Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Dimensional Eclipse => Topic started by: JCQ on September 06, 2012, 11:21:58 pm
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I have to put invincibility in order to be certain missions. no other mod has given me this much trouble even on the easiest setting.
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I can't really say anything if you don't go into any more specifics.
Exactly what is causing you trouble - accomplishing objectives or simply staying alive?
What exactly is killing you? Hostile fighters? Flak screens?
Please provide some details or I can't really do anything but go : "Well, you're probably doing something horribly wrong."
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Im guessing its the fighters, they're a pain unless you learn to glide like them.
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That's what tutorials are for :p
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The tutorial is even telling you how to glide and stuff. How helpful :D
Otherwise, reducing the difficulty could be very helpful.
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When doing turns, make use of the lateral in verticle thrusters: in the direction your turning for sharper turns, away from the direction for sweeping turns.
Also, if your primary input device is a trackball or mouse: be wary of cramp-ups! I had to switch to a joystick by the end of the 3rd or 4th mission.
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Insane difficulty before release ver.
(http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww286/TSADestiny/Goodmission.png)
Insane difficulty after release ver.
(http://i728.photobucket.com/albums/ww286/TSADestiny/Ephyra1.png)
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In general, DE is hard. It's AI is consistent over all difficulty levels, and pretty much the only thing that changes is player's armor buffs, which might not really be enough to compensate for better AI, not to mention they don't help at all while escorting things.
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its some of the special "boss" fighters that are giving me the most trouble. some of these "boss" fighters like megan seem to have fighters that are faster than my fighter. idk. nothing else really bothers me. i use a keyboard and a ps3 controller to play btw. i cant use the mouse it just is too hard to play with it.
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Try harder, then :P And I'm preeeeeeetty sure the Blizzard CE doesn't have a speed boost, only a maneuverability boost like the Blizzard Cmdr ver.
Well if you leave Psi 1 alone and go to blow up other people, in the end, Psi One is going to be blown up by Shizuku <3
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I will fully admit that the latter missions of Chapter 2-A is too difficult (2-B seems to be decent)
I've been working with addressing these issues already for a 1.1 patch (which will also include things like implementing the new replacement models accounting for anything that may have been broken).
It's in the works :)
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Okay, having just started getting into this mod today (finally installed a nightly and DL'd the files), I am extremely impressed so far, but I have to agree with the OP--the difficulty is ridiculous.
It wouldn't be so bad if it was close to the same FS mechanics that we're all used to (and that retail FS/FS2 introduces to us slowly and steadily), but with a very different set of flight dynamics, gunplay, maneuvering, and spatial awareness, it's utter hell. Even on Trainee difficulty--which apparently only gives you a bit more armor and doesn't change the AI or mission events at all--I pretty much have to play with cheats on in order to simply enjoy the game without it being an extremely strenuous challenge. My first playthrough is as much about the story as it is about learning the general mechanics and dynamics of the setting/gameplay, and I facepalmed when a relatively early mission in the game involved me facing six better-equipped Blizzard fighters in perfect surround, ambush position, by myself, with a loadout geared towards light anti-ship duty as per the mission brief. To put it another way, BP2's 'My Brother, My Enemy' ace dogfight mission is intense and challenging, but it isn't jarringly difficult even from the first glance.
A few times I've been utterly annihilated by flak barrages in a later stage of a given level, and even when full afterburning away from the warship, I can't escape the flak at all and I'm obliterated in seconds. It wouldn't be quite so bad if I was actually given access to some of the anti-ship weapons in more than a couple of the missions where I'm expected to engage capships directly.
Also: holy ****, is that a Covenant ASSAULT CARRIER?! *Jaw hits floor* There wouldn't happen to be a Halcyon-class cruiser anywhere in the game, by chance? (Regardless, it was so awesome to see a 3D model of a Covenant capship in FSO, in-game.)
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What I find strange is that Flak is unchanged from FreeSpace 2 in terms of damage, your ship has comparable health, and they are present in comparable amounts (somewhere around Deimos-level).
I've been going through and routinely lowering the difficulty, as I've mentioned above, as well as implementing a few more helping bits for lower difficulties. Though I haven't touched the flak, but maybe I should?
There's also one or two missions which are slightly broken due to codeside changes, I'm aware of those...
Argh, really need to get my act together and finish this megapatch.
EDIT:
Also, this " a bit more armor" is...5x as much HP as on insane.
You look at that on paper and that's a pretty ridiculous durability increase. :P
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Notice, you fixed the AI without editing the flak. FS2 flak was very strongly nerfed by poor AI accuracy and artificially slowed ROF. IIRC, DE doesn't do those things, which is what is rendering the flak guns extremely deadly.
