Shadowstar

One of my favorite old space strategy games is Rules of Engagement 2. It has a Star Trek feel to it, but more militaristic. It's a good capital ship sim for its time (1995 i think). It's not 3d, but it does what it tries to do very well. The best part about it though is that you can combine it with Breach 2 and Breach 3 (squad sims) and create and play campaigns that work off the combined games. For instance, you can board a ship in ROE2 and play through the boarding operation as a mission in Breach 3. Works for planets and outposts too. Considering that these games are 10+ years old, there is a suprising level of gameplay variety there. In the years since, I haven't seen any game do the same quite as well. The only franchise with potential going in that direction today is the BC series. Since thier release, the developer and publisher (both small indy companies) have gone under, and so quickly that they seem to have dissapeared off the face of the planet. You can get the games from Home of the Underdogs, as they are now abandonware: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=932 I recommend downloading the version with all 3 games linked. None of the included campaigns use Breach 3, however one of them uses Breach 2, and you can make your own linked campaigns pretty easily.

Yeah those intruders have sticky fingers. I once found one of my shuttles littered with illegal artwork and wine. I had some interesting ideas about where those intruders came from.

I actually sell off all my spare parts and use the space for cargo. Cargo space is invaluable for a raider, cuz you always prioritize plunder above everything else. I just make sure I capture a nice station nearby and base myself out of there. If my ship gets critically disabled, as long as I survive with a shuttle or two, I can get the parts I need to repair it. Also, if you remove the drone and vehicle from the shuttles, you can use them as extra cargo storage. Really nice when your ship's belly is full of fat merchant plunder. Hehehe... A pirate's life for me!

I always like to play as a Terran Raider from Idan, with a Questar Cruiser. Sure it's not a big ship, but its one of the few capital ships you can fly like a fighter. As for taking out stations with it, once you figure out thier blind spots, it's a matter of waiting for someone else to attack (to draw the station's attention), then jump in and get to the blind spot quickly (and pray a little), then just unleash everything you've got, with a little discretion when the station gets close to SOS, so you don't blow it up. I captured Genesis that way, though apparently some AI beat me to Galcom HQ, as when I arrived it was a burned out husk. I've now built a nice little pirate base at the moon (without worrying about Galcom attacking from Earth) in my ROAM game, and that's a nice region to pick off transports in, plus the single jumpgate makes for a nice chokepoint, so it's defensible even. I like my ship, even though it has no fighters. One advantage to having a smaller ship is that it takes less time to walk around it, I believe. The transporter room is just a short jog from the bridge, so I can go on away missions at a whim. There's more to selecting a ship than its size and weapons. The position of turrets, blind spots, and layout are all different.

I haven't seen anyone interested in being Police. If I don't decide to be a trader, then definately Police. Something is just so charming about riding around on the surface of a planet as a Police officer in a Humvee. Not to mention, Police also get super cruisers to choose from, or can be fighter pilots. Lots of options to consider there. Also, a note about raiders: they can have non-raider allies. Some assassins and mercenaries are friendly to them. Not all, obviously, but a few are. Mercs, assassins and raiders all tend to have random affiliations to each other. Some are friendly, some neutral, some hostile. You never really know with those types.

Personally, in GCO I'm planning on being an arms merchant. Maybe also sell medkits on the side. The two would seem to work out pretty well together. Sell em the weapons to bloody each other up then sell em the medkits to heal themselves. Sell em weapons again, and well it's just one big profit making cycle...

The way I see it is that trading will be alot like in Elite. You're a loner. You go from station to station buying low and selling high, and using your wits to keep out of trouble. Your goal is to amass enough wealth to someday retire in luxury, while having a bit of an adventure in the process. It would probably be possible to make special deals with other players on the spot, but these deals wouldn't be worked out ahead of time with contracts and negotiations and all that corporate crap. If you want to mess around with contracts and negotiations and power, I'd suggest you choose the commercial caste.

