Yeah, it’s very annoying how powerless you are to assist in actually taking a planet. The only option I had was to use the Orbital Bomber operation and hopefully kill a couple of million per mission.
I think you’re misunderstanding what’s killing your ship, as I find I’m able to sail through a waller’s fire without taking too much of a beating. Maybe if I flew straight into the shots for an entire turn it would do that much damage? But they usually start shooting well before I’m in their line of fire, and the projectiles are slow and obvious.
As far as identifying wallers from a distance, it’s not too hard, as they’re usually mixed in with grav or MLRS turrets. Basically, any place there’s a gap in the turrets with the red firing arcs, look for a waller, because it’s probably there. Here’s a visual example:
pic
You can see two wall turrets (the greenish yellow…things) among the graviton turrets (the things with the neon beams extending on each side, indicating their firing arc).
I would guess you’re actually being killed by one or more missiles hitting, probably at the same time various beams and, yes, waller fire is impacting as well. I know it took half a dozen WTF KILLED ME THIS IS BULLSHIT experiences before I was able to make heads or tails of the defensive emplacements you’re thrown against.
I am really pretty sure i’m not. I was unable to cross a waller’s fire in this “give away space tech” mission without instant dying. I was also able to in one turn (at full engine power) start flying through their firing arc before they had activated (ie there is no wall), get hit by a wall of fire, and instantly destroyed. As you say, the wall turrets tend to be in places that would otherwise be easy ways to the target location, so i REALLY don’t think i was missing being hit by a hundred beams.
I found out how to identify wallers though. If you mouse over a waller it will have a circle firing radius, unlike the other turrets which actually have specific ones. However enemies have a little bump where they are facing, so you can tell that this will be the direction the waller will fire when activated.
This game desperately needs a manual of some sort (assuming i haven’t missed it). There are so many systems that are (in my opinion) easily missed and aren’t explained at all in game.
Murbella, I ended up with a cloaking special power that lets me get through such walls. It recharges slowly, so you can really only use it once per battle, or twice if its a lengthy battle. I’m not sure if these special powers are issued at random; if so I guess I’m lucky to have acquired it. If its standard, cloaking is certainly an easy way to get through a wall of turrets. For the delivery missions, I start out by powering down weaponry and pumping up shields and engines to move as fast as shit toward the destination. When I get to the edge of turret defenses, I cloak and make my way in.
I am enjoying the game so far, and really love the combat. I’m too old and slow for real time space battles. I play Distant Worlds, and just automate the combat except for general fleet orders. So for my old bones, the turn-based single-ship tactical level is really enjoyable. I haven’t played enough to see if the larger strategic level gets me what I want – a sense of a living, breathing galaxy with space opera-like political intrigue. But the combat is right up my alley.
I just finished a mission in which the Skylaxians, who don’t like me, asked for my helping destroying three Acutian bases. On the mission itself I made my way to the nearest enemy base, then immediately depleted engine power to boost shields. I didn’t need engine power because I was only flying little loops near the station. My shields still got down to dangerously low levels as I was focused on firing away at the station. At one point shields were at zero and I took hull damage, but a Skylaxian ally was able to take out a few annoying Acutian ships and that gave me time to replenish the shields. I did this for each of the three bases and successfully completed the mission but it was tense. Now the Skylaxians are neutral toward me and the Acutians hate my guts. But I then earned another special power that lets me instantly rebuild shields in just one turn (thought I can’t do anything else for that turn). Good times.
I didn’t disable the tutorial (it is basically the only manual i think) so i can’t use powers.
I didn’t disable the tutorial either, I’m still in it. But perhaps the powers come later in the tutorial than where you’re having trouble. I did die a couple of times in those earlier, pre-powers tutorial missions but never had to try more than 3 times. Guess I was just lucky. Obviously you’re not the only one having problems there, so maybe there’s a randomization of difficulty in these early missions that needs to be fixed.
Battle maps are definitely randomized, so early in the game don’t be ashamed of save-scumming if you haven’t gotten special abilities and need to in order to survive.
Using random battle maps in a tutorial and therefore forcing some players to save scum (and perhaps quit in frustration after the fifth try) is just plain dumb.
The maps aren’t that random. For a given mission, enemy force strength will generally be the same every time you attempt it. I suspect the bigger issue is people trying to take on mission types they’re not ready for.
