I’ve had my free ps+ copy sitting around for awhile and I gave it a brief run this weekend. It was quite a rough start. The starter quest to pick up whisky for the bar guy dropped me into a dual ship encounter that melted me, but when I restarted, there was nothing there but unarmed boxes to shoot. I then tried an “easy” quest to hunt down a bounty guy, and it was just some fighters that mauled me.
I have the starter ship, with starter gear, plus the beta scatter turret and deflectors that were suggested. It’s the very beginning. I must be doing it wrong or the difficulty is just too random.
The first several missions are scripted to be easily winnable. The problem is you live in a dynamic universe with random encounters and it sounds like you rolled snake eyes on the random encounters. AFAIK the first mission is just showing up & doing a simple trade with a ship, the 2nd is blowing up some boxes. Once you get shields then you can start the pew-pew. Otherwise run.
Once you’ve played a bit, I’d recommend reading my guide for some nice tips. They aren’t beginner tips (there are also guides for those), but it will help a lot with some of the UI and good tips for making some nice cash.
The game IS randomized. The first two story missions get you some gear (notably a deflector and tractor beam).
The first story mission should be completeable without firing a shot - but you might have run into unrelated ships.
The second story mission involves blowing up some crates for target practice, followed by combat with some fairly easy craft.
My guess is you ran into some non-story ships. Early in the game, running is a very viable option.
The ship names will be in gold if they are story related. If they aren’t, you know they aren’t associated with your mission.
Rebel Galaxy was one of those games where I think they really thought of everything to give players tips while they are playing. I remember one time I was just going everywhere, doing whatever and having a blast and a pop-up came up saying something along the line of “you haven’t saved for a while, you should visit a station to save your progress” and I was like, wow that was a very timely reminder.
The problem with the tips are they only come up a few times and it’s easy when you’re first starting out to forget a few of them and then later on you start thinking:
“man I wish there was an easy way to see a map of the system” (press SHIFT).
“man i wish I could scan that ship to see if it’s worth engaging” (press TAB)
“that militia is always on me about my contraband, how do I get rid of that crap?” (press ESC)
Is there a way to re-read all the tips you’ve been given?
Oh - best tip for starting out, hire a wingman from the bar ASAP. They are wonderful early game. Prioritize this over upgrading your weapons (but after shields and afterburner).
No way to reread all the tips - they’re all context sensitive anyway. You can re-view tutorials.
However you CAN reference all the controls from the control remapping area, which will show you hotkeys for anything else.
Thanks all. It was giving me warnings about threat orange or red, but I assumed that was just what a combat encounter meant as the missions were literally the first few. I have now realized that random world encounters can really mess those up.
I now have a bit better shield, a flak cannon, and a yellow stripe painted on my ship. Not sure how flak cannons work, but I can run.
You can just hold down the flak cannon button and any fighters that come in range of the flak will take heavy damage. It’s only useful against fighters. Actually, it will detonate incoming missiles as well.
I wound up playing the last half of the game using EMP flak. Being able to disable all fighters was a real nice way to get the job done. The lack of missile knock out was the only downside.
It also took me a few hours to realize that the secondary weapons you had to hold down for continuous fire, not send discrete shots.
