The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

My apologies - after hearing about this game for a long time, I wanted to try it. By and large I like it (It reminds me a lot of Starflight, another game I enjoyed), right until I deal with combat.

The long and the short is even after the wiki, I'm not getting how to do combat. I've only been able to afford thruster and speed, and one re-firing gun, and every Sylandro probe I run across completely wipes me out. I certainly can't get anywhere in the game because of them, the only ships I have are even less useful than the main vessel.

Basically, the combat area is so small I can't disengage or get any breathing space, do any tactical maneuvering, engage the enemy on anything less then the AI's terms, and of course the instant there is any possibility of any tactical advantage the enemy disengages and hits you from the other side of the screen, since (not effectively being limited the the 8 cardinal directions) it can basically always hit.

So basically the enemy can attack at will and I die. For a game that is so well thought of, I'm finding a combat system so hideous to be a real frustration.

Any assistance on how to actually manuever in this toroidal-space mess would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks - Jonnan

I'm no expert in this game, I'm sure other people will have better device, but some things that I did when I first started:
Don't use the main ship at the beginning, it isn't very good IMO and if you sell the guns you can get more thrusters to get everywhere faster -> meaning less probe encounters.
On Pluto there is something that can make your fleet a bit more competitive very early in the game.
For other thigns, use the wiki for advice and practice in Super Melee. I don't have any good advice about maneuvering because it basically boils down to - you go where the enemy is, you go where the enemy isn't, you avoid the planet, you go towards the planet to execute a gravity whip for speed.

This is more for PvP, but the fundamentals are the same I suppose.

http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/PvP_Guide#Fundamentals

Also practice in SuperMelee and invest in better thrusters and turning jets fro your main ship so you can run away.

Scrap the gun, use it on thrusters. Then combat becomes a very minor part of the game.

I'm maxed out on thrusters (Both types) already - that's a large portion of what makes this so annoying. I don't see any way to effectively maneuver in the small space provided - almost as soon as I'm out of range in one direction, I'm in range in another.

I might be able to master this as a twitch game, and if it was even vaguely realistic I might even be inclined to do so, but learning a twitch game about how to beat an opponent that doesn't miss on a toroidal map approximately the size of a broom closet is . . . neither fun nor realistic.

It may simply be I'm better suited to playing Nethack.

Jonnan

With maximum thrusters you can pretty much, as Death 999 said, fly around anyone you don't want to fight or talk to in HyperSpace. That said, the Slylandro Probe is one of the most annoying enemies in the game precisely because it is ridiculously manoeuvrable and can pretty much dictate where and when you fight it; much of the time you are stuck reacting to it. This is actually kind of fun if you like fast action games; if not, you might want to consider giving the computer control over battles.

Maximum thrusters makes you faster than the Slylandro in Hyperspace. I find it pretty easy to avoid them, really.

If you've already maxed your thrusters, then you could focus on gunning it up until you have spread fire and rear-firing guns, which tends to make combat with your mothership much easier.  Personally I never bring the Vindicator to battle until I have full armaments (and point defense), and once I do I rarely use anything else.

As far as avoiding combat, I usually set the ship on autopilot to my destination and then keep an eye on the minimap to see approaching encounters.  It lets you spot them from further away and with full thrusters you shouldn't have too much trouble maneouvering around them from there.

If the probes are your main problem (and I agree they are annoying as !@(*$^#!@#&($^) you might also consider dealing with them once and for all.  I don't want to give you spoilers if you don't want them, but talk to the captain and maybe the Melnorme to see if you can't track down the source of the probes.

Point defence lasers are useless.

Once you've got enough guns and tracking units, you can one shot pretty much anything, so it doesn't matter.

Also an option if you're REALLY disinclined toward dealing with probes in combat i to simply use your escape drive. It wastes quite a bit of fuel, sure, but you may prefer that over losing crew / the game.

Stop trying to use a rock on a paper bag. Wait until you have ships that are the equivalent of scissors.

So, what I'm getting off this is -

There's one ship type that shows up immediately. You find it in systems and hyperspace immediately. I've found three planets with life forms that you can get to (but not escape from) and possibly get enough info to trade with the Melnorme (I've found others, but all weather 6 or tectonics 8 planets) for something that would actually help.

This ship type is the one you should under no circumstance engage at this tech level, because it will kill you?

