Overview
Started with a flying heap of junk uncapable of doing even easy missions? Pirates on board of shinning large ships beat you up to a pulp while laughing? Dragging that slow hunk of crap of a ship trought gates for hours without a clue? I know how it feels. Read this guide and follow the tips to loot, sell and buy the right gear and find the right opportunity. Pirates and Xenon will laugh a lot less when you dive towards their ships and blast them in seconds while they´re unable to even land a single hit on you. Where to save, what to do, what to loot, where to go – when you know those basics, is just a matter of time until you´re flying a 8 Gigawat shielded capital ship towards your enemies doom.
Welcome! You start onboard a flying garbage.
I´ll assume that you have at least started this game once and is reading this while foaming on your mouth in rage. That´s natural on Terran Conflict: you expect to start saving the universe onboard a star figther like other games, but suddenly not only your ship is the crapiest, you have no idea how to fly the damn thing.
Terran Conflict has several different starts, and the majority is most always the same: your ship is underfitted, compared to the majority of NPC ships. We´ll start with “Nostalgic Argon” – the game says the difficulty is normal, but trust me: it´s only normal compared to SUICIDAL SQUID, wich you should avoid until you´ve mastered this game.
I´ll try to be frank: in all starts you are in a pretty bad situation. The huge universe, filled with factories and equipment docks you should be aware off, is all but obscured to you, save the sector where you started.
Your encyclopedia, wich should be filled with essential info about ship gear and stuff, is empty.
And your ship? If the thing where fully fitted, it wouldn´t be qualified for most of the missions – and at the beggining, you can´t do ANY mission for the lack of equipment.
We start onboard an ARGON BUSTER, with untuned speed, low cargo bays and slow Rudder.
Tooltips on the left of the screen will tell you to press “C” to enter a communicaton channel with the argon flight school right in front of you. If you need to refresh on the basics, do this and follow his intructions.
All right, on to the next step: ship tunning. You´re TOO DAMN SLOW NOW. Go to the nearest Argon Equipament Dock and sell your 1 mega shield and your two impulse ray emmiters, and buy engine tunnings until you ran out of money – now, the Buster´s can fly at 150m/s instead of 81ms. In this strategy, you´re accepting the fact that this heap of junk is UNABLE to survive an actual fight, even against a light figther, and you´ll be doing two things: opening the universe map and looting gear from skirmishes to sell. To speed up travel time, press “J” key – this activates the time compression module, a feature we really wish that were in more games!
Yup, we´re on a SALVAGE OPERATION to survive. The engine tunning can be also bought in trading stations (all sectors have one), but not all sectors have equipment docks.
The game only saves when you dock at a station: it´s possible to save in space later, but only after buying a SALVAGE INSURANCE – each one gives you one save outside a station and costs $3000 each, and are sold in few places.
Now, we´ll start looking for skirmishes to loot missiles. Some people might argue that they prefer to trade, but missiles are where the quick money is. A sucessfull trade run might give you up to $1000, while missile looting might give you up to $300.000, DEPENDING ON YOUR LUCK!
We need dough to outfit the damn ship to finally accept missions and maybe fight enemies, and missile looting is your best option now. The most expensive ones (Hammerhead, firestorm) are bought by $80.000 per unity, most commons like silkworm for $5000 and so on.
Conflict zones are awash with leftover missiles. In fact, missile crates floating in space are like blood splats: means someone died there. You can collect those in peace: NPCs don´t try to take loot, it´s all yours. The nearet conflict Zone in our start are the Argon ones who border pirate sectors – let´s head to the EAST GATE and keep that direction until we find a pirate sector.
Split Fire, Elena´s fortune or Brenan´s Triumph are promising sectors. During the travel, keep your eyes peeled for skirmishes.If you find nothing, you can stretch your map exploration to further sections of the X universe, like Merchants Heaven (almost in the other side of the universe). Anyway, we´re counting with luck in this humble begginings.
