downloaded your mod last night.

I think it's awesome, I have been exploring for a few hours and found some interesting stuff.

I found new lasers on the munition station in the new york system.
They are called "coldsteel" and I am using them to hunt rogue - shrikes.

I have upgraded my ship to the patriot, and have exprimental sensors and a new tractor beam.

Also I 'just' found out that Xenos - black guard (found near the munitions station) drop diablo missiles and launchers. the missiles are worth 3000 each and the launchers are worth 45000 each.

I'm level 9 and could anyone recomend what ship I could next please?

Wookieman, welcome to TLR and I hope you are enjoying the mod

Level 9, good job. Have you taken a look at the ship manual, if not, you can download it here. It contains a brief description and the class of every ship in the mod. They are ordered by levels, highest level at the top of each section, the sections are divided into classes (LF, HF, Freigher, etc). Hope they help

thanks but it doesn't say where to find them...ah well. the Quest begins!

Hi guys. I've just started playing this mod, and haven't played earlier versions, frankly... so please bear in mind that my comments are based on just messing about with OpenSP.

I've been playing for about 1 hour, and I'm lvl. 5 at this point, also, so I fully appreciate that I haven't seen the entire mod by any means. Please take my critique of the gameplay with the proper amount of salt- I'm probably missing a lot've the dynamics here.

OK... first off, the good things:

1. I like the custom weapon effects. Very pretty, and the beamers are very nice indeed. Overall, this mod has some of the best use of Beamspears and ALEs I've ever seen- very creative.

2. The game's code feels rock-solid. No significant problems, crashes, or other issues.

3. The custom Intros are bad as ... uh... heck

4. It has that Evo. feel to it- it doesn't feel like a bunch of ships and things were just randomly slammed together. Evo has always been my yardstick for what is "good" in a mod that mixes FL's original ships and weapon concepts with new ones, and this one has that same, nicely-polished feel. I haven't yet seen a ship that makes me go, "hey, you're in the wrong movie... I mean... game".

**************************************************************************************************

And here are my first-hour critiques. Please, don't look at them as "complaints"- I can see that you guys really worked hard on this thing, and unlike certain mods made with certain <cough> star wars <cough> ships... nothing about this mod's game-balance or game design, thus far, is really irritating me- these are just minor quibbles. In short, if I'm missing the point on an area or three... well, I've only been playing an hour, so feel free to chuckle at my ignorance

1. I feel that many of the ships don't fit the visual themes of the Factions they're assigned to. This is a purely aesthetic judgement, and as such, it's all in the eye of the beholder- and I know that y'all have been putting this together with whatever you've had in terms of art resources- as I'm running an art team myself, I know what you're dealing with.

But, for example... the Rogue's Shrike, while a pretty vessel, doesn't share any visual similarities with the Bloodhound, Wolfhound, or Mule- the characteristic boxes-glued-together-with-engines-on-the-side look of the originals. It's a very silly quibble, on the one hand- if the Shrike's attractive (which it is), then who cares? But... to achieve classic status, I'd suggest looking at your art assets, and cutting pieces that don't fit their visual themes as well as they could, and switching things around to match your art assets to the Factions a little better.

2. The AI doesn't handle ships performing the "two thrusters and engine-kill" shuffle very well at all. I'd suggest that every ship that has two or more thrusters have its linear_drag entry (for the ship, not the Engine) be raised to at least 5, so that it's not so obviously abusive. This will, of course, effect overall handling of the ship, so I'd go ahead and dock the Engine's linear_drag by the equivalent amount. This will cause ships with multiple thrusters to come to a halt much faster.