What . . . fun . . .  ::)

You should think about it like this:

It is evident that currently you are very weak. What would you do in real life if you were weak and you'd see an enemy?

Answer: Avoid combat.

But if you still run into the enemy while you are weak, you have two choices:

1) Run away.
2) Fight for your life.

If you have maximum thrusters, you can always run away. If you want to fight, you will win if you know what you are doing. Even an Earthling Cruiser can beat a Slylandro Probe (human vs AI only)  in competent hands. But the easier way is to get your hands on a Spathi Eluder and fight off the Slylandros with that. You can get a Spathi ship before the first encounter with the Slylandro if you investigate Sol adequately.

Also, if you have trouble with some other ship than Slylandro Probe, you are most likely in enemy territory. Don't fly into enemy territory before you can deal with it.

Not quite. It's more like this. From very early on in the game, there are three ship types available to you. There is one enemy that shows up very early. One of the ship types is essentially useless against it in combat. One can be utilized and consistently win but requires fair piloting skills. And your basic upgraded main ship can beat it with much trouble and heavy losses, but upgrading it gives you another strategy; not engaging in said battles.

You're playing an adventure game. That does not man you have to fight every enemy that comes your way. You don't need to grind enemies to collect XP. Killing a thousand probes does not give you "Supersonic power punch" or some other power to make the game easier. It just gives you RU's that you can earn in other places as well. You are advised at StarBase to start off slowly, build an alliance and so forth. With thrusters and turning jets you can easily avoid the most challenging enemy in the early game while you find a better way of combating it.

I mean, it sounds like you want a game where enemies slowly gain in power as you improve your ship and gain allies. Once you've levelled a few times, stronger enemies should warp in, keeping the challenge even. But Star Control isn't like that. Space is a tough place where wimps eat plasma and die. When you start out, there are a lot of bad guys who will easily walk all over you, especially if you don't know much about the ships at your disposal. You spend the first half of the game barely staying alive, gaining allies and resources and learning how to fly the strange ships. Then during the second half, you're a powerhouse that can't be stopped, but it doesn't matter because you now know that brute force isn't going to save you, you need to out-think the enemy.

Essentially, you're a lone human Captain in a hostile universe. Use your wit and the information given to you at Starbase to find allies, don't try to power through a slave empire that already defeated an alliance of the sectors most powerful races. Or deranged drones that can run circles around you in the field of combat.

Mmmm.

Lone 'PC Race here' 'PC Description here' in a hostile 'milieu here' against 'great evil here' is hardly an unexplored trope.  Saying 'you are incompetent to use fwifo's ship in combat against the sylandro probes - there are specific tactics  A B and C that work' is a legitimate criticism of my playstyle. Or that I just don't like a combat minigame that is a twitchgame.

That's actually kinda what I'd expected - I'm missing something fundamental about the tactics. Wouldn't be the first time.

However, that . . . doesn't appear to be the answer I'm receiving - This seems to be the 'expected' behavior, with explanations ranging from 'don't use a rock versus paper' to 'you're a lone human Captain in a hostile universe'  - well, apologies but being an adventure game doesn't make A balance issue a 'feature', and if this *isn't* a failing in my mastering tactics (annoying but possible), and this *isn't* a twitchgame I have to either master or leave (Annoying because I don't like twitchgames and will probably quit rather than messing with) . . . then this is an adventure game with severe balance issues.  Nethack drops the 1st level character on . . . the 1st level of the dungeon, with equipment just barely sufficient to make it to DL 2.  Saying you shouldn't expect an adventure game to *not* simply drop your level 1 character into level 10, naked, seem to ignore most of my experience in adventure games.

But, at the end of the day, some people obviously like it this way, I'm just not one of them. Time to use that "Satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back" warranty!

Jonnan

When I first started playing SC2, I got murdered by the probes, even using Fwiffo. After a couple dozen fights though, I got to the point where I could win Eluder vs Probe without losing a single crew member most of the time. It just takes practice.

My main strategy is to always run away from the Probe and fire off the occasional missle. As long as you aren't moving fast and you keep your distance, you can always avoid the probe. Usually, the AI goes comatose at some point and starts following you, making it an easy target for the BUTT.


I'd say don't give up. The fights aren't that hard if you use the right ships. The hardest part is the final fight, and even that only took me around a day and a half of trying before I beat it my first time.