Pirate sectors almost always have trouble and loot for you, as police border squads may attack them, or they may attack freighters who fight back. In the beggining, most pirates will be ‘blue’ (neutral) to you so you can stroll around in their sectors to search for loot. While making this guide i found a hand full of missiles in Brennan´s Triumph. Keep you distance from aggroed (red) pirates: they´ll mincemeat you if you´re not far away enough (Pirates generated outside missions are armed with PLASMA BURST GENERATORS, a flamethrower that kills even capital ships). Docking quickly at a station is a good way to run from enemies.
You can sell the loot in military Bases or Equipment Docks, and tunne up your ship with the money while at it. Remember: ship speed is essential, for both running away or go after somebody.
Be patient… as i wrote this, i found around $50.000 on missiles, and was able to tune up the speed to the max 175 m/s, got shields and filled the weapons banks with impulse ray emmiters. Nice, but not enough – tought you can fight a small pirate with this gear, for a Buster we need three 5 Megajoule shields, at least 3 Particle accelerator cannons and all extensions we can buy.
So now, keep looting those missiles and snooping around the battlegrounds on pirate sectors until you can afford to buy all extensions for your Buster. It´s still a heap of Junk, but is better to fly a well-equipped heap of junk.
My Garbage Can fly faster! What now?
Now well try to get a better ship, obviously. Actually, a ship that can help with the majority of missions, challenges and tasks ahead. For that, we need tons of money.
And money comes more easily as we gain both reputation with the races and skill in either fighting or trading – those ‘promotions’ decides how hard (and well-paid) the missions will be. If you´re still in the ‘innofensive’ level of fighter skill, a ‘easy’ assassination mission will pit you against a badly armed light fighter for $1000, but if you´re ‘battlemaster’ skill, the same easy mision will run you against a fully armed M7 frigate with a full wing escort of corvettes for $3.000.000. While looting missiles for money, now we can also risk some fight missions, provide your level isn´t too high (A buster can fight off up to two small fighters if you´re good). Fight related missions that are cool to accept in the beggining of the game are as follows:
-STATION DEFENSE: Some pirate fighters will try to destroy a station, and you have to kill them. Easy, for the pirates will focus on attacking the station while you pick them one on one – just try not to hit the station or they can get angry. There´s always a chance from a pirate to drop missiles after death, or even better, to abandon his ship.
-PATROL: Excellent for gaining quick reputation with a race, patrol simple requires that you kill all enemies who randonly spawns in the sector in the duration of the mission. You can also simple leave the sector and return later if you want, tough the pay is severely cut if you don´t kill any enemy contact or just one (there´s a bonus for every contact killed, value depending on the ship class). Try to blast at least two enemy ships. Enemies who are from outside this mission, or generated from any other mission are also accounted for the kill payout.
-ESCORT: You get those not from stations with a red target icon, but from freighters with a red target icon. You have to follow the freighter around and stop it from getting killed by a random numer of spawning pirates who will ignore everthing and go straight to the freighter to kill it. Very good to get reputation, but watch out for the freighters health, even small fighters can kill heavily shield targets in a few moments if you´re not careful.
About the Races…
Truth be told, to open the map and do non-fight missions efficiently (asteroid scans, taxi, courier) we´ll need a faster ship. Yes, we want the Teladi KESTREL, and to get one we first need to make friends with the teladi.
As you probably notice when you sold the missiles, there are gear you´re not allowed to purchase, even if you have the money (marked in red): that´s because you need to work in your STANDINGS with that race. There are six races: Terran, Argon, Teladi, Boron, Paranid and Split.
Terran: amazing powerfull ships, but only works with their own weaponry. The springblossom and the spitfire are ships you WILL want to have, but they´re only available in the final of the main storyline mission.
In this guide, i´m going to follow a strategy where we avoid all the main storyline missions, so you can start them only when you´re rich and VERY well-equipped (capitan of your own destroyer at least).
