So yeah, I'm another of the new crowd from Steam, and I figured I might as well ask a few things here, share a few thoughts as well, all in hopes of introducing myself and getting some knowledge in the process!
-The questions!-
Like many, I have found I suck at combat, and the game's AI seems to lack a learning curve. I've lost virtually every dogfight I've attempted, and I've only gone as far as Olympia. ...How do I not die? I've read the basics, so I've learned that charging head first is suicide, but even trying to angle my approach and get enemies from their flanks seems to fail, as more often than not someone ends up getting me while I'm busy dealing with someone else.
That said, IS there a better place to get my feet wet in the space combat element of this game?
What's a practical amount of Secondary weapon slots? How many should I have considering I rely on having a lot of equipment slots? (Shield boost, auto repair, tractor beam, jump drive).
-Thoughts/Ideas!-
So yeah, I don't expect to necessarily see any ideas I toss out implemented, but I did feel like sharing a few random thoughts after my initial experience with Evochron.
-1 missile per secondary slot? Seems kinda restrictive, though I can kinda understand the logic when you look at how hard a single missile can hit. Has any thought been given to having different secondary weapons besides the standard missiles and torpedoes? IE, micromissiles that can have multiple rounds attached to one slot, but hit for only a small fraction of what a regular missile does? What about rocket pods for quickly saturating an area in unguided explosive ordinance?
-For an open galaxy, it feels kinda dead and lifeless since the only chatter is gibberish. I read this will be somewhat addressed in the next patch, though that leads me into a few other things regarding life in Evochron.
-No illegal/contraband trading? This has always been an interesting thing for me: Running contraband that sells well, but runs the risk of attracting unwanted trouble if military finds you carrying it. You'd think there'd be some place in the Evochron universe where narcotics or other illegal substances would be in high demand. Of course, if this WERE an option, one would also need to have a faction (Navy probably?) scan ships for contraband.
-Combat AI difficulty curve. Though apparently this is also being addressed for Evochron's expansion. I can understand having to grasp some of the basics of Evochron's physics before going into combat, but there doesn't seem to be a learning curve...It's more like a steep 90 degree incline. If you don't know how to do all the fancy stuff the guides explain, you get yourself beaten down by the weakest enemies in the game.
-Primary slots seem awfully restrictive as well. One beam, one particle? It seems like that really limits what one can do, since I'd likely want a rapid particle cannon for dogfighting, and something stronger for slower targets like capital ships. That just seems a bit odd to me.
-Mission payouts in the beginning seem rather unbalanced compared to the profits you can make mining. I could have cleaned solar arrays for 10000 apiece. Instead, I bought 5 cargo bays, a mining/tractor beam, and went to the local asteroid field. From there, I mined and sold stacks of Platinum for 32800 each, getting over 150,000 in profit for just sitting in an asteroid field with my tractor beam set to automatic. When just ONE stack of a commodity outweighs the pay of any job you can take, what's the point of a job in the first place?
Anyway, hope I didn't come off as too much of a ranter, I just tend to talk a lot. I do enjoy Evochron, and hope to enjoy it more when I learn how to stop being blown up by every Rebel I come across.
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
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RetroNutcase
- Ensign
- Posts: 4
- Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2012 8:05 am
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Flying Brick
- Lieutenant
- Posts: 115
- Joined: Thu Jun 30, 2011 7:36 am
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
Hi RetroNutcase, and welcome!
No worries, we welcome Nutcases from Steam or from anywhere else in an equally-friendly manner!
The questions:
Short answer is that you WILL get better with practice. Seriously. I suck at combat too, as my name implies, but I used to suck a lot more! One way to improve is to hop online, and ask for help practicing: people are very nice and will help you; there's also the turret gunner mode, which can also help while flying with a good pilot.
Following the IMG quest is probably a good idea, since it exposes a lot of interesting things about the game (places, items, etc) that you may have a hard time finding on your own otherwise.