Certainly not. Just trying to provide you with some reasoning for why your starting power is less than that of the enemy and why you might not want to engage everyone head on. I wonder if it was an unexplored trope back when the game was made? Probably not, although probably "unexplored-er"


To be honest, I don't see why the above wasn't. Off the top of my head, there are only four or so encounters in the entire game that actually requires you to fight. All these are later on in the game when you have access to more hardware. Isn't it a legitimate criticism to say that you should avoid random encounters that are in no way obligatory if you find them hard?

But yes, you're also missing the tactics side. The combat is very arcade-y, so you do need to have good reflexes. There's no time to sit around and plot out strategies, you need to act from the beginning. I suppose that's what you mean by twitch, having to react in real time? But as others have lined out, you also need to be familiar with your ships and weapons, and those of the enemy. If you want to fight that is. I never really got the hang of fighting the Slylandro, but I also didn't feel compelled to invest time in it. Instead I avoided them by upgrading thrusters and turning jets quickly.


I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. There's no expected behaviour in the game, we're simply trying to advise you on how a player with low melee skills can get the most out of the game. If you're saying that you don't want to avoid combat encounters then you need to learn how the combat works, which is what we're advising you in in addition to ways of avoiding the problem completely. But f you don't like combat and don't want to skip it either, then I'm flummoxed as to how to improve your enjoyment.. That's not really a balance issue though, more that you don't like a particular part of the game. In my experience most adventure games (by that I mean games like the Sierra games or Monkey Island) don't have combat, what you're talking to sounds more like an RPG to me. If you go into an adventure game and expect it to be a scaling RPG, then I can certainly see why you are disappointed.


True that. There's a lot of different systems out there, and from your writing it seems that you are mostly used to scaling RPG's. I used to play a lot of fighting games, racing games and such where difficulty doesn't necessarily scale in such a comfortable fashion, so I'm pretty comfortable with setups like this. But each to their own.

In my opinion, SC2 was a highly original game when it first came out.  In fairness that may simply be because I was about 12 at the time and hadn't really seen too many computer games before it.  Computer games also weren't half as wide-spread as they are today.  Yes, the space opera setting is fairly generic.  You're a lone heroic captain, lots of weird aliens and a big bad enemy to confront.  Really though, you can make anything sound like a tired old trope if you generalize it enough.  No such thing as original thought, right?

If you look at the specific races, their (extensive) histories and the way the plot unfolds, I think there's plenty of original stuff in there, but you would have to hang on for the long haul in order to experience it.  Some of SC2's aliens are pretty generic, but others are much more imaginative than anything I've seen elsewhere.  To date SC2 is the only space opera (game, movie or whatever) I've seen with an alien race who evolved and live in a gas giant, for example.  I won't say any more for fear of spoilers (I may already have said too much.)


To be clear, you do have a legitimate issue against the game.  Combat is a twitch minigame in an otherwise decidedly non-twitch adventure.  I don't think anyone is denying that, most people are trying to offer suggestions for how to survive long enough to learn it.  The reason why combat is so different from the rest of the game is because the combat engine was lifted pretty much verbatim out of SC1, which was entirely a twitch combat game with only a small amount of time spent moving your forces around the starmap before the next battle.  It had relatively little in-game story (plenty of background in the manual though.)  With SC2 the programmers decided to expand the game in several new directions, and added rather a lot of content.  Compared to today's sequels that are usually just carbon copies of the gameplay, sometimes with better graphics, I have to say I find SC2 somewhat inspiring in this regard.

If you're really that put off by the combat, though, then maybe this game just isn't for you.  Like all truly original products, there are those who like it and those who don't.  Obviously, most of the people who frequent this message board will fall into the former category, so if you find yourself leaning toward the latter, please try not to take offense at our fervered attempts to bring fresh blood into the fold. =)

As Novus mentioned, you can trun on cyborg and let the computer do the fighting for you. If you save just before battle you can do it over and over until you get a satisfactory result (less people killed). But that is a bit lame and really takes away from the game's overall excitement.

As stated earlier, perhaps this game simply isn't for you. It does grow on you if you give it a fair shake though. I think if you do give it a chance, you'll see what a non-issue the pesky probes really are. Sometimes its fun to let them multiply and farm them during the mid game when you have the Vindicator beefed up. It's faster gaining ru's from combat than visiting planets. And finally there is a certain satisfaction in exacting revenge on the probes that terrorized you in the early game.