everything out and figured out a better form of conflict resolution before the attack actually got to me, which means I block early and "miss" the window to stop all of this from happening to me. You learn from an actual boxing coach to look for openings, and every part of my muscle memory screams in agony as I watch an opening large enough to stuff a blue whale in present itself for long enough to order a pizza, but mechanically I can do nothing until precisely the moment at which I can firmly place my hand on my opponent's hand after they have proactively offered it to me.

Cyberpunk 2077 boxing is so polite when you get down to it, it's insane.

Just what the title says. I'm curious if it's actually possible.

I've been away from Giga for a while, in large part because although I like many things it adds, I always disliked how the big end-game crises were solved by building a System Craft and it never seemed like you were expected to do much else. If anything, just because that meant you were locked into a fairly demanding collection of Ascension Perks that cut you off from doing anything other than working towards a System Craft (and I'm thankful to see that was consolidated a little).

I've had a look at the Aeternum, and beating them without rocket planets seems... feasible. Like I gave it a go, and it depended on luck, but as you fight Aeternum fleets you gradually start doing more damage to them, so you can gradually build up a running buff enough that normal ships armed with torpedoes can tangle with Planet Craft, and you can win on a principle of sheer volume. I still buckled in the end due to attrition costs, but it felt attainable. You know, like if I were playing a stronger origin or really abusing certain mechanics, it was in the realm of possibility.

Part of this is owed to being able to delay the Aeternum and also slowing their craft enough that I can choose the fights I get into early on - though if you're in their direct line of attack and they dump their first several planets on you right when they wake up, it's not happening.

Blokkats just appear to not be a possibility, though. One aspect of the problem is that we now have Cetana, so you can't delay defeating the crisis since she will unceremoniously cntrl-a delete the galaxy via an event command if you don't kill her off when you're instructed to (which was cool once but now I wish I could turn her off). Killing her then triggers the Blokkat spawn. The second issue is that Awakened Empires tend to wipe out the crises now if you don't make the effort on your own, so any other crisis is liable to die when the galaxy's vengeful grandpa gets off his porch (in fact this is part of why I thought I'd grab Giga again, to get crises the Awakened Empires don't defeat independently). So you're dealing with the Blokkats soon after the first crisis arrives regardless of what you'd like.

On the default setting for Giga Experience, you're limited to one planetcraft, and I think mine died of fear before the fighting actually began with the Blokkats. Probably the first alpha strike wiped out its hull instantly, since it was the largest thing in the system. That was just fighting the little expeditionary forces, mind you. A fleet going to fight a Dismantler vanishes into dust before the game can actually draw the graphics for the Dismantler.

I'm well aware of the game settings and the mechanics for the mod, so I'm not asking for help on how to turn the Blokkats off or lower their difficulty or whatever. I'm really just curious - has anyone beaten these things in 4.3 with the default "Giga Experience" settings without using other mods? I can respect if "Blokkats kill you, there's nothing you can do, sorry" is the intended "Giga Experience", but there are people who build Dorf Fortresses in Hell, in spite of that not really being intended as possible, so who knows.