LarryTyphoid
Scholar
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2021
- Messages
- 2,233
Privateer 1 seems to be regarded quite highly, but I'm not sure I think it's very good. The most interesting part of WC's combat, afterburner drifting, is locked off to you until you can buy a ship capable of the speed necessary for drifting. The cheapest chip, the Orion (which still takes about an hour of grinding from the beginning of the game to afford) isn't even capable of drifting. Maybe the game gets a lot better once you get a Centurion, but I haven't gotten there yet, and I don't get why the other ships are so bad. The first one, sure, it's bad on purpose. But the Orion is said to be the safest, most well-armored ship, yet unless you can afford all the shield upgrades it can support, it feels like a straight downgrade from the Tarsus. And once you're in that position, it's a lot harder to get enough money to upgrade the ship.
The easiest ways to make money seem like the most boring. Travelling from system to system means you'll run into tons of unavoidable enemy encounters, so it's easiest to just keep doing missions in the very first system until you're well-equipped enough to start pursuing the main plot. In fact, I've seen several people online making that exact suggestion to beginning players. You would think that the very first thing you'd do is join the Merchant's Guild and start doing their cargo runs, which always take you to other systems. But those only pay about 10,000 credits each, while a simple scouting or base defense mission can be done inside the same system and reward around 5,000 credits. When doing one of those cargo runs, you might have to travel through like 7 warp gates before reaching your destination; during that time, you'll be accosted by shit tons of pirates and retros. Unless you shelled out 30,000 credits for a repair bot prior, that means you'll almost certainly be taking damage to your ship components; when your shield generator is badly hit, you might as well call it quits right there. If you're especially unlucky, one of your components might even be destroyed, like your radar system, meaning you'll have to shell out 20,000 credits for a replacement. Already you're in the red badly for your 10,000 credit reward for completing the cargo run. You know you're not going to make it, so you dock at a planet or station, spend even more thousands of credits on repairing your ship, only to have the unpleasant revelation that docking anywhere cancels your cargo run mission; your cargo has mysteriously been jettisoned from your hold, and now you're in a hostile system with harder enemies and no credits. So the Merchant's Guild is a beginner's trap. It's better to trade and do easy patrol missions in the starting system.
I went back and played a little bit of Wing Commander 1 after another failure in Privateer. Despite WC1's choppier framerate, it still controls better and is generally more fun. An earlier space trading game, Space Rogue, I also think is superior by virtue of every station having unique NPCs that you can talk to and get unique missions. In Privateer there's just a bunch of generic bartenders who vaguely point you towards the main story, but Space Rogue has Ultima-style town exploration, with NPCs pointing you to different stations. In Privateer I got a tip from a bartender about a pirate base in a remote system; I flew over there excited hoping to ally with pirates and start doing something more exciting. But all you get is another faggot bartender giving you generic tips, except pirate flavored. The only thing that makes a pirate station different is the fact that you can buy contraband. Not even the visuals are different from the generic mining stations. All the pirates are hostile by default at the start of the game, and the only way to get on their good side is to kill bounty hunters, militia, or Confed troops, meaning you have to get on someone else's bad side. You'll be attacked by several pirate ships on your way to the base, of course, meaning unless you make an enemy of the Confederation and law enforcement, you cannot smuggle contraband; so what's the point of having the ability to jettison cargo to hide contraband from militia forces searching your ship? If I'm smuggling contraband then the militia are probably already hostile. That is unless I managed to get to the pirate base either by evading all of their ships and landing, which is retarded (why wouldn't they attack me when I land), or doing this retarded cheese tactic where you spam a single "I surrender" message to each individual pirate ship through the comms menu. Both are very sloppy solutions to being able to smuggle contraband on the down-low without waging war on the police, which you think would be an obvious thing I'd want to do roleplaying as a Han Solo kind of character (which the game encourages with its characterization of the protagonist).
I hear the sequel is very hated, but that might be bullshit. I mean, who cares if Spoony said a game is bad? That retard said Ultima Underworld 2 was bad and he didn't even get past the first level.
The easiest ways to make money seem like the most boring. Travelling from system to system means you'll run into tons of unavoidable enemy encounters, so it's easiest to just keep doing missions in the very first system until you're well-equipped enough to start pursuing the main plot. In fact, I've seen several people online making that exact suggestion to beginning players. You would think that the very first thing you'd do is join the Merchant's Guild and start doing their cargo runs, which always take you to other systems. But those only pay about 10,000 credits each, while a simple scouting or base defense mission can be done inside the same system and reward around 5,000 credits. When doing one of those cargo runs, you might have to travel through like 7 warp gates before reaching your destination; during that time, you'll be accosted by shit tons of pirates and retros. Unless you shelled out 30,000 credits for a repair bot prior, that means you'll almost certainly be taking damage to your ship components; when your shield generator is badly hit, you might as well call it quits right there. If you're especially unlucky, one of your components might even be destroyed, like your radar system, meaning you'll have to shell out 20,000 credits for a replacement. Already you're in the red badly for your 10,000 credit reward for completing the cargo run. You know you're not going to make it, so you dock at a planet or station, spend even more thousands of credits on repairing your ship, only to have the unpleasant revelation that docking anywhere cancels your cargo run mission; your cargo has mysteriously been jettisoned from your hold, and now you're in a hostile system with harder enemies and no credits. So the Merchant's Guild is a beginner's trap. It's better to trade and do easy patrol missions in the starting system.
I went back and played a little bit of Wing Commander 1 after another failure in Privateer. Despite WC1's choppier framerate, it still controls better and is generally more fun. An earlier space trading game, Space Rogue, I also think is superior by virtue of every station having unique NPCs that you can talk to and get unique missions. In Privateer there's just a bunch of generic bartenders who vaguely point you towards the main story, but Space Rogue has Ultima-style town exploration, with NPCs pointing you to different stations. In Privateer I got a tip from a bartender about a pirate base in a remote system; I flew over there excited hoping to ally with pirates and start doing something more exciting. But all you get is another faggot bartender giving you generic tips, except pirate flavored. The only thing that makes a pirate station different is the fact that you can buy contraband. Not even the visuals are different from the generic mining stations. All the pirates are hostile by default at the start of the game, and the only way to get on their good side is to kill bounty hunters, militia, or Confed troops, meaning you have to get on someone else's bad side. You'll be attacked by several pirate ships on your way to the base, of course, meaning unless you make an enemy of the Confederation and law enforcement, you cannot smuggle contraband; so what's the point of having the ability to jettison cargo to hide contraband from militia forces searching your ship? If I'm smuggling contraband then the militia are probably already hostile. That is unless I managed to get to the pirate base either by evading all of their ships and landing, which is retarded (why wouldn't they attack me when I land), or doing this retarded cheese tactic where you spam a single "I surrender" message to each individual pirate ship through the comms menu. Both are very sloppy solutions to being able to smuggle contraband on the down-low without waging war on the police, which you think would be an obvious thing I'd want to do roleplaying as a Han Solo kind of character (which the game encourages with its characterization of the protagonist).
I hear the sequel is very hated, but that might be bullshit. I mean, who cares if Spoony said a game is bad? That retard said Ultima Underworld 2 was bad and he didn't even get past the first level.