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DE doesn't do those things as much as any mod with "Fury AI" doesn't do those things...
Still doesn't quit explain it (except maybe people are familiar with the flak screens and safe zones of FS2 ships that they got to know before the flak was as deadly).
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Well we 'fixed' it by swapping all the standard flaks for heavy :shrug:
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LOL. Okay. Guess I could tune them down a bit then XD.
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Also: having 5x health isn't much of a help when it just means it takes 10 seconds of sustained fire to kill you instead of two...when you're already being juggled to near-helplessness after the first second or two anyway. And you're outnumbered 10 to one in every mission, often by either dedicated (and effective) swarm craft and/or similarly (or more) powerful fighters than your own.
Also: there's actually a checkpoint system? I heard about it before starting to play, but I never found a single instance of it. The few occasions in which I was prompted to press '1' to skip an intro cutscene resulted in absolutely nothing. I was never prompted to select a checkpoint, or that I had any kind of checkpoint available (or that I had reached a checkpoint).
Oh, and one other important note: just because a tutorial tells you which button to press to glide doesn't mean you've actually learned anything about *how* to effectively utilize it, or when. Trial and error is far from effective for learning this, as it can be quite difficult to tell what works, why, and how much so. Same with lateral thrust, vastly different intertia, autoaim/convergence, etc. The last one in particular confuses the heck out of me--I can have my gunsight perfectly on target for over a minute straight, firing full-auto with proton guns, and not hit my target a single time. Even when randomly aiming at various points around the gunsight, the result is usually the same. What gives?
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This is *probably* creator bias kicking in, but I found that I could pretty much just sit there on trainee for some time and not die. Again, I'm lowering hostile forces counts on lower difficulties, to account for the fact that there is a much wider range of how well people use the new stuff like backburning/sidethrust/glide than I initially expected (I thought I was pretty bad, in comparison to my testers, actually - maybe they were just *really good at it*).
Some missions have checkpoints, others do not. Depends on the mission and if I felt it was necessary. Most missions are actually fairly short and continuous so there's no good place to put it. If there is one, it'll prompt you via training message when you've reached the checkpoint (CHECKPOINT REACHED), and the next time you start the mission it will prompt you again via training message to press a button to load checkpoint. Mostly checkpoints are to skip periods of expository downtime rather than saving combat progress.
Urr...no clue why skipping cutscene is not working. Check key bindings?
Yes, I know that one doesn't simply know how to use all the new tools immediately, but I think I've made at least the first chapter's missions fairly light, but challenging enough to prompt you to try out new things. Sounds like you're already most of the way through chapter 2 if you've reached the 6v1 ambush mission (which is not "fairly early", that's already past the mid point of the campaign already, actually). That said, chapter 2 was built after chapter 3 so if anything things get a bit easier. I've gone through and reduced the difficulty for chapter 2 (in some places drastically). This was due to a testing oversight and I apologize.
Iunno about autoaim - I've noticed it too, its...probably a quirk with how FSO handles autoaim - sometimes it's just...off like that. Might be because nobody's used it until now. I still think it's preferable to having no autoaim/converge though, that just makes it even harder (in more ways than one - makes the AI more accurate too, actually...) I think how effective it is depends on the angle - it's not very good when trailing/chasing.
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This is *probably* creator bias kicking in, but I found that I could pretty much just sit there on trainee for some time and not die. Again, I'm lowering hostile forces counts on lower difficulties, to account for the fact that there is a much wider range of how well people use the new stuff like backburning/sidethrust/glide than I initially expected (I thought I was pretty bad, in comparison to my testers, actually - maybe they were just *really good at it*).
Some missions have checkpoints, others do not. Depends on the mission and if I felt it was necessary. Most missions are actually fairly short and continuous so there's no good place to put it. If there is one, it'll prompt you via training message when you've reached the checkpoint (CHECKPOINT REACHED), and the next time you start the mission it will prompt you again via training message to press a button to load checkpoint. Mostly checkpoints are to skip periods of expository downtime rather than saving combat progress.
Urr...no clue why skipping cutscene is not working. Check key bindings?
Yes, I know that one doesn't simply know how to use all the new tools immediately, but I think I've made at least the first chapter's missions fairly light, but challenging enough to prompt you to try out new things. Sounds like you're already most of the way through chapter 2 if you've reached the 6v1 ambush mission (which is not "fairly early", that's already past the mid point of the campaign already, actually). That said, chapter 2 was built after chapter 3 so if anything things get a bit easier. I've gone through and reduced the difficulty for chapter 2 (in some places drastically). This was due to a testing oversight and I apologize.