Argon: The “standard” race, only have standard ships (we started with their middle fighter “Buster”) However, there´s a secret sector called LEGENDS HOME where the OTAS faction builds the best military transport (Zephyrus) and Destroyer (Boreas) in this game. We´ll go after the Zephyrus later in this guide.
Teladi: The happy merchants of space have the best cargobay in their ships… and everything else is crap. Expensive and useless, the only ship we want from them is the Kestrel, who is the fastest m4 ever created (600 m/s!), you will be using this ship again and again, even after buying a carrier (you´ll probably buy one for each Capital ship with a docking bay).
Boron Good guys, with good ships… but not quite good enough. They have a decent passenger transport, the Angel, who should be the player choice if you decide to get a mission were you HAVE to fly a PT. Boron ships, like some argon, have the ability to fire ION DISRUPTORS, who damage shields and spares hulls, essential for boarding operations.
Paranid The paranoic religious cretins of the universe, their ships are all meh except for their M7 DEIMOS, sporting 6 Giga shield and a nice shockwave generator capabilities, and the legendary HYPERION (who´s not available outside the paranid start, but can be boarded and stolen if you find her). Paranids have the precious DOCKING COMPUTER on their Equipment docks.
Split Now we´re talking! The family oriented psychotics prize SPEED and FIREPOWER… at the expense of shields and cargobay. This render their fighters useless and their capital ships awesome. They also have the best prices for Capital ships, the Dragon corvette costs only 8 million (plus shields and weaponry), and the Panther 40 million. The Elephant is a steal at 17 million credits, but only pay for a TS when it´s time to move stations.
Ship Purchase plan: the KESTREL
You need the best ships that will do the job well and quickly. This purchase plan will basically decide how much butt you can actually kick in a fight, and how rich you can quickly get. You are what you fly in this game, after all. The first ship we want is the KESTREL:
Kestrel: Do Missions in the Teladi sectors for recognition among them, or kill the occasional pirate trader or small pirate fighter.
The sectors i like to do this step are the ones around IANAMUS ZURA.
The Buster you´re in can handle Xenon defense missions in the “Eight Billion” sector (the military base there often give those), but don´t try to cross Xenon sector 347 on it!
The Kestrel is in the Shipyard in Ianamus Zura sector for around $130.000, plus equipment and tunning. Dock the Buster somewhere and use the Kestrel to open the map, do taxi missions and some light courier ones.The ship can fight some light fighters if needed, but don´t press your luck: the ship is more of a map opener than anything else.
With de Kestrel you can:
1- EXPLORE: flying around the sectors on it is INCREDIBLE quick; at 600 m/s you can ‘J’ key to explore all gate positions in an instant. You NEED to know where are all sectors and gates if you want to correctly jumpdrive to a specific target in assassination missions later. The safest way to cross a Xenon sector is onboard a Kestrel.
2- TAXI: The Kestrel can carry “M” size freight, wich means you can do taxi missions (a passenger takes 8 M-size cargo space). A taxi mission is basically flying someone from a station in a sector to another, so you only need to worry about purchase a CARGO LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM for $3000 in a pirate station or some Teladi trading stations.
3- SMALL FIGHTS: The kestrel can fire Particle Accelerator Canons, wich can kill small fighters quickly, It also have a Back turret: fit a impulse ray emmiter there and set it to missile defense for even better protection. Station Protection Missions and patrols are a piece of cake on this ship, however avoid dogfighting anything larger than a M4 with a backturret – your 5 Mj shield can´t handle damage, so you need to rely on speed and skill to avoid getting shot.
Now Player show how to fight: Kestrel and small ships
The default W A S D keys move the ship in STRAFE, while Q and E keys barrel roll the ship.
The right mouse will ALWAYS fire at the mouse target, anywhere in the screen – pressing space bar will turn mouse flight on/off, wich kinda makes for a different approach if you´re steering and shooting at the same time.Pressing CTRL shoots straight at the ENEMY TARGET WITH PRECISION, if you have the FIGHTING COMMAND SOFTWARE Mk1.
