Slowtrain

I enjoyed MOO2, except the AI cheated badly and it was still an easy game to win. MOO 1 otoh was revolutionary for its amazing AI and was a damn hard nut to crack. I stil have my MOO strat guide which is like 300 pages long or something.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/stars-supernova/

yeah, I just did a massive search and all the links to the downloadable demo seem to be down or broken.....no one is serving it up independently it seems....huh. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sadly, the developers of STARS! were workign on a follow up called STARS! Supernova. But as usual with independent games, they couldn't get any sort of funding or even find a publisher. They had it pretty much finsihed, but last I had heard it just dried up and died a feew years ago. Too bad, STARS! is a fabulous game.

What is MOO then?

Well, you spread such lies, dear Volo. One can hardly be blamed for assuming a personal vendetta. Aha, but at least you cpould ride a horse. And a wagon. And you could fill your wagon with loot and gear. And you could sack a dungeon, carry everything back to the entrance, fill your wagon, then go back for more! Daggerfall was soo far ahead of its time that it's amazing that it didn't run into the Borg.

Silly lad. Did Julian Le Fay and/or Todd Howard stuff you in a locker when you were a kid?

I have X3 sitting on my shelf. But I'm not going to play it until I've played X2 to death. Which I probably have at this spoint, but still. X3 is something to look forward to. When the time is right!

The problem I have with this is that it uses different terminology for functionally identical characters. Ie Tycho and Ian in Fallout, from a mechanics perspective they are the same, but since one gets paid while the other doesn't, you're using different terms for them. Not terribly descriptive and as such fairly meaningless. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Also Ian only gets paid 50 bottlecaps. Is there a functional term for stupid? :D

Did you download all the patches and updates, including the artificial life scripts? They are really awesome. If you are going to start again, you should install those. http://www.egosoft.com/download/x2/patches_en.php

True. I forgot to mention them. They are an all-around good reliable bet for trading. heh. I just send them out into the galaxy and don't worry too much about them. I upgrade their speed all the way, give them a scanner upgrade, and raise their manouvering. I never put on any shields except a single 1 MW. That way, when they get destroyed, which they will, I'm not out much. Basically, I just send one transport into a sector, look for any good runs in sector, clean the stations out, then send the ship on to another sector. I miss good deals from time to time since there are so many ships to manage, but I'm running enough ships that it doesn't really matter if I miss the occasional run here or there. Correct. You need a TL class freighter that can carry station-sized containers. Believe it or not, if you keep going you will eventually own some of your own! However, before reaching such lofty status, you can just hire TL's on a per job basis. The Captains charge for each gate they pass through while under your contract. Races charge different rates. TL's are scattered around, but you can usually find one idling about in many of the heavily industrialzed sectors. Argon Prime has one. So does Home of Light. You can ID them easily by the cloud of M5's buzzing about them. To hire a TL, fly into comm range, ring up the Captain, ask to hire him. He'll quote you a rate. Once you've hired him, ring him up again and ask him to follow you. Once you are close to a shipyard, ring him up and tell him to dock at the yard. Note that the docking process can take a long time since those ships are so huge and ponderous. You can just fly into the shipyard and wait for him if you want. Once the TL is docked, you will be able to buy a station and load it onto the frieghter. Fly out, and tell the Captain to follow you. Fly to whatever location you want the station in, then wait until he is in comm range and tell him to drop your freight here. You will get a little location grid to select the exact spot, but it has to be within a few kilometers of the freighters current location. Bingo! Your own station.

I just wanted to expand on what I said in my first post. Doing a ton of trading is the best way to get started, but once you get your rankings high enough (trade ranking especially but a high combat ranking also helps), you can get single person transport missions that pay a ton of money. A good sequence can net you hundreds of thousands of credits once you have enough experience. In the end those M5-class missions are the best way to make money. You can slo run drugs and booze, which pays well but cna get you unwanted attention in the wrong sectors. The space cruises also pay well if you happen to have a fast TP ship and a good knowledge of the sectors. AGain, until you have high rankings they don't pay as well as trading.

Here's my station setup for my current game. I've got 34 TS freighters in operation at this point. At the moment, I've been taking a break from station building and am flying around in my M6 because some of stations in less-protected sectors have been coming under threat.

