express train to hell

For the first 20 days, newbie’s Lobcorp play was hyper-competent, which was still entertaining, but not maximally entertaining. He had nothing comparable to my early game snafus—day 2 Beauty and the Beast (literally did not have anyone who could work non-repression without going insane), the Nameless Fetus incident (that thing has popped up in newbie’s list three times and HGR has been like NO), all the exploding heads from Porccubus (newbie would genuinely love Porccubus since all his dudes have temperance III; it’s free real estate for fortitude training).

Then day 21 came and the difficulty spike hit newbie hard. One wipe was directly attributable to HGR, who, on day 18, steered newbie directly onto Silent Orchestra, an Aleph-class. newbie tiptoed around the abnormality for the next few days, but on day 21, it finally breached.

• It’s basically an entire raid boss with phases.
• Each phase is immune to all but one damage type. Also, because it’s a performing orchestra, it puts these ridiculous curtains on screen that cover parts of the UI, including the part where you can see your employees’ weapons. Hope you’ve memorized what weapons everyone has equipped!
• Also, newbie’s team is drastically undergeared to suppress a breaching Aleph. He did like 5% damage and wound up with a nearly full-facility wipe. Silent Orchestra, ladies and gentlemen!

So that was a lot of fun. However, newbie also had various other deaths/resets related to the difficulty of micromanaging a bigger facility and having to remember the minutiae of not getting everyone killed. I averted one reset by noticing that he sent the same employee to Teddy Bear twice in a row. Lots of mundane stuff like that.

Around the fourth reset or so, HGR mentioned that a lot of players use days 22-25 to farm abnormalities: since you get two a day, you can farm codex information and gear and then rewind to the memory repository, so you don’t have to worry about employee deaths and training. A more chill life.

newbie decided to go for it. Shortly thereafter, HGR was like “you want the most cancer abnormality in the game?” and newbie said sure. That’s how he wound up with Express Train to Hell.

(On Saturday we were progging Kokytos and I was distracted by the thought “what if this fight, but also Express Train to Hell” choo choo!!)

newbie was also very slowly progging Silent Orchestra. He would get its counter to 1, then leave it alone for the rest of the day. Working with it is dicey because both good and bad results lower the counter; neutral results are the only safe ones. Late on day 22, with Silent Orchestra’s counter at 1 and newbie’s energy quota not quite reached, he got a meltdown in Silent Orchestra’s chamber. yikes! He sent a guy in and we all sat there watching the bar go up. The result was…good. yikes!!

But newbie almost had his energy quota for the day. As Silent Orchestra’s performance began, newbie started frantically throwing employees into the nearest chambers. go! work!! Incidentally, the Big Bad Wolf also broke containment. It seemed like he had been part of the meltdown as well. In any case, the only thing that mattered was energy. The orchestra’s curtains covered the energy UI lmaoooo

“Fast playing is so fun,” said HGR.

Finally newbie’s energy filled up, and he instantly hit “end day” (with a penalty of all his LOB for breaching abnormalities. It’s fine, he’s resetting this anyway). Another successful day at Lobotomy Corporation!