Drastic

In a current game, the station Gazer1, over yonder by Pluto, has an inflation level displayed as -1%, via docking, tradcom, info. I saw in a thread on GoneGold that this probably shouldn't happen. Savegame available if desired.

To wander in fashionably late: I put enough hours into BCM a couple years back that much of UC was familiar to me upon starting it up. A few things have shifted about here and there, either in the interface or in my memory--took me awhile to find where the option was to launch all fighters at once from the HUD, for instance. Down planetside definitely looks and handles better than I recall it being in BCM; it also seems to be the bit where my current computer's performance suffers the most during any activity, but upgrades are in my future anyway. I like the flocking wildlife; more options for them (toggling by type, for instance) would be well-received. They add a nice touch. The music didn't sit right at first, and mostly made me recall that I liked BCM's better--so what I ended up doing was digging into the games storage and reinstalling it just long enough to copy over its music for UC's use. Thus far, it's been much more stable out of the box than Millennium was--the only crashes I've had so far were because of a known reactor-upgrade-red-alert bug that's already being acted on. Dropped cargo pods seem to be much more lucrative than they were before, which is terrific starting out.

Just saw the bit about avoiding reactor upgrades entirely till final patch. I'll let the engineers damage me in some other way in the meantime. Edit: And upon seeing swift response after posting that...savegame sent. [ 02-16-2004, 02:31 PM: Message edited by: Drastic ]

...which is sort of worrisome, the engineers being willing to jam naval missiles into the reactor core. The situation: Roam career, Ter/Mil commander, Megaron carrier. I've been nabbing cargo pods as they drop, and amongst the loot in one was five APN Exocets. I travel back to Galcom HQ, dock, tradcom, sell a bunch of stuff and have enough to upgrade my bare-bones reactor one level. Exit station, logistix, drill down to relevant deck of the CC, select for reactor upgrade. The Megatron (for the Megaron!) is lit up as an option, as I'd expected...but now, underneath the Trellis top-of-the-line, appears APN/Exocet. It lets me select it and allocate engineers to replace it--I didn't let them run through to completion. I saved that gamestate, and loaded up an earlier one I'd save-and-exited as I was approaching staiton with loot, pre-docking. The Exocet appears as a reactor upgrade in there as well. [ 02-16-2004, 02:01 PM: Message edited by: Drastic ]

The pilots do have a "SHUT UP!" button--when you're in the bridge view, and they're out and about, click their little square and it's one of the options along with the individual orders menu. I've gotten pretty quick at activating it. (But leave it on if you're ever having them escort you up into orbit. All four screaming "spacebound spacebound!" at once is comedy.) Safe havens: The latest patch has made Earth remarkably safe, since it buffs stations, massively so. Even safer--the sub-regions from Saturn and Jupiter and (I assume--I've stuck homeward so far) similar multi-region planets-and-moons have. I park my CC in there, angle for the best solar soaking, halt, shut down reactor and shields, and just leave it sit for hours. Never touched (and it gets the AI climbing, too).

I've been seeing a lot more blue dots around lately, and I'm glad of it. After a bit of confusion with Requisitions from HQ, I finally got that jetpack back, and had independent space mobility once more. (The crew had been all too happy to boot me out without one, I noticed.) I spent some time flying and walking around my remodeled and much-better-looking MK3, playing trust games with the crew (i.e., floating directly in front of the main guns--they did a good job staying Halted, I think I'll get them t-shirts "I Passed Up the Chance to Vaporize My Commander, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt"), and so on. While this was going on, some miscreants attempted an attack on Genesis, and were repelled quite handily. HQ must have seen I was busy, as they'd dispatched one of their other MK3's. I took stock of things after the explosions had died down, and noticed all those neutral castes flying about. A journalist here, returning to base, a tourist over this way, and a paramedic...targeted at a disabled and SOS'ing fighter. I watched it closely, as it hyperspaced over, collected the immobilized craft in tractor, and RTB'ed with it. Very neat.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: If I had to explain in the manual everything that the AI did, it would be 10x its size. You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Tonight's lesson learned was the importance of situational awareness, and not missing some very important trees for the forest. I had taken orbit above a remote moon of Saturn, far off from shipping lanes, in order to put the crew through some paces. Interceptors escorting each other chasing waypoints, all four OC's on the surface running laps. Occasionally I'd beam down to the OC-racetrack, avoiding getting run over by the slightly-dumber-than-a-box-of-dumb-things marines driving, and breathing the hard vacuum secure in my SEP field. Meanwhile, the systems engineering team was hard at work putting in new top-of-the-line upgrades all around. The medics roamed, occasionally patching up the SE's when they did things like weld their feet to bulkheads. The last scheduled upgrade, my BC Mk3's new Linear-Spec/IV shield system, went into place. The SE's went for a nap, I watched racing OC's for a time, then sent the shuttles back to retrieve them. My mining drones were soon to be full; my long-range plan was to return to Saturn, from there sweep through Mars, and thence back to Earth to collect minerals, sell, and restock. Engines online with a powerful thrum as the shuttles re-docked with OC's and marines safe and sound--and even a tiny little bit less stupid in a couple of the more abject cases. The interceptors jumped back and redocked, and I set FE's to work re-prepping them. I had a fully-upgraded ship, as powerful as it would ever be until such time in the distant future when my RE got more brains, a slightly-better trained group of pilots and marines, and a purpose. Hyperspace, and into Saturn we went. All was empty, and another jump took us to the Mars jump node, when the alarm klaxon sounded. An Insurgent vessel appeared, clear on the other side of the sector, and a Droidan Raider followed--they were clearly having a disagreement. Curious, I gave the order to halt, waiting to see who would survive that little tussle. Turned out to be the raider, who immediately set his sights on myself. I smirked and waited, engaged as he emerged from hyperspace by me, dispatched the woefully-outmatched fighter without a problem. More raider vessels appeared, and I focused on the nearest. PTA fire carved its shields steadily, and it began returning fire. Ha, with my new shield, it doesn't stand a chance before... thud. thud thud thud. Kendrick announcing a stream of things that all ended in "...damaged." The heck? The offending raider fighter went boom, and I looked over to the shield indicator... ...and realized it was off. I had never turned it back on before leaving that quiet little sub-region. I corrected that, dispatched the last couple raiders with a bit less speed--I must not be too badly messed up, got lucky, I thought. All was quiet again, so I decided to survey the damage. I'll just fire up logistix and... "Logistix computer is destroyed." Oh...kay. I'm not as lucky as that. Let's just jump to the nearest friendly station and... "Unable to engage hyperdrive." Fair enough, my top speed was halved, the engine was obviously in a bad place. I'll just get a marine back in a shuttle to tow me... "Tactical computer is destroyed." At this point, I nodded calmly, and engaged the autodestruct sequence, ignoring the crew's pleas for calling a commercial tow service. Moral of the story: never just assume your shields are up. They're rather important.