Always make sure the auto aim is ON – K key toggles between On, OFF and SEMI.
Pressing the F1 key will alternate between turret and cockpit views.
It´s not well know, but you can control turrets from the side monitors: select GAMEPLAY on the menu, and click on the left monitor or right monitor options. Now you can select between target view, external or back view of the ship. Clicking in the monitor gives you control over the back turret. You can also select to WATCH a specific ship cockpit from your fleet, or monitor any ship in the sector from the external view.
Dogfighting with the Kestrel
Small fighters dogfights are fast action ones, you´ll hardly be able to avoid Impulse ray emmiter fire or Particle accelerator cannon shots if the enemy i going straight at you, but strafing and turning is almost always a sure fire way to dodge. If more than two enemies are trying to hit you, you have a problem and should back off to a station or behind cover as soon as possible.
What you want is to draw enemy fire to anotherr target: they´ll aways start dodging and targetting anyone who´s shooting at them, so having a fight near police sector patrols is a good idea. In station protection missions, they´ll be too busy with the station and will ignore you completely even after you downed their shields, so kill them quickly – same thing with transport escort missions.
Watch out for collisions against enemy ships! Collisions are two-way damage, and the best shields always win. Your 5 mega shield can´t handle most impacts too well. Heavier and more well-shielded ships can ram enemies to death without even scrathing the hull (also a great strategy), but the kestrel should avoid collisions.
A WORD OF WARNING: The Xenon M (The Xenon M4 medium fighter) is armed with PULSE BEAM EMMITERS, and they´re as bad as the Plasma Burst Generators from the wild pirates for you. This rapid fire weapon can quickly turn your Kestrel to shreds, so it´s wise to avoid Xenon fighters until you acquired at least the Zephyrus Military transport.
RELOADING SHIELDS?!?
This is a juicy secret that saved my skin many times: if you dock anywhere and exchange shields with another docked ship, your shields ARE IMMEDIATLY RECHARGED. Doesn´t matter what shield is, or what ship is: you get full shields. Most of my capitals carry an extra 1 megawatt shield just to do that! But you NEED to be docked for it to work. Specially nice if you´re using it in conjuction with the docking computer, capable of teleporting you inside a station or a carrier.
MONEY!!!!
Big Money!!! SURPRISE!!!
If you think you will have to chore for days to make just the minimal penny to be able to buy that damn corvette who is just $7.350.000 away from your hands, wait. Not always, but sometimes big chunks of money come right down your alley in this game, usually in the form of abandoned ships, VERY expensive floating loot or an easy mission generated with a crazy payout. Yup, this is the juice part of this guide: the big money.
1- Selling captured Ships: small fighters and transports
2 – Ship recovering: the scam
SHIP RECOVERING is a mission (ligh bulb icon) where you find a half-hull abandoned ship in a sector, claim it and drive it back to the mission station in a limited amount of time. Sometimes the client pays a fortune for a small fighter, some times not so much… and sometimes they ask you to claim a 20 million credit M7 for $30.000. When that happens, rejoice. Transfer a jumpdrive and energy cells to the thing´s interior and jump her to Legend Home or any other sector with a shipyard near a gate, fix her up with your repair laser up to 5 minutes before the time expires (a police squad will jump to you and try to destroy the ship after that) and dock her into the shipyard (a docking computer is more efficient). Sell the ship for around $25.000.000 and worry with the recognition loss later.
3- Accumulation of Patrols
Patrol missions are pretty straightforward: kill enemies in the sector, get paid. But when five different stations offer the same patrol mission, with different payouts, the result is a crazy enemy invasion where every enemy get a bounty in ALL missions, bonus varying from mission to mission. I once scored 300 Million in Black Hole sun with this. Of course, requires a lot of battle power from the player.
