Squiddy McSquids possibly short life - {Possible spoilers inside}

[gamer993]

Wow squiddy took care of the pirates! sweet. I got a question squiddy. How do you jump to those sectors? can you still do so? or only access it via the HUB?

[shilhi]

All the pirates just simply...Vanished...



Nice job! I wonder if the hub can be used more then once to maybe...get rid of one of those annoying little races...like the split?

[Orion1632]

I can't figure out how Squiddy keeps getting ships to eventually just completely stop moving altogether after he Ions them for awhile?

I spent a good 40 minutes Ion D a cobra last night and he never stopped moving too, I got his weapons off, but he just kept on going. In the end I did what someone suggested and did a head on pass at him and dropped my marines on his nose. That worked well. Now i have the cobra I can use boarding pods!

I would also like to know how Squiddy gets his ships to "give up"

[Necrosexual]

So this is the true power of the hub...

I to would like to know how to gets them to give up.

[softweir]

It has been mentioned before that missiles don't evaporate easily and you have to persuade the mark to make an attack run and start launching missiles. Once he runs out of those he will stop. To do this, you have to RSLM (run screaming like a Mongol - with the intent of luring the enemy after you only in order to turn on them at your convenience ).

[X-Morgan]

I can't figure out how Squiddy keeps getting ships to eventually just completely stop moving altogether after he Ions them for awhile?

I spent a good 40 minutes Ion D a cobra last night and he never stopped moving too, I got his weapons off, but he just kept on going. In the end I did what someone suggested and did a head on pass at him and dropped my marines on his nose. That worked well. Now i have the cobra I can use boarding pods!

I would also like to know how Squiddy gets his ships to "give up"

Following his stories, I think he fried all the lasers on the target ship (and by that time, it really should have 1 mounted shield too) then he runs away from it.

The enemy ship is still trying to kill you, only it has no lasers to do so. So while Squiddy is running, the enemy ship uses onlywhat it has in it's arsenal: it's missiles.

Once it launches all the missiles, it has nothing to use, and simply stops. Leaving for you to go in for the kill.....or capture.

I think it's best Nuclear Slug clarifies this, as I'm only trying to guess at what he does.

But it worked for me. Pirate Centaur with everything fried and only 1 x 200 MJ shield left had 3 Wasp missiles left, and it used them all on me. Once that happened, it just stopped.

Try flying away from your prey, and let it chase you. Set turrets to missile defense and wait until it exausts it's compliment of warheads.

[Flashand]

[quote="NUKLEAR-SLUG:]

I ION'ed a Zephyrus for 45 mins, and the thing just kept circling around me at 91m/s? Eventually I just launched marines and the Zeph circled through their flightpath so I managed to cap it, but it was pretty frustrating...

You may have fried the guns but did you get the missiles too? [/quote]

He did answer the missle Q.

[MegaJohnny]

Er....

Won't you still have that little mini-economy up and running in the cutoff area, not to mention some freetraders jumping gate-free in and out of the area?

[Flashand]

i do believe he has done 3 things, and one of them is a very big maybe.

First a hunting grounds, i would say anything to enter Squiddy's realm is fair game.

Secound he set up a place he can run and hide with his ill gotten gains.

IF they re-spawn he has a chance at the Cap ships of the pirates, Nuklear is either very smart or.. very lucky

Q: Trial and Error reloads ok Or NO?? if you make a big ol factory and one accidentially rubs another one or some transient asteriod is it ok to reload on that?

[Magnabyte]

please forgive me for asking, but i've used the HUB before....I don't understand how he can do this properly.....surely all this does is slip the hub inbetwen those links, thus not cutting it off fully

[Stormsong]

please forgive me for asking, but i've used the HUB before....I don't understand how he can do this properly.....surely all this does is slip the hub inbetwen those links, thus not cutting it off fully

Ah, but any ship passing through has to try and get past this. In-sector view here(both screenshots are from one of the previous posts a few pages back).

[Magnabyte]

ahhh, nice blockade. Must admit, it would have been fun to completely seal off a sector...like link the north gate ot the south gate and the east ot the west, ah well

[kurush]

I will try to answer the question from this thread how to make ships stop. I had a similar problem until I realized that you just need to change ships a couple of times for your target to stop. At least it works on chokarros like a charm. They stop even if they still have some unmounted guns. I'm just switching between a Skiron and a Springboossom a couple of times to make them stop.
I am pretty sure that Squiddy has to change ships when capping.

Many thanks to Nuklear Slug for an excellent thread!

