POSs and stuff not covered by tutorials

[vertex]

POS = Player Owned Structure, too long for title.


Now, as I've read through the forum prior to registration, I noticed you tend to put huge effort in warm greetings and chitchat so.. hi everybody, glad to be here, love and hugs for everyone. I even brought tea and cookies.

With the etiquette fulfilled, I'd like to ask some questions:

1. Building my own station: what do I need (build device?) and where do I get that stuff?

2. Where can I get that automatic anti-missile device? When I do the first mission in Optimus system, I'm being greeted by 4+ rats who seem to have nothing aboard but missiles.. they don't seem to run out of them. Even if I run out the missiles, they have more when I get close again - 2 to 3 missiles and I'm stardust. My CM doesn't seem to work (hitting that button, but missiles keep coming).

Current ship: Panther, Engine 5, Cargo 3, Fuel 400, Wing 2, Crew 1, Equip 5, CM 1x25, Hardpoints 3
+ Mine/Tractor Beam, Fulcrum C3, Cannon Relay Sys, Shield Boost X3, Repair Sys C3
+ Particle Razor, Beam Metal-Vapor

3. Somewhere I've read about building my own equipment from antimatter and such? Where? How?


Finally I'm very confused by missions:

a) some are earning me 12k for delivering items with a value around 30k? I'd rather just sell the item than fly around.. but do I lose reputation for abandoning the mission?

b) clean asteroid fields for 8-24k doesn't yield any money, because when I'm done my fuel tank is empty.. are there any weapons with a higher range than 400-500 clicks?

c) Race missions: you can't overtake the opponent, because the tunnel is too small - shields are colliding and most of the time it kicks me out of the tunnel. Am I missing something, or is the only way to race doing the "hot start" and then being bounced in the back all the time to the finish line?


By the way: is "clicks" the right unit for the displayed distance?


Finally maneuvering:
I've read something about being faster than 1400 (so faster than missiles), but how can I tell how fast I am, if the number is only correct when I look in the direction I slide? When going sideways, zero speed is displayed.

I'd like to have a 3D-360° arrow displaying the current direction I'm drifting and some number displaying my absolute velocity - not the one that's relative to my viewing direction

I'm looking for the 5th and 6th strafe buttons - forward and backward. Currently I'm using the afterburner to accelerate and switching to IDS (speed 0) to decelerate. Somehow that feels wrong.


Talking too much again. Now I'll go and post my custom HUD in mod forum

[Viper]

Disclaimer:
I am usually quite punctual when it comes to spelling and grammar, but since this post is so ginormous, I'm not going to bother with it.

Wow that's a lot of questions. Ok let me get some tea and cookies as well and we're off:

1. Building my own station: what do I need (build device?) and where do I get that stuff?

Yes, there are two types of 'buildable' stuff: the Deploy Constructor and the Build Constructor. The Deploy Constructor deploys temporary items such as a shield array and scanning array. These items disappear if you leave the sector. the Build constructor lets you build permanent stations. There are several types: Trade station, Energy station, Research station, Ore Processor and Constructor station. Thes items are permanent, unless another player destroys them using a Station Detonator.
Build Constructors and Deploy Constructors can be bought on stations in high-tech regions of space. You can find these areas by opening your nav map, clicking on 'Quadrant' and then on 'Economy'. The regions where the economy is highest, are also the most high-tech regions.

2. Where can I get that automatic anti-missile device? When I do the first mission in Optimus system, I'm being greeted by 4+ rats who seem to have nothing aboard but missiles.. they don't seem to run out of them. Even if I run out the missiles, they have more when I get close again - 2 to 3 missiles and I'm stardust. My CM doesn't seem to work (hitting that button, but missiles keep coming).

We're not in the habit of posting spoilers on this forum, so I'm not going to tell you exactly where to find one. The same method as I described above can be used for finding the general area in which the 'anti-missile system' and 'auto-cm launcher' might be found though. Beware though, they are pricey. And besides, the auto-cm launcher will usually suffice when coping with a lot of enemy missile fire.
By the way, NPC's don't have an unlimited supply of missiles. Each ship frame has a max capacity of 8 missiles, and that goes for them as well. But yeah, if you have 3 NPC's riding your tail, that's 24 missiles coming at you.

3. Somewhere I've read about building my own equipment from antimatter and such? Where? How?

I'm not too familiar with this myself, but some minerals can be converted into material if you take them to a Constructor station. You can then sell or use the material. I'm not sure if they also convert in actual hardware though.

Finally I'm very confused by missions:

a) some are earning me 12k for delivering items with a value around 30k? I'd rather just sell the item than fly around.. but do I lose reputation for abandoning the mission?

