When you start back from the auto save, hit the after burner and use it up then go cruise engine and get away to another area/base.

Yeah, I tried something like that. I need better countermeasures and better luck. In the end I just turned on a dime and headed right back through the gate from which I came, and lost nothing but a couple shield batteries.

Which reminds me . . .

Can someone explain how Shield Battery usage works? It took me a while to realise that hitting F was using more than 1 battery. Something to do with more powerful shields using more batteries, or what?

Anybody have solid facts on this?


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----- Mr. Lopithecus -------
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Shield batteries and nanobots each restore a given amount of shielding and armor--200 units for each, I believe. Hence, ships that have heavier armor, and shields that have a higher maximum energy, take more nanobots and batteries to repair.

Hitting F or G uses required number of bats/bots to fully restore your shield/hull. This number varies with strenhght of your shield/hull, stronger shields/hulls require naturaly more bats/bots to restore. Most fighters carry enough bats/bots to fully restore their max possible shield/hull about 3 times.

If you want to escape NPC's, activate your thruster to max speed (default TAB ) and then hit engine kill (default Z). This will cause you to continue going in previous direction, not affected by where you turn your ship. Now, do a 180 degree turn, so you now face the enemies. (you are still moving at your thrust speed away from them, you are technically flying in reverse) They will fire some shots at you, be prepared to take some damage. Their AI wont tell them to use their thrusters if you are facing them, so in few seconds you will get too far from them to shoot, and after a while they will get out of your radar. Wait few more seconds so they wont be able to catch you later, turn around (back in the direction you were thrusting) and activate cruise engines.

Better do not try to do this in an asteroid field.

Edited by - Lord Emperor on 4/14/2005 10:52:51 AM

I like doing that... Experimenting with space physics is fun... Like getting to cruise speed and drifting into a station of some kind XD...

But yeah, that's what I do. Mind you, with my new stuff, deadly encounters aren't very usual, Eagle with 4 Codename weapons... Dragons don't do me any harm. What you want to do is, in a hard system, try flying below the plane line. What I mean is that Freelancer is generally on a 2D plane. The Nav Maps are all 2D. If you fly about 4K below the main line of things, pirates won't really detect you so easily. I have tried this a few times, and I basically did that from base to base when things got hard...!

Hmmm. . . very valuable advice I think. I am still but a padawan and have yet to experiment too much with cutting engines and advanced maneuvers.

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----- Mr. Lopithecus -------
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Well... Good luck. Simply activating cruise drive and then cutting the engines is actually quite fun, especially if you experiment with bouncing angles off of space stations. If you need to get better because the game is too hard, in SP campaign mode, simply refuse the mission and get a new ship with better weapons and such. If you're near the end and can't break off (trying not to give away any spoilers here), reload an earlier save game and start from there.

some one should make it so kill engin is permanantly toggled so we can use a sembelence of space phisics