From Piece of Cake to Instant Death (warning: spoilers)

[Phileosophos]

Let me repeat: I already have the best I can find. I don't see a "guardian" frame anywhere. The highest I've found is mirage, which is what I have. Everywhere I've gone that's the best I can find. And when I've tried to go elsewhere, I get blown out of the sky before I can even turn tail and run.

But I see several people have said "hire a fleet", so how do I do that? I've got money, but the only thing I've found to hire so far are crew members, and I got rid of those slots to pack more missiles instead. How do I hire other fighters? I guess I"ve been missing that.

[TGS]

Sigh as great as this community is I think the answer "Hop on multiplayer and get help" is simply silly. You shouldn't have to do that to beat any mission.

That being said if you are content playing single player. Get some fleet members to help ya. Also the missions are somewhat randomized (Yes even the quest missions) The mission type will be static but the details of the mission can change. So you might end up with 6 enemies or 26 enemies or 46 enemies. The reward also changes depending on how many you have to deal with. But if you are finding it to be too hard just move to another sector to reset then try it again and see if you can get a lower amount of enemy fighters to deal with for the IMG missions.

And yeah going onto multiplayer for help can be good but you really shouldn't have to imo.

[Whytephyre]

You hire fleet members from the trade menu (press f4 within 1000k of the targeted ship).

If you are having trouble in other systems (like thuban) where there are lots of hostiles, your very best bet is to divert power to weapons/engines & quickly jump away from any engagement. You can go through a gate, open your nav menu & right click on a gate to get it's precise coordinates and jump right through it to another system ASAP. I spent my first eight hours of gameplay running away from people & just mining/trading.

If you can make it to virgo or rucker you should find better stuff & be pretty safe still (both fairly safe systems). They both offer a good variety of goods & contracts, & both locations have secrets.

I will send you a u2u

good luck, & good flying

ps: typos due to phone keyboard


[Edited on 9-25-2010 by Whytephyre]

[Blackthorne]

Whytephyre has a point here - you're not obliged to fight every red you come across; going through Thuban is pretty much an exercise in running, since the entry gate from Sapphire is located close to several stations - as a result, the place is crawling with bandits. Ignore them for a moment, plot a jump towards the exit gate to your destination, and launch a few CMs if the bandits start to get too friendly. I've made that trip in a badly shielded Arrow several times, unscathed except for a few launched CMs. And most of these were "just to make sure".

Alpha Centauri for example offers a good selection of equipment and frames, and is no more hostile than Olympus (admittingly, the bandits there have much better ships). If you really want a high-end frame and equipment badly, you can always make a trip from Orion to Earth.*

*=Or go to a "secret" planet. Admittingly, finding those without help isn't easy, hence Earth: It's there on your Nav Map. Just bring along enough fuel and something to read.

-Blackthorne

[Marvin]

In Legends, you could escape enemy fire by using inertial as you jumped from one gate to another. In Mercenary, you slow down after a jump ... but a quick burst of afterburner solves that problem easily enough.

[Whytephyre]

Originally posted by Marvin
In Legends, you could escape enemy fire by using inertial as you jumped from one gate to another. In Mercenary, you slow down after a jump ... but a quick burst of afterburner solves that problem easily enough.

you know, i always wished for an emergency jump cancelation ability. So you could create a fulcrum point, be drawn towards the gravity well & accellerate to high speeds, & then destroy the fulcrum point before you pass in to the singularity. Naturally, this would deplete your energy & maybe the massive release of enery would destroy your shields or something. Or maybe, if you are too close to the singularity, you are simply destroyed. Or maybe both!

Just a thought

[Spartan268]

If you would like some help just U2U me and i can come help you in MP.

[Whytephyre]

Phileosophos, BTW the best tech you can find around is in pearl, but pearl is even more dangerous than thuban. you should tool around rucker and virgo for a bit until you have your 'space legs' LOL

[Aures]

Originally posted by Phileosophos
Well, I'm starting to think I can't cope with this game.

