i'm gonna break from my pattern on every EV game i've ever played and actually take a minute to map the commodity prices so i can leave the starting area with one of those nice armed hybrid freighter-warships
instead of just taking missions headed approximately the same direction i already felt like going until i get bored and buy a scoutship
i absolutely did not map the commodities. i have a list but i don't have a paint program on the iBook yet so i haven't charted them. instead i salvaged a disabled military vessel, somehow tanked the reputation hit from appropriating government property, bolted on some fuel tanks and fuel scoops, and am now way too deep into alien space in the wrong direction for the normal first contact mission. my reputation as an accidental pirate hunter in self-defense has allowed me to go to some places that normally wouldn't give me the time of day. i have no idea where i am. this is the best $15 i have ever spent. in today's dollars that's like two million i think
plus the like… $40? i gave some fellow retro Mac fan for this iBook
this game has, like, four named characters. it could have had more.
and even in the first EV, you could implement them as massless equipment with the "follows you between ships" flag set, and have them start applying bonuses (shield charge, maneuverability, fuel collection) as they level up and are replaced by more powerful versions of themselves with more experience at ship systems.
imagine if Mass Effect but mostly text and in 1996 🤔
…i really need to play Frozen Heart, huh
i am a giant idiot and forgot how much tech strengths and weaknesses differing across the galaxy can be exploited, and assigned my captured Voinian frigates to the escort fleet instead of taking one for myself. Voinian shields aren't worth shit, but their armor can soak up Crescent phase cannons all day and all night, far more than the disappointingly underpowered freight-courier and its human-civilian-typical mix of OK shields and mostly ceremonial armor. the average Crescent renegade fleet can peel that off me like a banana and i've probably died 40 or 50 times today. but my two frigate escorts have barely been scratched in Crescent space so far. pretty sure i saw them take out a whole Crescent Warship without my help.
so now it's back to Voinian space to see if i can catch a third frigate. when i can get in deep enough, their supply ships have huge capacity (250 tons) and are easy to capture, but sadly hard to keep alive, since the escort AI only knows:
what it really needs is:
but afaik the EV series proper never had any more escort commands (except the two for carried fighters, the most expensive and most short-lived consumable in the game ime) so that's what i got.
should have bought a damn Arada instead of buying human lol but really i'm just gonna have to keep trying to snag another frigate. the upside is that, aside from fuel and hunter missiles, it'll be free…
p.s.: one hilarious thing that this game does is that most emergency defense and planned offensive missions are not time-sensitive, so you can literally fuck off for three months and do some trading or raiding and try to come back with a better ship that lets you survive the mission. similar to Mass Effect's general lack of urgency in the future. yeah there's a war on, but i got side quests 🥺
#EscapeVelocity #EscapeVelocityOverride #VyrPlaysEscapeVelocityOverride
the ability to store previously purchased ships in a sort of garage was one of Naev's innovations on the classic EV formula and i think that should be recognized even if the rest of the game is somewhere between unfinished and unplayable. (they tried. play it so you can see what i'm talking about, and then play Endless Sky instead.)
No Man's Sky does this too despite the fact that nothing really matters in NMS. the economy's a joke, combat barely less so, but ultimately it's a game about traveling until existential horror at the sheer scale of the universe catches up with you. switching ships doesn't make a huge difference.
RNGesus was not with me today. in two hours (?) of combat, i took out enough Voinian frigates, supply ships, and a few cruisers to spike my combat rating straight to Ultimate, mostly because my two captured frigate escorts are excitable idiots and kept blowing up disabled ships before i could order them to stop shooting. of the dozen or so i successfully disabled, i was able to capture exactly zero. maybe the freight-courier's crew isn't big enough? also, i got myself killed more times than i can count. the freight-courier is not a hybrid freighter/warship, it's just heavy rocket bait.
i eventually gave up and fucked off to Miranu space and bought a Lazira, then gave up almost all of the cargo hold to max out on reverse-engineered Voinian neutron turrets and basic armor from finishing the Paaren Station mission string. pretty sure Ultimate unlocks missions that are still totally beyond this thing, but we'll see.
the only Crescent systems remaining are dispersal rockets (maxed out at 3 launchers) and my experimental Igadzra plasma siphon, which, if that doesn't let me take out the Adzgari warship and its ☯️🪯☦️🛐ing Azdara complement that i'm supposed to be hunting, i don't know what will. i should probably get Miranu ECM (or Igadzra if they trust me enough yet), because i don't have room for shield capacitors and likely can't tank many SAD modules. rather not take the hits at all. a sensor upgrade too, so i can see incoming ships instead of nebula static. but $$$…
i'm having so much fun y'all
there's a bug in EVO 1.0.2 where the offset for a certain weapon's sprite is off by 1, causing it to flash a frame from another weapon after every 35 frames of its normal animation, and it looks unfortunate. i want to either find the old EV plugin repositories (which had fan patches for that bug) or fix it myself.
