StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Luke Starkiller wrote:I thought that it was hard coded that 2 intact generators made bombardment useless; the problem being that shield generators take away space for more shipyards

No, you can bombard them with a large enough fleet, an Admiral and all that jazz. What two or more generators accomplish is making it impossible for the enemy to assault the planet.

In that sense, Rebels have it on easy-mode when they get far enough. A pair of GenCore II Shields is enough to stop bombardment from most AI fleets, and those Sullustan Regiments not only have the best detection rating against special forces in the game, but they're stupidly cheap to boot. Even Dark Troopers aren't as good, while being far more expensive to maintain.

And really, your primary limitation will be the maintenance pool. Once you get your economy going, the refined materials won't matter as much. Speaking of which, replace your GenCore Is with IIs as soon as you can; turns out the advanced models are cheaper in maintenance points, which will help if you're like me and stick them on pretty much every system because you don't feel like playing whack-a-mole against random AI invasions. Though I suppose a strong enough fighter garrison can chase away enemy fleets, but that'll probably be more expensive than the shields.

Jub wrote:I've never played the game, but canon wise; why should any system not be able to support as many shipyards as you desire them to? Star Wars shipyards aren't planet based, rather they are space stations and the only limitation should be the ease of getting raw materials and finished parts shipped to any given system. We also know that the shipping or said resources isn't a huge deal simply because we know that something as massive as the DSII can be built out in the ass end of nowhere in secret. If I was a modder I might allow any planet to support an unlimited number of shipyards, or, depending on the games time scale, I would simply make building new shipyards outside the scope of the game so you're stuck with what you started with and the focus of the game would be capturing or destroying the enemy's shipyards.

I've never worried about the energy points thing. I just accept it as necessary gameplay mechanics to try and provide some kind of balance to where you can't just spam shipyards on one planet and pump out a Death Star every other day. FYI, with 12 advanced shipyards it only takes 98 days to build one; the maximum energy I've seen normally is 14 but on a mega-shipyard planet I always make sure to have a couple shield generators handy so I don't know how much of a difference those last two shipyards would make.

Also I'm not sure the primitive-as-fuck tactical space battles could really support the massive fleets you (or was it Purple?) went on to mention. I think the game would cry.

But really, if you want to get annoyed, here's this: natural disasters (ie: earthquakes, volcanoes and crap on the planet's surface according to the little picture) will take out your orbital shipyards.

God I hate natural disasters and wish I could mod those out. They always seem to go for my shipyard systems, and any planet that gets hit is effectively useless for the rest of the game as they get reduced to like 3 energy/materials after. Fuck I've seen especially bad ones that'll take you down to 0/0 at which point you might as well hit it with the Death Star.

Speaking of, you can perform Base Delta Zero operations if you're so inclined. That's a nice touch. I typically do that as the Empire to whichever system had the Alliance HQ, and occasionally Yavin if I'm feeling especially vindictive that game.

If you are really worried about energy points, it's not difficult. All you have got to do is let Threepio, or the Imperial equivalent, do it for you... I mean, you don't have to micromanage everything.

He won't find them for you, all he does is build garrison troops and mines/refineries. Which can be useful sometimes though occasionally you'll run into issues where he builds them on systems you'd rather he didn't.

There have been times in the late-game where, once I've set up all the shipyards, training facilities and construction yards I want, I'll let the droid assistants fill in the rest with mines and refineries. They're pretty good at that.

The game can handle large fleets. It will enlarge the cube even more and take the fleets longer to meet, but it will happen. However playing the AI vanilla means the likelihood of it happening is practically nil. I've had to use the editor setting capital ships cheaper for the AI to build them in large numbers.

Systems with 14 are great for shipyards. Sometimes you might find one that's 15!

RogueIce wrote:No, you can bombard them with a large enough fleet, an Admiral and all that jazz. What two or more generators accomplish is making it impossible for the enemy to assault the planet.

Yea. My bad. I knew it was something extremely important but it's been a while since I played.

In that sense, Rebels have it on easy-mode when they get far enough. A pair of GenCore II Shields is enough to stop bombardment from most AI fleets, and those Sullustan Regiments not only have the best detection rating against special forces in the game, but they're stupidly cheap to boot. Even Dark Troopers aren't as good, while being far more expensive to maintain.