I don't know how many of you may remember me, but I was once a tiny part of this forum... I'm hoping to get back into it soon if I can (with the release of the BCM beta I've managed to re-immerse myself in the BC universe), but it's really more a matter of if I will have the time. In any case, I'll be watching to see how things have changed in the years I've been gone... ------------------ Cap'n Shadowstar UCV Jolly Roger, Arenis Starstation [This message has been edited by Shadowstar (edited 01-10-2001).]

This happened once to me after I had already installed the game and played it for a while with no problems. I came back to play it again and it gave me this error. The problem is caused by a missing or corrupted file which is most often the result of some sort of damage to the disk. I would suggest running scandisk and defrag on the drive just to be sure and then copy your saved games to another dir on your drive or another drive (if you have any), uninstall or delete the BC3000AD dir and reinstall. Then, repatch if neccessary and copy your saved games back into the proper directory. Disk damage can cause anything from a bad install to a game going corrupt for no reason. If this doesn't work, you should check your cd. Check it for scratches and make sure it's clean and not dusty.

I am using version 2.08 I heard about a 2.09 version but I haven't seen it on the download page when I last looked. I didn't think it was worth mentioning since I will probably just find it later anyway. As for the fluxfields, I decided to manually pilot a shuttle through the fluxfield in question and ended up in places I didn't want to be so I'll just ignore them from now on. The reason I was interested in it is because I saw a fleet of heavily damaged galcom ships emerge from it on thier way to the starstation in the region. I thought that it would be worth investigating further, but just got lost in the end. So unless I have any specific reason to, I'm not going to be bothering with them again.

I have found that the game has a very high learning curve. Things that seem to act like a bug are really just characteristics of the engine. I'll agree it's not really intuitive, but it works once you learn the quirks of the game. I'm sure in future BC30##AD's, they'll design a more user friendly interface, but until then you'll have to work with what you have. I've done fairly well with it so I think other people can too... Stormcrow, about the mining drones vs. ATV's; the reason mining drones deploy so much easier is that they can actually be dropped onto the planet from an airborne shuttle (They can also be recovered from any location in the planet). When the shuttle enters the atmosphere and reaches it's waypoint, it simply drops the mining drone which falls to the surface (with no damage). ATV's cannot be placed unless the shuttle has landed (at least I think so), so unless the shuttle actually lands first, the ATV won't be placed. [This message has been edited by Shadowstar (edited 12-31-1999).]

I've looked through the readmes and the manual and the online documentation but I can't find anything specific to this problem I have been having for quite a while: Every time I launch a probe, or sometimes when I give a support ship orders to jump at a fluxfield (what i would normally use a probe for), or even in some rare random occurances, the game suddenly drops to an alarmingly slow framerate. It becomes so slow, the mouse only moves every 3 seconds. Normally, the game runs just fine but when it slows like that, I have to go back to a saved game and avoid doing whatever it was i did to cause it to slow like that (if possible) or spend the night with a turtle machine. I've gone over it and even fiddled with some of the properties of the file to fix it but that doesn't seem to work, so I've just gone back to using the default settings. I've already considered that it might be my system configuration even though i have more than the minimum requirements (P-233, 96mb ram, Voodoo2). If anyone has any ideas that might help, please let me know. Other than this minor annoyance I haven't had any problems.

Looks like alot's been going on here... err well maybe it just looks that way because I was gone for so long... I'm going to have to make another post and cover some of this time that's gone by... I'll do that when I have more time on my hands. Gotta sleep now By the way Ben, you sound a little Star Trekkish there