Do not give up befriender of wisdom. You will get the hang of it. The game does not go from easy to impossible, but quite often mistakes are rewarded with instant death. Here is my list of advice to help you follow the natural curve of the game (rather than doing the equivalent of jumping into a high level dungeon with a new character in an RPG):

0) Get a fleet. Hiring a fleet is cheap considering you don't have to buy missiles your fleet mates fire. Have 15 of them hired at all times and you will burn through the contracts. Just remember to have them reload (or save the game and load, same effect) between contracts. To hire fleet mates just fly up to within 1000m of green ship (or a red ship if you want to bribe them) and open the ship-to-ship trade console (default F4). Down the bottom right is the hire fleet button. Bargain at 63,000 a pop. However, I think wing mates make it too easy so here are some more tips you can use to solo it and improve your skills, though they also apply to flying with a fleet. Unless you have something against fleets like me, use them.

1) Never turn off inertial mode while in combat. It has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread to use inertial mode rather than IDS while in combat. I would like to make it explicit that you should COMPLETELY AVOID IDS while in combat, do not switch out of inertial mode. The AI has a much easier time hitting you if you are in range and are moving at much below 1000m/s. Your overall speed should never drop below this (because your velocity is broken down into x-y-z components if you have 1000/(3^0.5)=577m/s x,y and z velocity components your overall velocity is about 1000m/s). This applies to guns as well as missiles, you can sail through the middle of a cluster of AI ships without adjusting your velocity at all and have none of their guns hit you even with 10 or so in gun range and firing at you. You should never die to enemy guns, missiles are what you have to worry about.

2) Make the AI waste missiles. While you are getting the hang of keeping your velocity up you will find you spend most of your time heading almost directly away from the AI because they chase you. Notice that they will keep firing missiles at you even though they have no chance of hitting unless you alter velocity drastically. The AI don't have infinite missiles so anything they waste like this can help tone down the missile craziness when you make a pass. Start trying to get a rhythm where you are using this time to recharge your weapons.

3) The AI always uses IDS, use this to your advantage. Once you are a little distance away you can slow down to a bit above or to their IDS speed and they will happily maintain their distance from you until the cows come home. They will continue to fire missiles at you until they run out or you get out of range. If you have the patience and you are in a sector where random contract unrelated reds don't keep popping up you can just wait for them to run out. Most importantly when damaged use this method to let your repair system C3 repair the component damage and as much of the armor damage as you have the patience to wait for.

4) Get a repair system C3. Try to get comfortable with using your inertial thrusters when your afterburner stops working due to damage. That way you can survive long enough to let the repair system do its work. You can just let them kill you or self destruct after a missile hit if you don't have the patience or can't spare the equipment slot, but I find a dead is dead approach is more fun in this case.

5) Abuse the afterburners. Except for multi waypoint patrol contracts even the small fuel tanks have enough to hold down the afterburner almost constantly without running out during a fight. At the moment the forward and reverse inertial thrust are weak compared to the lateral and vertical ones. This will be fixed in a patch. Until then never use forward inertial thrust, used the afterburner instead. Try to practice not letting your velocity drop too much while using afterburners. You are really vulnerable up to 1000 m/s. If you are going backwards and you afterburn to reverse direction you need to keep lateral and vertical velocity up (or be at a decent range) to avoid having a window of a few seconds when the AI missles and guns have an easy time hitting you.

6) Learn to use CMs. As long as you stop using afterburner for the brief instant you fire the CM it will be pretty effective. CMs are almost 100% effective if you are not changing your velocity and you time it right. The right time is when the range indicator is red with just a little bit of bar left. It takes a while to get the hang of it but if you follow points 2 and 3 you will encounter a lot of missiles that are very slowly gaining on you. That gives you plenty of time to practice finding the butter zone for CMs. When you get good at it you can reliably dispatch a missile with 1 CM in most circumstances.

6) Use the cannon relay system. This doubles your weapons energy reserve and the weapons energy recharge rate, enough said.

7) Use the highest shield boost that you have encountered. At your stage you should have at least a x3 or a x4. Get a shield boost x5 ASAP.