3. The rapid-fire guns... say, "abuse me, high-level players" to me. If I were you, I'd go steal the code I used in WOS B1... and make all such guns use ammunition that takes up cargo space and costs... something. I don't mind the concept of rapid-fire guns... but the way they work right now... if a player min/maxes, they can end up with a high-level ship that can fire two or more of these things all day long... and they will pwn anything else in the game, in terms of sheer damage/sec. and hit-rates, in the hands of anybody with moderate skill. I'd offset that by making it cost money every time you fire one... and setting their cargo space usage vs. the cargo holds of combat fighters so that there is a distinct tradeoff here, instead of how it is now. Just my $.02, of course.

4. On the lvl. 1 missions, I quickly found that if I took any of the ones where "helpers" showed up... they so rapidly destroyed my enemies that I could've just sat there and watched. In short, it wasn't very challenging, and I'm thinking that the Loadouts for equivalent-level ships need to be looked into.

5. For goodness sakes... why, o why... is it that the starting fighter completely owns the Defender in every stat category, so far as I can see? Please... buff the Defender up some, so that it's actually worth using again. It's always been a laughingstock vessel... give it a stat boost, so that it's relevant.

6. The Xenos Starfliers seem to move at insaaaaaane speeds. Combat with them in the starting ship with starting guns vs. their shield recharge wasn't terribly successful- luckily, I brought "help" which killed them for me

7. I know this is petty and lame of me, and feel free to stick your tongue out... but this is a personal pet peeve of mine. How is it that you cannot buy SHIPS at the SHIPYARD?!? This mystified me in FL, and it double-mystifies me in any mod, considering that fixing is simplicity itself

Overall... while I am enjoying myself at this point... I am seriously wondering how much challenge will be left once I upgrade my ship to something that can mount some rapid-fire guns. I know that I won't be able to get all the way to the capital of the Corsairs until I can afford a VHF and survive the radiation... but I'll betcha that I won't need to upgrade ships until then. Maybe I'm wrong here, of course- maybe the difficulty curve reverses once you get past this initial threshold. But, given that the NY system is literally crawling with Factions who carry Diamonds, Niobium and Cardemine now... I can very easily see myself earning a few hundred thou by hanging outside Buffalo and just owning the poor buggers as they spawn... which, surely, isn't how you want the gameplay to go, right?

Last, but not least... could I get whoever wrote your Intros to please... pretty please... write even a basic Tutorial explaining how to make custom THN scripts? Thus far, I've been happy just getting the one I "borrowed" and rewrote from Freeworlds to work... but I'd really like to make one that was more interesting, and I'd really like to make a custom Room... please, share that knowledge, I've been wanting to make a custom Room for ages now...

<comes back from playing another hour>

Ok... I got ahold of *one* Coldsteel. Yikes... after that... just went to Rochester, and suddenly, I'm level 10. In the starting ship. Without having to do jack but fire short bursts, I can own Black Knights, which are surely meant to be a real threat to lowly Lvl-1 ships. Gonna see how long it takes me to get a Mantis without ever upgrading anything but the gun and a single thruster- I haven't bother upgrading the shields...

<and yet another hour>

OK... 3 hours is enough. Basically... here are my thoughts, after 3 hours of gameplay:

1. Like many FL mods... "uber ships" and "uber guns" make low-level ships irrelevant. Which is too gosh-darn bad, because I really disliked that about the original FL's gameplay, and it's far worse here.

2. I cannot for one minute believe that the weapons with fire-rates over 20 are healthy with a MP environment. They lagged enough on this box- granted, I have the resolution at 1280, and 2X AA and 2X AF, but hey, that's still unusual.

3. While "uber ships" rule outside of New York (or anywhere you meet Elementals, which are... ridiculous, and zero fun, since they're just about unkillable with anything but uber missiles)... in NY, hanging outside Rochester works just fine. All you've gotta do is just harvest, harvest harvest... and then bribe the Junkers so that you can continue the slaughter. If it weren't for the Lane Hackers and Elementals, it'd be even easier to do this in Colorado. Instead... in a level one ship, one tends to become a crispy critter as one leaves Pueblo a fair fraction of the time. Is this *really* a good way to ramp up difficulty?