4- Xenon Loot
After you start blasting capital ships onboard your M7, head to the nearest Xenon sector and hunt down a Xenon J carrier. Right before it blows up, save the game and after that savescum until the resulting Carrier explosion leaves packages with twenty Photon Pulse Cannons and other expensive weapons all over the space. The majority of capital weapons those ships uses sells for around $800.000 each.
5- I´m a expensive professional
The most straightforward way to make money is doing missions, ok. But notice how the payout starts to slowly increase after you did the same type of mission around twenty times with the same race: both the difficulty and the payout doubles. Thats because both standings and personal ranking affect the mission pay. Those are more apparent in fight missions, given their quick nature: assassinations goes from $1000 to $300.000.000, bounties in station defense increase tenfold and patrols pay hefty sums even for small fighters. Just try to do the same type of missions with the same race in a specific set of sectors, and large paying missions are bound to pop up now and them.
6- It´s cheap, fix and sell it
Sometimes NPCs try to sell you a fighter or any other kind of ship for three times it´s price, it´s normal price or half-price. They´ll be flying the thing or will be inside a station (yellow Cent symbol). And sometimes the deal is too frigging good to be true: a Teladi Falcon for $25.000, an Argon Centaur for $2.000.000… when a falcon, fixed, sells in a shipyard for $1.500.000 and a centaur for $ 7.000.000. All you have to do, most of the time, is to swin in space as an astronaut and repair lazer the thing until it is on 100% hull, and sell it for maximum profit.
7- Selling captured Ships: Capital ships
I´ll address this one in detail later, but suffice to say, you´ll be capturing heaps of destroyers and carriers and sell them for $30.000.000 each, plus large weapons caches in their interior that value as much as the ship. But is NOT easy: the gear necessary for the feat are mariners, expensive and takes a eternity to train them well, and a missile frigate capable to launch both boarding pods and flail barrage missiles -to wich you´ll have to have a factory off. You´ll also have to savescum the boarding operations and isolate preys from extra damage carefully, but the pay is worth the trouble.
Where are these damn ship extensions?!?
So, where are them now?
Where do you buy that damn cargo life support system to make the damn taxi missions?
Where you find that fragging docking computer? Where´s the jump drive?!? Where the hell is everything?
Let´s go straight to the point: after getting some money, you´ll need to update the ship to be capable of fighting, exploring and solving missions.Here´s a list of the most essential extensions and where to buy:
TRANSPORTER DEVICE:Lets you exchange cargo between ships outside stations, and teleports you in and out of the ship in a range of 4,5 km. Ships equipped with this can ressuply any ship on your fleet with any type of ware (provide it has also the command softwares for it installed). For $50000. You´ll find it in TERRACORP HEADQUARTERS in Home of Light sector, or JONFERCO HEADQUARTERS in Belt of Aguilar.
DOCKING COMPUTER: This one is a must have. Get near of any station and press SHIFT+D: instead of auto-pilot docking, your ship will TELEPORT inside the station. Also work with military transports and any capital ship with a fighter bay. You need to be at least 4,5 Km of the target, like the transporter device – ideal to run away from a tough fight and reload shields.
Just $18.000 credits. Paranid Equipment docks have those, but you can buy it also from OTAS HQ in Legend´s Home.
SHIP SOFTWARES Fight software mk1, Trade software mk2, explorer software, whathever software… those things add instructions options for the command menu in your ship.Teladi Equipment docks have almost all of them, and they costs around $4000 each – install all if you´re planning to give remote instructions to a ship.Navigation command software is specially essential to order ships to jump and dock at a specific station at the same time, for instance.
TRADE SYSTEM EXTENSION Another essential: you can´t check prices outside a station or make purchases with a remote ship without it.For $8000, this is one important gear you´ll want as soon as you can afford it. Almost all races equipment docks have it.
