The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I've been thinking about writing an informal strategy guide on how to beat a human opponent with a section for each invidual ship. However, I'm not interested in doing a massive amount of work for nothing. If the small crowd of people that frequent here aren't enthusiastic about such a project then I'd rather spend my free time on something else. I hate polls, so post your level of interest in such a project.

I'm interested. Mind you, this could be used to make better AIs, which might be interesting but I don't think better AIs should ever be put in the game, because I think it would truly suck to have AI players better than humans.

I would read it.

Also, the Ultronomicon would be a good place to put such a guide.

...which would make this a community project too, possibly saving Shiver a lot of time if enough people are interested :)

melee relevant ultronomicon pages (http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/Category:Game_mechanics)

Such a guide already exists. It's called Leopards utterly complete guide to Star Control 2 ship-to-ship-combat.

Its quite old and I can't find a link for it. If you can't find a link, I could send you the Word file. It is in need of an update. But, perhaps you could contact the author and ask to use some of his or her content.

Here's  melee "extended reference notes", if it helps: http://www.fileplanet.com/hosteddl.aspx?/hst/s/t/starcon/sc2/star_control_2_melee.zip

I'm interested. and i think i remember seeing that one guide somewhere...

Yeah, I remember that. I also remember Jonathan Dagger's melee site, which was informative but not really an end-all source. I think it refered to Yehat as one of the most effective ships in the game going by default pricing? Bleh. Anyway, I can't find either of them now. If you could send Leopard's guide over AIM or e-mail, that would great.

This is relevant to my interests.

It would be neat if such a guide included information about all the 300 possible match-ups, but that would probably take too much work...

Here's Jonathan Dagger's old site (http://web.archive.org/web/20050515134242/http://www.geocities.com/jdaggar/starcon/). Its archived, so the images and the "New Recruits" section doesn't work.

Anyway, I'll send over the Leopard Guide (which does include ALL possible matches, albeit it’s a bit old now…) when I get the chance.

including sa-matra and flagship? Anyway, I don't think it would be too much work, except maybe for just one person.

I'm sketching out the first section of the guide right now. Does anyone know the exact damage algorithm for when a ship crashes into the planet? I'm planning on putting this information in there but I don't know entirely how it works myself.

On collision with a planet, a ship loses one fourth of its crew, rounded down, with a minimum of 1 crew.

I'd be very interested in reading it.

Hey Shiver, are you the anonymous user who has just started this work on the ultronomicon (http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/Talk:Super-Melee_tactics)? It couldn't be pure coincidence now, could it?

Negative. I hardly ever touch the Ultronomicon. It's funny that the other person doesn't know how to sign their wiki messages either.  :-\

Yes. One-fourth of the current crew, rounded down, to a minimum of 1, is the amount of damage you take every frame you hit the planet.

On occasion, a collision with the planet will last for more than one frame. The physics are pretty chancy, so it's unpredictable when it'll happen, but I've seen ships go from full crew to less than half this way, from one collision.