Fit the biggest engine you can, followed by shield and wing systems. Try to have shields and engines at similar levels if you you are in a small frame. Some of the levels are relatively better than others (eg level 9 engine vs level 10), compare the different levels and pick ones that give more bang for your buck. You don't need cargo bays or big fuel tanks for combat and on the smaller frames turning is fast enough with a basic wing system.

9) Get a maxim IR cannon and the best laser you have encountered. Your laser range is determined by your cannon and the maxim has one of the longest ranges. You can then out-range your enemies and gives you more time to fire during a pass. It will also be enough to drain your energy pretty quickly. The maxim is a good choice until you get access to the best cannons.

10) Learn to use the different fire modes. Dedicated buttons are better but for AI dedicated buttons or cycling the weapons mode are both fine. Check elsewhere in the forums for details about managing your weapons energy.

11) Get yourself to a war zone. The name sounds intimidating, but they are actually much safer than hostile sectors. Then you can start doing military missions and get access to the military frames. I would advise renting a hanger in the war zone and getting a military frame. Military frames all have level 10 shield, engine and wing sys along with 99 CMs, 8 hardpoints and better agility. You can then swap between the ships for different contract types. In war zones there are two non combat mission types. Lost item just needs you to head to a nav point and go to the container, easy and quick with a cargo scanner (preferably C5) but counts towards your military rank just a much as an 84 fighter patrol. Recovering escape pods requires a tractor beam and a cargo bay, also easy money. War zones also have some of the better equipment and frames available. Even if you don't want to do military missions you can still get the first military frame straight away, much better choice for the IMG combat missions than the loadout you described.

12) Pick your contracts. Think nothing of saving and then self destructing ( I think the quickest way to reload since it avoids the loading progress bar) to generate a new set of contracts. The game randomly generates contracts on load. Contrary to what you said earlier the game did not make it easier for you because you failed, it was just the luck of the draw. Reloading slightly annoying but necessary for me because only a small number of contracts/items for sale are generated. If you want a particular kind of work it is the quickest way to get it. You can also use this to make the IMG quests easier. I got up to 150 military missions (allowing me to purchase all military ships including the evoch-e, probably the frame you want for hardcore combat) doing nothing but lost item, escape pod and spy missions. Spy mission btw are scary fun and really good practice for using CMs, keeping your velocity up and keeping in range of a target. Orbit them using afterburners and keep within 1500m (of the centre of the ship) for 60 seconds while locked on to them, much more fun than using a stealth device. Even if you just do the lost item and escape pod missions by the time you reach 150 missions (4-6 hours, your results may vary) you will have made over 10 million. More than enough to finish the IMG missions and get some real walking around money.

13) Do non combat contracts until you have decent kit. While you can actively seek combat contracts (ie not just IMG missions) at your stage in the game you are making it harder for yourself than necessary. This is fine if that is what you want to do. It is like being a dedicated miner or trader. It takes longer and is more difficult than the most efficient route to getting a top tier loadout. And, combat is far harder than mining or trading. As a way to get the best stuff I can only recommend it for veterans of the Evochron series. I kick AI posterior in Legends but I almost completely avoided combat in Mercenary until I had finished the IMG quest. If I had dedicated myself to combat missions rather than getting on with it I would probably still be saving for a starmaster plus kit rather than getting one in the first day of play (and that is with getting 150 military missions before finishing the IMG quest).

14) Do the main IMG quests ASAP, where ASAP is as soon as you have good enough kit to complete the mission not as soon as you complete the previous contract. Hire a fleet of 15 ships and reload until the number of fighters is manageable, they will make short work of all the missions. The reward is worth it and then you can go into combat with the best equipment the Evochron universe has to offer.

15) If you want to make combat really easy, get an excalibur pack from a war zone. Then let the enemy chase you and wait for excals to reload. I used to do that sometimes in Legends, it still works but now it takes three times as long. Now I only do it if I am badly damaged.


There are two questions to ask yourself. One, do you care about getting the best stuff quickly or will you take a harder route for role-play etc reasons? Two, do you care about finding stuff out for yourself or are you happy to have locations etc pointed out?