X2 is an awesome games. I never had that problem with Brennan's Triumph, so I don't know how to fix it. You'll probably have to reload a save from before the mission. The only problem I ever had with that mission was finding the goddamn place the first time since I hadn't done much exploring of surrounding sectors before I got that mission. M5's work best as extremely fast missile platform. Wasp missiles can take down even an M3 if you use enough of the them and no one will ever catch you. Don't go guns with anything except another M5 and even then only out of desperation cause its a fifty-fifty chance which one of you is coiming out alive and even if you win repairs and equioment loadout are expensive. The fastest route to wealth is to buy a whole lot of TS class ships and trade like crazy. I keep 100,000 credits per ship in my bank so I have enough to buy cargo for each vessel, buty everythng else goes right onto buying more TS transports. Good stuff to sell includes: Silicon ore everywhere, Chelt Meats in SPlit Space, Bio-Gas in Boron space, Argnu beef in Argon Space. If you get a lot of Transports going you can bring supllies logn distances. Magalit for example is neccessary for a lot of things but you can only find it in Paranid space and some of the outlaw sectors. Careful on building stations, most of them take a long time to earn a profit and require time and effort on the part of yourt transport to keep them supplied. Make sure you've got plenty of cash before you go the station route. Generally speaking I only build stuff for me early on; later I open up some my factories to all the races. Chip plants for example make a ton of money, but you need to build all the stations to supply your chip plant first in ordder to really make a profit. I almost always start by building a Crystal Fab in Argon Prime. Its a well- protected system, crystals are always neccessary for building your own power plants, and the extras you don't use turn a good profit. But before you build it, make sure you've laid in 2 or 3freighters worht of Meatsteak Cahoonas and one of silcion and 3 or 4 of energy cells. That way you got enough materials to run the station right from the start without having to scramble to keep it supplied.

Arcanum is an awesome game. SO close to greatness.

Oblivion's voice acting is worse than its story. In fact the story might have been more compelling if all of the voice actors weren't pronouncing daedra differently

Of course we argue. Why not? Arguing over things gets us thinking about them and helps us clarify our own thoughts. Of course. But there are many ways to make a game non-linear. Not one single one is right. Or even the best. the feature I want most is...non-linearity! Here lemme define that for you... edit:Fixed quote stuff

well, if one doesn't offer their definition of something, in this case linearity, then we have no common agreement over what we are discussing. It's not that a defintion is "right" that makes it important; it's that it is "known". More side-quests is one way of making a game less linear. I agree. Another way would be to have an extremely robust skill system that lets you create a wide variety of pcs, and which then changes your gaming experience. There are many ways to decrease the linearity of a game.

non-linearity has nothing to do with the end point. It has to do with the "line" one has to walk to get there. A single line that must be repeared every time by every gamer is a linear game. A game that has many possbile lines and deviations from the lines to the same end point is non-linear.

Non-linearity is all about choices and FO is about as choice-filled as one can get. There is very little that you HAVE to do in FO and I don't think there is anything you have to do in a certain way. I've never really understood why some gamers are anti-choice in computer games, especially crpgs. It seems that they feel that a game should really be nothing more than another shape of the novel: click to turn the page and follow right along. But, that seems to totally work against the one thing a game can provide thata novel or a movie can't: the ability to make choices and change your gaming experience. Some choices will be small, some will be big, but regardless, they allow you the gamer to create your own experience. You can't do that in a novel or a movie. Every media has its unique power. You wouldn't make a movie of a book simply by filming the text of a book's turning pages; that would be a waste of the power of film. By the same token, making a game that is simply a choiceless following of a pre-created narrative path is a waste of the unique qualities of a game.

To me, non-linearity is simply the freedom to go left, right, or straight at various junctions through the course of a game. Left, right, or straight does not just apply to physical direction either, but in a more figurative sense to the freedom to alter the course of your progress through the game as you see fit whether by choosing different npcs, different skills, different conflict resolutions, whatever. The more of those junctions there are, the more non-linear a game is. Obviously it is scale, since there is no such thing as a totally non-linear game or a totally linear game.

Well, its a good thing it didn't win, I'll say! The only thing you can say about the voice acting in Oblivion was that it had a lot of it. So does a lot of a really bad thing somehow become good? I think not. Alas. I have a lot of issues with the design choices Bethesda has been making post Daggerfall. Too bad, because the core gameplay of the ES games is right uop my alley. The first thing I would have done is make sure all the voice actors could actually pronounce their own npc names.

Depends on your personal take really. For me the ability to go where I want and do what I want how I want when I want is the most important thing in a computer game. I'm the kind of person who far prefers flying CAP in flight simulator with a dynamic campaign engine and have nothing happen except me flying around in circles for a few hours than I do flying a canned mission. The unknown of what might happen is far more compelling to me than anything a dev can script.

The voice acting was almost uniformly horrific, except for the Imperial Male. Also horrific was the fact that about 4 voice actors voiced hundreds of npcs. Also every voice actor pronounced names and words differently from every other voice actor. A little tighter control of the production probably could have prevented that. Giving Oblivion an aware for anything having to do with voice acting is absurd. And I actually like the game, too.

weren't you criticizing Volourn for saying exactly the same thing about Oblivion and Morrowind? mmm?

That's kind of like winning an award for having the best mullet.