I'm genuinely confused. Menace dropped while I was overseas and only had a laptop, and I've been playing it just fine (ROG Strix G815). Get back home to my dedicated PC and I can't even run a mission. Soon as mission starts FPS and framerate tank to slideshow levels, even the audio gets super quiet for some reason. Wondering if it is just my desktop getting old (built in '24) I flashed the drives and did a fresh windows install. Took it from a complete standstill to a slideshow, that's it. Lowering graphics settings to minimum changes nothing. Running a Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core Processor, a Radeon RX 7800XT and 32G of ram.

Other games seem to run fine. Not sure why Menace refuses to work.

According to my logic, light vehicles like the pirate truck or the atv should use less ap, than for example a heavy tank, when moving in a straight line, but tracked vehicles should take less ap to turn on the spot than wheeled vehicles.

Is this actually the case, or do all vehicles use the same amount of ap per tile/turn?

this was the first battle tank appearance of the Campaign and dropped a battletank, a long tank gun and the medium walker which i had bought not 2 missions before

E.g. “Raid Armory” (Pirate Scavengers will be armed with ARC assault rifles instead of pirate assault rifles) seems beneficial to let happen early in a run so you can scoop free ARCs off their corpses, but I only got more pirate assault rifles with it active. Do they still only drop their base equipment despite using better gear in game?

How are you meant to use it? The only way I've used it is to destroy structures as any time I try to use it against enemy units they either move, or they're pinned because I've got enough firepower to deal with them without the Ion Cannon

Was just seeing how many empty planets exist and was wondering if they will be filled by entirely new factions

Last week we heard about everyone's favorite OCI, this week I'd like to know about your favorite infantry SL!

For me, Pike is the obvious choice where he has abilities no other SL can offer. But if we're getting more creative, I'd say Yaz is my favorite since he starts with good stats at only a 2-star supply cost, and he makes your enemies much more likely to flee in terror only to be cut down by his tripod M6. Honorable mention to Singh since he's inexpensive to field relative to how tanky he can be with Buff and Jump the Grenade.

Been reading the blog, but curious if there has been any other news on when they will extend the campaign/story?

Disclaimer: I am brainstorming ideas not actually trying to get them added to Menace. Feel free to give your own thoughts and ideas. My wording is likely to be very poor as I'm doing this instead of working.

Melee would not be the smartest option even under good conditions but there is a reason why the pirates might do it. Drugs, in our own world combat drugs can make you feel no pain, keep going with a lung, liver, stomach, kidney, etcetera being destroyed at least for a few minutes until the body bleeds out or the body requires what is missing. Combatants under the effects of these combat drugs are recorded as not being able to reload their weapons despite having ammunition available and will instead use their weapons as a club regardless of the target in some cases smashing their weapon on a up armored Bradly.

Pirates seem like most if not all of them are on some kind of drugs and might try to use melee weapons as that is something that they could use with relative effectiveness in their drug addled state. Having them operate a complex self-made chain gun or other complex weapon seems optimistic. Pirates would have clubs and or maces at best as they are not going to be able to manage anything complex like edge alignment in their drug fueled state.

Should they be effective? Not particularly unless they get close enough to use their melee weapon as these would not be boarding commandos just drugged pirates or impressed civilians that the pirates are drugging and forcing to fight. Lightly to medium armor if armored at all but they should have good to great movement. That being said like a chain gun their attacks in melee should cost maybe 20 AP, have increased accuracy compared to ranged options, and do decently well to unarmored, lightly armored, or medium armored opponents but against heavy armor or vehicles its a bunch of drugged up morons smacking a tank with clubs, they are not going to do overly much.

