Day 10, hostile systems are a pain.
I kept following the main quest and it got me to go to Cerulean - Really? Skip Onyx completely then. Great. Okay. Olympus straight to Cerulean. Sure I can handle it.
A warning, the missions get a LOT more difficult here, now going for around 140k credits and being tricky like 'scan this ship while other ships constantly fly in and attack you'. This is a SERIOUSLY hostile system in that if you wait around, you'll have a dozen ships around you within a few minutes. And they're not light ships either.
Thankfully I found a C14 cannon on sale in one of the markets. 570 range - YAY so upgrading cannons doesn't mean forever diminishing range. There is light at the end of the tunnel yet! It WAS a few hundred thou but my current cannon also sold for a few hundred thou so I didn't pay a great deal for it overall. Considering I got over 100 range and double damage, I'm not complaining.
But man is everything EXPENSIVE in this system, geez. I went in with a full hold of diamonds - literally, all slots full of 18-19 diamonds. These sold for about 3k per diamond in Cerulean so I made quite a tidy profit from that. The downside is all the upgrades are also overpriced.
Additionally there's some more upgrades and a regenrative missile pack?? Wow! I want one. I don't have 3.5mill credits though so I'll have to wait.
I did some testing on managing cargo and I can't find anything you can do with commodities except dump or sell them. Maybe Alt+right click might do something but I ran out of stuff to test it on. I do know now that you can put weapons into your cargo holds while docked by right clicking though so that's cool.
Another neat little trick I found awhile ago but keep forgetting to mention is the IDS scale - check your keyboard config for it. This allows you to increase the maximum speed you can go while IDS is active. Why they bothered with it is beyond me but oh well. I bump it up to 2X so my max speed is safely within planetary speed limits and I can just cruise to the dock.
I think I'm getting the hang of navigation too - you can zoom out and click the Text button on the right to switch on all text, then the button under that cycles the various types of object. So you can switch text on only for gates so you can see where you need to go next. This unfortunately overlaps each other and is pushed around by the borders of the screen so when you can read it it's often still a mission to find what it's marking, but it's easier than flicking through each sector.
Showing posts with label navigation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label navigation. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Day 4 (Navigation)
Day 4 dawns in-... wait... Are there days in space? Screw it.
So today I tried multiplayer. It was actually not so different from single player except sometimes people talked. Mostly they didn't care to answer newbie questions and when they did they were sometimes wrong (see day 3, R = fire rate). It was generally nice to have some background conversation however and to see other people playing, and it seems to make no difference to the game whatsoever if you're not playing with anyone. You can still pause and everything, which suspends the status of your ship.
Now one of the guys playing actually sort of sent out his own distress call, basically he'd run out of fuel and was prepared to give a big, shiny expensive mining laser to anyone who could bring him a tank. Problem is he was the other side of the galaxy and I had no clue how the navigation worked. I'd worked my way into Olympus after thoroughly researching the subject so I could play taxi (ended up with 90k in my pocket) but travelling that kind of distance was beyond me and again, nobody was keen to help. Oddly enough not even the stranded guy.
So I had a better look at the nav map and found the Quadrant button. This showed me the general path I had to take to get there as it shows each sector and how it connects to other sectors by wormholes. This didn't tell me where the wormholes were however nor do the wormholes tell you which sector they're in. Helpful.
So I returned to Sector view and tried browsing through for wormhole gates - I don't know if you've noticed but there's a slight lag in it loading the next map, which is agonising when you're flicking through them. OH! There's a zoom out button on the left. Let's try that. Okay, now I can see where the wormholes are, but I can no longer get information by hovering over them.
Seriously? My first gripe with this game. True, navigation is difficult in three dimensions and they've done reasonably well with it, but this is just painful. You can zoom out, look for the wormholes, note their position relative to you, and scroll over to them. THEN you can get the details.
Alternatively there's an interactive map, http://mercenary.junholt.se/ which you can search for objects in. Very helpful, but I still couldn't work out where the gate I needed was and then someone else got to the stranded guy. Oh well.
As this is the section on Navigation I will add some more tips I worked out later; You can check the SX, SY and SZ coordinates for each sector from the Quadrant map, identify the one you want, then look for the gate with roughly those coordinates. It's roundabout but seems to work. If you can work out how to use the Junholt map then that's good too, I haven't really bothered with it yet.
So today I tried multiplayer. It was actually not so different from single player except sometimes people talked. Mostly they didn't care to answer newbie questions and when they did they were sometimes wrong (see day 3, R = fire rate). It was generally nice to have some background conversation however and to see other people playing, and it seems to make no difference to the game whatsoever if you're not playing with anyone. You can still pause and everything, which suspends the status of your ship.
Now one of the guys playing actually sort of sent out his own distress call, basically he'd run out of fuel and was prepared to give a big, shiny expensive mining laser to anyone who could bring him a tank. Problem is he was the other side of the galaxy and I had no clue how the navigation worked. I'd worked my way into Olympus after thoroughly researching the subject so I could play taxi (ended up with 90k in my pocket) but travelling that kind of distance was beyond me and again, nobody was keen to help. Oddly enough not even the stranded guy.
So I had a better look at the nav map and found the Quadrant button. This showed me the general path I had to take to get there as it shows each sector and how it connects to other sectors by wormholes. This didn't tell me where the wormholes were however nor do the wormholes tell you which sector they're in. Helpful.
So I returned to Sector view and tried browsing through for wormhole gates - I don't know if you've noticed but there's a slight lag in it loading the next map, which is agonising when you're flicking through them. OH! There's a zoom out button on the left. Let's try that. Okay, now I can see where the wormholes are, but I can no longer get information by hovering over them.
Seriously? My first gripe with this game. True, navigation is difficult in three dimensions and they've done reasonably well with it, but this is just painful. You can zoom out, look for the wormholes, note their position relative to you, and scroll over to them. THEN you can get the details.
Alternatively there's an interactive map, http://mercenary.junholt.se/ which you can search for objects in. Very helpful, but I still couldn't work out where the gate I needed was and then someone else got to the stranded guy. Oh well.
As this is the section on Navigation I will add some more tips I worked out later; You can check the SX, SY and SZ coordinates for each sector from the Quadrant map, identify the one you want, then look for the gate with roughly those coordinates. It's roundabout but seems to work. If you can work out how to use the Junholt map then that's good too, I haven't really bothered with it yet.
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