{RP} The GCV Starflight was coming around to it's last patrol run in the Earth region, and it was about time to move on to Mars... Cap'n Shadowstar was watching Tacops absent-mindedly. The past few hours had been uneventful. He figured if nothing else, the Mars region would provide a scenery change. "Ok, let's go." He said, rather suddenly. The ship angled for the jump gate and approached slowly.... It eventually reached the gate and flashed out of the region, arriving the same instant in the Mars region. Two MRT's were travelling together near the gate where the Starflight had arrived. One was a Terran Colonist and the other a well known Empirian Journalist. Cap'n Shadowstar tediously set up the patrol run for the Mars system and decided to hang around for another day or so... The Journalist pulled close to the Starflight, but not dangerously close. It was apparent that the journalist intended to get a story about the Starflight "back in action", typical... At least he knew enough not to bother a military vessel with frivolous communication and seemed content to film the ship... Several hours into the patrol run, the journalist finally broke off and jumped back to Earth. Another thirty minutes later a damaged Terran diplomat transport jumped into the region, bound for the Earth jump gate. Shortly after, a Gammulan assassin in an X22 Aurora jumped in following the diplomat. This caught Shadowstar's attention. He watched the fighter close on the transport from the Tacops display and smirked. "Max, you up for some trash take out?" He spoke into the comm-link. The pilot responded from the flight deck, breaking away from a chit-chat with a young nurse, "Sure, what kind of trash we talking about?" "X22 Aurora. Gammulan assassin is picking on one of our diplomats." Shadowstar replied. "Hmmm... Sounds tasty." Max grinned as he strapped into the interceptor and prepared for launch. "The diplomat's ship is looking a little worse for wear. Better hurry on out there." said the Cap'n over the comm-link. "Gotcha." The pilot donned his trademark shades and soon the interceptor was space-bound. His nurse friend watched as the ship left. In only a matter of seconds, Max's interceptor was roaring toward the harried Diplomat and the Assassin at hyperspeed. The interceptor arrived just behind the Gammulan, and Max chuckled as he stormed the unprepared fighter. The X-22 broke off quickly and attempted to dogfight his attacker, but was outmatched and outgunned by the skilled Interceptor pilot. After a short, but intense battle, the X-22 was destroyed, with only a tiny escape pod to mark it's position. Max did a flyby of the pod, nearly smashing it with the wing of the interceptor as a finishing touch to scare the occupant. The pod fled for the jump point it had come through. Max set up RTB and engaged the interceptor's autopilot. He relaxed and monitored the comm frequency on his way back to the Starflight. As the Gammulan pilot fled the system, the diplomat onboard the transport contacted the Starflight himself to express his extreme gratitude. Cap'n Shadowstar cooly responded, "Just doing our job." With that the two ship captains saluted each other and shut off the transmission. The transport laboriously made it to the earth jump gate and vanished in a quick flash. Moments later, the interceptor docked. After disembarking, Max sought out his female friend to continue thier chit-chat. Meanwhile, Shadowstar sighed and relaxed back into the command chair. "That was the most exciting thing that has happened to me so far..." he thought, and prepared for another long wait as the ship ponderously completed it's patrol runs around Mars. Another day, another dollar... {RP off} [This message has been edited by Shadowstar (edited 05-22-99).]

This is a pretty interesting start for Parias... Judging from his past actions, I wouldn't be overly surprised if he somehow ended up in Sol again... The thought of the two newbie RP'ers (Shadowstar and Parias) on opposite sides of the law meeting up does present a very interesting RP situation, but, it could quite literally mean the end of Parias's career, if he is caught being bold agian. I'm not pushing for such an encounter, but a newbie vs. newbie situation occuring the midst of all else that is happenening around the universe right now might just be that spice that Parias is looking for, then again, we should probably save it for later. We don't want Parias alienating himself from both Galcom AND the Insurgents. He'd have to become a pirate or something and lay low - REAL low... I think either way, Parias has some BIG decisions to make and must be VERY careful about what he does with his future. I get the feeling that he's on pretty thin ice with the Insurgents and well, Galcom probably hates his guts with a vengeance. If he does show in Sol, I should think my character would jump at the chance to snag a promotion for nailing this guy. I'm going to have to post something in the other forum about the kind of reaction Cap'n Shadowstar will have at the news of this... Also, I LOVE the Mr. Mordan bit - it's perfect, considering where I left my last RP off in the other forum. [This message has been edited by Shadowstar (edited 05-17-99).]