MINERAL SCANNER: You can´t build a mine or accept an asteroid scan mission without this one. With it, fly to an asteroid at less than 10 Km range and click on it – the ‘scan’ option will appear, and you´ll instantly know what´s the asteroid is and how much yield it haves. The larger the yield, the smaller the time between procuction cycles is, once a mine is build on it. Almost all equipment docks have it – for $37000.
FREIGHT SCANNER: Approach to any ship for at least 5Km with one of these, and you can scan their cargo to see everything they´re carrying! Of course, do this in a race sector and you´ll find the world “ILLEGAL” near the scan option – this means you will loose reputation with that race if you do it. Purchase this race´s POLICE LICENSE in any trading dock to receive small bounties for enemies killed, and to scan ship´s cargos without breaking the law. Just 27.000 in any equipment dock, or pirate stations. Oh, the police license is around $8.000.
DUPLEX/TRIPLEX SCANNER: Noticed that when you press “.” key or select to view the sector map, you can only see up to a tiny circle around your ship? That´s your scanner range, and boy, it´s lmited – only 10Km.Inserting a duplex or triplex scanner will increase the range of view two or three times: the ship starts with a 10Km range, the duplex increases for 20Km and the triplex gives 30Km. Duplex are sold in most equipment docks, while Triplex scanners are sold in Military Outposts, TERRACORP HEADQUARTERS in Home of Light sector or OTAS HQ in Legend´s Home. You pay around $5000 for the duplex and $10000 for the triplex.
VIDEO ENHANCEMENT GOOGLES: A binocular inside the ship? How advanced. Also, press the ALT key to zoom in and view distant objects – i said VIEW, not contact or have it in sensor range, those are different things. Good to check for distant objects while exploring, but most sectors have a damn fog obscuring anything beyond 30 km so why bother paying $5000 on Boron or Teladi equipment docks for it.
My first Carrier: the Zephyrus militar transport
Following the south gate from Brenna´s triumph sector is Danna´s chance, another pirate sector.
If you allways follow to the east gates from there, you pass four more sectors (Nopileos memorial, Hatikva´s fate, Aladna hill and Akella´s Beacon). Now, Akella´s Beacon has a south gate… waaaaaaaay hiden down south, passing the standard radar map border: not easy to find, but some trade ships can be followed so you can find the damn thing. And guess what? You just found LEGENDS HOME, the home sector of the OTAS company, an Argon based developer of special ship technology. Their ships are different from everything, they have their own shipyard and Headquarters on the sector. You can buy Jumpdrives, triplex scanners, docking computers and all shield types from their HQ, and their Shipyard have the damn best Military transport you could hope to buy: The Zephyrus.
Flies at 140 m/s, has 1275 LX cargo bay space, and raises 600 Mj shields (3 bays of 200 Mj shields each). It also have two upper front and back turrets, and one pair of main guns. But his main attraction is 4 fighters bays, installed on the back of the ship. Yup, you can dock on this ship, and this ship can dock in any station, like a normal transporter would!
Now, normally you would expect this ‘corvette’ to cost 20 million credits, right? It costs only $470.000. Seriously.
As i wrote this guide and playproofed it, i was lucky to capture three or four pirate transports and rack $970.000 (plus some small pirate fighters and a TON of missiles), so i´ll assume that you did your homework with the kestrel and got this much.
For weapons, it´s nice to leave Particle Accelerator Cannons on the turrets, but ONLY ONE IN EACH – the zephyrus only downsize is it´s small weapons generator: inferior to even most small craft. But the shields and everything else compensate for it, and Zephy can fight off any annoying small fighters with those.
Anything larger than a m4 threats you (up to a corvette!), and you can ram the ship into the enemy: 600 mj shields are more than suffice to blast any heavy fighter out of space. Oh yes, we are flying a giant metal baseball bat!
Jump to IANAMUS ZURA sector and dock at the equipament dock to fill all the extensions you can buy, especially the command software. I didn´t sold my old Buster, so i docked it in the Zephyrus for a combat ship role. If something is too big for the Kestrel, a fully shielded Buster will hit harder.