stuck on a very difficult mission: cleaning out a huge renegade fleet at Pariah, mostly Turncoats, and that means i get swarmed by about 15-20 Kraits on system entry.
now Kraits are nearly pointless alone, but 20 of them can easily rip apart a Lazira (even one with a layer of reverse-engineered Voinian Dospect plating thanks to the Paaren Station mission string): human blaze cannons are fairly effective all-rounders including armor. i don't have any captured escort ships at the moment and i haven't had any luck snaffling more Voinian frigates.
so i keep getting exploded. with turrets requiring a lock to fire, i can barely hammer the R key (target nearest hostile) fast enough. so i've also got a plasma siphon and triple dispersion rocket launchers, but the dispy rockets are kinda useless. you hit one Krait, congrats, there's 19 more behind it, and even triple launchers don't cycle fast enough to keep up. the Igazdra plasma siphon and its knockback are helpful but not quite enough.
for my most recent attempt, i dropped one dispersion rocket launcher and replaced it at shocking expense with 4 shield capacitors (max possible) and i still can't do it. still a few more Kraits than i can take alone.
so i fucked off to explore the rest of uncharted-by-me Voinian space, which went pretty quickly because most of them don't attack you on sight or are slow.
then i think, maybe i go make so much money somehow somewhere that i can rent a decent escort fleet instead of continuing to fail at capturing one. problem is, escorts get paid by the day and it's difficult to hire anything with serious teeth in human space, so it's going to cost if i want to bring in Crescent mercenaries. other problem is my own cargo bay is a tiny 20 tons after i irreversibly turned all that cargo space into weapon space, so it'd need to be entirely fast courier missions or combat, not commodity trading.
i bumbled up to Miranu space to try to progress Miranu/Strand missions, and upon dropping off a classified cargo and checking my pilot/ship info box on a whim, only then do i notice…
i still have a UE cloaking device. i thought i'd left it behind a few ships ago, but in fact those ship changes were before the UE mission that grants it, and i've had it the whole time.
so i have a whole new tactical option, which is to cloak right after system entry, hope that there's a fleet coming in with me, wait for that fleet to mix it up with the Turncoats and Kraits and take their numbers down.
if they don't win outright, i'll use the time to slide out to the edge of the system so it'll take as long as possible for the fighter cloud to catch up with me after i decloak: cloaking drops shields and i need time to refill them. (i think the recharge rate booster in this game is Adzgari tech and thus not accessible to me on this playthru, so they take forever to recharge.)
other options include:
i got sidetracked into the nebula penetration research missions. since those are one of the game's three objectives (a thing it only tells you when you finish one of those major mission strings) this is good actually
the worst part of replaying a game that you finished multiple times as a kid is that you know it can be beaten by (a) yourself and (b) literal children so you don't really have an excuse for getting stuck
so, having paused one mission string to avoid being murdered by a half-dozen Turncoats and dozens of Kraits, i have now reached a point in another where i have to handle the same thing except replace the shitty human renegade ships with much nastier alien renegade Crescent Warships and Crescent Fighters.
at this point i have concluded, for both missions:
so now i'm thinking
@vyr I must remind myself of this. To be stuck is a luxury. A stucxury?
Not again! EVERY TIME @zarfeblong , like the moth to the flame!
god i love this game
@zarfeblong @rezmason NO OH MY GOD THAT'S THE GAME I WAS THINKING ABOUT WHEN YOU SAID WORD PUZZLES! i should have said something! System's Twilight rocks!
i can't finish it because i am legitimately terrible at lights-out puzzles but SOMEDAY
@vyr @zarfeblong I just finished the lights-out part. I have a suggested strategy: always build in a direction, such as from the top down or from the outside in, and if a pattern appears in multiple places, try repeating your steps (or even partial steps) to achieve the same result.
Also anyone who likes System's Twilight is catapulted to top tier, enjoy the Rezmason Lounge's treats and refreshments while you await your flight's departure 🍸🛫
@vyr good times… I never did get the Igadzra mission string started.
I did try to fight the dreadnought with a shields-maxed Azdara fighter (and a couple other things) but never finished it
@lioness the dreadnought is a beast. it's probably possible, but you'd be at it all day with phase cannons, given how little damage they do to armor.
mind you, long drawn-out fights on the edge of getting blown up are kind of an EV staple. what else do you do once you've fired off all your consumable secondaries?
Elara Voss fucked my wife
rezmason
🔏 Matthias Wiesmann
evil shoofle
lioness (stuff)
hyratel