Getting to the spot on the map where the OC was, wasn't the problem. Problem was, the OC simply plain wasn't there any more. It was gone from the zoom-to-support-craft menu; hovering the mouse over its TLM tab said it was right by its first waypoint, which I was looking directly at in a variety of zoomed-in settings. I swear I'm not making any of this up. Which makes it all the more head-scratching when today I find I can't reproduce that behavior, using the same exact steps, for the life of me. Transient miniature gremlins poking at my processor's circuits, apparently. Looks like a bizarre but non-issue, anyway, so no worries on my end.

The Case of the Vanishing OC's (1.0.0.2RC9) What I did: Load Marine to pilot each shuttle. Pile the rest into the OC's. (I was going to have them drive around a clear area, for AI training purposes.) TacOps, observe the planet. (In my case, it was Dione in Saturn sub-region 2.) Assign each shuttle a waypoint to deploy their OC's. Each shuttle dropped off their vehicle and RTB'ed, no problem. This is where it gets interesting. Support/ZOOM-TO shows all 4 OC's, as normal. I zoom down to one of them, pull back. Go to the waypoint menu, add one. Click on setpos. The OC vanishes. Pop, right out of the TacOps view. It doesn't show up any longer in the Zoom-To/Support Craft menu. Doing the trick of zooming down to the surface and pitching/rotating the view (which shows the others' TTD's on the horizon) doesn't show its TTD. The instant of clicking setpos for waypoints for each of the others causes them to vanish into the ether as well. Sending shuttles back at waypoints with an extract order causes them to report back that no OC is in the area, and to return to base empty-holded. PerScan shows the 16 marines in the four missing OC's, alive and presumably happy. Their commander is scratching his head.

In general, when/how do stations' inventories get replenished/rearranged? I'm especially leery of the iridium-trading approach, as HQ's stocks have (near's I can figure) remained unimpacted by anything other than my own actions, at least in game so far. Don't want to transfer all the things I'll need to be rebuying later to more expensive stations.

They weren't anything remarkable. AI 18 or so, but I don't recall what his dogfight was at. Nothing that stood out at me, in any case. I deleted out that game, though, because I somehow managed to lose an ATV which was driving laps on Earth. The zoom-to-support-craft menu showed nothing, mouse-hovering over its TLM entry claimed it was right there by the waypoints I'd left it at. I think the marines buried it--and themselves.

I don't know whether some bit of behavior got tweaked with RC9, or my pilots simply suddenly were touched by the hand of Shiva, but I like the results either way. About two minutes after first launching, Sol/Earth was suddenly awash with Fal military types and Val raiders--they entered initially fighting each other, then I think they made a quick truce when they saw me jumping towards them. My fighters were in standard dual-escort, which was set up much more quickly than before (the new support units targeting option is a good thing). I put them into it and forgot about them. A minute or two later, FC-1 had 3 kills and was working on more. FC-3 lagged a bit behind with only 2, and then took a nasty hit; I quickly reeled him back in with an RTB order, sent the slightly banged-up pilots to medibay. We don't have any medals on board, but I figure I'll autograph them each a nutripack. I hope they make this kind of showing a habit.

I'm a big fan of the Saitek X36, never seemed at all fragile to me. I didn't think too highly of the integrated rudder-rocker at first, but have grown used to it, it just requires a light touch and is a lot more precise than it seems at first use.

Missiles work well. Too much is always better than not enough! I think it's a shame they can't be towed. Not so much because that would allow an alternate way of clearing up the sector after the dangerous things are gone (and I'd be amused to see what GalCom would pay for towed-and-delivered enemy marines. 1 credit?), but for the main benefit of being able to alt-E, order your own shuttle to tow you, and go vacuum-surfing.