Thank God For SE IV.

[Paul1980au]

the downside to movie to game strategy games is mostly - they suck - star wars , star trek lol

Its the smaller titles like SE3-4-5 and Starships unlimited etc that really excel.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Half-life excelled. I still remember the first time a soldier snuck around behind me.

[Randallw]

I thought Galaxies was entertaining enough and I played it for months.Eventually I had a lot of mining facilities and was making respectable money selling my minerals that I found. Meanwhile I was practicing my weapons building skills and becoming an experienced weapons maker. I was stockpiling minerals to use so I could make weapon after weapon and increase my skill. Every few days I logged on to pay the maintenace on my facilites and move them to better positions. Therein lay the problem though. Ok I could practice making a lot of weapons (and when experimenting I don't even have to actually create things) but whats the point. I'd eventually make Master weapons maker, but then so could anyone who spent a week just practicing. One day my Guild moved to another planet to build our guild city. I redeeded all my facilities and took a transport to our new planet. Finished for the day I logged off. I never went back. I realised I had spent the Last 3 weeks logging on every 2-3 days merely to pay maintenance and move my facilities. All my facilities were in my pocket so I had no reason to return to pay maintenance. I had spent 1 1/2 to 2 years waiting for the game to come out and even bought a new computer to handle it. After a few months I just wasn't interested in playing anymore. To explain it in SE4 terms I was in top place (#1) and I just couldn't be bothered making the effort anymore, afterall what was the point I was already at the top.

[Atrocities]

The thing is, it hit me right off as a boring game. I was into it about 15 minutes and realized that it was horribly borning. Run around and shoot sand critters. Ohhhhh what fun.

I had no money, not enough skill to get a job, and I really hated reading everything. Hell people talk in RL so why can't they do it in the game? At least have the basic NP's dialog scripted for talk like in Deus Ex and such.

I wasn't looking for a FPS, I was looking for something fun to do for a long time. SWG just was to borning with an excessive learning curve that sent me into a new demention of pi**ed off that I could hardly imagine.

Not since CIV III had I been any where close to this frustradedly mad. Not even with MOO3, because I bought that game KNOWNING it was going to suck. I just wanted to see it for my self, and learned a valuable lession, NEVER BUY A GAME ON OPENING DAY.. Unless its DOOM, SE, or Tribes.

You should post how you did what you did Randal, it might make for an interesting read. In the mean time, I have truncated the space that this game took back to the HD and am defraging it now. 2.4 gigs is a lot of space for any ONE game.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

2.4 GIGS? Only half-life ever took up more space on my drive, and that was with a bunch of mods. Still, like I said, at least you didn't buy it.

[FLX]

SW galaxies tries to be a mmorpg, but it fails, as many other, due the powerplayers that only play to kill critters (or other players) getting cash to buy better weapons so then they can kill more critters. The point of games like that is the roleplay, never log alone. I've been playing in a NWN server for more than a year with the same character, reaching only the 9th level , because i knew people that enjoy playing the roles of their characters and not to going hunting every five minutes to rise stats and gold.

The point is: mmorpg like swg are social games, if you play alone they're terrible boring, but if you find people that really roleplay, can be quite addictive. On the other hand are the stat-rising players that screw off any game.

btw, why did you downloaded swg if you were looking for a fps?

[Randallw]

Originally posted by Atrocities:

You should post how you did what you did Randal, it might make for an interesting read. In the mean time, I have truncated the space that this game took back to the HD and am defraging it now. 2.4 gigs is a lot of space for any ONE game.

Warning the following goes on for awhile.

If you wish. I'm not doing anything at the moment. I have a terrible memory and its been about a year since I quit, but I'll do my best. First off I didn't go much into the Fighting stuuf as from the beginning I was pursuing a crafting career. My previous MMPORG experience was Ultima and perhaps another game, which to the life of me I can't remember what it was (it may even be that I am confusing my 2 times previous experience before CoH).