You may want to play around in a WarZone; counterintuitively, those contracts may be easier than civilian ones, because the Vonari don't get reinforcements that much if you hang around and take your time finishing the contract. For civvy ones, reinforcements fly in all the time, and you may have a harder time fighting against too many. So warzones may be easier than hostile systems.
I'll leave specific combat advice to the experts who will chime in later.
A few things that might help: what frame (ship) are you using? The earlier ones are a bit fragile, so you may want to save up on some money and buy a beefier one, and also outfit it with some decent equipment.
Try the auto-cm launcher; some people hate it, but give it a shot and see if it helps your personal style; if it does, it's one less thing to focus in the heat of the battle, and you can focus on shooting and flying.
The general idea, which you seem to have already, is not to use IDS (use inertial mode only) in battles, to fly just "grazing" the group, and fly at relatively high speeds. Look at the missile speeds - fastest missile is 1800, so you never ever need to fly faster than that; but the AI doesn't use the fastest missiles...
On the other hand, if you're crawling around at 400, you'll get shot down faster than you can say "Vonari". Try flying past the edge of the enemy group at around 1000 or so, and shoot when in range. You should be able to kill 1 red per pass, or close enough (sometimes the other green ships around will also help finish them off).
Missiles: there's a replenishing missile pack, dunno if you've spotted it yet. Stuff like micromissiles and such could have potential. Vice is always considering feedback from the players - in fact, that's one of the most awesome things about him and the game - he adds new features that are actually based on player feedback!
Micromissiles sound cool to me, the only issue, as ever, is balance - we don't want something that everybody would choose, and nobody would ever choose any other weapons.
You might be happy to hear that the expansion will let you customize your primary weapon design!
You may want to put some of these suggestions in the "Things you'd like to see in future updates" thread, in the EM subforum:
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7616
I definitely like some of them, and putting them there will certainly spark some discussion and analysis.
Weapons vs capital ships: there certainly are _very_ powerful weapons, that you may like to use against cap ships. Some players don't even use them at all, because they consider them overpowered
The contraband idea is nice, from a roleplaying pov, I agree; in practical terms, tbh, I am not sure how much of a difference it would actually make in practical terms. Please allow me to explain (and understand that this is simply a very subjective opinion, it doesn't mean the idea is poor). As you pointed out, one of the main attractions of smuggling (other than from a roleplaying perspective), is that it's profitable (unless you get caught). However, in EM, money is really not an issue, you can easily get very rich very fast, so the practical appeal of contraband isn't really there. To give you an idea of how rich, there was a contest a couple of months ago, and one of the players was kind enough to offer the cash prizes of about 10 billion.
That being said, I do agree that it might add a nice touch of roleplaying to the game, and maybe add a new type of mission that some factions might give you.
If you think that making money off of mining is "unbalanced", I think you'll have a heart attack when you discover the "real" money-making ways
(I'm not kidding)
Seriously speaking, here's a few thoughts/comments on your suggestion/question. This has been an issue that sparked some discussion, and comes up now and then. One of the arguments (which I strongly tend to agree with) stems from the fact that EM is primarily a sandbox, a freeform space sim. The reason why money is not an issue is because some players (myself included) don't want the constant hassle of being poor (I get enough of that in real life), and like to acquire a sufficient amount of money easily enough so that afterwards, I can do whatever I like in the game without having to worry about money. (This is also why you don't lose money upon dying). Some people want combat only, others like mining, there's a surprising amount of people who explore, others like populating systems with their own stations and changing reputations, and so on. Not having to worry about money allows you the freedom to actually do any of these things.
You will also note that the ways to get super-rich are not really revealed to the player in the first 5 minutes of playing. I think overall there's a very good balance of allowing a player to gradually make enough money to be able to buy whatever they want, without becoming absurdly rich (although that's also a possibility, if you want to, but you have to dig a little bit...)