4. The level restrictions on ships are... erm... not making any sense. Basically, they're either reasonable, or Level 28, no matter what price they are, what their usage would be, or their power. By the time I'm Level 28... I do not think I'm going to care about buying a freighter, no matter how slick it is. Personally, I think locking ships to level was a stupid idea in FL from the get-go, and only vaguely made sense as a game-balance tool in the SP campaign. Here, it smacks of elitism... everbody who played this mod frequently MP would have lvl 28 ships, and newbies would stand *zero* chance, as opposed to *slim*. This, to me... is exactly what good MP mods for FL should be opposing... this mod doesn't do that, and that's unfortunate.

In short... I've played 3 hours... and it was good for about 1 Sorry guys... but this doesn't appeal- getting owned by Elementals and Lane Hackers who never run out've thruster power and can out-run a ship using its Cruise engines was the last straw... it went from being somewhat whacky in NY, NY... to being a totally annoying experience just one system out. And I cannot for the life of me imagine that you'd be able to change that significantly by buying any of the ships that are available in NY, NY.

I think that, to fix things... I would:

1. Increase the reward for Missions, so that there is a non-lame leveling path in NY, NY. Most players aren't going to pounce on Rochester... and that shouldn't even be a good option, imho- players should either have to become pirates (bad choice, with a weak ship and the game-balance the way it is), trade (which I don't see as being a realistic option, given that leaving NY, NY is often fatal) or do Missions (which aren't worth taking right now, period- because you're more likely to get good loot by just going to Rochester).

2. Remove anything with a fire rate over 10. In my experience coding WOS, I found that was pretty darn near the limit for MP servers to register shot positions reasonably accurate anyways... more than 10/sec., and you tend to overwhelm a server. I can imagine the lag, when multiple players and AI ships get into a firefight...

3. Review the Loadouts for everybody, and rebuild the difficulty ramping.

4. Review and revise the flight physics of ships like the Elementals, which are ... ridiculous. Imagine a player who got one of those... he/she would be just about totally invulnerable in MP, because of lag + CM.

Basically... I think that the game-balance needs a lot've work to be any fun at all, and I would never, ever be willing to put any time into playing this MP- it'd be no fun to be a newbie, because people who camped on the server would own me regardless of skill- which is totally lame. I like the pretty effects, but I don't like the way game-balance is structured, and the difficulty curve more-or-less steered me towards breaking things instead of following a "normal" FL career path... which is never a good sign.

At any rate, that's my final judgement call on this mod- it has a lot've promising ideas, and it's very ambitious... but it's not very solid on the fundamentals, and once I got past the first impressions, I just don't like its gameplay very much.

Edited by - Argh on 3/27/2005 8:40:25 PM

Argh,

Many thanx for your critique, many of the things you mention are intended to be reviewed... however.. we are not perfect and we wanted to release this version so that we could refine the concept.. Stability was the first criteria.. and we can build from there.

I agree some of the ships could be better located factionally for look and while I agree that a brick in space would fly as well as the most streamlined shape.. I have always considered that the rouge ships are ugly.. and if you gave them any of the forces involved in planetary landings you would finish on the ground in a heap of panels and nuts and bolts.. lol ..
To me it is fairly obvious that more than one ship designer worked on different ships (and the weapons) and in many ways they did not seem to interact, now in some ways this gives freelancer a unique feel, but a sad fact of life is that the criminal elements in any society always seem to have access to the latest in technology, so why would the rouges not fly ships that were better equipped to "take from" someone else.. yeah I know its a small point and one which we intend to change in some ways.

When we started this mod none of us knew a whole lot and the whole thing has been an evolution as we have all learned stuff. Our premise was to never use anything that was not original and we had not made ourselves.. unless they were contibutions.. firebases models being a case in point, as well as the marsflyer, and Vaitors models to name some.. we have added other stuff as we went that moved us away slightly from that concept, but have tried to stick to our concept and not introduced cross genre ships.

when I first started to model I had plenty of ideas and little skill , many of the models could be improved and in time many of them will be, and our goal is to try to fit them into the 'new' order of things as we plan Epsilon to be , and we will try for a better balance between the old and the new.

