ive tried it with a defender, but i cant get past the tekagi arch mission.

Hey, I think you picked the wrong thread! I have enough of the difficult stuff for a while - died four times at Tekagi's Arch in the Starflier plus once in mission 10 - and I want maximum fun for a change; that is why I posted this topic.

Uh is it just me or are you overlooking the fact that an Outcast Base (Cali) is neutral, and you can just get the guns from them...I don't see why you'd even wanna be bad with the Crimmies, if you want a real challenge go up against all the police.

no no no. ive beaten the tekagi arch mission, but i cant get past it with a DEFENDER. i keep getting shot down, ive beaten the mission with a dragon tho.

SolidStolid, the Outcasts do not become non-hostile until after mission 7 but they do not become friendly enough to sell high-level kit. I want class 4/5 guns much earlier, before mission 4 (for the Cavalier) and then for the Crusader which can be bought right after mission 4 IIRC.

Skycom, I realize that the mission at Tekagi's Arch is a toughie but the Defender does have a couple of advantages over the Starflier in this mission. In particular, the Defender can destroy the generators a lot faster than the Starflier because it can use missiles and torpedoes in addition to gunfire, the powerplant has 30% more capacity/regen, and even with missiles on some hardpoints the Defenders can do much more damage with guns alone.

The downside is that the wings carry equipment so you cannot afford to lose them; my Starflier got both wings shot off during the patrol skirmish but I could not care less. Not having the wings made the ship a smaller target and repair was only $45 each. I lost the wings again during mission 11 but I did not repair them until just before the final leg of mission 13 (I wanted the ship to look good on the game-beaten screenie ).

Edited by - Sherlog on 24-06-2003 21:27:40

Heh, I was planning out for about the same thing. But after doing the campaign in a Starflier, one can use pretty much any level 5-6 ship and it feels like overkill

I wouldn't bother getting a Dagger over a Patriot, since there aren't any big targets in the Liberty missions anyway.

You can't access Hudson and Kepler (for Tarantulas) before getting kicked out of Liberty. I'm not sure if you can get there after doing mission 4; the Omega systems might still be off-limits until after the Sprague mission, and I don't know if you're allowed there by way of California and Texas.

Cali Base sells at least the class-5 Pyros, and I think the class-6 as well. I don't think there's any way to get them still in Liberty, and maybe not in Bretonia.

My only comment is: You have waaaay too much time on your hands.


Careful what you wish... You might just get it.

Chetnik, I wish it were so. As it is I can only fly now and then - last week it was only Sunday for an hour, yesterday I was lucky and had more than two hours (which allowed me to fly missions 10 through 13 of my Starflier campaign), next time might be next weekend or next week. I can easily check this forum daily or even more often, and as a touch-typist I have no problems producing reams of copy pretty fast. So I currently I post much more than I play ...

T-hawk, yes, overkill is precisely what I want to achieve here. Pure, unadulterated fun blasting Rheinlanders and Nomads to pieces.

I did not plan to mine Tarantulas while being based in Liberty because fighting wings of up to eight Xeno Hawks in a Patriot or any other ship available at that time would be too tough to be compatible with the spirit of this project. The Tarantulas are only needed for the Drake path and I planned to get them in the Drake right after I bought the ship and equipped the class 6 Tarantulas brought from Texas.

I do not think that any of the normal jumpgates/jumpholes are locked after mission 2. Once upon a time I went to Kusari space right after mission 4, because I wanted to buy a Dragon. Of course I got the 'You need to be level 13' message and I was royally p*ssed off at the game designer who made me do this long and dangerous (for me, at that time) voyage for nothing. The in-game info screen withheld this vital piece of information from me when I was there during the Kusari phase of my first run through the campaign, so I had no way of knowing.

There is no way to buy any class 4 or class 5 guns before mission 4 is over, but it should be possible to loot them and a well-equipped the Patriot is just the right ship for such a task. And flying mission 4 in maxed-out Cavalier (except for the shield, of course) is precisely the correct thing to do with regard to the spirit of this project. Even if - or especially if? - it requires a bit of skilled piloting to slaughter Daggers and Stilettos with a Patriot in order to get the guns.

Class 4 guns - the Defender can mount them, and you're high enough level after mission 3 to buy them. And I think I've seen the class-4 Magma Hammers on sale somewhere in Liberty, and doesn't Buffalo sell class-4 Raphaels?

I started a campaign game to try out some of these ideas, and discovered one problem - the wrecks in Texas are in the middle of an INTENSE radiation field. We're talking Defender armor lasting about 30 seconds intense.

Just spent an hour killing Xenos around Ouray, and got my Defender kitted out with four Adv. Scorpions, a Slingshot, and a Stunpulse turret. (If only Starkillers were available in Liberty.) Going to start mission 3 now and try for the Rowlett's Revenge; I never got it before.

