The Full Privateer Experience

hoovsbin

Spaceman
I recently re-started the Privateer 'Steltek' and 'Righteous Fire' campaigns for about the 15th time since the game hit the stores and my PC. In the RF campaign, I like to concentrate on the Retros, and will have Lynch fix the pirates as enemies once I polish off Gov. Menesch. On this past go around, rather than going back to Lynch, I decided I'd make the pirates my buddies by taking out ConFed ships until we were pals. After several times around the Perry circuit, I was not only pals with the pirates, but the Kilrathi as well. I had never heard them say friendly greetings (friendly for a warrior cat, anyway) like: "You make me laugh, Monkey Boy". Usually I hear them talking only about my bones being mounted back in their housetrailer on Kilrah.

Of course after this little transgression the Militia, ConFed, and all the Bounty Hunters were after me, saying downright hurtful things to me on the vid-com, so I left the Clarke Quadrant for the Fariss Quad and proceeded to destroy as many Retros as I could to try and win back their affection. After some time of Retro scum-busting I was able to get ConFed, the Miltia, and The Bounty Hunters to back off with some kind words from me on the vid-com, with their ship designations going from red to blue in my radar screen. After several more Retros were mandatorily invited to suck void, I was friends with everybody in the known universe (except of course the scum Retros, who will never be friendly).

Life is good.

I have played this game more than any other, and even with the dated graphics it remains my favorite. Despite all this game time and accrual of nearly 15 million credits in one of my games, this was the first time I ever became friends with the Kilrathi, or experienced the ability to call off an attack by saying sweet nothings over the vid-com.

Maybe my little experience has been repeated by everyone here, but it's quite easy to miss this particular side of the game if you play the straight and narrow. Before I was so proud of never attacking ConFed ships, even when running contraband. Probably had something to do about my love for ConFed and my WC1/WC2/WCAcademy/WCArmada/WC3/WC4/WCP days flying for the government.:)
 
Well done, but I found that the Kilrathi could be friendly a long while ago. :) Still, I'm impressed with your 15 million credits. I thought my current 4 million was over the top, but wow.
 
Even 4 million is... well, I don't know if admirable is the word I'm looking for :p. After finishing RF, I got tired of the game before I could even assemble 1 million, and I couldn't go on.
 
If you sold all your stuff, once you were fully decked out, you'd easily have more than a million. I had $600,000 in guns, not counting the expensive cooler and such.
 
Yes I was also friendly with the Kilrathi once, and that was quite useful to visit the Kilrathi planets :) Never been friendly with Retros, though. Is it possible? BTW, 15MCredits??? Wow! You could've bought and entire fleet :eek:
 
I think it is absolutely impossible to make any overtures of alliance with the Retros, regardless of what you do.
 
The game is set so that the Retros won't like you no matter what. The idea seems to be that they will never like anybody who is not one of their own.
 
damn retros, i'd kill 'em even if i could be friends with 'em. ain't never been friends with the cats before. and 15m!? damn, and i thought my 3M was good. guess this means i gotta go back and play it again
 
Perhaps there could be an option where you could join the retros. You would have to fly a crappy fighter and shout "DIE BY THE VERY WEAPONS YOU ADORE" 3 times to each foe in a nav point before retreating.
 
the question is, why would you want to join up with the retros when they are so much fun to kill?
 
Originally posted by Delance
Perhaps there could be an option where you could join the retros. You would have to fly a crappy fighter and shout "DIE BY THE VERY WEAPONS YOU ADORE" 3 times to each foe in a nav point before retreating.

Retreat? Retros can retreat? They only get fragged when I meet them.
 
Retros suck and lose all the time. Their main goal is to be annoying. If you can't retreat, it would be a short game.
 
15 mil is alot of creds! Try 23 mil, as I continue to play both P1 and RF to this day.

Still looking for the "hollow asteroid" too. (ya ya, its not there, so what, nuthin wrong with a little adventuring.)

What is funny, is to have Confed against you, and your doing missions for Confed! Always got a laugh from that. Flying next to cats taking out milita and Confed ships is quite amusing, especially watching two Confed fighters slam into eachother while trying to break formation once entering a nav point! :D
(tried to get a screenshot of that...darn it!)

Quite often, the Retros and Pirates would ram eachother too. Guess just entering an area scares the living jeebies out of em and they panic and SLAM-BOOM!
 
I salute the true master, General. Please take pity on me in my poverty state of only 15,000,000.

Any other exciting things you've discovered in the game after a decade of playing, say since your first 10-15 million?

Too bad having all that cash can't buy you much of anything. I don't even bother with buying missles as it makes it too easy to pop anything other than a cap ship.

I wish there was a way to allow the Retros to keep those Kilrathi-produced ships once the main RF missions are completed, but as that old ConFed saying goes, "Wish in one hand, sh*t in the other; see which fills first".:D
 
Welp, its fun to let the ship fly away from a sector for several hours, come back and see all the nav points of that sector clustered in one small area from such a great distance from it.

Not much else to do cept fly around and run the computer missions.

However..

Many here know of our good friend, and long time WC community contributor Mario Brito. Well, Mario has done some research in P1 and RF. I assisted with testing a mission add on for RF, as well as helped debug the mission. Similar to how his famous "Steltek Endurance" mission begins, you start at Perry, and make your way to a couple of sectors to hunt down a renegade group of cats, pirates and retros who combined to attempt to throw a final blow and bring chaos to the region. The mission pays 300,000 credits upon completion.