Before it shipped I went through the net looking for a PA to join. In fact as SWG has never been released to my knowledge in Australia I needed a fellow PA to send me a copy. Come the time it was released I waited 2 weeks for my copy to arrive. I spent an hour or two getting the avatar to look as much like me as possible. Since I knew where my PA was starting I chose that planet and sprinted across to where all our PA buildings where (Consortia). Until the PA moved I never left my starting planet, and only travelled once across country (I only bought a 1 way ticket to somewhere and then ran home). To pursue my career crafting I needed funds. As a crafter I either started with or knew how to build all the basic equipment. I built a detector to find deposits and a maker to cook food and gathered wheat and fruit. With the ingredients I built cakes etc and sold them on the market. With this money I could afford shuttle tickets. I started with single missions but eventually realised it was more efficient to have 2 or even 3 missions to the same city. In SWG you can get missions delivering disks or trinkets to people (ie. delivery boy. In America I think you have FedEX). Basically get a mission from a terminal. Look at the distance the target is away. Simply look at the map. Say for example one city is 4500 m from where you are, look for missions between 4300-4700 m. After accepting the mission run a couple of hundred meters to the first person and collect the disk or trinket (sometimes it was orders) go to the shuttle port and buy a 2 way ticket to the target city (first check that your estimated waypoint is in the other city. If you made a mistake then just quit the mission). You get a discount for a 2 way ticket, and pay about 100 credits for the 2 way trip (or maybe 200).....but a mission going so far will pay 800-1000 credits. (In other words it will take you longer to run a kilometer out of town for 200 credits than to take the bus 4.5 kilometers in a few seconds (disregarding waiting 10 minutes for the shuttle)) you arrive and run to your waypoint(s) where the recipient says "thakyou very much heres a wad of cash for your time" With these missions finished you get an identical mission in that city to the city you came from and do it again. This is simple and quite frankly hardly any effort. If you want to gain points as a Imperial or Rebel just take that sides delieveries. When you get bored being a gofer buy some fairly good minerals (even this is not necessary, you can always search for deposits and hand mine stuff) and build weapons or stuff (as you build stuff you get xp. Eventually you have enough xp to go up a level. Either pay a trainer or (and this is what I always did) ask a higher level PA memebr if he can spend 5 seconds training you. Your stuff hardly has to be the best in existance, at least when I played there were newbies willing to pay at least twice what it cost you to make (and remember some times you didn't even pay for the components you made yourself), and sometimes If i had found great deposits I charged 3 times the effort (note: when I played it was impossible to charge more than 10000 for anything, at least on the market). Eventually after building cheap stuff and gaining experience I could build Mining facilties and gas gatherers. I even had plenty of money to buy a few premade facilities. I hand gathered the couple of hundred units of minerals to build facilities (you get 1-10 units each time you dig, depending on the percentage of minerals/gas/energy etc in the area you mine. usually 4-7 in my case). Build the facilities and go out into the countryside searching for good sites (heres a hint. If you find a sudden industrial park in the middle of nowhere check your detector to see which mineral everyone discovered). Depending on your skill (or the skill of whoever built your facility) the miner digs a certain amount each 10-15 seconds (again dependant on concentartion).
When I started I made a mistake. You need to pay maintenance on facilities to pay for wear. With my first miner I didn't pay maintenance (why should I, its brand new) and left. Of course after a minute the facility stopped working because it had-.1 maintenance. This hurdle fixed the first time I checked I just left the facility and came back 2 days later picked up my stuff from the hopper and fed more repair money and fuel (you need to also put fuel in facilities. Fuel is also gathered so you eventually build a facility to gether fuel)
Basically add up the maintenance money and fuel cost and charge double for the stuff you make. Sometime if you found 95% good minerals charge triple. I tended to look at what others charged and reduced it by 100 credits. usually I sold minerals/wood/gas/energy for two to three times the units eg 500 units of medium quality wood for 1000 or 900 credits (you make a good profit since the original cost depends on the maintenance and energy bill, and you didn't place your facility on a place with only 20% concentration did you ) Congratulations you have now reached the stage where you need to do bugger all to get rich. Just pay the bills take out all the stuff you mined and sell it or, If you can be bothered actually make things from it. Being set for life spend the rest of your time experimenting on stuff (using you own minerlas ).
Take the minerals, build componments, turn components into product, then sell product, or if you can't be bothered (and you could only have 15 items for sale on the market at a time) tick "experiment" and get 5% extra xp while not bothering to fill your bag with junk (tell me your not using the good stuff to make junk ). You just keep doing this time after time till you have earnt enough xp to get to the top level. I never went this far, when I finished I was a novice weapon smith.
Sometimes I went hunting, but since I was rich and made my own excellent weapons this wasn't hard as long as I didn't get greedy and try to mug a Krayt Dragon.
At the end I spent 2 or 3 weeks doing nothing else but log on to pay maintenance, put in fuel and collect my minerals. I could have done other stuff in game but I was only logging on to check my facilities. Writing this now I realise I wasn't interested in doing anything else, but my facilities while they stood there needed maintaning.
Then my PA moved and I packed up all my facilites. The facilites were no longer being used so didn't need to be maintained, thus I no longer had a reason to play. I never bothered to play again and after a few weeks realised I hadn't played for ages and quit.
This is all my experience and quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the numerous easy things to do had been changed.I played SWG because I am a Star Wars fan ("oh boy, you mean I get to be in the star wars galaxy"). I felt bad that I had an up to date computer simply for a game I quit playing, but it runs CoH well so I'm happy . A Last bit of trvia, only yesterday did I get around to deleting the bookmarks to my PA and SWG pages.

Edit: As for what FLX said. I tend to play alone (What with the time difference most others are asleep when I'm on, and my PA was run by a Kiwi). I don't tend to group in CoH, and find it challenging enough. I prefer maximum points, like 50 pts, for beating the bad guys instead of joing 10 other people and not only do the villains die before I reach them but I only get minimum points. You can't roleplay well when its impossible to type comments while fighting bad guy after badguy (I roleplay a smart mouthed scrapper ala: Deadpool, try typing witty repartee while moving about choping villains)

[ July 31, 2004, 12:12: Message edited by: Randallw ]