That being said, kudos to you for identifying better ways than what was obvious, with mining. There are even better ones
Also, another important thing: mission payout _scales_ with your - not sure, but I think it's wealth. So, the richer you get, or the higher your civilian rank is, the more (some) prices and payoffs increase. For instance, ships (frames) and equipment will always cost the same, but things like docking fees will increase with your rank, the same with hangar fees. Mission payouts will also increase - I get some 200k for a single waypoint mission right now, for example. Haven't done civvy contracts in a while, but they also scale.
So, as you can see, even though I'm far from being actually rich, I can already make more profit in a regular contract than you can do by mining - and the _only_ reason for that is my civilian rank. I don't remember how much I'd get from cleaning a solar array, but it's more than 100k by now. Multiple waypoint military contracts net me some 500k, iirc. So payouts will increase, don't worry.
And you'll find other ways to make more money, as well
Finally, about combat: look, I still suck at it. But currently, I don't really die unless I get careless, and I can kill about one enemy per run. There are players who finish one combat contract in a few minutes, as opposed to 10 or so that I need.
Another suggestion for combat: hire wingmen. They cost you, but they'll help in combat, and make things easier for you.
You might find Mecingo's videos helpful, as well. I'm nowhere near that level of skill, but the point I was trying to make is that even if you're mediocre like me, you can kill stuff without problems, it just takes a little practice, honestly. You _will_ get better. I was like you, getting killed every single time - and so was everyone else here!
Get a beefier ship, better eq, hire wingmen, only use inertial, skim the edge of the pack, fly fast, use missiles when desperate, and things will start falling into place, I guarantee!
Here's a link to Mecingo's combat training videos:
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8326
edit: to clarify, the "glide by the edge of the pack at high speed" style is not the best, or most efficient - but it's extremely safe. You said that your problem was dying a lot, this helps a lot with that - basically, you'll never die, but you'll be slow in killing the enemies.
Don't skimp on CMs, throw them down whenever you hear missiles closing (you'll get good enough to only need 1 per missile later on). Or better yet, you can do what other folks do: you can shoot down incoming missiles.
Also remember that you can refuel/restock during contracts, as long as you don't leave the sector. So if you run out of CMs, which you may if you use the Auto-CM launcher, you can just restock. Try the anti-missile system as well, see if it fits your style.
Otherwise, like I said, fly past the edge of the pack, strafe, use inertial, lateral speed, and shoot at the bad guys
Good luck, and be safe!
[Edited on 1-21-2012 by Flying Brick]
No worries, we welcome Nutcases from Steam or from anywhere else in an equally-friendly manner!
The questions:
Short answer is that you WILL get better with practice. Seriously. I suck at combat too, as my name implies, but I used to suck a lot more! One way to improve is to hop online, and ask for help practicing: people are very nice and will help you; there's also the turret gunner mode, which can also help while flying with a good pilot.
Following the IMG quest is probably a good idea, since it exposes a lot of interesting things about the game (places, items, etc) that you may have a hard time finding on your own otherwise.
You may want to play around in a WarZone; counterintuitively, those contracts may be easier than civilian ones, because the Vonari don't get reinforcements that much if you hang around and take your time finishing the contract. For civvy ones, reinforcements fly in all the time, and you may have a harder time fighting against too many. So warzones may be easier than hostile systems.
I'll leave specific combat advice to the experts who will chime in later.
A few things that might help: what frame (ship) are you using? The earlier ones are a bit fragile, so you may want to save up on some money and buy a beefier one, and also outfit it with some decent equipment.
Try the auto-cm launcher; some people hate it, but give it a shot and see if it helps your personal style; if it does, it's one less thing to focus in the heat of the battle, and you can focus on shooting and flying.
The general idea, which you seem to have already, is not to use IDS (use inertial mode only) in battles, to fly just "grazing" the group, and fly at relatively high speeds. Look at the missile speeds - fastest missile is 1800, so you never ever need to fly faster than that; but the AI doesn't use the fastest missiles...
On the other hand, if you're crawling around at 400, you'll get shot down faster than you can say "Vonari". Try flying past the edge of the enemy group at around 1000 or so, and shoot when in range. You should be able to kill 1 red per pass, or close enough (sometimes the other green ships around will also help finish them off).