The rest I will think more on and some I will answer here and some in an email.

Thanx again for your comments.

Harrier.





We would hope

Well, I will certainly vouch for its stability- it plays quite smoothly throughout, and while there was noticable FPS loss during fights with hundreds of shots flying at once, that was the only point when things seemed to get slowed down. And as I said... I had the settings cranked. So... it's definately stable- and better than my mod in SP at this current point in the build

And again... don't take my critique very hard- when I review a game design like this, I am (of course) viewing it through my own particular viewpoint on how things should work, which is not exactly the same as everybody else

As for the comments about ships- I get the impression that:

A. The Freelancer art team did, as you suspect, work on different areas. You can tell, if you look at the meshes- each Faction's mesh has subtle differences in the style of manufacture, and I have a feeling that each Faction was built by different artists on DA's team, or different combinations of people, working from the conceptual sketches.

B. One of the things I really liked about FL, and wish had been extended much more thoroughly to Base design and other areas... was how each cultural group has such distinct architecture. It gave the game a much more complete feeling, and vastly increased its charm for me. That's why I picked out the Shrike as my example- its color and use of shapes is so completely different from anything else the Rogues fly that it really looks like an alien vessel. There's nothing wrong with alien invasion being part of the theme, and of the Factions adopting some of that new tech- it's actually a nice idea. So... if your models were a slightly more subtle blend of the Factions' looks + some new ideas, it'd be about perfect. I really wish I could do more than whine about it for y'all... unfortunately, I'm totally tied up with WOS's development, and will be for some time yet. But after release, hit me up for a new ship or three, if you want to see how I'd go about this sort've artistic interpretation.

Many, many thanks goes to all who worked very hard on this mod. But, after playing for over six hours, reaching level 23, I cannot believe how hard the game is to progress. Maybe there's the irony. There are some very tough guys out there, even though I only play SP. I've tried alot of other mods but this is extreme. I actually like it though but found it getting extremely frustrating to get completely zapped. Best outfitted ship I've attained is the Valkarye with lvl 7 shiels, two green terrors and two argon slicers with the Vulture or something like that powerplant. But, you've definitely produced the bait to keep me going back.

Mucho, mucho gracias.

Argh, alot of that slowdown would be my fault...I go nuts on the weapon effects Lol I'll spend the entire day working on them...I make some incredibly detailed effects that, imho, look good, but in large numbers can cause slowdown unless of course your alias is Harrier and have a NASA computer

San juan, glad you like the mod and find it a challenge, the reason leveling up is so hard is becase you need double the money between levels, we did it that way to reinforce the level requirements to buy things...An attempt to get people to play longer...Hope it isnt too much of a burden, that wasnt our intention.

Thanks for the critique, keep it coming

Downloaded and started playing your mod over the weekend. I really like it and am looking forward to exploring around (I have only been in the New York and Colorado systems so far).

This mod rocks in SP, but I'm reluctant to try MP until I figgered out what I'm doing. It would be very easy to get owned in this mod.

I like the Reflex and Howler, they are great ships. The Gryffin is ok...but a good resilient money maker early on (I like to jack pirates for loot). The Tempest I was dissapointed in its handling-steering... flies like its tethered to an invisible elastic chord... very hard to hold a bead on my target (and some info card errors about counter-measures for this ship).

I stayed up way too late last night playng this thing... am headed back for some more now. Keep up the great work, it could be destined to be a legendary Mod!