Yes, you do lose some reputation points for canceling a mission. But if it gets you more money that way, who cares lol. Be patient though, by the looks of things you are still early in your progress, and mission rewards will increase drastically when you gain more progress and venture to other systems.

b) clean asteroid fields for 8-24k doesn't yield any money, because when I'm done my fuel tank is empty.. are there any weapons with a higher range than 400-500 clicks?

Yes, I believe the weapon with the highest range has 750. and it's not even one of the high-level weapons either.

c) Race missions: you can't overtake the opponent, because the tunnel is too small - shields are colliding and most of the time it kicks me out of the tunnel. Am I missing something, or is the only way to race doing the "hot start" and then being bounced in the back all the time to the finish line?

Actually, it is possible to overtake opponents inside a race tunnel. You just need to bump them out of your way, just like you would do in everyday traffic, lol. Also, I always fo flying starts, when I fly to a point some distance in front of the tunnel entrance, then increase speed up to around 1250-1500, and fly right past my opponent. Will give you a huge lead. And if you keep your average speed around that mark, there is no way they will overtake you. Taking turns with that speed will take you some practice, though.

By the way: is "clicks" the right unit for the displayed distance?

Well, we usually refer to the 'K' as kilometers, but from a relative perspective that makes absolutely no sense what so ever. To tell you the truth, I really don't know what the right unit would be. Good one.

Finally maneuvering:
I've read something about being faster than 1400 (so faster than missiles), but how can I tell how fast I am, if the number is only correct when I look in the direction I slide? When going sideways, zero speed is displayed.

Yes it will. But if you look at one of your inertial speed displays on the top center of your instruments, it will give you a reading on your sideways speed, and also up or down. If you are not facing directly forward and not directly sideway either but somewhere in between, simply add up the numbers for forward and sideway velocity and you have your total forward motion.
and by the way, 1400 is a bit low to outrun missiles. Most AI ships travel at around 500-800 in combat, and you have to add the speed of the missiles to that, to get the final missile velocity. I'd recommend something above 2500 if you wanna be on the save side.

I'd like to have a 3D-360° arrow displaying the current direction I'm drifting and some number displaying my absolute velocity - not the one that's relative to my viewing direction

You could ask Vice nicely but I don't think you'd get one. Navigating in space should not be easy, and Vice has tried to make this game as realistic as possible. Navigating really well is somewhat of an art in itself.

I'm looking for the 5th and 6th strafe buttons - forward and backward. Currently I'm using the afterburner to accelerate and switching to IDS (speed 0) to decelerate. Somehow that feels wrong.

I'm assuming you are in 'Inertial' mode when you try to strafe. If you are, you can also reverse thrust by hitting the /+Tab key combo. The Tab will fire your afterburner, the / will reverse the thrust. Essentially, that is forward and backward strafing.


Well, I hope I answered some of your questions. If there are more, feel free to ask Maarschalk.
Nah just kidding, you can always ask anything. We're glad to help you out.

Good luck!

[Edited on 1-28-2012 by Viper]

[Maarschalk]

Hi Vertex, I already welcomed you in the other post, thanks for the cookies and the tea!.....

These are a lot of questions which some of them have already been answered in many different threads!
But I shal try again to answer most of them!

1. You need a Built Constructor and you can Buy them in high tech Systems. You can visit SeeJays Junholt Website to get a lot of info of where to find stuff!

2. See answer #1 for finding equipment. Also 4 enemy fighters could have 8 missiles per fighter so that is a total of 32 missiles so 25 CMs is not going to be enough, you need an average of 5 CMs per missile when you do not know how to handle incoming missiles so that means you only have enough CMs for 5 incoming missiles. You can shoot incoming missiles down you know!.....:P

3. You can take raw material to a Constructor Station and exchange the raw material for equipment! Again where to find Constructor Stations see answer #1. Also with the Built Constructer you can Built a Constructor Station.

a) I do not think you can sell the equipment that you need to deliver as a part of a contract and if you can you will fail the contract and affect your reputation. One way to make it worth while is having a player with higher rank choose the contract for you in Multiplay and your pay will be more then the equipment is worth in most cases and you get the higher pay of the higher ranking player.

b) See answer a). And yes there are weapons with higher range the class1 Cannon has the highest of 750!

c) Yes you can overtake and stay easily 800 units in front of your opponent. Fly at IDS speed between 800 and 1000. Set your speed to 900 so you only have to concentrate on navigating through the rings with out worrying about speed and you should be able to pass him easily at the edge of the rings. Once you have past him stay in the middle of the rings. It takes practice but it becomes very easy after a while.

About Clicks: You can use what ever you want for the Unit of distance. I call it units, some call it parsecs, km, miles.....you can call it clicks if you like in Space distance is relative!....