Delivery missions are now easier with the zephyrus: it´s cargobay allows for most of those mission types. This ship will be usefull as a safe, fast trade ship even after you started flying bigger ships.
What the Zephyrus can do:
A big problem when claiming ships is that sometimes the sector´s too dangerous to peacefully repair or send the ship to a shipyard to sell. The Zephyrus allow for the easy removal of any ship: if it´s a fighter, select it, transfer a docking computer to it, then transfer yourself. As soon as you´re inside the ship, teleport the ship with the docking computer to the zephyrus and get the hell outta there. If it is a big ship, you will transfer the Zephyrus jumpdrive and some energy cells, and order the ship to jump to a safe sector (Ianamus Zura or Legends Home, for instance) and then transfer a jumpdrive from the Kestrel to jump yourself right after the big ship.
Jump long distances and quickly explore
So you just remembered that you forgot to add a cargo life support system into the Zephyrus, but the pirates want you burned alive? You´re in home of light, and you want to go to Grand Exchange for it? The Zephyrus can carry more than a thousand units of energy cells, and you can go back and forth from the end of the universe two times with it. Cross dangerous sectors with the Kestrel, wait for the Zephyrus to pick you up in the other side after discovering a new Jumpgate. Get an assassination or transport mission, and select that misterious gate covered in the fog but highlighted in yellow by the mission guide and jump to it, then cross over. You can open the universe map in minutes with a Kestrel and a Zephyrus.
Carry fighters to quickly refit
If you finally got rolling in money enough to be sad at selling those nice fighters you just claimed, but want to quickly fit them and store somewhere without hassle? Load them in the zephyrus and while you do something else, send the transport to Ianamus Zura right in the Equipment Dock position, and remotely refit all fighters from the radar map. The radar map runs differently from when you´re inside the same sector where the ships receiving orders are: they never crash into anything and even combat runs differently (victory is given to the best fitted ship). After fitting all them, send them back to the Zephyrus and do the same into Legends Home OTAS HQ, Home of Light TERRACORP HQ and Grand Exchange´s Teladi trade station. Done, your ships have all the most essential extensions money can buy!
Combat aid in small squirmishes
While hunting down pirates and Xenon, order the Zephyrus to follow you: it´s turret fire may be limited but will help in a fight by attracting enemy fire away from you and taking down small fighters. If you run out of shields, SHIFT+D to teleport inside the Zephyrus and exchange shields with it to replenish them.
Carry large cargo loot
So the sector´s police destroyer collided with that Xenon Q, and a package with a Photon Pulse Cannon is now floating , tempting you? Unfortunately, this one million credit loot takes XL cargo bay to be picked up, and no fighter can carry it… but the Zephyrus can!
And what about that freighter loot the pirates you just vaporized left behind? The sector´s too dangerous for a freighter to pick up that 30 firestorm torpedo cache… so the Zephyrus is the one to go collect it!
Carry great amount of passengers
Military Transport missions are usually not only well paid, but dishes out a ton of recognition with the given faction. Problem is, transport those 21 people quickly to a distant sector´s remote station will need both cargobay, speed and firepower… wich only the Zephyrus have!
Any other ship would run into cargo, security or speed limitations.
With the Zephyrus as your poor man´s carrier, you don´t need to fear for dear life whenever ten pirate scouts or a khaak death formation approaches: you just dock quickly and bam, suddenly a wall of 600 megajoules shields is protecting you. Shields are dropping badly? Ready the jump drive and reappear in the south gate of the same sector, only to approach and finish the enemy from another angle – if they´re aggroed, the small fighters will rush first in hot and receive your turrets in the face, or docking anywhere to easily recover shields,
Extra tips and tricks
Adjust game options :
There are a few choices you´d best tune up in the gameplay options: for instance, the monitors are disabled – put the left one for targets and the other one to your rear is a good idea. Numerical hull and shield display are more precise, especially when fixing ships with the repair laser to sell, and raising the SETA (the ‘J’ key time compression/game accelerator) up to 10X will speed up all those boring time travels. In audio options, turning on Captions is nice if you´re not a native english speaker. There are even non-spoken text in the game – like the new extensions explanations they have added – that has a caption text explanation, but no audio!
