The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hello,

I've started to play UQM and I think the storyline and dialog are excellent, however, I cannot learn how to fight. I read some info from wiki, but before making any manoeuvre I'm usually killed... Everything is to fast (I've got cyborg off).

How do you suggest to start to learn fighting? What should I choose in SuperMeele?

BTW. When do you plan in implemant mouse control. Keybord 'resolution', respond time are horrible and nearly kill ale joy of play.

Tip #1.  Don't fight with your main ship when possible.  To start, it is a slow, cumbersome over-sized paperweight and no good for fighting.  Early on in the game, you'll meet a scatterbrained Spathi named Fwiffo, and you should learn how to use his ship well.  Many use him exclusively throughout the game, but I never had enough patience for Spathi Guerilla tactics...

Of course, towards the end you'll find your ship well equipped and flatten most targets in its path. :)

In Super Melee, The Avatar is probably the "easiest" ship to pilot.  It packs power, while retaining decent mobility. 

The Arilou Skiff is also a good choice.  With no inertia, it's extremely easy to pilot, and stupid mistakes can usually be fixed with a quick teleport.  Because of its limited crew and propensity for draining its battery reserve, you should pick up things NOT to do in combat quickly enough. ^^

If you're upset at being too slow, no ship can match the Pkunk.  It's notoriously difficult to keep under control though.

And if you're not good at aiming, use the Earthling Cruiser. Its auto-lock laser and FAF nukes don't require much training on your part.

For practising specific fights, it's quite helpful to create some new battle groups made up of lots just one kind of ship.  (And save them)  Here's some tips for beating the ships you have to deal with at the start of the game, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:


Orz vs Slylandro:
This is a stupid fight.  Run away and launch 4 marines.  The probe will go nuts trying to avoid the marines.  While it's doing that, it's not shooting at you, and the marines will get it eventually.


Earthling vs Vux:
Vuxen are fairly easy to kill with the Earthling.  All you have to do is keep your distance and fire missiles.  Unfortunately, the Vux will sometimes warp in right next to you and slag your ship before you can do anything.  There's not much you can do about this :(


Spathi vs Ur-quan:
The puny Ur-quan Dreadnaught is helpless against the mighty Spathi.  Keep out of range, and when it launches fighters, fire BUTTs at them.  Or just fly around - the fighters will eventually hit asteroids and die.  To kill the main ship, you need to fire BUTTs from just out of its range, while it is chasing you.


Spathi vs Ilwrath:
The Ilwrath can be killed by almost anything with greater range and speed.  And that's just about every other ship in the game.  You can tell exactly where it is because it's always opposite you.  Thrust away from it until you're moving at about the same speed, then turn round and shoot.  The Spathi, ZokFotPik and Shofixti can kill it quite easily this way.  The ZoqFotPik's scatter gun is hard to miss with (well, hard to miss every single shot with, anyway)


Spathi vs Kohr-ah:
This is much harder than the Spathi vs green Ur-quan fight.  Run away from it, dodging the saw-blades and firing BUTTs.  Dodging the blades is the tricky part - it's best if the Kohr-ah is chasing you, because then you have much more time to react.  You can't outrun the blades, so if one is coming up behind you, turn!  It takes a long time to kill the Kohr-ah this way, because half your missiles will hit saw-blades or get F.R.I.E.D.  But it eventually goes down.

" respond time are horrible "

This may be due to some installation/hardware problem.
Try changing your display settings (resolution, color depth) to see if it gets better.

Good advice... although I usually find Spathi vs. Kohr-Ah to be an easy win. Just make sure they stay behind you and head in a straight line, veering out of the way of blades in a zig-zag pattern as they come at you. You can force them to waste their FRIED with a single BUTT missile, and after that they are easy game (or you can wait for them to waste energy launching blades.)

It might be harder if the kohr-ah tries to pillbox, but you will never run into this tactic while playing the AI.

There is also plenty of room for error with the spathi due to its sizeable crew- it can sustain several direct hits from blades and still be in fighting shape.

I'm a big fan of using the Syreen ships against the Ilwrath.
Their crew still jumps out the airlock when they cloak,
which makes it easy to target the ship....sort of a green engine trail.