I have played the mod for a few hours and I do like it, and like others I do compare it to the evo mod,so here it goes:
I found lanching into space for the first time a little bit of a test sine you are not on mouse flight when you first lauch into space, if it wasnt for you extensive explination ( which is the best I have ever seen) I would have been space dust in less then a sec. after that I do love evadeing the incomeing fire from the elementals, but then it got unbalanced really quick, I had no trouble going after level6 ships when I'm only level 4, still in the starter ship and with lavablade(?) guns on it, and there were six of them at that. I did post you a comment on the main page about how easy it is to level up, but that is mainly because you made it esay to do with the caramine being so profitable in the starting system, maybe you should change that so there is more motivation to go to other systems. and another comment I had made was the powerplant in the sartership is way to powerful, it is more powerful then anything on the open market in both ny and colorado systems, so when I made the upgrade to a patriot ship I sold back the powerplant that came with that ship and left the starter one on the patriot. I dont know if that was the intention but agine that made it easy to level up. and I have to agree with argh on the "helper" ships, it made some of the missions boring. ok there is my vent lol, other then that an dsome other things that excape me right now ( i've been up for over 20 hours now) I really like the mod and the hard work you put into it really shows. I haven't had the time to go into one of the systems that were added to the mod yet but whn I do I will give you some feedback on that.

Blessed Be to all those that still dream of the flight to the stars.

I'd hafta say Argh covered about everything I wanted to say, but then went well beyond.

Visually, and WRT completeness, the mod is very well done. However, the uber ships that lurk near the docking rings and jump gates render the game essentially unplayable for me. It's taking things a couple steps way too far when you have ships chasing you that are impossible to out run/outdodge except via tradelane, and they disable the tradelane before you can enter it. And if you manage to survive until the tradelane regenerates, they disable it again before you can possibly enter it.

It's bad enough in single player, where you don't lose your posessions when your ship is destroyed, but in multi-player where respawn empties your cargo hold, at minimum, it becomes disheartening rapidly.

I've got about 6 hours of time in it now, and am at level 12 because of experimentation outside of Liberty space; primarily in Kusari. I was considering putting this on my public server, but I can't justify it, considering how low the survivability rate is for low-level players.

Maybe I'm not a "hardcore" enough player, but my ship has been destroyed more times in the last 6 hours of play in the Epsilon Mod than I have been in 2 years of "out of the box" Freelancer + a few months of WTS-World 2.5.3.

That said, I think it has a truckload of potential. I'm looking forward to the announcement of the release of the next version with the new difficulty ramp.

Cybe
Cybe's Quadrant

Got the mod last night and tried it, so far i like what ive seen, with reguards to some of the points raised about encounters in new york, maybe you should tweak the encounters for the liberty systems and drop there level just a tad, and that way starting players can survire a bit longer till they get there characters built up and move out of liberty, and are in a persition to face tougher opponants, with reguards to the point about shipyards, i agree that ships should be avilable to buy there, either light or medium fighters and frieghters. Also as i have run serveral servers in the past, and am concidering running epsilon as a server, maybe you can add some server side options like thay have in rebalance where you can adjust encounters and difulcity level and even turn on and off the docking sequrance. Well thats my 2 pennys worth for now, back to playing the mod.
BLACK_SABBATH

all of my questions are answers to my sins.and all of my endings are waiting to begin

Thanks for the reviews everyone I'll respond to them all now, they are very much appreciated as we actually do make refinements on the mod based on reviews.

Pollux, glad you are enjoying the mod. Completely understandable about reluctancy to play MP, there are some people out there that have been playing this mod for multiple versions now, and are very talented. Good to hear that you are enjoying the new ships, regarding the Tempest, we had made some changes to its handling, though the file got rolled back and we didnt realize until we had already made other changes, so a rollback would've rolled back other things also. Thanks for the positive comments, and we'll try to make this mod better each time.