It´s a godsend that we can actually leave our own ship and repair it with our repair laser if it got hit too hard, but you should do it to full 100% whenever possible. Dropping bellow 90% hull SLOWS THE SHIP DOWN, as you probably noticed, so keep it repaired to be able to fly fast!
Whenever you´re repairing a large hull – meaning, it´s taking forever – your best option is to disable mouse steering with the space bar and hold the CTRL key with a piece of paper, toothpick or weight, and do something else while your astronaut repairs the ship. Be sure you´re close enough to the ship´s hull and in a safe sector, so you won´t be surprised when returning to the game later and finding the main menu screen after a gameover instead of your astronaut! Also, be warned about astronaut flight: they have a limited amount of O2 in the suit, and you can die if you forgot the game running with him in space. A little tip: the astronaut´s strafe speed is far larger and more efficient than his forward thruster, so if you want to get to that ship quickly while space walking, fly sideways with the strafe command like a crab. The percentage of any ship´s hull equals how much of the original price the shipyard is willing to pay for the ship, so repair it to get a good price! Repairing the ship in the shipyard actually COSTS double the ammount that you would receive, so only do it to cheap ships when you´re in a hurry and have millions in your name!
Sometimes, telling that fighter you just captured to dock at a station results in disaster: he crashes on an asteroid, on the station, or simply keep running in circles. The AI pathfinding is somehow messy, so leave the radarworld to do it! Jump out of the sector, and access that particular sector from the radar: telling your ship to dock from there now runs very smoothly… no collisions, and the ship´s take almost half of the time to dock! Even combat runs differently from the radar: if your corvette was taking a beating from a bunch of small fighters right in front of you, from the radar he kills everybody effortlessly. Sending for the radar world is necessary in large docking operations, like when you refit several fighters and have them docking in and out of stations one afther the other.
From the several command softwares you purchase for the Zephyrus and your other ships, there´s one particularly handy: the ressuply command. The intention is to send the ship to go fetch anything you want a particular ship filled off: a type of laser, shields, or any type of ware.
This, however, have a far more usefull aspect: the ship can FIND the damn things much quicker than you! In need of Particle accelerator cannons, right? So where the hell are they? Often, Equipment docks and factories are fresh out of them, so you have to run in circles like an idiot trying to find it. With the ressuply command, just point the target ship as your own and pronto, the ship will automatically scam all factories and docks you opened in your map after the ware, and jump straight to the right place to buy it. It also gives a list of all available wares of the type in the know universe: the more you opened the map and revealed gates and stations, the bigger the list.
No, you´re NOT going to take on that Xenon P onboard your buster. The Kestrel can´t do much against it too. Watch out for large small squads of fighters: they are, actually, all shooting Particle accelerator cannons at you. If the enemy is a pirate Nova, a Blastclaw, or you saw it spitting a large flame thrower, pull out. Combat missions get tougher as they progress, so when that million credit bounty is on a pirate CENTAUR, you´re finally fighting corvettes and you might try to ram it with your sephyrus after softening the shields with particle accelerator cannon fire, but those High energy plasma trower turrets will probably kill you way before that. It´s time to sell everything and buy a Dragon corvette… and when onboard one, no, you WONT fight two Xenon Q at the same time! Know when you can risk your neck, and when you need to get the hell out of the line of fire. As a rule, you can´t fight a ship one level higher than you – your small M5 fighter can´t fight a medium M4 fighter, who can´t beat a heavy M3 fighter, who has no chance against a M6 corvette, who shouldn´t mess with a M7 frigate, wich in turn should avoid that M2 carrier who can´t fight that other M2 destroyer. Is a rough universe out there.