Thank you very much for your so fast and so wide response.

Do you think it can be useful to add this to Wiki?

Doesn't seem like such a bad idea. It could be added to the tactics section of each respective ship, or a new article on melee tips could be created.

Mouse control (http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=2316.0) has been discussed before. I suspect many of the problems you describe are due to the limited amount of different directions in which the ships can point (64, IIRC). This means that especially slow ships (e.g. a flagship with basic modules) will turn very jerkily. Adding mouse control would not do anything about this. The reason for this limitation is that the graphics for each different direction in which a ship can turn are predrawn instead of rotating a single picture and, in doing so, losing quality and using (by 1992 standards) a lot of CPU power.

While it would be technically possible to increase the amount of steps in which ships turn, this would require changes to the way angles are represented in the game and a lot of work in redoing graphics or additional code to rotate the ship graphics as required. Also, providing smoother turning would affect gameplay, which would offend the purists.

I always use:

Chmmr: Good versus anyone
Utwig: Very good against ur-quans
Orz: Good against ur-quans and all slow.
Pkunk: Very good also, in the end too.

Also, having finer turning control would overpower long-range ships like the Ur-Quan and Druuge. As it is, you need to line up your shot rather than just turn and shoot. Unrealistic, yes, but it balances the game.

Also, you will need to fight MUCH less if you max out your thrusters. Stock up on the little red things and they will save you. Scrap the ion cannon to get 4 more of them, it's worth it.

Such Cowardice. :P

The slylandro are INSANE. It's only by abusing the AI that you can survive fights with them at all. Anyway, at high thrust not only do you have fewer fights but the game time slips past less rapidly.

Hmm, I've been winning a lot of fights which I really shouldn't, thanks to the AI. 

Th worst AI stupidity I've seen is an  "Awesome" Cyborg Chenjesu vs a Chmmr, sending DOGI after DOGI, only to have them killed by the zapsats.  The Chenjesu has a really difficult task here, but doggies are not its best chance to win.  It will also send them after a totally-drained Utwig.  Duh...

"The slylandro are INSANE."

Not really, if I recall correctly they're just bad programmers and the one you talk to is maybe a pervert.


"It's only by abusing the AI that you can survive fights with them at all."

What? Do you mean the destruct code? Because when I played through UQM, I made a major part of my resources from killing 500 credit probes.

If your not coward then you should use Shofixti's Glory Device  ;D

How can I know 'where is Ilwrath' anyway? I usually outrun them (or use Quasi Portal).

Earthling Cruisers are great! I busted many Probes with them.

You can train yourself to know exactly where cloaked ilwrath are. This is because of how the game centers the view.

What happens is that the game draws an imiaginary line between your ship and the enemy. The game then centers the camera at the midpoint of this imaginary line. That means that wherever your ship is, the enemy will be at the exact opposite position on the screen.

Also, notice that cloaked ilwrath can blot out stars.

Yeah, and you either had a superduper battleship or you abused the AI. Like, it doesn't use lightning to shoot down nukes, it doesn't properly dodge BUTT missiles, it is confused into paralysis by a marine, etc.

I have abused nothing. It is a probe, it is not meant for combat (it doesn't even have the missiles that it was supposed to.) I am a human- a species of lifeform well evolved for warfare. You shouldn't expect a circuit board to go up against something like that and win. 8)

The mere fact that you've overrationalized your abuse of the AI doesn't mean it isn't AI abuse.

So what? Probes don't pull your arms out of their sockets when they lose. ;)

File a complaint.

There are many good threads on this board about how to do different fights.  In fact, that's where the highlight of the game is (even past the RPG element, that's the best part that's left).

When you practice be sure to practice on "Awesome" though - that's where the CPU generally is when you are in the RPG part of the game.

In a full Melee, this isn't necessarily stupid; it means they're pre-deployed for the next fight.

"Awesome" really means more "properly leads shots at where you're going to be when you match course; also, uses the special ability."

Also, since nobody's said this directly; practice learning to fight with the keyboard.  Gamepads are much harder to deal with, so you'll want to get the basics down first.

However, nothing quite compares with the all-out mayhem piloting a Pkunk with an analog stick...

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