About Maneuvering: You can tell how fast you are going by your total approximate velocity vector!. If your moving side ways at speed 1500 and 0 at forward speed your moving at 1500 speed side ways and your horizontal movement speed in your HUD will display + or - 1500 and your forward speed will show 0 in your HUD
If your side ways velocity is 300 and your forward velocity is 400 then your vector speed in a diagonal direction will be 500! according to the equation of Pythagoras! but you will not see the 500, you will only see the side ways and the forward speeds ... You have a little box that shows you your drifting or heading direction there is no 3D-360 degrees arrow.

About the Forward and Reverse Strafe Keys: These are < and > Keys on your KeyBoard. Check the Keyboard Quick Refference Guide in your Game folder for a file called "Keyboard.jpg"......

[Edited on 1-28-2012 by Maarschalk]

[Viper]

Great minds think alike don't they Maars!

[vertex]

Yeah, most stuff instantly solved - thanks alot

Disclaimer:
I am usually quite punctual when it comes to spelling and grammar, but since this post is so ginormous, I'm not going to bother with it.

Oh dear, I'm sorry. Have I made that many mistakes? I'm actually no native English speaker - native would be German. But I always enjoy corrections - so don't hesitate if you enjoy giving lessons

the Build constructor lets you build permanent stations.

Err.. I come from the x-verse.. I don't need to first "buy" a station before deploying it?
Do I need any materials for that? But it already sounds like "consider it in maybe one or two weeks..." ... I don't even survive in Olympus yet.

by the way, 1400 is a bit low to outrun missiles. Most AI ships travel at around 500-800 in combat, and you have to add the speed of the missiles to that, to get the final missile velocity. I'd recommend something above 2500 if you wanna be on the save side.

Whee.. but at that velocity my ship maneuvers like a lead-duck

So I'll first let them fire all their missles and try to take them down afterwards..?

Should I generally use a hit and run technique? Can't think of anything else on that speed..

I'm assuming you are in 'Inertial' mode when you try to strafe. If you are, you can also reverse thrust by hitting the /+Tab key combo. The Tab will fire your afterburner, the / will reverse the thrust. Essentially, that is forward and backward strafing.

Aaah, gorgeous! Yeah, inertial mode. I know that from Mantis (oh, I loved that one). I've just found "Inertial Forward" and "Inertial Reverse" on the second page under "Miscellaneous Controlls". That's what I've been looking for! Mapped it to mbt4 and mbt5. Yay!


@Maarschalk:

Also thanks to you

For the "has been answered" part - yeah, some. But I found using the search rather difficult, since I don't know the syntax of this search engine. When I searched for "own station" or something like that, it found me alot of "drowners"
Thinking about it, I didn't try Google syntax like "+own +station".. hmm..


Mentioning gun classes! Good. That reminds me I wanted to look up what the Y/C/R attributes mean. For now I just considered the Razor cannon with class 10 being better than my old class 2 cannon - obviously I've been wrong? That thing is worth 120.000 credits, while my old sold for 14k.. hm.. need to look that up - thanks for the input about class 1 range

[vertex]

How is double posting handled here? There's nothing on the rules about it. Err.. if you're for "edit rather than double post", sorry in advance for this. I always consider a double post more efficient regarding length and different message content.

Okay, you guys always say "see you out there" (other topic regarding hud) but you never state the server, tehe

But that's another question I have: are those I can see there permanent servers? How is progress distributed from singleplayer to multiplayer? One way or "full duplex"? Well, I guess I can find that out pretty easily.

[Viper]

Disclaimer:
I am usually quite punctual when it comes to spelling and grammar, but since this post is so ginormous, I'm not going to bother with it.

Oh dear, I'm sorry. Have I made that many mistakes? I'm actually no native English speaker - native would be German. But I always enjoy corrections - so don't hesitate if you enjoy giving lessons

Actually I was referring to my own post. I can't stand typos and grammar errors if I made them myself, and my post has far too many lol.

the Build constructor lets you build permanent stations.

Err.. I come from the x-verse.. I don't need to first "buy" a station before deploying it?
Do I need any materials for that? But it already sounds like "consider it in maybe one or two weeks..." ... I don't even survive in Olympus yet.

Nah you don't need to buy a station. You need to buy a Build Constructor. This is the item that will build a station for you and you mount it on one of your equipment hardpoints. You still do have to pay money for each station you build though.

by the way, 1400 is a bit low to outrun missiles. Most AI ships travel at around 500-800 in combat, and you have to add the speed of the missiles to that, to get the final missile velocity. I'd recommend something above 2500 if you wanna be on the save side.

Whee.. but at that velocity my ship maneuvers like a lead-duck

So I'll first let them fire all their missles and try to take them down afterwards..?

Should I generally use a hit and run technique? Can't think of anything else on that speed..