BTW - how do you get a Cavalier before mission 4? You can't leave Liberty until you do so during mission 4, no?

Hey, I had completely forgotten that the Defender can mount some class 4 kit - haven't used the ship since my first time through the campaign many moons ago. Thanks for reminding me.

The class 4 guns are sold on all law enforcement bases in Liberty (LPI, Navy etc.) except for Planet Manhattan; in fact, the only place outside Liberty where you can get them is Baxter (during mission 5) which is an LPI base IIRC. The class 4 shield is not sold anywhere in Liberty, though. The earliest opportunity for getting it is Mactan during mission 4.

The radiation in the Texas cloud is strong but if you have the rough coordinates of the wrecks - that is, if you do not have to search for them by flying a scanning pattern - then you can loot them in a Starflier or Patriot. BTDT.

And you are right, some anally retentive fascist of a game designer locked all jumpgates and jumpholes out of Liberty. An "access denied" message from a supposedly natural (non-technical) phenomenon like a jumphole, my *ss! But it is probably for the better because some fascist (it may be the same) decreed that you have to have a certain minimum net worth - either total net worth or worth of fighting gear, don't know which - in order to get a weapon loot drop. To see what I mean, go to the Silverton field at earliest opportunity (SP: after mission 2) in a Starflier and slay Xenos for an hour. You'll probably end up with dozens of thrusters and nothing else, not even a measly class 2 Scorpion ...

So it'll have to be a maxed-out Defender for maximum carnage during mission 4.

P.S.: the powerplant of the Defender has 1500/157 capacity/regen, not 1300/126 like the Patriot. I must have gotten the wrong row when I looked this up last time.

Edited by - Sherlog on 25-06-2003 08:01:06

OK, I tried it, and I conclude that a Defender with Adv.Scorpions wrecks missions 3 and 4. Given that you can't buy class-4 weapons until after mission 3, you'll want to go mine the Adv. Scorpions before mission 3, and then it isn't worth it to bother buying Magma Hammers for the very marginal damage increase. One Slingshot launcher is desirable with the Adv.Scorps, if paired with a Stunpulse turret as well.

And once you complete mission 4 and level up in the freelance period (which you can do immediately by buying Optronics ahead of time at Fort Bush and selling them after talking to Tobias on Leeds), you can buy the Crusader, meaning there's no need for the Cavalier at all. I'm currently puzzling out the best loadout for a Crusader, which is pretty important because you use it for three full story missions.

I DID find Outcast ships (Daggers, even, heh) carrying class-5 Pyros guns - in Manchester system, attacking trade lanes. Sherlog, do you know the requirements for a level-5 weapon to drop as loot? I didn't see any after about a dozen kills, at pilot level 9 with $150k net worth, though I got several of the Pyros 1 which is probably the best option to fill the Defender's class-4 slots.

There are indeed two Pyros 2s on a wreck in Leeds, and New London system also has wrecks with pairs of class-5 Dragoon 2s (not too bad though don't match the Pyros projectile velocity), class-5 Dublin Dusters (pretty lousy), and class-5 Corsair Angelitos, which aren't bad at all (excellent efficiency and match the Pyros.)

So I'm thinking this:
2 Pyros I (Class 4)
2 Pyros II (Class 5)
2 Angelito Mk I (or two more Pyros II)
Starkiller torpedos (can buy after mission 5)

An option is to swap out one Angelito or Pyros for a Corsair Borocco shield-killer (have to complete mission 5 before you can buy it), which I'd keep on my ship all the way through mission 11. It makes Starkiller kills quite a bit more reliable, and if you're attacking one of the stationary targets in the various story missions, just turn it off and save the energy for the other five guns.

==========

Anyway, I decided to find out just how far the game lets you wander during the Bretonia phase. And the answer is: all the way. My Crusader is currently at Freeport 9, and has visited Freeport 10 and flown past a HOSTILE Planet Malta. There isn't anything to do out there besides loot wrecks, but hitting the one in Tau-37 DOUBLED my networth from $150k to $290k.

Now I just gotta get back from Freeport 9 to civilization to actually go start mission 5. Might actually have to bribe the Corsairs to do it (!), but I have the money (!!) after looting a couple of the Codename/Paralyzer wrecks. Plus I can make back half of the bribe money by unloading my hold full of Bretonian gold on Tripoli.

Excellent work, T-Hawk! I agree, the class 4 Magma Hammer Mk I does only marginally more damage than the class 3 Adv. Scorpion (379 vs. 358 hull damage) and the Adv. Scorpions in the class 3 slots more than compensate for this since the Lavablade Mk III does only 299 hull damage. The Xeno guns are more fun anyway because they have twice the firing rate and much better projectile speed, compared to the Liberty plasma weapons.