Iunno about autoaim - I've noticed it too, its...probably a quirk with how FSO handles autoaim - sometimes it's just...off like that. Might be because nobody's used it until now. I still think it's preferable to having no autoaim/converge though, that just makes it even harder (in more ways than one - makes the AI more accurate too, actually...) I think how effective it is depends on the angle - it's not very good when trailing/chasing.
About the autoaim--yeah, that's my impression as well. I'd much, much rather have it than not, but in some situations it seems utterly incapable of hitting the target. Come to think of it, though, Diaspora feels like an exception to that--I have no idea what it does differently, but it might be worth a look to see if there is some kind of simple (or not) solution to the problem.
About trying the new mechanics--it's not about trying them, it's about learning them. Trial and error is grossly inefficient as a learning process when you aren't sure what is actually working or not, why, and how much so. It's like the difference between trying to learn golf entirely on your own through trial and error and having someone teach you--aside from the very talented, the former method is far longer and more difficult of a way to get better.
To put it another way: the tutorial tells you which buttons to press to use lateral thrust. It doesn't tell or teach you how to USE that effectively, and how different usages of it will result in X, Y, or Z effects, and why it does/why it matters. It doesn't tell me when and when not to use reverse AB in combat, and why. It doesn't tell me tips for dealing with a dozen swarm fighters surrounding me and breaking free of the juggling effect that even one of them can initiate.
Further, though, some of the weapons are really inadequately explained, introduced, or clear as to what they actually are/do. That three-stage anti-squadron missile is still a total enigma to me, both in terms of its specific intended usage and how it really works. I have no idea what the actual range and effective usage of the Diamondback is, because it has no rangefinder and no mention of its range/behavior anywhere in the game. It doesn't tell me *how* effective it is as an anti-shipping weapon, either. The shield mechanic for the Phoenix makes no sense to me at all, even after reading everything I could find on it (in-game), so I never bothered using that fighter. When it came time to attack the Amaterasu, I did the whole trench-run thing, until I spent five minutes trying to find where the hell I was supposed to go to get to the hangar from 'inside' the ship. I eventually just flew around, trying to find the outside entrances to the hangar, made possible after a few minutes of searching and god mode, of course. Some target-able waypoints would really help here.
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As an aside: "The Exarchy has been the galaxy's guardians for longer than your species has looked to the stars." --Said as they're systematically glassing population centers of a species in an unprovoked attack, threatening and promising xenocide of a species that doesn't even know what they did wrong (and were never told, even when they asked), and lets its war-driven peons invade other species with impunity while declaring xenocide if those species so much as take a step in Exarchy territory.
Erm, is every free-thinker in the Exarchy THAT much of an extreme hypocritical moron?
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I believe I've expressed my opinion on this before, but such things are really beyond what can be effectively conveyed in the form of text. Not to mention the fact that I have no idea if my way of dogfighting is even any good, thus I wouldn't presume to try and tell people to do things my way, and rather let them figure it out on their own. I don't think there's a single mod (or even game) out there that tells you off the bat the "right" way of playing it... It's ultimately up to the player to develop their preferred playstyle after all. If I gave situations when to use X and when not to use X, people would have the same complaint after trying it and having less success than they expected, etc.
Hell, I don't think there are all that many guidelines like that for regular FreeSpace and it's been out for 10+ years and has had a period with an active, competitive Multiplayer scene. Most of that knowledge is only in the hands of people who have played during those days (ie. QuantumDelta), and even then it doesn't translate the best into words. There would have to be videos showing strategies and I'd say of you're asking for that, it is completely unreasonable...
I mean I could put in kind of generic pointers like "use lateral thrust to sidestep fire momentarily", or "use reverse afterburners to put a pursuing fighter into your line of sight" etc, but that still doesn't really say when is an actual good application to do so (or when it will even actually work). I suppose that's a step, but I don't think going any further would actually be any more instructional.
The three-stage missile is designed for fire-and-forget. You just spam it and it kills stuff, or misses.
The "effective range" of the diamondback depends on the size of the target. It's a shotgun missile. The closer the better. You can hit bigger targets a lot better from further away. The missiles themselves travel ~1.5km but it does next to nothing at that range. Very effective against shipping (and close range).
I'll revise the descriptions a bit and add some numbers... >.>
The Phoenix shield system is kind of a development flub. It was designed with the intention of being present, only to run into an engine bug that made it unusable until close to release.
Perhaps this makes more sense?
