How the heck are you guys calling in invasion fleets already???
I’m still learning to negotiate! I’m stuck* on the third mission as an altern, tasked with negotiating a treaty with a tech 5+ unified government. I ran out of time because I missed the requirement that the planet needed a unified government, so my negotiating party just stood around addressing non-unified natives who milled about aimless and unled. That did not result in the establishment of a treaty and my time limit expired.
I also had trouble with my secondary objective of finding an enemy starbase! You’d think that would be easy, and I had a suspected location, complete with recurring notifications from my probe about Alliance ships gadding to and fro through the star system in question. But I never actually saw the starbase. Do you have to get within a certain distance? Do you need to fly around in interstellar space to look for it? Are they cloaked? Again, I seem to be stuck*…
…but having a grand time figuring stuff out! This was what it used to be like to play games! You had a ton of detail onscreen, a manual, and whatever wits and patience you could bring to bear to reconcile the two! This game totally gets me.
* in that I’ll need to read the manual to progress
I’m pretty savvy with probes at this point! Well, the basic ones. Reading the manual for advanced probe operations is a bit daunting, but I’ve got a few promotions to go before I have to worry about that. But for now, I’m pretty good at popping off five probes, destroying them as needed, and popping off five more, reloading as needed from the neighborhood starfort.
OH apologies, missed that part. If it finds a potential starbase, then you have to fly to each corner of the system to try and find the starbase. Just hit the brakes once you do and run away. ;)
And upgraded probes are a game-changer. Probes that can orbit and scan planets or search for starbases on their own are just astounding, especially since you can manage a dozen at one time.
Maybe I goofed something up, but on tutorial mission 4 I couldn’t get close to inflicting enough damage to the planetary shields with phasers and torpedoes to knock them down so I could use the obliterators and destroy the planet.
Perhaps the strength of the planetary shields you get for that tutorial is randomized and sometimes they’re so strong you can’t knock’em out?! The ones I encountered were 12k+ and the damage I was doing was never going to take them down because they were regenerating faster than I was damaging them.
Nah, just a little ole Altern doing tutorials. Probably chalk it up to not reading the manual closely because I just assumed diving in and doing all the tutorials is what I should do before starting a campaign. Me thinks perhaps based on your response this might in fact not be the way this is supposed to be done! haha
I had no escorts btw for tutorial 4, was just me orbiting a planet with some UGA freighters I was practicing firing at.
Ah so in tutorial 4 – which you don’t need to do until right before 1-E – has you focusing on taking out enemy ships then using obliterator pods on the planet. Page 74 of the training manual.
Be sure to do the others first. There’s a method to the madness. ;)
I was being a chicken and running the 2nd mission in practice mode just to get a lay of the land on what the mission was about.
And of course it went really well. Completed the mission, grabbed a couple of supply ships and the crews off them, established bases everywhere I surveyed.
Got no credit for it on my career progression, but it was a good bit of fun just the same.
Waiiiiit. You typically can’t do a practice mission until you’ve finished it in career mode. Am I misunderstanding?
Edit: Okay I apologize. Apparently, if you finish a mission, you CAN do a practice version of the next mission? I didn’t know that at all, I wonder if it’s a new thing. It’s a great idea, if so.
Or it might be a bug. I dunno. I doubt it though, this is too specific and sounds like something the dev would concoct.
I guess so. I thought practice mode sounded like an interesting way to scope a mission out. Course you don’t get credit for it, so there is that.
But it definitely works. I’ve completed mission 2 in practice mode, it flashed up I’d done it, but then of course when you drop out at the end to the main menu it shows no credit for it because it was done in practice mode.
What I don’t know yet is how many you need to leave behind to hold it!
Yeah, another amusing thing I noticed is my crew was “interrogating” rather aggressively and I was getting repeated updates saying a prisoner died “accidentally”.
I went to security and changed status to hold to see if that changed it so I didn’t have repeated pop ups saying another prisoner died. Not like I was all that concerned per se, it was just getting silly how often I was getting the message.