Missiles: there's a replenishing missile pack, dunno if you've spotted it yet. Stuff like micromissiles and such could have potential. Vice is always considering feedback from the players - in fact, that's one of the most awesome things about him and the game - he adds new features that are actually based on player feedback!
Micromissiles sound cool to me, the only issue, as ever, is balance - we don't want something that everybody would choose, and nobody would ever choose any other weapons.
You might be happy to hear that the expansion will let you customize your primary weapon design!
You may want to put some of these suggestions in the "Things you'd like to see in future updates" thread, in the EM subforum:
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7616
I definitely like some of them, and putting them there will certainly spark some discussion and analysis.
Weapons vs capital ships: there certainly are _very_ powerful weapons, that you may like to use against cap ships. Some players don't even use them at all, because they consider them overpowered
The contraband idea is nice, from a roleplaying pov, I agree; in practical terms, tbh, I am not sure how much of a difference it would actually make in practical terms. Please allow me to explain (and understand that this is simply a very subjective opinion, it doesn't mean the idea is poor). As you pointed out, one of the main attractions of smuggling (other than from a roleplaying perspective), is that it's profitable (unless you get caught). However, in EM, money is really not an issue, you can easily get very rich very fast, so the practical appeal of contraband isn't really there. To give you an idea of how rich, there was a contest a couple of months ago, and one of the players was kind enough to offer the cash prizes of about 10 billion.
That being said, I do agree that it might add a nice touch of roleplaying to the game, and maybe add a new type of mission that some factions might give you.
If you think that making money off of mining is "unbalanced", I think you'll have a heart attack when you discover the "real" money-making ways
(I'm not kidding)Seriously speaking, here's a few thoughts/comments on your suggestion/question. This has been an issue that sparked some discussion, and comes up now and then. One of the arguments (which I strongly tend to agree with) stems from the fact that EM is primarily a sandbox, a freeform space sim. The reason why money is not an issue is because some players (myself included) don't want the constant hassle of being poor (I get enough of that in real life), and like to acquire a sufficient amount of money easily enough so that afterwards, I can do whatever I like in the game without having to worry about money. (This is also why you don't lose money upon dying). Some people want combat only, others like mining, there's a surprising amount of people who explore, others like populating systems with their own stations and changing reputations, and so on. Not having to worry about money allows you the freedom to actually do any of these things.
You will also note that the ways to get super-rich are not really revealed to the player in the first 5 minutes of playing. I think overall there's a very good balance of allowing a player to gradually make enough money to be able to buy whatever they want, without becoming absurdly rich (although that's also a possibility, if you want to, but you have to dig a little bit...)
That being said, kudos to you for identifying better ways than what was obvious, with mining. There are even better ones
Also, another important thing: mission payout _scales_ with your - not sure, but I think it's wealth. So, the richer you get, or the higher your civilian rank is, the more (some) prices and payoffs increase. For instance, ships (frames) and equipment will always cost the same, but things like docking fees will increase with your rank, the same with hangar fees. Mission payouts will also increase - I get some 200k for a single waypoint mission right now, for example. Haven't done civvy contracts in a while, but they also scale.
So, as you can see, even though I'm far from being actually rich, I can already make more profit in a regular contract than you can do by mining - and the _only_ reason for that is my civilian rank. I don't remember how much I'd get from cleaning a solar array, but it's more than 100k by now. Multiple waypoint military contracts net me some 500k, iirc. So payouts will increase, don't worry.
And you'll find other ways to make more money, as well
Finally, about combat: look, I still suck at it. But currently, I don't really die unless I get careless, and I can kill about one enemy per run. There are players who finish one combat contract in a few minutes, as opposed to 10 or so that I need.
Another suggestion for combat: hire wingmen. They cost you, but they'll help in combat, and make things easier for you.
You might find Mecingo's videos helpful, as well. I'm nowhere near that level of skill, but the point I was trying to make is that even if you're mediocre like me, you can kill stuff without problems, it just takes a little practice, honestly. You _will_ get better. I was like you, getting killed every single time - and so was everyone else here!