Want to do it the hard way and not read spoilers? Be careful about what you read on the forums. In the extreme, you shouldn't read anything on these forums as people have differing definitions of spoilers. Let pain be your friend, I applaud your masochistic tendencies and desire to figure it out yourself. While you're at it consider not reloading for better equipment/contracts. If you want to be really extreme play dead is dead (ie you die=start new game). From your posts Phileosophos I don't think you fall into that category.

Want to do it the hard way but not adverse to spoilers? Read up in the forums skipping spoilers you don't want to know and make a decision about how you want to get rich and then follow that path. Kudos to you for imposing some discipline on yourself.

Want to do it the easy way but don't want to be spoiled? Finish the IMG quest, do non combat missions/trading/mining if you cant handle the next IMG quest with your current kit. The quest will lead you to areas where you can get better equipment.

Want to do it the easy way and want to be spoiled? Check out other forum posts or get someone to send you a U2U of something profitable, you can make money really easily and get all the best equipment without touching the IMG quests.

And of course there are many shades in between those answers. For most new players checking out more of the forum posts (including in the Legends forum) is a really good idea. Just remember to avert your eyes when someone mentions a spoiler you don't want to know about. Most of the advice in this thread appears elsewhere in many forms and time spent reading old posts is often better practice than actually playing.

And whatever you do:
FORGET IDS EXISTS IN COMBAT SIUATIONS.

[Whytephyre]

I disagree with NEVER using IDS, i switch it on and use it and horizontal/vertical thrusters & afterburners to maneuver. When i am done maneuvering, i switch IDS off and accelerate to attack speed (for me 1600-2200 K).

I also like phantom cannons better than maxim R, but to each his own

[Aures]

Yeah you can use IDS IF you know what you are doing, but if 3 AI enemies is too much for you the first thing to do is learn to live without IDS. I still use it in combat situations sometimes because of the current weakness of the forward/reverse inertial thrusters. Once the patch is out I will probably still use it occasionally to wipe off excess speed while freeing up the keyboard and my attention for other things. I will also sometimes use them as you do to manoeuvre, though for people who know what they are doing that doesn't usually count as a combat situation. My advice to players like Phileosophos is to never use it in combat until AI enemies are easy prey for them. And my post was addressed to him with similar users in mind rather than experienced players. Its a common rule of thumb in pedagogy, don't let students know the rules can be broken until they have mastered following them (lovely rule because it applies to itself:)). And when they find out a rule can be broken, don't let them break it. Make them see they are better off keeping it simple and following the rule for the moment so they know how to break it properly eventually.

I use a phantom myself and prefer it to the maxim, but Phileosophos isn't at the stage of the game where one is available. Again, for players who are moving onto the second line of IMG quests rather than in general. However, I will probably experiment with the maxim (or even the flarebeam!) again when I get into multiplayer. The new acceleration curve system means that in high velocity fights (ie both opponents travelling at high speed in the same direction with little relative velocity difference) that extra range may well be the determining factor in who wins. Keep out of the opponents range while constantly hitting them with a fusion laser at velocities too high for missiles to matter much. You might as well not have a cannon or a laser if you can't get in range to hit with them.

[Phileosophos]

Heh. I see Aures knows some Greek Thanks for the tips, gang, I've been putting them to good use. With as many folk as contributed suggestions, I feel like I owe it to post again and give some updates.

I think I may have found my niche in Evochron Mercenary, and I'm contemplating changing my callsign to CotBBS, which is short for "Chicken of the Big Black Sea". I took a decidedly Obama-esque approach to dealing with conflict: I run from it screaming like a little girl. I don't hoist the colors, I don't lock missiles, I don't make any threatening moves; I pull up my skirt, open the nav console, and jump away from it ASAP.

