The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I have a pretty so-so melee style...I do really well with a few ships and pretty badly with all the others.  I play for the roleplaying, the wonder, the mysteries and the humor - so I usually play with cyborg mode ON.  

Unfortunately, I can't seem to jump out of combat when I'm in cyborg mode.  Pressing ESC does nothing.  In fact, pressing any key (except F1 and F12) does nothing.  

This isn't a big problem...unless you happen to hit someone's home planet by accident.  I had the interesting experience of freeing the umgah and then having them launch wave after wave of ships at me...my flagship personally took out over 40 of them!  However, seeing as how they seem to have an infinite number, this didn't help me at all.  This has happened several times - finding the Mycon homeworld by accident, or even just coming across a big Kohr-Ah battle group when I was low on crew and wanting to get out of there ASAP.  End result: I die.  :-X

Is there any way around this?

Yes, don't be in cyborg mode and when you encounter someone and you wish to fight him, you can active the cyborg there.

Huh? I think Deep Jiffa has now reached the point where he doesn't even pretend to make sense.

But yeah, cyborg mode is pretty buggy. My advice? Play in Melee until you can handle the fights yourself.

You should probably submit a report to Bugzilla (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/index.cgi) for this too. It may indeed be intended behavior, but especially in the aforementioned situation, this is a very very bad thing. In fact I don't see why a cyborg would even try to fight that many ships. It seems more logical to try and escape (an option it doesn't consider, most likely).

Three ideas for fixing this come to mind:

1) Perhaps putting in some sort of condition for infinite-ship-worlds that automatically disengages Cyborg mode with a notification of such?

2) Or simply putting a "get some distance then escape" routine high on it's priority list (not really sure it has one, mind you) when it encouters such worlds?

3) Or even having the ability to override Cyborg controls at any given time?

1 and 2 (from my perspective) seem like the easiest to implement, but I personally like #3. Granted it would be a lot more of a pain to accomplish.

Is it so hard to understand what I write in my posts? All I said was that he need to put the cyborg mode off, and when he encounter a ship you have 3 options: Fight, talk and game options. There he can active the cybrog mode if he wishes to.
Now was it so hard shiver?

Thank you, Deep_Jiffa.  I'll try turning cyborg OFF and only turning it on to fight.  But it seems a bit strange to me that it means an automatic end to the game to have it turned ON when you find a hostile home planet.  :(  

Thanks, Sage, for the idea of posting it as a Bug Fix.  I wasn't sure if it qualified as a bug or if I'd missed some easy way around it in the game - but pressing every key on the keyboard had no effect.  I'll put it up as soon as I figure Bugzilla out (if someone else wants to, that'd be nice, too - do I use the same account as the Forum?).  

Thanks to everyone who posted for their ideas.  :)  I'm not that interested in melee, Shiver, so I don't want to improve - not playing the game for the combat.  Although blowing up 40+ umgahs is something to watch.  ;)

You'd need a separate account to post to Bugzilla. It still may not qualify as a bug per se, but it's a helluva lot easier to get the devs' attention directed at these things when a report is submitted.

One thing I realized is that when you free the Umgah, you don't have access to the "Red Alert" screen, so Jiffa's suggestion for disengaging Cyborg mode won't work unless you do so before speaking with the Talking Pet

Since I already have an account with Bugzilla, I'll go ahead and report (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=563) this one.

Thank you, Sage.  That's right decent of you. :)

Ah, how about doing it the other way? Starting with the cyborg mode off and turning it on when you want to use it? More times to switch it but it will solve problems like the Umgah homeworld. But yea, it will be nice to have a button you push to "override" the cyborg mode and start playing.

The final battle can't be cyborged; it's skipped entirely if Cyborg is on.  Furthermore, the conversation leading up to it is changed.  If we have a toggle, it'll need to persist across battles, and it won't always work.

you dont have to use cyborg cuz the comp is easily fooled =]
i always bought 1 utwig for the final 6 urquan\kohrah ships battle. 1 utwig can take an entire fleet if played carefully.

the jugger is also effective vs chmmr even while not vs a comp, since the zapsats autofire and the jugger's range is higher then the avatar's. it's all matter of patience.

Personally I prefer 6 avatars in the final battle, since 4 of them at least(3 if you are try hard, but you don't want too) are destroyed in the battle, so you could switch them with much more effective ships against the vessel itself...

Alternately you could use Fwiffo and leave room in your fleet for the gift ships.