Well if you're sprayed with missiles, your priority should be to RUN!, not so much to maneuver. So take some distance at high speed if you don't know how to counter the missiles in a different way, then regain control of your ship again and prepare for another run. The best speed for engaging other ships lies somewhere between 800 and 1500. This differs per player and their style. 2500 Is indeed a bit too fast to quickly maneuver your vessel.

I'm assuming you are in 'Inertial' mode when you try to strafe. If you are, you can also reverse thrust by hitting the /+Tab key combo. The Tab will fire your afterburner, the / will reverse the thrust. Essentially, that is forward and backward strafing.

Aaah, gorgeous! Yeah, inertial mode. I know that from Mantis (oh, I loved that one). I've just found "Inertial Forward" and "Inertial Reverse" on the second page under "Miscellaneous Controlls". That's what I've been looking for! Mapped it to mbt4 and mbt5. Yay!

Excellent.

[Edited on 1-28-2012 by Viper]

[vertex]

You still do have to pay money for each station you build though.

Aaah, that covers it *pling*

then regain control of your ship again and prepare for another run. The best speed for engaging other ships lies somewhere between 800 and 1500. This differs per player and their style

Ok, I'll try that. Evochron is the first space sim where I don't count dps that much, but need to invent the "odpm" abbreviation for "own deaths per minute"

I prefer not to lose control over my ship in the first place tho.. but I'm eager to watch your lose-and-regain-technique sometime!


Just found Y/C/R in the manual..

when you highlight a weapon, the Y: stands for Yield, S: stands for Speed, C: stands for Cycle rate, and R: stands for Range.

S? Sounds like there'll be projectile guns later on..? Tehe we'll see. But that covers the "range" question.

So yield is damage? Weird.. and cycle rate needs to be low for a faster gun I guess. Please correct me if I'm wrong

[Maarschalk]

Cycle rate needs to be high for a faster firing gun. Think of Cycle rate as frequency!....

[Flying Brick]

Wheeee, tea and cookies!!....oh bother the tea, gimme more cookies!!
Right. So, welcome. You already got most of your answers. And to clarify, you likely already have both projectile, and laser weapons mounted on your ship. You can shoot them separately (F5, F6; N cycles between one, the other, and both).
Beam weapons (lasers) are best against ship shields; projective weapons (cannons) are best against ship armor.
So the general idea, as I'm sure you've got it by now, is to usually use the lasers pew-pew to down their shields, and then use your cannons for more pew-pew against their armor, and kaboom! More cookies.

Of course, you can just be a tasteless bourgeois and fire both at the same time, but it is SO lacking in style...not to mention it eats up your energy.

Also possibly useful tidbit: your laser weapons have the same range of your cannon. So they will both reach the same range, always.

Now go get them reds! And bring back more cookies, please.
Fine, you can bring some tea as well, whatever.


edit: As for range, try and see what you're comfy with: a lot of folks use the lower-class cannons because of their long range and high rate of fire. In this case longer is better, but bigger damage not necessarily always so.

[Edited on 1-29-2012 by Flying Brick]

[vertex]

Lt. Flying Brick seems to be fun

Ok, I'll try to get dark cocoa shocked chocolate chipped cookies, vanilla moon cream cookies, strawberry housing cookies, white fudge frosted caramel cookies with peanuts and almonds... and lebkuchen (tehe, funny - just looked that up and they seem to be using our word in English) back from the rats.

But cookies without tea, coffee or cocoa are not even half the fun. Don't eat too much tho - else you'll turn from Flying Brick to Flying Rock and that would mess with your agility in space


Yeah, if I get used to the shiny things in my cockpit, so I know when their shields are down, I might even cycle through particle and beam weapons. I too decided to use class 2 now, which has a range of 700cows.

Actually I just made that up and invented the cow - those are "clicks or whatever" units.


/edit:

Oh, post scriptum: my beam seems to be not using any energy at all. I can fire that thing non stop and the energy bar doesn't go down. So I figured ducks - be a moron and use all weapons at once

[Edited on 2012-1-29 by vertex]

[Maarschalk]

ROFL Vertex, your only some cows away! And if Gorf was/is still around he would say Moooooooooooooooo! and I would not mention cookies or milk if I where you when he is around!.....:P:P:P:P:P:P:P

[Edited on 1-29-2012 by Maarschalk]

[vertex]

Mr. Moo? I take it he dislikes being milked by strangers?

Some cows away from what?


Ehm.. is it correct that the beam doesn't do 'any' damage to the hull and the particle doesn't do 'any' to shields?

[Maarschalk]

About the weapons it is not quite that way. Beam does to damage to the hull but very little as its yield/damage output is minimal compared to Particle! And Particle do less damage to shields then beam weapons but Particle cannons do a little shield damage to or a lot depending on the modulation frequency of the particle cannons. There is a Particle cannon that will drain the shields faster then any beam weapon!.....