Tried the Demo and have these questions, thank you

[tinkthank]

Thanks very much for that reply.

Just a quick follow up if I may:

- You say there are no hidden rolls, just a question of hit or miss? But there must be, since otherwise the business of "shields" and "optimizers" wouldnt mean much. But if what you say is for the most part true and plasma = laser = railgun etc., that is: these differences are cosmetic only, then that would be a pity.

- Just tested (in the demo, anyhow), and once you get the hyperdrive, you can sell the FTL-drives of other ships and teleporting still only takes 2 days.

- See what you mean by firing from the broadside; so what does "arc of fire" mean??

- Does the Digital Download include the manual as a .pdf?
- The order screen says

Important: This game is delivered as an .ISO disk image file. You must have access to CD burning software that will allow you to create a CD from the image file.

I DLed a few other games (such as GalCiv2), and these were self-extracting .exes or wizards. I don't know what ISO is, but I have winXP, and it has a built-in burner. Is that sufficient, or is there special software required for ISO?

Thank you very much

[Hugh Manatee]

- You say there are no hidden rolls, just a question of hit or miss? But there must be, since otherwise the business of "shields" and "optimizers" wouldnt mean much. But if what you say is for the most part true and plasma = laser = railgun etc., that is: these differences are cosmetic only, then that would be a pity.

Shields affecttheamount of damage you take before your components take damage, it's denoted by the blue line on the display in combat(the green is your hull). The Optimizers increase the rate at which your guns fire, and improves the rate at which they track targets(I think at least, watch a continuous beam weapon sweep back and forth, it seems to sweep less witht he optimizers).

Also, while there are "tiers" of weapons, a particle vortex cannon will almost always own a gauss riffle, a Multi missile launcher will own a Impaler missile ect(you can tell how much whupass a gun has by checking out the credits, "***" it's worth), some of the lesser guns do have different purposes. For example the neptunium rail gun auto targets missiles and torpedoes, the micrometeorite cannon firesa spray of shrapnel, 1 ship with this can cover a fleet from fighters and missiles, the beam type weapons which sweep have similar aplications, they do continuos damage as opposed to bursts like the gaus cannon, they can sweep a target hitting more of their components ad sweep missiles.

- Just tested (in the demo, anyhow), and once you get the hyperdrive, you can sell the FTL-drives of other ships and teleporting still only takes 2 days.

Yes but if that ship gets blasted somehow or damage in a retreat(urquali are hard to retreat from, they suround you and ambush) you're stuck. Having one or 2 of the faster drives, a Zorg Corvette or a nebula drive or plow in case is a good idea.

- See what you mean by firing from the broadside; so what does "arc of fire" mean??

For example, the science ship has 1 gun on the left side of it, the sensor array is on the right. The gun can only track in front of the ship, to the left and a bit to the rear. The Pirate corvette has guns on both sides, able to fire left right and both guns straight ahead. The military frigate has a gun in front, and on the sides. You can see the arcs of ships you can ally with by clicking on them, if you can get behind a ship in it's firing arcs blind spot you can kil it unmolested.

[tinkthank]

All right, thanks very much.

I tried the demo once more and am still considering, shall see how much I have to invest before weighing the cost of Dom3....

Perhaps one last question, since at least some of my worries had come from the points 1 a and b in my original post:
- Would it be easy to mod the game, or could someone help me to do so, so that that telporting Hyperwarp drive took, say, double the time to recharge, and those space-folding allies one can recruit took, say, a month instead of a week to recover? (That would greatly enhance replayability, IMO, since these two items really negate the strategic variability of the map, and they seem so easy to obtain.)

Thank you, as well as any other input I may receive from others in the community (any out there?).

[Hugh Manatee]

I forgot, ISOs are CD images, burners use them to "print" a copy of the wierd worlds CD onto a blank cd. There are utilitiesthat allow you to extract individual parts of a cd, and most burning software can take the ISO and turn it into a CD. Not sure if the manual comes in itthough, it seems like it would, if it doesn't the in game tutorials explain about everything it does.

The hyper drive engine file to mod it looks like this:

NAME Hyperdrive
NAM2 a hyperdrive
ICON items/s_system1.jpg 23
GFXP items/l_system2.jpg 7
FLAG tech nothief unique
DIST dead cold warm hot toxic<----This is the planet types it can be found on to mae it ore rare, delete a few
TEXT A ship with this special type of star drive can teleport to any star system in the sector. It also requires nearly two months to recharge.
COST 803 technology
TYPE drive
SIZE 2

DATA

PAR0 0<----thats the speed in normal space
PAR1 0<----speed in a nebula
PAR2 3000 <--- I think thats the range it can warp out to
PAR3 60<---That's the recharge time

END DATA