Is That a Sparse Matrix? Extraordinary!

Freelancer is a joke, but yeah I noticed the "Cruise Engine" is the analogue of I-War's "LDS Drive".

I have to disagree with those who've said I-War 2 is "polished". The flight engine is, yes, very polished, but the scripts are bugged to a degree that adequate playtesting should have corrected.

Case-in-point, in one mission where you find a secret L-point linking Mwari to Dagda you must escort a group of transports through the L-point. However, instead of their flying through the L-point after you defeat the Marauders, sometimes the transports wander off on random vectors under Newtonian drive.

Then there's the hex edit, "Santa Somera" to "Santa Romera" in the savegame file, required even in the latest version (I restarted just to verify this!), in order to get MCA to accept certain cargo shipments.

Then there's the first MCA escort mission, which fails if you allow the autopilot to take you through the first L-point. You must disengage autopilot and manually set Toadskin as the destination L-point!

The autopilot's tendency when making L-jumps to smash your ship into freighters emerging from the "red side" makes me see why nobody allows the autopilot to make L-jumps in the first place.

The autopilot won't show you how to match up a manually entered L-point to the L-point it wants to take you to. When you call up the map the jump you're to make is shown as a red line, but it isn't labelled so you don't know where it's going, and your manual selection is not highlighted as it would be if no autopilot destination were set, so you don't know whether your manual selection matches the red autopilot line or not. Once you've memorized all the jump points, of course, it is no longer a problem, but ... should you really have to memorize the map in order for the interface to be usable?

The superb quality of the flight model is at first marred by these frustrating glitches, but of course experience teaches you to work around them, and once you do I-War 2 is the best out there. I do hope they make an I-War 3 ... and I hope they test it, as well.

i agree that the game is really tight-scripted in places and can actually really piss you off at times, but its the only game that after getting screwed out of 200+ pods of loot, can make you sit right back down, smoke a cigarette to cool off, and play for another 4 hours:), i think the longest sitting i have played in EoC would be pushing the 9-10 hour mark, longer than i have spent at one time on any rpg or, for that matter, any game. the somera, romera terraforming mission really bothered me, i guess i just thought that spelling errors shouldnt make it into mass production. and my autopilot has killed me on more than one occasion trying to enter capsule space, then suddenly smashing into a damn freighter coming out, at one time i got to see my patcom explode in capsule space, really not quite as cool as it sounds.....!, but all said and done i totally forgave this game all its faults 'coz its simply the best space sim, but im not holding my breath for i-war3, i think i heard that PS(back when it was) said that EoC was it, which is sad but if you think about it these types of games are very genre specific, and not alot of people want(or respect) a real newtonian flight model in space, its hard to learn to play at first which is a real turn off for most people

"Faith lies in the ways of sin"

I'm not sure if the Newtonian flight model is what made EoC's sales disappointing enough that PS doesn't want to make another one.

For me it's no big deal to hex-edit a savegame to fix a broken mission, but for the average gamer that's game-suicide.

Flying through the rings of the training course was challenging in a fun way.

"Whoa, Bessie, WHOA!"
-- Me, while overshooting yet another ring

Eventually you get the hang of it and feel a real sense of accomplishment, and you can watch yourself becoming a better pilot with every maneuver you make.

Game-breaking glitches, like the autopilot taking you through to the wrong damn L-point on that MCA escort mission, just piss people off, and when you finally figure out that the game is broken and how to work around the break, you don't feel a sense of accomplishment, you just grit your teeth and move on, wondering when you'll be sandbagged again.

I love I-War 2, but we shouldn't kid ourselves about why it might not have been as commercially successful as other games. "Hex edit the save file" as a requirement to complete missions would've killed Madden NFL 2003 Superbowl Wrestlemania Deerhunter Blowout III whatever just as surely as it must have harmed I-War 2.

With a little QA I betcha I-War 3 would break records.

Game-breaking glitches, like the autopilot taking you through to the wrong damn L-point on that MCA escort mission, just piss people off, and when you finally figure out that the game is broken and how to work around the break, you don't feel a sense of accomplishment, you just grit your teeth and move on, wondering when you'll be sandbagged again.

The mission bug you refer to only occurs some of the time. There is no need to use hex editors.

If you travel to one side of the group of ships, and then hit autopilot, you go to the right L-point. If you're so much as a couple of meters off, you go through the wrong L-point and the mission fails. You see, the gathering of ships is right on a 'LDS fault line'... right at the point where the autopilot will route you through a different series of jumps.

This was a little irritating... but does not require hex editing to get through the game. I've completed the game several times and don't know how to hex edit a savegame. And I doubt many here do.

So I would disagree the game is 'broken'. Just manually pilot to the correct waypoint.

While I agree it shouldn't have happened... and there's always some more testing that could have been done ("Games are never finished, they just escape." as Stephen Robertson says) , EoC is still the most stable, bug-free game I've ever played. And that says alot; I've been playing PC games since the Apple IIe and Trash-80's.

These bugs are relatively minor compared to most space sims. I don't think the EoC bugs have any significance on how well EoC was received by the gaming community. To prove my point; I challenge you to find a bad review for the game. I've never seen anything but praise for EoC and Independence War.

Were they perfect? No. But a damn sight better than the other stuff out there.

And the game is by no means 'broken'.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

Ahh, the missions are "broken", not the game itself -- I'm having a blast!

But I just discovered that what is really "broken" is the patch. The opening menu says "Version F14.6" but it really isn't. There is no "Extras" menu, and I must of course use a hex editor to get some of the cargo delivery missions to acknowledge.

I suspect the patch only fully installs if you've chosen to install the game into the default directory, so as I write this the CD player is buzzing and the installer is churning.

Wish me luck.

Hmmmm... I have an install which does not use the default directory, and have had no problems running the patch on that. Mine is labeled simply E:/EoC.

It might be helpful to check your registry and see if the patch is reflected there. Just be careful!

Info on registry edit for EoC here:

i-war2.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=421

I tried playing the game unpatched before, but didn't get too far. If your registry says the game is patched, post back and we'll try something else... can't think of what... but something.

<edit> If you're reinstalling, you'll have to perform a registry edit to make the patch run.

<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">