Day 10, is that it?
Well I finished the campaign today. Well that's not strictly true. I collected the missions while another player flew around firing OMGDEATHTOEVERYTHING missiles for me, which made things a LOT easier.
This player was also friendly (and rich) enough to just hand over an Excalibur Regenerative Missile - indeed as I speculated, these missiles only need to be purchased once. There is a few downsides however, you need EIGHT secondary weapon hardpoints to equip them and they have a rather long cooldown. Five minutes sounds about right but time is difficult to keep track of in games. I could rarely use them twice in the same fight at any rate.
The advantage comes in that it fires eight missiles. All at once. Bambambambambambambambam. This is usually enough to kill anything so at the very least I got one opponent down before getting into cannon range. Maybe not worth 3mill (especially since I had to buy a new frame to equip the damn things without sacrificing equipment) but not bad at all.
Coming back to the missions, I highly recommend playing online and asking for help. There is usually a veteran player with nothing better to do so speak up! Most of the missions this point onwards are impossible with standard equipment.
Let's put it this way. There's NO point attacking a cruiser without a Fulcrum Torpedo. It's pointless. You should only need one though, plus a fair distance between you and it when it detonates and you're fine. Sometimes a friendly destroyer or cruiser might jump in and take out its shields but I'd try not to rely on it.
If you get to the point in the campaign where you can't find anyone to help, get a Fulcrum Torpedo. I know they're like 3mill each but better than going nowhere eh? Now you may be wondering what the point in spending a 3mill topedo on a 200k quest is, but fret not - the reward at the end of the questline, well, let's say it's worth it.
I haven't had a chance to run around like a schoolgirl buying everything yet but I'll do that tomorrow. For now, I've worked out that you CAN condense your cargo, I think this even works while not docked, hold the Alt key and right click an item and it will put one unit into the topmost hold of the same item that is not already full.
I also mentioned earlier about a docking fee, I will amend this but docking fees in hostile sectors are recurring - you will pay it every time you dock until you have a better reputation. This apparently takes LOTS of mercenary quests.
Which brings me to factions. Generally picking up things from other players and looking at the News screen, it looks like you've generally got two factions in each sector that work reasonably well together. For example Military protects biological research while Energy profits from it. It will occasionally even mention this. If you do lots of quests for these two factions you will gain favour with them and your system reputation will go up, while those factions (probably) get a higher presence from your assistance.
In this way you can turn a hostile system into a mostly friendly one, however I am told this take MANY many missions so maybe a long term project? The appearance of the station also looks like it designates what faction it is from and so your standing with them will affect the docking fee.
This is all speculation mind you - I haven't yet found any good resources out there on this stuff so take nothing for granted, test and speculate for yourselves!
Next I plan to just screw around with missions and of course upgrade everything, then in awhile I'll go through the Military missions. It looks like it's probably another questline or something, don't know, will look into it. To activate them I just need to equip a military frame, to test this you won't be able to change the colour of it.
