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Author Topic: Short Questions and Answers  (Read 4101 times)
Cfant
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Short Questions and Answers
« on: April 06, 2013, 05:54:59 pm »

Hi!

I didn't find such a thread, so I start one Smiley

1. Got a broadcast from Rigel. How can I find this (or any other) star system? There are so many of them, I can't just look around...

2. Found a planet with biological activity, but this things harmed my crew a lot. Are they just "monsters" to make it harder to collect minerals? How do I know, that contact is possible? Can I make any use of the "primitve" lifeforms?

Thanks a lot,

Cfant
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Elestan
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2013, 06:11:38 pm »

1. Got a broadcast from Rigel. How can I find this (or any other) star system? There are so many of them, I can't just look around...
On the starmap, hit the forward slash ('/') key.  Then type "Rigel".

Yes, it's inobvious, but matching stars to names was the original game's copy protection (It came with a labeled starmap).  This search function was added after the game became free.

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2. Found a planet with biological activity, but this things harmed my crew a lot. Are they just "monsters" to make it harder to collect minerals? How do I know, that contact is possible? Can I make any use of the "primitve" lifeforms?
There's no way to talk to them, but your lander has a stunner gun that will allow you to shoot the life forms and collect bio-data capsules from them; you will find a use for that bio-data later in the game.  However, some lifeforms are much harder than others; if these ones are causing you significant injury, it might be best to avoid that planet until you are better equipped to deal with them.
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Cfant
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2013, 06:53:06 pm »

Thank you, but / doesnt work. Simply nothing happens?

I won't give up so fast, but I'm getting desperate. Space combat is far too hard for me - I simply stand no chance Sad I was hunted by an enemy through hyperspace. I escaped to a star system. But when I leave it, the enemy "buble" is waiting for me. It's a spider with working cloak, and I have just my mothership and this weak guy from Pluto.
The enemy is cloaked, I stand no chance. So I hit esc to escape, but while the drive loads, the enemy uncloacks and kills me. If I try to run away first, he stays cloaked, but suddenly he appears in my rear, no matter what I try.  Roll Eyes

Trying 10 times, one or two times I escaped - just to be soaked into the planetery system again, from which I came. Leaving it - the spider waits. One time I get away, but was followed by two (!!!) bubbles, which hunted me down, beeing faster then me.

Is it a situation without chance? Is there any way to slow down combat, so that I guy, common to turn-based-games, stands a chance? Is there no way to escape a faster and stronger enemy?

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Cfant
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #3 on: April 06, 2013, 07:04:19 pm »

Ok, it's 3 spiders now  Roll Eyes Whenever I manage to escape one battle, I'm immediatly soaked into the second bubble (wihin half a second - no chance to react). Space battles take never longer then 5 or six seconds - is that normal? Even an action-used player will have problems at that speed, I guess. Is the game meant to run on a modern laptop?
The spiders set themselfes behind me, as soon as they uncloak, it only takes 2-3 seconds to destroy my ship - no countermeasures possible. Do I have wrong settings?
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #4 on: April 06, 2013, 07:08:39 pm »

Thank you, but / doesnt work. Simply nothing happens?
It works for me.  You're playing the free version (Ur-Quan Masters), right?  You need to be on the starmap screen, and then hit the slash key, and start typing.

Quote
I won't give up so fast, but I'm getting desperate. Space combat is far too hard for me - I simply stand no chance Sad I was hunted by an enemy through hyperspace. I escaped to a star system. But when I leave it, the enemy "buble" is waiting for me. It's a spider with working cloak, and I have just my mothership and this weak guy from Pluto.
The enemy is cloaked, I stand no chance. So I hit esc to escape, but while the drive loads, the enemy uncloacks and kills me. If I try to run away first, he stays cloaked, but suddenly he appears in my rear, no matter what I try.  Roll Eyes

Trying 10 times, one or two times I escaped - just to be soaked into the planetery system again, from which I came. Leaving it - the spider waits. One time I get away, but was followed by two (!!!) bubbles, which hunted me down, beeing faster then me.