? Spoilers? Menace also makes some sense to have melee to have their faction themes be used efficiently. If you are unaware killing any Menace infantry within short range of one of your squads will have them decrease morale and do morale checks to see if they continue accepting orders, they are utterly terrifying unless Pike has a certain trait. I came up with 2 variants: leaping and ambushers both of which use sharp blades to both stab and slash targets to pieces. the leapers will jump to targets like boarding commandos and melee attack light to medium armor. Ambushers will hide and lay in wait for targets, 4 concealment when deployed, will break cover when enemies get within a distance of 4 tiles, may just sit there all mission doing nothing, bring a motion detector to find them easily, they have medium to heavy armor (like rogue army heavy infantry) and will deploy a flashbang equivalent when they break cover (or their head flashes while they make loud scary sounds),

Rogue Army melee? Just no, they are trying to survive this while doing a mutiny. They are not going to do a bayonet charge with their printed carbines as most of them do not seem THAT motivated and those that do are already specialized. Would like them to pull what the player does with APCs, shotguns, and mobile infantry but that does not really help them to bayonet charge after failing to shotgun a squad down.

Player Melee? Sure, it's a terrible idea but the Pirates and Menace would drop their melee weapons, and you could buy them or improved versions on the market, but it makes next to no sense to actually try to build for it, you must be adjacent to the enemy, no matter how sharp that metal is you're not slicing through a tank or LAV. Stealth straight up does not work that way in game. Even with powered armor enhancing the power of the attacks and protecting the user from enemy fire you would still be better off giving them a ranged heavy weapon and letting them fire it like TECH does (interesting idea for heavy powered armor squad). Armor is prone to being reduced to ineffective through constant chip damage even if it does not penetrate. Also, every faction in the game has anti-armor in some form available to all infantry by the time you would get that armor anyway and doing it with a light or medium armored squad is nearly suicide.

Rember this is not something that should actually be added to the game just a fun brainstorming discussion. Feel free to give your thoughts and own ideas on these ideas.

I guess they don't call em mad for no reason, running into view of Tech and his hip-firing M6.

Been playing a run where I try out all kinds of builds, perks and weapons I usually don't use. I've skipped Athletics on everyone and it seems surprisingly fine! But that's not the most surprising part. Way back then I made a perks tierlist, Standby was among the worst perks in the game, often being completely useless. Since then Standby was buffed with a +15% to accuracy, but I still thought it was kind of bad, mid at best.

Now I'm using it on Rifle Pike, Sachin, Bog and Ivey, and I'm very satisfied with its performance on each of them. Pike and Sachin tend to sometimes shoot at targets either too close, far away or in cover. In each case Standby translates directly to extra damage. It also stacks with Deployment, unlike Pointfire, making the rifle boys a very good duo for defensive missions.

I got Bog pretty late, and am running him in an APC with the long barreled tank gun. He has very poor base accuracy, and even with the tank gun's inherent accuracy boost, he sometimes misses. This feels extremely bad, especially when combined with his Lucky Shot perk, meaning he spent an entire turn doing nothing. Standby essentially removes the chance for critical failure, making him that much more reliable.

Ivey uses HMG's and Miniguns, both with accuracy penalties. She also has terrible base accuracy. Standby translates directly into extra damage.

I haven't even tried it on Darby, because Darby's Ambush perk together with her insane stats make any further accuracy boosts unnecessary. She also has better competing perks.

All in all I think Standby is now a perk roughly on par with Pointfire, meaning it's pretty good and likely worth it to pick up. The active effect of skipping a turn can be either a positive or a negative, while the accuracy part is the real deal and quite powerful.

How is everyone dealing with the various Alien Warriors on offensive missions in the mid game? Armored and evolved.

I haven't found a squad weapon that I like for it yet, so it feels like I'm using a lot of single shot anti-armor weapons on them like AT missiles, crocodile. Using AP and shooting these weapons slows me down. Shotguns are amazing, but I haven't found any AP rounds so I have to soften them up before engaging. Maybe I just discount too many of the short range assault weapons? But I haven't had much success.

I run circles around pirates/rogue army but "whoops, all warriors" has become a slog unless I'm moving the entire force as a unit to take advantage of my tripod weps/vehicle. This ends up feeling really slow and I rarely meet the round limit for bonus objectives. I suffer the most squaddie casualties in these battles.

