A few things I have learned..

[ColdSteel]

It's been a long time since I posted here. I loved SE4 and making mods and utilities for it. So, when I saw that MM was doing an "Elite" style game I grew quite excited and hopeful.

I have to say that I've really been enjoying the demo so far. It does remind me more of the classic, open ended gameplay of the game 'Elite' than anything else. Love those cargo containers.

A few things I've learned so far:

- Once you've killed a few ships, hit the N key and see if you've gotten enough experience to level up. If you do, you'll see a bunch of "+" marks next to your stats. I didn't see this mentioned in the readme and found it by looking through the various screens randomly. Makes a difference when your hull and armor regenerate, no?

- Don't try to pick up cargo where a ship has crashed into a planet. Even if you're very careful to miss the planet entirely and only touch the cargo container itself you'll still "crash" like you've hit the planet no matter what you do. The collision detection may still need some tweaking there as it seems to treat the cargo as part of the planet. Tractor beams to get the cargo out of planets, asteroids, etc. would be nice.

- For old SE4 hands, the missile dance works just great here as well. Drop one cargo bay and a few shields and load up with two capital missiles and a light weapon or two. Shoot, run. Repeat as needed then close in for the kill.

- Divide and conquer. You can't beat three ships in a furball. Isolate and take out one at a time. Hit and run tactics work very well here. Hanging out near terran warships also helps. Run through warp points or duck into a spaceport for repairs when things look bad.

- Forget the missions, kill pirates and pick up their cargo. Take it back to a spaceport and repair it. Outfit your ship with the best of the pickings and sell the rest. In no time you'll have a well outfitted ship and a ton of cash.

- Don't pick up illegal cargo unless you want to get shot at by the good guys. This is just like Elite. Always check your cargo bay after picking up something and dump the illegal stuff unless you're playing as a pirate.

- Finding ships you're supposed to escort in a system can be very difficult. Maybe there are sensors available later on in the game that help this. One thing I wish MM would do is put a strobe beacon on each ship. Elite had this and it worked great. Even if the ship was way too far away to see, you could still see the ship's strobe light even at great distances. Airplanes all have these. Even the space shuttle has these. Starfury should have these too. Maybe this can be modded?

- Never take on multiple missions at once. The time limits for a lot of the missions (bounty hunter missions in particular) are *way* too short. On bounty hunter missions, even with fast engines and hustling directly to the required system, often the mission will expire before you can even find the stupid pirate ship in question. You'll rarely have time to move on to a new system that's far away and complete that next mission too. So, take them one at a time. I also wish that they would halt the mission timer once you actually engage the ship that you are after in combat. Last night, I was hunting down a tough pirate cruiser that had two destroyer escorts. They all had some high level weapons and the only way I could manage it was to pick off the trailing destroyers one at a time first before engaging the main dog. After a frenzied and long battle, I finally had him beaten with his shields down and his engines gone. Right before I send in the coupe de grace, up pops the *&%* "mission failed" message. I hope MM fixes this or that the mission lengths can be modded to be longer. This one area is the biggest problem I have with the game so far.

Overall, I really, really like this demo and will be purchasing the game. I'm having a bLast. I just love this kind of open-ended, 'Elite' style of gameplay. Privateer and Freelancer just didn't cut it for me for some reason.

Yes, the universe is 2D, the controls are skittish and coming to a sudden stop on a planet or asteroid like you've hit a brick wall can be a bit startling, but this game has wonderful open-ended gameplay and with the extensive modding capabilities thrown in, this could be a whole lot of fun.

Can't wait.

-ColdSteel

[ September 24, 2003, 23:26: Message edited by: ColdSteel ]