Could you believe that I have only ever played as the good guys in this game? In all my years of playing it I have always been the Empire. So I actually don't know much about rebel strategy. I just thought that might be fun to share.

And really, your primary limitation will be the maintenance pool. Once you get your economy going, the refined materials won't matter as much. Speaking of which, replace your GenCore Is with IIs as soon as you can; turns out the advanced models are cheaper in maintenance points, which will help if you're like me and stick them on pretty much every system because you don't feel like playing whack-a-mole against random AI invasions. Though I suppose a strong enough fighter garrison can chase away enemy fleets, but that'll probably be more expensive than the shields.

From my memory imperial fighters aren't all that good until you get to the late ones. My strategy was always to build up on the shields and crank out SD's and interdictors to make those fleets die.

Jub wrote:Also I'm not sure the primitive-as-fuck tactical space battles could really support the massive fleets you (or was it Purple?) went on to mention. I think the game would cry.

I newer had any issues. But than again I newer really concentrated my fleets that much. At their biggest my fleets were no larger than 6-8 SD's (or what ever variant the largest capship is, it's been ages since I played it unmodded), a death star and a couple of interdictors. I tend to go for many small fleets as opposed to lumping them all in one pile where they can be easily dodged.

But really, if you want to get annoyed, here's this: natural disasters (ie: earthquakes, volcanoes and crap on the planet's surface according to the little picture) will take out your orbital shipyards.

From my experience those tend to be very rare.

More games!

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II with Mysteries of the Sith expansion
Republic Commando
Star Wars Starfighter

RogueIce wrote:More games!

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II with Mysteries of the Sith expansion
Republic Commando
Star Wars Starfighter

... They have Mysteries of the Sith? /falls over

my only problem with Mysteries of the Sith is the in-game cut-scenes really as at the time the game engine wasn't really good enough to give the game it's due in cut-scenes but game play was fun and there was this nice where you play as Mara Jade and had to lay low IMHO a stealth section done right, no "guards have super-natural senses and you got to tread a very specific path in very specific pace to win" that FPS stealth sections have (good god I hated that part of JK2) as long as you don't shoot anything and ain't detected where you're not suppose to be in you're fine, in "public areas" IIRC you could walk right next to a stormtrooper and they wouldn't react as long they weren't in "alert" mode.

also the ending can be bit hard to figure to an FPS fan even if it does sort of fit the canon at the time.

What I love is that the lightsabre scenes shot for Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight were the first live-action lightsabre sequences shot since the original trilogy.

Lord Revan wrote:my only problem with Mysteries of the Sith is the in-game cut-scenes really as at the time the game engine wasn't really good enough to give the game it's due in cut-scenes

Really, my primary annoyance was the colored lighting support and the developers wanting to show it off at every opportunity. Still a great game. Hilarious thinking back about how much flak the JK2 live-action cutscenes got when the game came out, only to have people then complain about the (as you said) limited in-game cutscenes. My memory is hazy here as well, but I also recall it missing the voice-overs from a third-party (think the character was Rahn in JK2) to summarize the boss fights.

JK2 hit a lot of little areas I really enjoyed: live-action cutscene, followed by a short in-game action shot (a la later Final Fantasy games would do when a battle started, but before you get control of your characters) with a Rahn voice-over. The game had an excellent cinematic appeal I find modern games which bill themselves as a "cinematic experience" routinely miss. Jedi-Outcast hit a few of these moments, such as running into your first Reborn enemy in the weathervanes. He just jumps down out of nowhere and stands there. Then as you approach, you see a red lightsaber flicker into existence in the dark and you know it's time for "wah jedi."

Also, the JK2 AI was light-years ahead of many other games, aside from Half-Life, that didn't translate over to MotS. People take a lot of shit for granted today, but seeing a Stormtrooper jump over the box you dove behind for cover to continue to try and gun you down was a big deal at the time.

FYI Humble Bundle is running a huge Star Wars pack so you can get quite a few titles for $12.