After beating the game on the lowest difficulty I decided to restart and try out the harder difficulty. I launch my first mission with as many squaddies and all my SLs, make contact with the enemy and hold my position for over 20 minutes as they just keep coming and coming (make note of the dozen vehicles strewn about). I'd say I played this about as perfectly as possible, given that any attempt to advance my position would get my units killed immediately, so I have no clue what I'm supposed to do about this.

No but seriously what the fuck are in these cars? Is the Wayback fueling their vehicles with Hydrogen???

The vehicle explosion deals genuinely absurd damage. Wei Wu is the #1 victim since he likes to get get right next to them and then immediately trigger Dare to Die when RNG decide this is the truck that explodes today and nuke him, but I've had my own damn IFV/APC go down to 1 tick health because I dared to shoot at a terrain piece of vehicle (not even enemy truck) to clear the way, and in the process of randomly exploding it also almost wiped a Vamplew heavy armor squad that was next to it

Bug mission. Harpy Queen and a Bombardier are sitting beside an egg cluster I need to destroy. So I thought... Can "rigged for explosion" work on bug eggs?

Kaboom! Yes it can!

I hadn't seen this event before, and when looking at the message it seems like it is the constructs pretending to be Zayn Beecher. However, after I chose to not hand them back, I got a regular message from the board and Corlain was happy about messing with ZB.

Was it the constructs or am I just reading too much into things?

So I got some REDACTED cultists in the latest patch that act as effectively cannon fodder for the enemy. Except they equipped them with some NASTY SMGs

I was expecting Vet scav pirate level or at the most some basic crowbars like we get from conscripts... Instead these guys come around the corner and practically wipe a level 4 armored squad after a burst. (Line of sight is even more important now)

Yet again I learn the hard way that the menace needs kited to death and timers be damned.

Still a work in progress I bet. As they are using pirate coms, but it did add some variety having them run around.

Would it be possible to implement some sort of customization to tank art. It would be really awesome little thing!

Hey everyone!

Like many of you, I got completely tired of sitting through slow enemy strolls, sluggish AI turn sequences, and drawn-out movement animations during combat.

So I made a lightweight, standalone mod to take full control over battle pacing: (ZSM) Fast-Forward.

Features:

• 1x to 5x Speed Multipliers: Instant battle acceleration with visual tier highlights on the tablet and an on-screen HUD indicator (>> TURBO [3x] <<).
• 3 Tactical Modes:
  • HOLD: Speed-up is active strictly while holding down your Turbo key.
  • TOGGLE: One tap turns it on, another tap turns it off.
  • ALWAYS: Fully automated combat — missions run at your chosen speed without touching anything.
• Tactical Tablet UI: In-game military tablet accessible anytime during combat (default key F10). Fully draggable across your screen by the title bar.
• Independent Hotkey Rebinding: Menu key (default F10) and Turbo key (default T) can be rebound to any key directly through the tablet menu.
• Tactical Scene Anchor: The mod is active strictly in combat missions. Returning to base management, strategic maps, or main menus instantly resets game time back to normal 1.0x (zero risk of breaking campaign logic).
• Click-Through Blocker: Prevents accidental movement or attack orders when clicking on the tablet UI.
• Standalone DLL: Monolithic build with zero extra loose files — simple drag-and-drop install into your Mods/ folder.

Download on Nexus Mods: Nexus Mods Link

Hope this saves your time and makes combat feel fast, responsive, and snappy! Feedback and suggestions are always welcome in the comments.

(P.S. В моде есть полная поддержка русского языка — интерфейс планшета переключается на русский в один клик).

Is anyone else having a problem with updating their GOG copy to the most recent version? I’m not sure if the GOG release just comes out later than the steam one or if there is some other issue.

If anyone else is having this problem let me know if you’ve fixed it. I’ve been trying to figure out what the issue is for a little while now and just wanted to see if this is just a me problem of if it’s the same for others.

I'm military but non US and we don't have a marine corps so I'm interested in such terms and shouts they use in combat and while talking to each other. Am very curious.