Buying, Selling, and Looting

Okay, I've looked through the keybindings a zillion times and can't figure out how to do these things:

1. Buy goods from a station
2. Sell goods to a station
3. Pick up cargo / transfer cargo from pods into cargo bay
4. Look inside the cargo bay
5. Find out how many credits I have

Surely these functions are accessible from the HUD, but I can't find them. Oh, and where do I buy weapons? That "Charlie's Warehouse" guy said he had them, but I can't figure out how to buy them, nor whether I can afford them.

Can anyone set me straight? (Thanks in advance)

Hah, okay, I've figured part of it out: cargo is kept in external pods, and you dock with them in order to move them.

Most of the rest of the action takes place at your base, including trading.

Can you also engage in the conventional mode of trade, buying and selling goods at bases? I couldn't even dock with Charlie's base with a cargo pod attached, but he seemed to acknowledge my bringing it to him even though I jettisoned it prior to docking with his base.

If someone says he'll trade you weapons or something, it will either be jettisoned from his station when you get paid, or it will magicaly appear at your secret base that nobody knows how to find. Dont ask how.

In the standard game, there is no conventional trading system. If you get the Futuretrader mod - which requires the unigui and multimod mods - you can trade at various bases. Your credits and Manufacturing Units are now one and the same thing, since EoC dosent have a credit total and adding one would be difficult.

Hi UglyAngel

Do you have a manual for the game?
Do you fight in your Storm Petrel?

Clay tells you what you shall do next, so check "shift o" and go for it. In Act 0 you have to do some jobs for Wolfgang Spielman to get some better weapons and you have to steal some parts for your base.
You don't have to hunt any convoys or escorts, listen to Clay and follow his orders:
visit Touchdown - have a fight - meet Wolfgang Spielman - go to his base, dock to it and take a job - deliver the pod (to the junkyard as far as I remember), undock the pod next to the station or a "highlighted" ship - go back to Spielmans station, dock to it and he will offer a second job ...
Act 0 is only a kind of training ground for getting used to ship and weapons and for orientation with the starmap.
There is no way to trade via base trade screen, but you can do that in Act 1.
You'll get a partner who'll collect the cargo and stores it in your base for trading or recycling.

For now there is no way to buy or sell something at the stations, but after you finished the game you may install a mod for that.

So go on listening to Clay, we are waiting for you to come back in a tug...

by the way: "n" disables flightassist

My Storm Petrel is, alas, 15-year-old history.

This game is more scripted than I thought at first, but it's enjoyable enough I'm not minding so much. In a certain way it reminds me of Star Control II, inasmuch as the action is framed into sorties flown from a fixed base of operations, and SC II was a great game.

I really love the I-War flight model; it's a blast! (Even though my shiny new(?) tug handles like an amoeba.)

I also recently picked up X2 (EgoSoft's "Elite"-style space sim, not the comic book merchandising tie-in), and as you might expect of an I-War 2 + X2 gamer I'm pining for the best of both worlds ...

* rant *

I've been searching for a game with combat at least as good as I-War 2 (or even TIE fighter) but with the free-form flexibility of X2. X2, as even the beta testers acknowledge, lacks exciting combat or a decent flight model, while of course the various awesome combat-heavy space sims like TIE, the WC series, and of course Freespace 2 are scripted and lack replayability. (I've just started in on I-War, so I can't send up an opinion as yet.)

Jumpgate looks like fun, but I don't game often enough to justify the monthly fee. None of the other "premium" space sims have joystick support, which Freelancer proved is a big warning sign for major suckage.

I'm sure everyone here already knows that Freelancer is a joke as a space-sim; it's more like "3D Whack-a-Mole" -- no joystick support?! However, the people who designed FL also made Privateer, which is to me a perfect game, a perfect balance of fighting, free-form exploring, and "scripted" adventure. It's sad to see the Privateer team decamp from the genre, but eventually the penny arcade will become too saturated to make a buck in and developers will revisit our -- ahem -- "Elite" genre once more.

HardWar is the best of the genre I've played post-Windows, but it loses replayability for reasons which are organic to the game's premise. I love HardWar, but its scope, confined to a single city of roughly half a dozen craters, gets claustrophobic after a while. That said I've replayed it at least a dozen times -- that would be 11 times more than the vast but mindless Freelancer.

I don't feel qualified to talk about I-War 2 yet, but I'm having fun playing it.

* end rant *

I've played almost every space sim since Wing Commander back in the early 90's. And this is killing them all. Yes even X2 which is horribly unpolished. I war 2 is a bit hard to get into at first because the concepts are so different compared to your traditional "Privateer" sort.

There's a Future Trader mod that helps fulfill all your HardWar needs. Such as buying or selling cargo. Unlike other games, most of IWar2's mods help add to the game rather than change the universe.

Just place the Zip files into the Mod folders and then thats it! (activate the mods in-game in the Extra's Menu).

If you dont have a joystick, use the mouse.ini mod and don't forget to get the location finder mod. Starmaps are now a point and click away!

After that prepare for a breath taking experience!


By the way: Hardwar was pretty incomplete, released for only $20 at its debut.