I’m sure that’s not the intended design goal, I would be very surprised if some rough edges aren’t smoothed out in the near future.
You DO get special abilities quickly, and the second battle, after you’ve learned power allocation, is not really a tutorial itself - just a way to use what you’ve learned so far. The basic battle tutorial is the first one.
I certainly hope, because I think the game deserves a large audience, and it would be a shame if this tutorial issue prevents that. The official forums have had a few threads devoted to the problem, including this one.
Chris Park had posted last week that he intends to release a demo this week; I hope the issue is smoothed out in time for that. It could be a big turn off for someone who hasn’t plunked money down yet.
The cloak is definitely not guaranteed. I don’t have one.
I don’t have one either, but I do have the instant shield-refill, which gets me through difficult mornings.
I’m also not shy about using the flock of fighters to soak up incoming fire.
So how much of the ship combat is variable then? The one thing that has my wavering on the purchase is reading accounts that the combat gets stale and the player ship doesn’t really change during a game. That last part has me really scratching my head as I was expecting technology upgrades that gave new guns, types of fighters, or whatever.
This game feels way to random for me, I can go from a-ok to dead in a single hit even early on, and I don’t know what weapons really that are dangerous, and whats just pellets, there is just no way to know.
Also, why all the ordonance, my ship could fire at ACTUAL enemies, instead of just into random space, I don’t know about most of you guys, but it makes things look a bit weird.
Won my second game (died in the first one while experimenting), but it took an atrocious amount of time as the damned Burlusts refused to die for a few dozen years. I had to start detonating nukes in orbit just to deplete their environment and planet quality enough for them to lack the pop growth needed to constantly replace their losses, even though the Federation fleet in orbit had over 11 million fleet strength.
Started the Fed with the Andors and Skylaxians, used some credit to get the Peltians and Evucks in, and then had to race to save the Thoraxians from the cool rival alliance that sprang up. Ended up just annihilating the three remaining races after elevating the Thoraxians into the all-powerful warrior race they were always meant to be.
Game still needs some work, but I enjoyed what I played and look forward to taking a crack at it without the tutorial restrictions.
1.002 is out, and get this:
Version 1.002 is now out, and includes lots of goodies. One of the top-requested features was a way to get techs from races that already have them, and so that’s today’s “feature of the day.”
Beyond that, there are a ton of fixes and improvements all over the place:
- A few GUIs are now quicker to navigate through (those small-action “after action report” popups, primarily).
- A lot of racial attitudes now shift in reaction to bad things that you do to other races.
- Fixed three exploits that clever players found. It’s always fun to see what an increasingly-larger audience thinks of that a smaller one did not. And then of course do something about it. :)
- We also fixed some really unfortunate errors in the planetary ground and bombing attacks that were making those basically… well, borked. Incredibly sorry about that. It was a small change that we had made right prior to the weekend that caused it, and the fact that it was happening was not immediately obvious.
- And then some other, smaller bugfixes as well.
Today is the first day of us releasing at least one new free feature every DAY at this point, thanks to the overwhelming support this game has had. Seriously, this is now our best launch ever, and we’re extremely grateful to our ever-growing community for their support, as well as to the press for taking the time out to look at our stuff.
After this week, we’ll continue putting out at least one new free feature every week for at least a few months, if not longer. A quest, a new weapon or ability, a new ship, a new action… something. We’ll vary it up, and make it fun. I’m really excited about expanding the game even further, as large as it already is. Right now we’re doing that very fast in response to all the huge numbers of new players and all the things that a larger audience is bound to dig up in a game of this scope and complexity; once that settles down, we’ll make it less intensive but still ongoing.
I can personally vouch for the change in research. I went to research a tech with a race that already had it, and the time had been cut by 2/3 for that reason.
Nice support, Arcen. I only wish I liked your other games as much as I like this one.
You can hover over any given projectile (including your own) to see the damage it will deal. Hovering over ships and emplacements will show their DPS and the damage type. Also, although you probably have weapons I don’t, I have never seen my ship fire into random space. It only fires at targets within range. It may miss if the shots don’t track and the target moves, however. If you want to make sure it prioritizes a particular target or targets there’s a mode for selecting them and it will then fire at only those targets, only while in range.