As onpon4 said in the other thread, you can't slow down the combat, but you can turn on the Cyborg to fight for you.  If you're currently pinned by more enemies than you can fight or evade, you may have to reload from an earlier save game.

However, if you're running into Illwrath, then you've entered their area of space; you should be able to see it as a circle on the starmap.  There's an easy solution:  Just don't go there until you're ready to fight them.  Preferably, wait until your ship is faster than theirs, so that you can run away.
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Cfant
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #5 on: April 06, 2013, 07:56:11 pm »

Ok, I tried about 30 different battles in melee mode and won not a single one  Shocked Seems I'm too slow / old / stupid to get it Wink As battles are such an important part of the game, which I don't want to leave to the AI, it's just a game for faster players then me. But I really want to say thank you for your patient and nice help Smiley So: Thanks. Maybe a life as slave of alien supreme masters isn't bad at all  Wink

Edit wants to add: Although I'm still not sure, if it runs as it should - space battles of 3-5 seconds seem somehow ridiculous to me.

Susan wants to add: In Melee, I have no chance to outmanouver a spider ship with a human missile-cruiser, although it's not cloaked. It closes in, I fire 3-4 missiles, killing about 1/10 of his crew. From then I'm under fire for 3 seconds and then destroyed. Any movement is followed by the spidership. How could I keep it away? Its faster and has better curving-ability? Depressing.

Does the missile cruiser have only missiles? I can't fire any other weapon with shift or ctrl? And I cant fly backwards - is that wanted?
« Last Edit: April 06, 2013, 08:26:25 pm by Cfant » Logged
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #6 on: April 06, 2013, 08:26:33 pm »

Ok, I tried about 30 different battles in melee mode and won not a single one  Shocked Seems I'm too slow / old / stupid to get it Wink As battles are such an important part of the game, which I don't want to leave to the AI, it's just a game for faster players then me. But I really want to say thank you for your patient and nice help Smiley So: Thanks. Maybe a life as slave of alien supreme masters isn't bad at all  Wink

Edit wants to add: Although I'm still not sure, if it runs as it should - space battles of 3-5 seconds seem somehow ridiculous to me.

Susan wants to add: In Melee, I have no chance to outmanouver a spider ship with a human missile-cruiser, although it's not cloaked. It closes in, I fire 3-4 missiles, killing about 1/10 of his crew. From then I'm under fire for 3 seconds and then destroyed. Any movement is followed by the spidership. How could I keep it away? Its faster and has better curving-ability? Depressing.
If the Illwrath gets to you, you're probably dead in 3 seconds, yes; the Earthling will not win in a close-in slugfest.  But you should be able to keep range on it most of the time.  Remember that once you've accelerated to your top speed away from it, you don't need to keep your engines on; you can stop thrusting, turn to face it, and shoot without losing any velocity.  Just be ready to react if he tries to wrap-around the screen to get ahead of you.
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #7 on: April 06, 2013, 09:18:23 pm »

Ok, I tried about 30 different battles in melee mode and won not a single one  Shocked Seems I'm too slow / old / stupid to get it Wink As battles are such an important part of the game, which I don't want to leave to the AI, it's just a game for faster players then me. But I really want to say thank you for your patient and nice help Smiley So: Thanks. Maybe a life as slave of alien supreme masters isn't bad at all  Wink

Edit wants to add: Although I'm still not sure, if it runs as it should - space battles of 3-5 seconds seem somehow ridiculous to me.

Susan wants to add: In Melee, I have no chance to outmanouver a spider ship with a human missile-cruiser, although it's not cloaked. It closes in, I fire 3-4 missiles, killing about 1/10 of his crew. From then I'm under fire for 3 seconds and then destroyed. Any movement is followed by the spidership. How could I keep it away? Its faster and has better curving-ability? Depressing.