OK, so apparently I could have just edited my old Rebellion's shortcut settings to put it in window mode (-w) and setting it in the compatibility section to show as 640 x 480 will keep the damn mouse clicker in the correct size to properly click the planets and what not. Plus, renaming a couple files lets it skip the droid intro which was definitely my biggest peeve in playing on Windows 7. Nothing seems to have been changed by GOG, so I guess the $6 I shelled out is to show support for releasing it which I won't mind in the end doing since it was their forum that gave me half the answers.

By the way, for anyone who wants the characters to travel faster, you can change the hex values as described in the PDF on page 34. For the Millennium Falcon (using Han), I would change the values for all the difficulty levels since it seems he mixed it up.

Rejoice, Star Wars fans, for GOG continues to giveth!

First up, X-Wing and TIE Fighter now include their respective 1994 and 1995 DOS CD Special Editions. The ones with updated graphics that still retained the iMuse system. Free for those who already own the two games, though you may have to refresh your account to see them. (Just add "refresh" to the end of http://www.gog.com/account/ after you log in)

In other news, they also released four new Star Wars games: Rebel Assault I + II, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. (The latter two are also on sale! See below)

Finally, they've also bundled up and put on sale all of their previously released SW games (as well as JO and JA), so if you haven't bought them already, now's the perfect time! (Sale ends May 7th)

Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy had already been for sale, I've been playing through Outcast lately... so I wouldn't say that's "four new" games per se.

They had the announcement up as if they only released at the same time as the X-Wing and TIE Fighter updates. *shrug*

In any event, two new games, so there.

Also, for those who prefer to keep all their eggs in one basket when possible, the entire X-Wing series is finally available on Steam as well.

Why can't they just release The Curse of Monkey Island already...

Does anyone have any first hand experience with the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series on GOG vs Steam? I browsed the GOG forums and there seems to be some issues with the Steam releases compared to GOG (big surprise ). I picked up the Jedi Knight pack on Steam a couple years ago, but haven't gotten around to playing them, and was wandering if repurchasing them on GOG for a few bucks as part of the Sabre Bundle would be worthwhile. I hate repurchasing something I have already bought, but compatibility and experience tend to outweigh that in my opinion.

I managed to play Jedi Knight on Steam without much issues, although I did install an utility that would make the music play properly. link

Executor32 wrote:Also, for those who prefer to keep all their eggs in one basket when possible, the entire X-Wing series is finally available on Steam as well.

This is not accurate. The Steam copies lack the DOS CD versions: improved graphics w/iMuse sound. Only GOG has that, for now.

Also, since X-Wing vs TIE Fighter played music off the CD, the Steam version may not have music, as it did with the JK games. I haven't seen any reviews mention that, though.

Wing Commander MAD wrote:Does anyone have any first hand experience with the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series on GOG vs Steam? I browsed the GOG forums and there seems to be some issues with the Steam releases compared to GOG (big surprise ). I picked up the Jedi Knight pack on Steam a couple years ago, but haven't gotten around to playing them, and was wandering if repurchasing them on GOG for a few bucks as part of the Sabre Bundle would be worthwhile. I hate repurchasing something I have already bought, but compatibility and experience tend to outweigh that in my opinion.

You can't play the music with the Steam version, because it required the CD. the GOG version includes the music natively.

RogueIce wrote: You can't play the music with the Steam version, because it required the CD. the GOG version includes the music natively.

Yes they do. It's a tad glitchy, but it's there.

But the No-CD crack they use gets flagged and deleted by your antivirus program, so you need to add an exception for both XvT and BoP

Darksider wrote:

RogueIce wrote: You can't play the music with the Steam version, because it required the CD. the GOG version includes the music natively.

Yes they do. It's a tad glitchy, but it's there.

But the No-CD crack they use gets flagged and deleted by your antivirus program, so you need to add an exception for both XvT and BoP

I was talking about Jedi Knight. Good to know that they at least tried for a workaround for XvT/BoP, even if it was an apparently poorly done one.

Oh, and if someone wants to replay Dark Forces: Jedi Knight here is a mod.

Vendetta wrote:
Frigates were still the biggest pain though, a Star Destroyer is six torpedoes and a few ion cannon blasts away from being a big useless brick, corvettes have the giant deadzone in their fire arcs behind the engine block, etc.

As long as you didn't get smacked by the Star Destroyer's light speed bow.