Funny things to do in UE...

Lazy Panda

Spaceman
Whether it'S intended or not, the Scimitar's Viper Cannons pierce capship phase shields. Even though the damage is very low per shot, enough salvoes can down a capship segment. That makes up for nice challenges/tricks:

-Destroy the smuggler transport in the Prelude (a valid solution if they're sill hostile)
-Destroy the Fralthi in Mission 1 (never tried, that would be failure for sure)
-In the escort two convoys mission, destroy the Orca at the final navpoint.
-In Mission 10B, kill both Hydra and Leviathan before the Vampires/the Devastators/the Eisen arrives. (I think it's possible)
-In the losing mission 5B, destroy both Hydras (If you can do that, I salute you as UE master)

Give it a try, it's certainly a different experience.
 
Lazy Panda said:
Whether it'S intended or not, the Scimitar's Viper Cannons pierce capship phase shields.
Sounds to me like someone hasn't read the UE fiction :p.

Actually, the viper cannons' ability to damage capships is one of the things I'm most ashamed about when it comes to UE. For two opposing reasons, even:

1. It's really horridly fanboyish. Confed has the plasma gun that damages capships but can only be carried by Devastators, and we gave the BW a gun that can damage capships but can be carried by anything. But then again, the viper cannon is fanboyish even without this ability - stat-wise, it's almost a clone of the dust cannon (in the very earliest versions of UE, it was the dust cannon), which isn't even in use in Confed yet.
Of course, this doesn't really matter too much, because UE didn't even try to keep in line with the canon (a BW Bengal? :rolleyes: ), and the vipers did make the Scimitar a wonderfully fun ship to fly. I can't help thinking, though, that ultimately UE could have been more interesting, and just as fun, with a little less fanboyism.

2. Ignoring the whole issue of canon-correctness and such, the vipers' ability is something we completely failed to make any use of. In fact, we had to impose special restrictions on some missions just to avoid having to deal with capship deaths:

-Destroy the Fralthi in Mission 1 (never tried, that would be failure for sure)
Impossible - I think I made the bridge invulnerable. From a storyline point of view, this makes no sense - destroying the Fralthi should be a valid strategy (for example, if the marines get killed) to make the losing path a bit easier - there should be a mission 2C where you only have to deal with the Ralari.

-In the escort two convoys mission, destroy the Orca at the final navpoint.
Not possible, because I made the Orca's engines (or bridge, or something) invulnerable. Again, storyline-wise it's very, very silly - we force Daniels to keep the Orca alive, just so that when he gets back to the Dauntless, he can worry about whether he's got enough fighters around to muster a follow-up strike.

...And then, of course, there's M9, where one of the reasons why we give the player a choice of Banshee and Epee is precisely to avoid the headache-inducing question of whether the player should be able to get out of our oh-so-clever (urgh!) Squid-launching-Hydra trap.

In all cases, the main reason for disabling this ability is technological - we simply didn't want to deal with the need to have three or four variants for each mission, the need for additional alternative fiction, et cetera. But whatever the reason, the end result is that the vipers' capship-killing ability is nowhere near as neat or useful as it should have been.

Let that be a lesson to future modders - it's fine (necessary, even) to impose some restrictions on the player, but you'd better make sure they make sense storyline-wise. Sometimes, it's worth a little extra work.
 
One of the funniest things thats ever happened to me in UE, was when i launched and this big nephilim figther came flying into the hanger just as i left it.

Quarto said:
Let that be a lesson to future modders - it's fine (necessary, even) to impose some restrictions on the player, but you'd better make sure they make sense storyline-wise. Sometimes, it's worth a little extra work.

Does that mean that standoff won't have any pain-in-the-ass invulnerable ships?
 
Dyret said:
Does that mean that standoff won't have any pain-in-the-ass invulnerable ships?
That depends on your definition of invulnerable. We certainly won't make the Hakaga invulnerable... but that doesn't mean you'll be able to kill them :p.
 
Lazy Panda said:
Whether it'S intended or not, the Scimitar's Viper Cannons pierce capship phase shields. Even though the damage is very low per shot, enough salvoes can down a capship segment.

I discovered this on the last simulator mission. I was flying a scimitar and all the avengers had been destroyed and I thought, "what the hell, lets just shoot the fralthi anyway," and to my amazement it took damage. I destroyed the whole thing with just the scimitar (the fralthi gunners should be ashamed).

Quarto said:
That depends on your definition of invulnerable. We certainly won't make the Hakaga invulnerable... but that doesn't mean you'll be able to kill them.

We'll just have to see about that :p .
 
Awww, half my ideas were disabled by hardcoding. Too bad, but I got two more things to try. Oh, and I read the fiction, but I guess I overflew the technical section too much. Congratulations to luminon for finding another anti-capship use for the Vipers.

And I'm convinced that the Standoff Hakaga will not need invulnerable segments if enough turrets are installed on it. Since turrets are dangerous in Standoff specs, you 'llhave the option to either get your torpedo blown to bits or you ship.
 
Apart from the turrets, Hakagas have several layers of extra-beefy-armor which makes at least the vital areas of the ship nearly impervious to torpedo attacks. (ie: each of the six engines)

In FA, it takes a wing of Broadswords to damage a Hakaga's bow and destroy two of its hangar bays, IIRC.

Standoff Hakagas have 9 vital components.
 
Which, just to clarify, means that depending on the strength of the individual components (which I can't remember offhand), a Hakaga will take somewhere between a dozen and two dozen torpedoes to destroy. That, needless to say, is more than the average Crossbow can carry :p.
 
Woah, not even the nephilim dreadnought took a dozen... let alone two dozen torpedos to destroy. I know they are in different eras but that makes the Hagaka one monster of a ship to destroy (if at all possible). I guess that means we won't be witnessing any rambo style heroics by the player against the Hakagas.
 
will damage carry over from one mission to the next? say you damage one of the engines on the Hakaga, will it stay damaged on the next mission against the same hakaga?
 
That'll happen for all capships, but some on a looser basis (ie: some components might get automatically repaired between missions).
 
Sounds interesting. But I don't know whether I can resist the temptation of just blowing up any capship except Hakaga awhole. They only take two torps, don't they?
 
Due to the way the engine works, it can take up to four. Most ships take either two (engine, bridge) or three (bridge, left engine, right engine).
 
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