House atreides, finally someone that reads the documents attached Good to know there are people reading them, we worked very hard on them. I agree that it is quite easy to get a good chunk of money in the New York system, we changed the loadouts so the NPCs carried much less cargo than before, but they still do carry profitable cargo that sells for high prices all over the place, its a mistake I'll admit we made in this mod, we'll definitely look to fix it in the next version. Ah yes, the powerplants, I haven't discussed it with any of the other members of the team, but I was considering reducing the Reflex's powersupply slightly, and raising the others slightly. I agree it is sort of funny that there is no need to upgrade your power supply when you buy a new ship for a bit of time. Hope you enjoy your treks through the new systems, they are very diverse in nature and Buck Danny and JustSomeGuy populated them for this version, and then I added the market entries so every base is dynamic. They are much more complete than before.

Cybrpnk, thanks for the review, it will be helpful in refining the mod for our next version. My recommendation for the tradelanes and jumpgates is, as the survival guide says, avoid them if possible, though I understand where you are coming from. I know it can be a bit unnerving when you are on your way to a destination with something in your hold and POOF! But we were trying to give this mod a "How do you like it?" feel to it...I'm sure it happens to the NPC's on the wrong sides of your guns in SP all the time, so we figured, why can't it happen to players too. It's obviously a change, even I didnt like it at first But then I found that it's more exciting to not just be able to sit around outside Manhattan...Go on any vanilla Freelancer server and 99 times out of 100 you'll see players in Titans just sitting outside Manhattan doing nothing...Try doing that in our mod...Deflate your ego pretty fast The mod however, will have changes in it, e.g. loadouts, number of hostiles in certain areas, in the next version, so maybe you'll give the next version a shot and find you like it.

Black Sabbath, We all agree about the encounters and loadouts in New York. We were going to change them, had a list of what to do, but we were under alot of pressure to release the mod, and we figured doing new loadouts would take at least another week, and we'd been promising this mod for quite some time and needed to get it out there, since it is almost 100% stable in SP now, we figured now would be a good time to release. We could make ships for sale in the Freelancer shipyards, it would just require changing the template of the base, though if done improperly, can cause problems. That is why we havent done it to this point. Hope you do enjoy the mod though, we have put about 20 months of work into it so far. Good to know people appreciate the work we put into it, it doesnt just make itself.

Thanks for the reviews everyone, the more reviews you post, the better we can make the mod. So keep posting please

- Parabolix

Heya guys,

I've been doing some exploring throughout all the systems, and so far the only system that I've had any trouble in is the one whose name I can't remember right now (typical me). Anyhoo, the trouble was what seemed to be a random crash in ... I think the system's name starts with a K... Bah, need to look at a map, it's one of the systems that have a gate to Niyad, so I hope that helps. This is in SP, btw. I was flying a Warrior, or some name like that, it's the black one with the lettering on the wings. (great with names, aren't I? )

Anyway, so far that's the only trouble that I have had so far. I have to say that I am truly impressed with the Mod as a whole, the ships are well done. I do agree with Argh that some don't seem to fit their factions too well, but I understand your assertion that they could have been recent additions from alien "donations". One other thing that I'm also very impressed with is that the ships, while not being too fast, aren't too slow either. You guys have done very well in making the ships travel at an appropriate speed for their size and intent. Which is something that Ro9ue and I, working on Rebalance, still have yet to get corrected... Ah well, we're getting there

As for things that I see that may need either improvement, or at least a change. The only thing that comes to mind, has already been mentioned above by others... The getting owned by Elementals, and Spiders. In my case it wasn't so bad, as I've been playing Mods for a while and know how to load up a ship to take on anything. So by level 6 I was holding my own, well enough. Getting back to my point, my only recommendation is to make the Elementals and Spiders a little less formiddable, maybe lower their gun levels by one, or reduce their maneuverability and speed a touch. Nothing too drastic, because I was able to kill a few with even the starter ship, before one of their bolts dissaccociated my ship's and my own atoms from close proximity to one another

Overall, really outstanding work guys, keep it up, and if you want any ships from this ol' loon, let me know

ArchKaine



Some say ignorance is bliss, I say they're just too blissful to know better.