You got the Crusader pretty well kitted out, congrats. The wreck finds are particularly nice. It is a pity that the Crusader does not have a turret ... With a turret it would be possible to mount two missile launchers (Catapult, Moonstalker) for increased cruiser-killing potential and still do convincing amounts of damage with only guns.

Gun drops: the only thing I know for sure is that enemies are much more likely to drop nice equipment during bar missions than when you battle them in the wild, and that each piece of equipment has a certain threshold for level or worth below which you won't get any normal drops (the famous "no Nomad gun drops below level 34" effect). The records in LootProps.ini contain values that correspond directly to level thresholds in PTough.ini, e.g. 646965 for the Nomad guns which maps to level 28. Since 28 is much lower than 34 I suspect that the worth threshold refers to fighting gear only (i.e., ship and weapons) but I have not been able to confirm this yet.

In order to find more sources for Pyros gear I took a Drake that was parked at Falkland and explored the Tau systems. Here comes:

Tau-37

Wild: mostly Sabre, a few Stilettos in the area around Freeport 10 and in the Malvinas Cloud.
Missions: mostly Stiletto and an occasional Sabre.
Drops: tachyon kit only but very good drop rate (Wyrm Type 1/2 and class 6 Dragoon turrets from Sabres, Dragoon and Wyrm Type 1 from Stilettos), plus the occasional Hornet disruptor

The kit is of no use during the campaign - except perhaps for the class 6 turret, for the Anubis later - and Tau-37 is not exactly a good place to be in a pre-level-13 ship except Drake. For a fully 'tarantulated' Drake it is the perfect hunting ground but it can get ticklish if you run into a wing of five or six Sabres when you are low on shield batteries ... The financial rewards are better in Omega-41 but Red Hessians are no challenge for a Drake.

Tau-23

Wild: mostly low-level Stilettos (Dragoon kit) but occasionally normal Stilettos with Wyrms
Missions: mostly Stilettos, but also an occasional Sabre or a swarm of Daggers
Drops: mostly Dragoon kit, plus very few Pyros drops from Daggers

Neither rewarding nor challenging enough for a Drake, but might be good Cavalier territory.

Tau-31

Wild: mostly pairs of low-level Stilettos, but also swarm of Daggers in places (Tau-23 gate); the loot is not worth the bother (except for the financial value of class 6 kit drops from Stilettos and Gaian Hawks, perhaps)
Missions: got a winner here! Took two missions out of Harris and got one Pyros Type 2 drop each time, plus assorted Pyros Type 1. The first mission out of Holman Outpost was a dud - only Stilettos on the menu - but the second mission compensated with two Pyros Type 2 drops and a couple Pyros Type 1s.

Tau-29 may also be worth a look but Tau-31 is already perfect, seeing that it is just one gate jump from Leeds.

Note: of course, things like the $35k class 9 kit will not drop during the campaign - the worth threshold will prevent that. My Drake was level 33 when I started in Falkland and I hit level 37 on the way out of Tau-37 (had so much fun battling Sabres that I spent almost an hour there before remembering the objective).

Well, some more experience and thoughts...

With my Crusader on Freeport 9, I bribed the Corsairs as I had planned. Then I decided I had to see if you could see Nomad ships and enter the Unknown (Primus/Gammu) system while still in the middle of the SP campaign. Yup, sure can. Of course, the Nomads ripped me apart, so I HAULED my ass back through that jump hole. But no, I couldn't just reload the game from Freeport 9, since I'd hit several of the Corsair Fighter wrecks on the way to the jump hole and dammit, I was going to keep the half-dozen Salamancas. So with my hull barely holding together, and out of nanobots, I actually had to fly out the BACK side of the Omicron Gamma radiation cloud and take the long way around to avoid the radiation area until limping in to Crete.

Anyways, back to the point.

After doing that and running through the Omega systems (hitting a bunch more Codename/Paralyzer wrecks) back to civilization, I went and played around in Manchester for a while. Couldn't get any of the Outcasts I'd seen before to appear, though, and none of the bases in the system offers missions against them, just Mollys, Gaians, and Lane Hackers. Outcasts with the class-5 Pyros do exist in Manchester, but appear very rarely. So your findings in the Tau systems are quite helpful. One question - do Harris and Falkland offer missions at low enough levels to actually get them during the campaign? (I'd guess Harris would but Falkland wouldn't.)

And I did see the Gaian ships in Manchester drop several class-5 weapons this time around, so the net worth threshold to see class-5 gun drops is apparently somewhere between $150k and $750k. (Yeah, you can get THAT much from wandering out and looting wrecks in the middle of the SP campaign before even doing the Sprague mission. You'd think Juni might wonder why you're suddenly sporting a seven-figure bank account or classified Navy prototype weaponry...)