This was to test the ability to import extra missions and to figure out the scripting and other things within P1 and RF.

But at this time, due to time constraints and Mario's involvement with the recent UE project, and real world life to live, the research on P1 and RF is on hold TFN.

If you would like to try this mission, check out Mario's website for "P1 test mission" and download and give it a run.

The primary research was to investigate the "JEMM" runtime module that P1 and RF uses, and to find a way to work around that without spending tons of money on some special program that would let it run under a win-x environment. (not everyone wants to fork out 200 bucks for some emmulator)

Just doing the research on the missions and the TRE file structure and the mission scripting was hard work for Mario. But according to Mario from his last email to me regarding the project, the research will continue at a later time.

In as far as playing the regular P1 and RF missions over and over all these years, I still find it fun and enjoyable, and quite often, you see funny stuff happen that you did not see before, such as my previous post talked about the two Confed ships flying into eachother once I entered the nav point! (laughed till my sides hurt!)

And sometimes, tho I have not figured out why it does this, but sometimes jumping into certian sectors, the entire space is blank, no stars, no bases, nothing, just the nav points. Its like being in a huge black abyss, with nothing but your HUD showing the nav point, then jumping out of the black abyss, you return to normal space with stars, background etc. (weird)

I have often sold the Centurion and flown around in the Galaxy and Orion a few times since the credits are up to 23+ mil. You know, cuz you can cuz you have the bucks kind of thing. ;)

Then experiment with siding with the different factions in the game. Become a good friend with the cats, or pirates. Make enemies with the merchants, the militia, Confed or bounty hunters. Or sometimes being the "nice guy" and flying the white line.

And sometimes I fire it up and shoot everthing in sight. I become the sector's worst nightmare!

But I guess the primary reason why I still play that game so much, is because it still remains the best "privateer" type space sim out there, despite the antiquated graphics. Pretty decals and such dont mean a thing when your chasin after enemies or being chased. I like fancy graphics too, but unlike the fool who is admiring the textures on the cap ship while a missile is heading towards their tailpipe, Im out there saving his butt and yelling at him to "get out of the way!!!"

Im really hoping that this upcomming "Freelancer" is all they say it will be. So far, the ONLY true "privateer" like space sim that exsists today is the free sim "Vega Strike". With such a vast number of systems to explore, and you REALLY can just explore, it seems to be the only sim currently following the idea/concept of P1 and RF outside of its normal missions. VS does have missions and plots, but it remains the ONLY game to where you can TRUELY be PRIVATEER, as with PRIVATEER 1 and RF.

Any other sim that limits your ability to explore or trade or limits your access to sectors etc is "IMO", NOT anything like P1.

(prays Freelancer will break the ice of "tied to a rope")
 
YEs i still play Privateer on my old laptop, whenever im on the bus or bored or whatever. I love te idea of being all alone flying around through the great void of space, doing as you please. I absolutley loved the idea of an online privateer... shame it was abandoned. My favorite thing to do was load up an Orion with big engines and weak shields and see how many missions i could beat with only ramming. ONce through sheer luck i managed to ramm 3 gothris 2 dralthis a couple of retros and a gladius and still make it home. Of course i had no sensors, no weapons, no comm system, litteraly no armor on all sides, and a malfunctioning afterburner, but it was all good.
 
Originally posted by Ijuin
Retreat? Retros can retreat? They only get fragged when I meet them.
Occasionally, an odd thing will happen, like one time in the Oxford system a Retro just wouldn't engage me. Flew away at a constant sub-afterburn speed, crashed through Oxford (damaging it severely) and just kept going. Eventually I finished off its fellows and chased after it to put it out of its misery. :)

Originally posted by hoovsbin
Too bad having all that cash can't buy you much of anything. I don't even bother with buying missles as it makes it too easy to pop anything other than a cap ship.
I don't even bother with missiles. They sometimes work on Talons, but most of the time they just make your enemies run away until the missiles expire. I hardly even need them for capships - matching speed and sitting on their tails while plugging them with guns is enough to kill them. :)
 
Originally posted by Wedge009
Occasionally, an odd thing will happen, like one time in the Oxford system a Retro just wouldn't engage me. Flew away at a constant sub-afterburn speed, crashed through Oxford (damaging it severely) and just kept going. Eventually I finished off its fellows and chased after it to put it out of its misery. :)

ACK! Do you have ANY idea how much that sounds like 9/11?! (religious fanatic crashing aircraft into civilian building I mean)

I don't even bother with missiles. They sometimes work on Talons, but most of the time they just make your enemies run away until the missiles expire. I hardly even need them for capships - matching speed and sitting on their tails while plugging them with guns is enough to kill them. :)

Heh. Normally I only use missiles to take out the first opponent quickly to even up the odds if I am outnumbered more than three to one--otherwise I get distracted with avoiding enemy fire. Two missiles will kill a Talon, three will kill most medium ships, and four are needed for heavies like Orion, Centurion, Broadsword, and Gothri (assuming that you use only missiles and no guns I mean).
 
Originally posted by Ijuin
ACK! Do you have ANY idea how much that sounds like 9/11?! (religious fanatic crashing aircraft into civilian building I mean)

We should censor Privateer! Think of the children!
 
No references to buildings. :( All I meant was that the Talon went straight through the sprite that is supposed to be the planet Oxford.
 
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