Does the missile cruiser have only missiles? I can't fire any other weapon with shift or ctrl? And I cant fly backwards - is that wanted?
Don't give up. Just re-load and try to avoid Ilwrath until MUCH later. It is possible to completely avoid them. I could never defeat them. It was ridiculous. I just made sure I had full thrusters and then I outran them and this was only near the end of the game.
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #8 on: April 06, 2013, 10:38:57 pm »

Are you playing UQM or DOS-version SC2? A typical combat should not take 5 seconds.
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #9 on: April 07, 2013, 03:07:15 am »

If you are playing the old DOS version, here's what you ought to be playing instead:

http://sc2.sourceforge.net
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #10 on: April 07, 2013, 04:50:22 am »

If searching using / does not work with your keyboard layout, try F6.

Some more tips:
  • max your thrusters early, so that you can avoid battles
  • remember that you can warp out of battle after the first fight, using the escape key
  • one gameplay style is to fight with just the flagship. Once you start upgrading it, it will get easier and easier to win battles. You can use the escort ships then to store additional crew.
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #11 on: April 07, 2013, 03:48:44 pm »

Just one more thing to add on top of the great advice others have given here:

UQM is a "sandbox" game - one of the things I love about it, btw.  Meaning that the game allows you to go basically everywhere from the word go.  Just because you CAN go into Ilwrath space doesn't mean that you SHOULD go into Ilwrath space.  In general, if you find the enemies in one area of the game to be too hard, go someplace else instead, until your ship is more powerful and capable of defeating/escaping from them.

Re: finding stuff on the starmap, most of the really important things in the game come along with a set of coordinates which indicate the approximate direction, if not the exact location, of the thing you're looking for.  When you're on the starmap, the coordinates in the upper right indicate where the cursor is on the map, so you can use that to find the general area that whoever was talking about.  (If the coordinates go by too quickly in conversation, you can hit spacebar at the end of the speech to get a static text review of everything that was said.)

so if the search feature really isn't working, there's always that.
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Cfant
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #12 on: April 08, 2013, 08:06:50 am »

First I want to thank you guys - no "haha it's so easy you noob" posts here, but many very valuable tipps. Great help from your side!   Kiss Startet new yesterday, stayed out of Spider-Space and had the one or other little victory in space. Mankind is not lost yet!  Grin Although I regard space combat very strong depending on luck... Had some battles against these machine-guys who tell of peace and run havoc some seconds later (could also be human behaviour  Grin). They are so fast, had to reload from time to time...
However, the game is great fun and thanks to you advice, I will keep on fighting for the "Federation of Stars"  Smiley
Thanks again!
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #13 on: April 08, 2013, 10:01:37 pm »

Had some battles against these machine-guys who tell of peace and run havoc some seconds later (could also be human behaviour  Grin). They are so fast, had to reload from time to time...

Those probes are a very serious problem. There are two things you can do to solve the problem temporarily, while you look for a real solution:

Firstly, run away! If you buy a lot of antimatter thrusters early on your ship will be ever-so-slightly faster than the probes in Hyperspace, so you will be able to avoid *most* combat with them.

When you must fight with them, it is possible with practice to defeat them with few-to-no losses using the Spathi Eluder
(click to show/hide)
. The key to this is that the probe's AI likes to chase you - the Eluder can use its rear-firing missiles to great effect while running away. Later on you may be able to upgrade your flagship enough to fight them with it - but you will hopefully have taken care of them entirely by then!
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Re: Short Questions and Answers
« Reply #14 on: April 08, 2013, 11:14:07 pm »

I'd like to add that although defeating the probes with Spathi ships is easy when you know what to do, it can also require a lot of patience, mostly because the probe will turn around when you fire at it while also moving at a great speed away from it. The key is to be moving ever so slightly below top speed and not point the B.U.T.T. missiles directly at the probe; point them slightly at an angle away and let the missile's tracking capability take care of the rest. If the probe gets too close, thrust away at full speed and point the B.U.T.T. gun at the probe while shooting. After a bit of practice, you'll get the hang of it enough to take care of small numbers of them you encounter every once in a while.

Another note: for the red probes, Super Melee won't work for practicing, IIRC, because the A.I. the probes use in Super Melee is different than the A.I. the probes use in the RPG.
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