Get a beefier ship, better eq, hire wingmen, only use inertial, skim the edge of the pack, fly fast, use missiles when desperate, and things will start falling into place, I guarantee!
Here's a link to Mecingo's combat training videos:
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8326
edit: to clarify, the "glide by the edge of the pack at high speed" style is not the best, or most efficient - but it's extremely safe. You said that your problem was dying a lot, this helps a lot with that - basically, you'll never die, but you'll be slow in killing the enemies.
Don't skimp on CMs, throw them down whenever you hear missiles closing (you'll get good enough to only need 1 per missile later on). Or better yet, you can do what other folks do: you can shoot down incoming missiles.
Also remember that you can refuel/restock during contracts, as long as you don't leave the sector. So if you run out of CMs, which you may if you use the Auto-CM launcher, you can just restock. Try the anti-missile system as well, see if it fits your style.
Otherwise, like I said, fly past the edge of the pack, strafe, use inertial, lateral speed, and shoot at the bad guys
Good luck, and be safe!
[Edited on 1-21-2012 by Flying Brick]
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Maarschalk
- Captain
- Posts: 7641
- Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:24 am
- Location: USA, Also check your six!
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
Hi RetroNutcase, welcome to the game and forum...Hope to see you out there some time!...
Flying Brick makes excelent points for a Brick that can Fly that is......
:P:P:P:P:P
Flying Brick makes excelent points for a Brick that can Fly that is......
:P:P:P:P:PArvoch Alliance Stat:
Evochron Legends Stats:
Evochron Mercenary Stats:
Darkness is the absence of Light as Evil is the absence of Good
Evochron Legends Stats:
Evochron Mercenary Stats:
Darkness is the absence of Light as Evil is the absence of Good
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Dengar
- Lieutenant
- Posts: 293
- Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 9:30 pm
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
RetroNutCase
Mr MuchTalk is correct. Practise makes perfect.
I am very impressed with the way Flying Brick put that post together. Lots of good advise in there. Must have taken ages to compose, so kudos to you Flying Brick.
Regarding combat, try going MP and there you will find the old lot will help you out and even be your targets if you ask them nicely.
See you out there sometime
Mr MuchTalk is correct. Practise makes perfect.
I am very impressed with the way Flying Brick put that post together. Lots of good advise in there. Must have taken ages to compose, so kudos to you Flying Brick.
Regarding combat, try going MP and there you will find the old lot will help you out and even be your targets if you ask them nicely.
See you out there sometime
-
Flying Brick
- Lieutenant
- Posts: 115
- Joined: Thu Jun 30, 2011 7:36 am
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
Just to clarify, pretty much _none_ of the info I gave is "mine", or discovered/figured out by myself. All of it comes from other, older, more experienced players on this forum. I wish I could give each of them credit, but unfortunately I can't really remember what I learned from whom; whenever I can though, I try to link back to their posts so people can read their advice in the original context.
So apologies to all those I "stole" the ideas from, and thank you all for being so helpful.
The kudos all goes to you folks who have been sharing your ideas and experience - I'm little more than a newbie with a penchant for thoroughness
(Well, that, and a flying brick, of course)
So apologies to all those I "stole" the ideas from, and thank you all for being so helpful.
The kudos all goes to you folks who have been sharing your ideas and experience - I'm little more than a newbie with a penchant for thoroughness
(Well, that, and a flying brick, of course
)-
Busch
- Captain
- Posts: 1468
- Joined: Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:07 am
- Location: Portland, OR. West Coast, USA
Yet another Steam newbie with questions and thoughts!
Yo Retro! Welcome aboard! F-B has given some excellent advice, no matter where he gathered it. It does just take time and effort on your part. Practise, practise, practise! Is way you get to Carnegie Hall ! :P:P:P:P 
:P:P:P:P 
Commander
[SW] Clan Squadron Lead - Retired
Call Sign: Busch
[SW] Clan Squadron Lead - Retired
Call Sign: Busch