Banksie on 2/12/2005 at 04:12

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I never really have understood the fuss about the capital ship defences in Freespace 2. I played the whole campaign bar the last two missions on maximum difficulty and the capital ships were fairly straightforward to deal with when without fighter cover. Simply divert energy to weapons and engines. Siphon surplus power from weapons to the shields as required - this meant a lot of tapping of that key in heavier combat. Don't fire wildly.

Many of the ship killer weapons were not energy based anyway, so you had plenty of weapon power to spare to reinforce shields as required. Because capital ships pound you from one side you also had plenty of shield power to pull from the facets of your fighter not getting shot at. Rebalance shields is the other key I tapped frequently. On approach simply corkscrew constantly - the defensive fire is a simple linear motion predictor which a medium corkscrew fools pretty well. Enough for your shields to handle the remaining hits.

With the Maxim capital ships are big enough that accuracy isn't a huge concern so long as you close before really cutting loose. Because the Maxim also sucked weapon power as well as being ammunition limited then accurate burst fire was always your friend. A good secondary punch was the dumbfire Sparrow (I think that was the name, been a year or two since I played either Freespace game.) missiles. Rapid fire, high damage and small in size so you could carry smegloads of em on a fighter bomber and still have room for the fighter to fighter missiles you need for self defence.

Capital ships of cruiser size or smaller died like flies and the larger ones just took some judicious softening through subsystem attack first to make them manageable. Fire control subsystems were usually my first choice for a quick high speed Stiletto II hit on the first few passes to degrade the accuracy of the turret fire. Don't piss about doing long range launches though - quick full throttle burns in to close, missile launch at near point blank then a fast afterburner exit to safer ranges is the order of the day.

On rapid slash attacks like that I would exploit the fact that my rear facet never got hit and reinforce invidual sheild facets. That way you tended to come out with little to nothing on the forward shield while reinforcing the rear facet to soak up fire on the exit.

The weakness is that you rely heavily on your sheilds to make it all work. There is little reserve for handling stray fire from defending fighters. So I usually used the wingmen squadrons to keep fighters off me as much as possible. I'd deliberately change their loadout to remove any capital killer weapons on the support and reserve squadrons to convince the wingmen AI to not even think about tackling the capital ships.

This worked well enough that during the Collosuss versus Sathanas (I think that was the Shivan ship name) duel I'd stripped the shivan ship of so much firepower in the previous few missions that she had no foward firing beam weapons at all and precious little fighter defenses left. So little that my ship sat motionless watching the scripted duel takeplace perfectly safely. It always annoyed me that the Collosus kept taking ridiculous punishment even though it wasn't really being shot at much. The Shivan ship was literally using two anti-fighter beam turrets as it's primary attack on the far side of the ship relative to me.



Gaining lock was the hard part, maintaining it was easier. Generally for subsystems I'd get the lock while corkscrewing in. While the unrealistic physics in Freespace made doing that a little easier it wasn't too different getting a lock in I-war for good missile launches there.

You always wanted to try and missile launch on a good angle for the enemy engines in I-war. Missiles generally were a waste otherwise as the particle disruptor array easily handled them if their shiedls had any charge left. So unless you used a light rapid fire PBC to soften the shields before firing then the only good you did with side on or frontal missile launch was getting the enemy to forget you for a bit and maneuver to deal with the missile. That why I so loved the gunnery console in I-war, if you flicked quickly to it after hitting the autopilot to either approach or evade mode as the enemy ship moved out of the forward PBC firing arc then you could lovetap the ship in the engines with the rear PBC for one or two shots and put a missile directly up their engine intake.

Use of that console generally meant in a single pass with either two or three enemy AI ships attacking I could get one kill on the first pass to soften the odds up. With three ships then even tilting your ship to spread the two PDA arrays meant that one ship always had hull hits. Killing that one ship rapidly made you a lot harder to hurt as then you had one PDA per ship to soak up their incoming fire so long as you maneuvered correctly. Good use of the consoles in I-war is what distinguished the good commanders from the best and in many ways is what distinguished I-war from the fighter simulators like Freespace or Wing Commander. I just wish Particle Systems had realised that and kept the subsystem control more for the sequel. They balanced I-war 2 for more in your face action and less simulation than the first game.

Still I am getting way off topic for the thread and probably boring people silly. Gotta admit the BSG mod trailer does look pretty good. What I will find painful is the same thing I found painful in the original Freespace - the lack of shields. I tend to exploit their regenerating nature a lot and am not so good at the total damage avoidance the lack of them requires - I like to use them to get close, personal and unleash a torrent of damage to really hurt the target. The mod shouldn't have any of that. Which means I'll have to spend some painful time adapting to suit.

ZylonBane on 2/12/2005 at 20:20

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You know, the much-vaunted realistic physics might not be entirely unrelated to that. :erm:

ZylonBane on 2/12/2005 at 20:45

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You mean they slacked everything else back even more so it finally became more fun than work? :p

Shadowcat on 2/12/2005 at 23:54

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ZB: Sorry to hear you didn't like it, but I-War was all kinds of awesome fun to play. It was a little more like an actual sim than most 'space sims', so sure that will cut down the target audience, but what you saw as 'work' was just excellent and much-wanted sci-fi immersion to many of us. It didn't make it hard, it just meant you had to develop your tactics based on the capabilities of your ship and its weaponry.

Banksie's post is an excellent example of exploiting the fictional technology to achieve victory.

To reiterate the point about shields (or displacement arrays, but I'll call them shields), for instance. They're not permanent all-encompassing barriers as in many games, but rather active systems that are capable of tracking a single threat at a time. You have two of them, one for each hemisphere of your corvette. If you have a single opponent, you'll be in good shape. If you have two threats, you want to position your ship such that each is covered by a shield. If you have more than two threats in range, you may have made a tactical error. The shields are described in the manual, and it's up to you to determine how best to use them.

You can of course exploit the shield technology for your own gain in combat, with missiles. You're unlikely to achieve very much with missiles on their own from a distance. You can't really use them to 'soften up' your opponents like you might in other games. However, if you launch your missiles such that your opponent's shield cannot cover both your ship and your missiles simultaneously and then close and attack with your PBC as the missiles reach their target, you are assured (if done right) that one of the two weapons WILL get through and you will take that opponent out of the picture rapidly.

You might call that work, but I think it's brilliant fun. When you systematically take apart your enemy with good use of tactics, using your technology to its full potential, there's immense satisfaction to be had.

ZylonBane on 3/12/2005 at 01:31

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I haven't played it. I've only played the demo for the first one, and that was so long ago that the only lasting impression I have of it is, "ludicrously complex". It felt like over half the interface was dedicated to compensating for a problem that the developers needlessly inflicted on themselves-- the realistic physics. As if commanding a corvette isn't complicated enough, they had to layer the physics on top of it and make the whole thing about as approachable as the cockpit of a 747.

Between I-War and Lunar Lander, I'm no fan of realistic physics in space games.