During my last play through with Vault City, it escaped my notice that the developers have been directly buffing implants for the Old World Blues mod.
But the research tree tells you that cybernetic warfare is a bad idea. Sounds like a plan for me.
Only Twin Mothers and Vault City can even use this kind of technology. Since I've never played Twin Mother before, why not take this very land for it?
The nation's premise is simple: A female researcher is loaded into a pre-war supercomputer, and she later controls a primitive tribe. Cybernetic amazons warriors with laser rifles. Fun idea, let's go!
The start in the wasteland is the same as so often. Start training, research and economy and five speed.
Since the army did not have the equipment yet, I first played the waiting game and started building up internally. Oh man, if I had known that this would have been the stupidest idea of all.
After Lanius had conquered my southern neighbor the following event came up directly:
Either give him the opportunity to fraternize or get ready for a fight. Who would say no to another wargoal? Can't be that hard to beat him back to Caeasr!
"Upholding Our Ideals" is the part of the focus tree, which handles this route. Also sounds easier than it is.
Prepared the defenses, trained a bunch of people, built outposts to lvl 4 and then we were in battle quite fast.
Okay not 51, but 7. This took me 7 Years.
Lanius did throw all the troops against the front line, slowly reducing his manpower. But neither was the process fast enough, nor were my units able to significantly push the enemy.
So I continued to research, train and expand until finally the decisive liberation blow was achieved.
An encirclement of a part of the forces and thus the possibility to finally take Lanius down. But this took such a long time that it hindered the nation as a whole.
After several more researches one had finally reached the end of the implant tree to research and use the Cybernetic Warfare technology!
This event, after cybernetic warfare has been researched, either hinders the production by drowsiness, the stability or one of the bordering states gets a wargoal against you (and also uses it).
Thus, either the production is weaker, which is anyway lame due to the resource-intensive implants, the state collapses and thus (guessed right!) slows down the production again or one of the neighbors beats on you. (Because he probably enjoys being beaten up by amazons cyborgs).
With a few more conquests, however, the country ended up in a dead end. Taking raider states is relatively easy due to superior firepower. But in the end I was caught between Heaven's Gate, Commonwealth (successor to Casear's Legion) and the Provisional Republic of Texas (the Texan Brotherhood).
I have tried to fight all three of these battles, but there is always a lack of production of the implants or robots. (Yes I have included also robots, due the lower manpower needs and it's not so ressource intensive like the implants, but it wasn't enough.)
There is simply not enough production capacity to field a large enough army against those states.
I think the fault probably lies in passivity at the beginning, earlier conquests would have given more breathing room for later, but oh well.
I suspect I'll stick with robots after all.
Guess it's time to let the Lucky 38 expand a bit further than just in the Mojave.