The tactic of running away until the fight's over is used sometimes, but when you have to fight, you can't run away, otherwise you fail the mission, as in this case [most probably.

One of the key things in Freelancer is that you have to maintain an upgrade cycle, which includes buying new ships every now and then. The Starflier's [the one that you're given the worst ship you could possibly fly. So you might have to backtrack, and make some cash by trading or taking missions to get a new ship.

As for the ships, there are, as you know, three, later on, four, distinct classes. For each class, there is a universal rule in the FL universe that if it is more expensive, it's better, in all respects. The more expensive your ship is, the more expensive equipment you can put on it [higher class guns & shields, etc, so getting a new and better ship's important.

Different factions are armed with different weapons. Some factions, like Outcasts, use shield eating guns [or they seem to, in which a hit takes of shields at a rapid rate, and from what I've found so far, different types of shields don't really make a difference against this. Also, since you cannot upgrade the armor of your ship, flying the cheapest one won't help you survive as there's not much armour to start with.

Sorry, I can't provide much adivce other than save up and get another ship. I had a Defender by that time, i think...the best Liberty ship you can get. I still found the mission kind of difficult, though....stupid shield eating guns...

oh well, hope this helps

Edited by - Hero Zero on 29-03-2003 22:59:55

I have a H.F and the maximum of weapons allowed for level 5 (5 class 3 guns and a turret).
Still the enemy kills me within seconds.
Running away does not help because the transports are destroyed and the mission fails. You have to reload.
What is the trick with this mission ???

http://home.hetnet.nl/~hubein

I had the same problem with that level. Some invaluable advice I got though was to use the thruster (tab key) for short spurts while dog fighting. This makes you an erratic moving target, which is the hardest kind of target to hit.

It took me some getting used to, but it did the trick. Good luck to ya!

Garadian

Fight fire with fire, equip yourself with an adv. stunpulse or a stunpulse turret, that will eat the enemy's shields and makes them MUCH easier to kill. I don't ever go out without at least one shield eating gun anymore.

The thruster short bursts is a good technique and you will find it essential later on in SP and a must for MP. Another good tip is to make plenty of use of your strafe keys. When i first got FL my HD needed a major defrag and it was running at least 50% slower than it should hav. Due in part to the fact i had never played it, and in part to my stupidity () i didnt work this out for a while and found i could dodge about 90% of gun fire by watching the beams and moving the other way. If you struggle to keep track of thrusting, strafing dodging while at the same time actually trying to kill the bad guys, just hold down one of the strafe keys - it definitely reduces the amount of fire you take.

Also, and i know this sounds kinda stupid, alot of the time when i seemed to be getting wasted too soon i wasnt flying at top speed, even 60 instead of 80 made me a sitting duck.

If you are already doing all this tho, like Hero says, the best option for this kind of problem is usually back-tracking and getting yourself a better ship.

I guess it’s a matter of personal technique. I never use the strafe keys, in fact I don’t have the programmed into my controller. I just finished my second run through the single player and never died. I attribute this to the thousands of NPC kills I have on multiplayer servers. I use the engine kill to make up for the loss of the strafe keys. If I want to hit multiple targets head on I simply wag the nose of the ship and “wipe” the shots across all of them. Shoot any target you have a good solution on; don’t just concentrate on the one you have targeted. If you have a shield killer this will soften up more than one target so when you do target them their shields are already down, or close to down.
One thing I found invaluable is to become rich as soon as you can. I took a LONG time off between missions 7 and 8 and became a millionaire. Juni will wait forever if necessary. When I finished the single player I was level 30. Being rich means that you can always buy whatever you need whenever you have the chance during the missions. If you have to worry about if you can afford more missiles or torpedoes you have a problem.


Ne frustra vixisse videar

Kill the big ship(RNC) first.It's dangerous to transport .Small ship can't hurt transport.Then you can run away until the fight's over.

i found it is easiest to kill the enemies when you are flying straight head on towards them, seeing as they are worse shots than you. so, if you start to get in trouble, a good tactic i used was to jam on your cruise engines and get nearly 2k away from them, then target the nearest fighter and head straight for them. by the time they get to where you were (once they are within weapons range) you should have destroyed them or at least damaged them a fair bit.

if theres a ship thats flying straight at me, i just pound his ship full of stalking missles...but the stunpulses work well too

Friend, this one is more than a year old. Create a new thread rather than grave digging.

Other than that, welcome to TLR.