Type 0: Standard : no strengths, no weaknesses
Type A: Trenton Field : improved shield strength, but shield leaks a small amount of damage through to the hull
Type B: Layered Shield : shield takes no damage from light weapons, but overall strength is decreased - good vs. rapid fire weapons, weak vs. missiles and burst weapons
Type C: Hardened Shield : shield takes a reduced amount of damage from heavy weapons, but overall strength is decreased - good vs. missiles and burst weapons, weak vs. rapid fire weapons
As for the Amaterasu, the ship moves forward slowly, it isn't stationary, so there comes the problem of making sure the relative coordinates of the targetable waypoints are correct, but since set-object-position breaks all collision that doesn't work so well... There might be some more hack-ish ways but not sure if those are any good either :P
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As for what the Exarch says, how much of that is true? How much of it is just what he believes and is passing off as the belief of the rest of the Exarchy? :P The Exarchy (that you see) appears to be holding the belief that humanity is posing some great threat to the galaxy, to the point of requiring xenocide - perhaps it could be justified (to them) in some greater scheme?
Is every free-thinker in the Exarchy holding the same belief? (Did every free thinker in the U.S. think that the alleged WMDs in Iraq warranted an invasion?) ...probably not.
Are those that do justified, by their (alien!) measures of virtues? ("Surely, you too eat babies! [are good people]") ...perhaps not by our standards.
This is perhaps the subject of a different thread, though :P
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Dude, Salty, I've played the whole DE without using slide thrusting, reverse burning or glide even once. You don't need them to enjoy the campaign. End of story.
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And the Exarchy, remember 'individual sects'. So the First, Second and Third Incursions and all that could've potentially been different sects with different beliefs! (idk)
Dude, Salty, I've played the whole DE without using slide thrusting, reverse burning or glide even once. You don't need them to enjoy the campaign. End of story.
Did you mention that you played on Insane? :P
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I don't think I played DE in Insane. Gameplay too different for my skills to catch up with so quickly. IIRC I played medium. Just wanted to enjoy the campaign :)
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Did you mention that you played on Insane? :P
No troll, it's quite possible to finish the campaign without using any of that. Not on Insane, probably, but my first playthrough on medium with a couple of one-mission exceptions I did.
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Exactly what he said.
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I suppose it is going to be a total nightmare without the auto aim. The worst part was the stronghold mission and the 2 missions after it. I kept getting killed by flak seconds after starting in the stronghold mission and that beam armed blizzard with aimbot is hax.
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And I thought the Cyclones were bad. How do you even get killed by flak? There is no flak unless you go near the station or any of the Rheas...and you were never directed to. For me, the only ways to fail the Stronghold is:
A) Get killed by the sentries if you get TAG'd all the way at the start when you fly too close
B) Get killed by the fighters while you're busy shooting the sentries
C) Get killed by the Cyclones when trying to intercept all the Masakaris
D) Get killed by the Cyclones while dogfighting them
E) Get killed by the Cyclones when trying to run away from them
F) The Belphegor kills one of the Baikals.
G) Get killed by the Belphegor
H) Get killed by fighters when you're disarming the Belphegor
For Megan? Well, murk all the Tornadoes and Blizzard CMDs first. Your Astrogator wings will definitely be chewed up. To defeat Megan, Shizuku is the key. She can keep Megan occupied for a long time, probably even match her. So ideally assuming that you've somehow managed to get Megan and Shizuku in a furball, start mowing down any fighters on Shizuku's six, or your own six. If you're the command-type, micro the Astrogators. They might be cannon fodder but Macanas aren't anything you can shrug off in a Tornado or Blizzard. So if you managed to command the Astrogators to take down something before they all get blown up, you just need to mop up the remnants. If they all get Shriekir'd before doing jack****, well...
"As a wise man once said, '**** happens'."
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I believe is that point defenses from the sentry. Otherwise, I usually get killed by the Belphegor's flak. I hardly ever died from the Cyclones, and I usually wipe the floor with the Protons without using any of my secondaries. In some cases, I got killed by friendly fire from the destroyers' flak or from one of the friendly cluster missiles.
For Megan, I only beat her after I spent all my missiles at her while Shizuku kept her distracted. For the first few tries, either she nuke me to bits at the first opportunity, or her wingmen gang up on me. Lost almost all of those red shirt Astrogators in both cases.
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Hello,
Often I fail too many missions that require me to defend escort ships such as the Ephyea outside earth, or when it is docked in taylor station in the asteroid belt.
Do you have any suggestions how to defeat the bombs? I try targetting them individually, but them move too fast for me to get a good shot.
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Only go after bombs which are relatively close by and not out of the way to intercepting the bomber. If the bomb is too far away, you should aim to kill the bomber to prevent it from launching further warheads and moving in to supplement with its primaries (which may end up doing more damage in the long run!), particularly the Duke bombers. Firing at them will also serve to distract them as they break their bombing run giving you more time (watch out for turret return fire though).