That strategy got me all the way to Virgo where I was able to buy a much better cannon at a secret planet, and along the way I managed to obtain a Guardian frame and a bunch of Exodus missiles. The much better frame and far more powerful missiles alone make it possible for me to survive for more than seconds in combat now, though I still have to be bloody careful what jobs I take.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get some of the suggestions to work, so I have a few follow-up questions. First, how can I hire a fleet? Lots of people have suggested it, and I've made the offer now to dozens of ships, but every time I do that I get a message back saying they're unable/unwilling to join me. Apparently my money's no good. All I'm doing is opening a trade request with a ship and making the offer; it doesn't seem to matter whether they're in a light little fighter or a big ol' bruiser: nobody will join me. What am I doing wrong?

Second, I bought an "Afterburner Drive" piece of equipment for the ship, thinking it would be handy given all the comments about abusing the afterburner, but all it did was get me killed. It seems like it sucks my energy down to zero and doesn't help me accelerate all that much. Can somebody perhaps tell me what it does? Or weigh in on its utility? I'm confused; I would expect it to help somehow but it seems only like a negative.

I'll post a different thread about questions I have about a few mission types. I'm finding I can do some combat missions, but I'm pretty clueless when it comes to others. As before and always: thanks for all the help!

[Whytephyre]

The afterburner drive siphons energy from weapons/fulcrum drive and uses it to increase afterburner thrust output 40-75% depending on your frame/engine setup. I personally only like it on heavier frames, & even then, using the afterburner in bursts can be limiting.

To hire a ship it must be friendly to you (green). Also, the ship has to not be busy, sometimes they seem to have their own agenda. You clearly know how to ask them to join your fleet, so now you just have to find some ships willing to join you. By the way, more dangerous sytems tend to have better ships to hire.

[Marvin]

I'd steer clear of some of the more exotic pieces of equipment until you've learned to use what's already available. For example, your standard afterburner is more than sufficient ... especially when combined with proper use of the inertial system.

[Sinbad]

Hey there Phileosophos, don't worry about being overwhelmed by combat in this game. I myself was a slow starter when it came to combat... always been more of an explorer anyway. Took me ages but eventually I got the hang of it. A little friendly player vs player combat can do wonders to improving your skills.

[DarK Rogue]

My strategy is to fly backward away from them at slightly less than their speed and fire your main weaponry (laser and particle) at them. Use missiles sparingly.

[Suranis]

Hi all.

I too experienced the "Slap in the face" experience of that first combat mission. I could not get it at all. I gave it up for a few days, then I got into a raven frame and ditched the cargo space in favour of lev 5 shields, wings and an engine, hired a fleet mate and did it. I also ditched a higher grade cannon for a flarebeam. It drove me crazy that i could not shoot the bad guys form a longer range, 500 seemed really short to me..

Anyway I aced it and the transport mission That extra range meant i was hammering them far more than they could me. Raven is a really speedy frame, agile too. I don't fancy my chances with the rest of the img missions with it though... might hire a fleet to do it for me. I'll defiantly look around for a better frame before i go onto it though, probably a Phoenix.

Game is frustrating but enjoyable so far. Thanks for all the advice in this thread, really helped me.

[Earl]

Something funny to share
http://www.youtube.com/user/earllad1?feature=mhum
I'm still working on the final mission of the questline...

I tried it out in single player, thinking some AI ships would lend a brutha a hand...
Well the game can apparently compensate for that!!
30 fighters YEAH RIGHT! I got throught the first wp somehow but on the second there were two capital ships in the area....

[Suranis]

Did you order your fleet there to attack the hostiles? I think they just sit there like that if you don't.

I was helping some people out today in the last mission, and i overshot and burned up in the planets atmosphere

Might make a youtube vid myself, actually.

[SeeJay]

Hi Earl.

There isn't a big problem with many opponents if you use the right technique/weapon.

I finished the last quest mission in 5 min or so with 34 boogies without taking any damage, and I'm a rookie!

Keep up the good work!;)

[Aures]

I had lots of trouble with the final IMG quest, until I stopped trying to draw them out of the atmosphere. Then I got through it no problem. Turns out atmospheric combat is a lot easier than I imagined. Now that the forward/reverse inertials are powerful enough to work in atmosphere it should be even easier.