Help! Die very quickly at first fight

I think I stumbled upon why I never really played the first I-war that much. I can't fight combat in this game to save my life. I ran through the rudamentary practice course where you shoot the 5 boxes in front of you, and that's all the training I see offered. The only thing left to do is go on Clay's tour of the system. First stop, some satalite docking station looking thing, where you get a friendly hello from the first strangers you meet. Followed shortly by a "your ship or your life", from the second group of strangers hanging out at the base. So I start the fight, and BAM, I'm dead in like two shots every time. Am I missing something? No matter what I do I haven't a prayer in combat because I keep getting killed so fast. I'm not sure, but I wonder if there's more training I somehow missed, or am I supposed to do something special to activate shields?

Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to your problem. Have you been at the gunnery range near Lucretia's station? That's about all gunnery practice you get - and, fortunately, about all you need as well. Just don't sit in front of the targets and pick them off one by one. Use your imagination and your lateral thrusters

For example, try to hit them while doing a high-velocity fly-by, pointing your guns at your target all the time while flying past them; turn off your flight assistant to achieve this (your ship will continue flying in the original direction while pointed somewhere else, e.g. the target...

In real combat, never fly straight at your target, all guns blazing. Instead, remember what you read about shields in the manual: they don't guard the rear, because of the engines. So, stay behind your target and aim for the engine. Use your lateral thrusters to dodge the fire of her/his buddies and roll your ship about, circling the target's tail and letting his engine have it.

Another approach I find most useful (mainly against corvettes and up): do a head-on approach, about 1km above or below your target. When you pass by, turn (with flight assistant disabled) towards him and do a fire-walk along his fuselage, front to end. When you advance in the game and get more powerful ordnance, one pass should do nicely for most enemies. If it doesn't, do it again until he blows up.

If you are absolutely desperate, or you can't manage to survive the first gunfight, I could supply you with a little, um, upgrade of your current auto-repair system that would take care of you getting fried. But it will most certainly spoil the fun if used in any but the most desparate situations Should you still want it, go drop me a line.

Good hunting


Chloé

LazyEngineer:

Also spend some time in the Instant Action section of the game. This really helped me to figure out what works and what doesn't. The better you become (the enemy becomes progressively stronger), the better ships/weapons are provided.

Well, for what I can add.

First off, LDA shields aren't like shields in any other space combat game. X-wing, Star Trek games, Tachyon, take your pick - they all use the old model where shields are like a second set of rechargable armor around your ship. I-war LDA's are NOT like that. They function like real shields, blocking attacks if they can. Any shield can only handly so many shots at once, and only from so many angles. A single shot from above will bounce off the shield uselessly, while a storm of fire from all directions will quickly overwhelm it and it will block nothing. Getting hit 15 times in 15 seconds will be much less painful then 5 times in 1 second, and that's different from any other game I've played. That got me early on, since I didn't really understand, and it might be getting you.

Secondly, more important, don't play it like a flight sim. Set throttles usually mean that you'll fly in a nice, regular computer assisted pattern, with nice, smooth turns, which make you an easy target. I never use set throttle, and fly entirely by overrides, which gives me much greater control over what happens to the ship. If you can, try that - jarring, uneven acceleration makes you a much harder target then a smoothly accelerating ship. Don't try classical evasive manuevers too much - in newtonian space, they just don't work since you have to kill so much velocity.


But more then anything, learn to fly by override, and leave the computer assisted flying for the autopilot. Fly in I-war like you were playing descent 3, not like you were playing falcon 4.0. Hope that's useful to you.

Thank you, a little more practice and it's not too hard, Apparently the secret is to turn off the nav-assist (whatever it is that holds you still) and slide a lot, so that they can't hit you with beam weapons.

Once you get the hang of it, its not that hard

To add to Phatose's post: If flying with the flight assistant switched off is too difficult at the moment, try to override it in battle by pressing the CTRL-Key. As soon as you release the key, the flight assistant will kick in again. Try it a few times against your targets at the gunnery yard; it makes for a nicely unpredictable flight path. During Act 0 it is not too difficult to survive that way.

On evading: Try to evade fire by holding down the ALT-Key and moving your stick. This will make your ship slide sideways (or up/down) without altering your ship's heading or hurting your speed to much. If you need to run, don't bother with the throttle; it will never allow you to exceed speed limits. Instead, hold down the W-key to accelerate quickly. Put some distance between you and your enemies, allowing your auto-repair to do it's work, then turn around and attack again. At this point in your game you don't have to kill that fast.

Good hunting


Chloé