Anyways, time to stop wandering around and try the Pyros gun loadout on campaign mission 5 (with one Slingshot still in there) and 6-7 (with a Borocco or two and Starkillers. Pity there's no class-4 shieldbuster; it'd fit the Crusader's class-4 slots so perfectly...)

Planet Harris and Holman Outpost do offer missions even if you are only level 8, but all missions are difficulty 15 with reward $9000. I could not take missions in Tau-29 because my rep with Kishiro and the Bounty Hunters was slightly negative neutral (the initial value - I had not done any freelancing prior to that) but I remember the insulting "Come back when you are a better pilot" from earlier runs through the campaign. The game should at least be so clever to check the number of Hammerhead/Sabre/Titan kills of a player before refusing to give them a mission that deals with small fry like Daggers or Stilettos ...

As a test I went to Tau-31 right after arriving in Leeds and did four missions each out of Harris and Holman, in the Dagger I had brought from Liberty. There were plenty of class 4 kit drops but only two of the class 5 Pyros (my net worth was around $100k at that time). During that time I also wandered into Tau-29 but Kishiro was slightly negative as usual and the Bounty Hunters hated my guts because I had kept the Dagger; I killed half a dozen each of Bounty Hunter Barracudas, Outcast Stilettos and Gaian Hawks but got only low-level kit and one class 5 Dragoon. So $100k is not enough to get reliable class 5 drops during missions or in the wild.

For the fun campaign I looted the pair of Pyros Type 2 from the wreck near LD-14 and took one mission out of Harris to get a pair of the class 4 Pyros Type 1. I slapped the guns on a Cavalier and was able to kill all Rhinelanders during the Sprague mission, including the fighters and the 3 gunboats that are dock-camping at Sprague when you launch. The first time I got a time-out screen just as the last gunboat was blowing up, so I concentrated on doing quick precision work the second time.

After Sprague I sold the diamonds that I had bought in Cambridge, because I wanted the cash. As a side-effect of this I levelled up but that could not be avoided. Then I hoofed it to Kyushu, bought the Drake and embarked for Kepler by way of Shi***u. There I noticed a bug: the Bounty Hunters were still hostile even though I had bought a new ship ... (probably due to the fact that I had bought the ship only after becoming eligible for the next mission). Originally I had planned to take a few missions against Xenos from the Bounty Hunters (in Kepler), to get Tarantula drops. Since this was not possible I opted to vandalize the two depots at Deshima (the Bounty Hunter base in Shi***u), which tremendously improved my standing with all criminals throughout Sirius including, but not limited to, the Xenos. So I simply bought the Tarantulas. Because of level restrictions I could not buy the class 6 Adv. Tarantulas, so the choice was either to use only class 5 guns or to loot the shipwreck in Bering. I opted for the latter because the route to Bering touches New York where the cardamine and artifacts from the Shi***u wrecks fetch the best price.

Originally the idea was to go from Bering to Dublin via Berlin and Omega-11, to make a little cash on the side. But in Omega-11 I was constantly pestered by the Bounty Hunters, and after I had killed a dozen Hammerheads without getting a single loot drop - the game deemed me unworthy of a drop because I was not rich enough - I got fed up and went on a looting spree throughout Omega, Sigma and southern Omicron (excluding Omicron Gamma; I did not want to face level-19 Hammerheads with my class 5 shield). When I finally arrived in Dublin I had 1.5 million in cash, and sure enough I got a class 6 Stealthblade drop during mission 6.

Omicron Theta was a bit tough because there were Hammerheads everywhere, often in groups of 8. I scanned the b*stards and they had class 9 guns and class 10 molecular shields ... There were four battles that I could not avoid - the reception committee after the jump into the system (8 Hammerheads), two groups that jumped me while I was looting wrecks (one 5, the other 8; kill-engine getaway failed because I crashed into asteroids) and a final group of 5 at Freeport 9. At one point I thought I would end as a fireball - all nanos/batts gone, shield failed, armour down to one fourth, and out of eight Hammerheads there were still four left and a bit of the fifth - when a miracle happened: number five dropped two shield batteries and enough nanos to restore the armour completely.

As expected, the Drake performed excellently during mission 7. I managed to kill the cruiser at the jump out of Leeds before Tobias showed up, and in the Tau-29 battle I got another cruiser plus the big battleship. Together with the cruiser from the opening skirmish of mission 4 this makes a total of four battleship kills so far in this campaign.

BTW, congrats for your Omicron Gamma exploits. I did not dare venture there even in my Über-Drake, and you did it in a Crusader.