[space pirate]

i have not tried it fully (didn't wait 5 minutes for linking to complete) but when i linked a hub gate to the same gate that it was linked to before the gate got connected to the hub but its opposite gate (and the second hub gate) became simply "gates" leading nowhere. i don't know if it will get fixed after linking is complete or after the hub gates are aligned to some other gate pair.

[Creston]

I ION'ed a Zephyrus for 45 mins, and the thing just kept circling around me at 91m/s? Eventually I just launched marines and the Zeph circled through their flightpath so I managed to cap it, but it was pretty frustrating...

You may have fried the guns but did you get the missiles too?

D'oh...

Thanks Slug (and others) for clarifying that for me. Off to hunt some more

Btw, Slug, thanks a ton again for your story and the inspiration it gave me. I'm playing a similar game to yours and it's been the most fun I've had with X in a LONG time. (Funny enough, I actually died today because the gate I jumped to seemed to think that it's perfectly normal to materialize my ship INSIDE a Teladi Condor. I didn't think that constituted an acceptable death, so I reloaded.)

Not being able to buy ships makes getting better hardware so much more challenging and requires careful steps up.

I've also barred myself from doing any combat and build missions (since they are way too easy money), and now things feel like actual X again.

Creston

[western]

Been scouting around for a while looking for a Cobra to attack/capture, nothing doing for a long time, then, quite by chance spotted one in Rhonkar's Fire, which just happens to be my 'home base' for Marine Training and have most of my meagre fleet stabled there for no particular reason.

I have 29 Marines in various stages of training, most of them at level 5 in at least one discipline, but when I spotted the Cobra, I only had a total of 7 not undergoing some form of instruction, so loaded 5 aboard my HCP and gave chase in Hyperion, followed by HCP.

Once the attention of the target was successful and he had turned red, together with his retinue of 8, I made my way into the far distance and they trundled along behind me.

Targeted the wing players with missiles and cleared them off, swopped over to HCP and attacked with Ion-D until weapons destroyed.

This is now the important bit - SAVED - and sent my little army across to capture.

Failed, re-loaded, failed again, and again......

After something like 30 attempts, I checked on the Marines and found that the best Hacker I had was 4 stars, so after the final failure i let the story roll as, during the meanwhilst, a number of marines had finished their classroom bit, so I loaded 5 of them onto a TP and rendezvoused in space, beamed the said staff across to HCP and tried again.

Result, ship was capped 1st time!

Moral of the story, the secret to boarding success is a TOP-NOTCH hacker!

[NUKLEAR-SLUG]

Hmm, I may not have explained myself quite adequately there so I'll reiterate the point and explain exactly how it's done in the process.

So, just to clarify, what I've done is break off a section of the galaxy into a seperate entity using the Hub. There is NO physical connection between the 8 sectors I've grabbed and the rest of the X-universe. In no instance is the Hub inserted between any of the bordering jumpgates in the screenshots you see here..

http://dbbr17626.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/map1.jpg
http://dbbr17626.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/map2.jpg

.. It is completely impossible therefore for any ship to fly into or out of those 8 sectors. They are completely sealed off from the rest of the universe because the jumpgates that border those sectors have been disabled. You cannot, for example, enter Split Fire from Elenas Fortune. Any ship that attempts to do so will just pass thru the gate event-horizon unharmed and remain in the sector they started in, just the other side of the gate.


So what's the trick?

Ok, as some have mentioned already the standard operation of the Hub is to 'insert' itself between the two jumpgates of two neighbouring sectors. The Hub has potentially three sets of gates and if for example I were to align Gate-01 to Argon Prime and Home of Light the result would be passing thru the south gate of Argon Prime would end inside the Hub at Gate-01A. Passing thru Gate-01B would end you up at the north gate of Home of Light.

There is however an interesting effect from aligning the Hub gates to themselves. Say we performed the above example and joined Argon prime to Home of Light. If after the gates had recharged you the realigned Gate-01A to point at itself what happens is that the anchor at one end of the wormhole joining the two gates becomes detached and the gate shuts down. Passing thru the south gate of Argon Prime will still leave you inside the Hub. But the corresponding exit gate, Gate-01B is no longer anchored and leads nowhere. In the same way the north gate of Home of Light has also become unanchored and is effectively disabled.

If you then align Gate-01 to a completely different sector, say Kingdom End and Three Worlds, the Hub now inserts itself between those two sectors and functions as normal. However in doing so it detaches from the south gate of Argon Prime which would normally be anchored to the north gate of Home of Light. Because Home of Light north gate is already disabled the south gate of Argon Prime has nowhere to connect to and is itself disabled. What this means is that travel direct from Argon Prime to Home of Light is no longer possible. You would have to go around thru Ringo Moon and Red Light to get there.


So just to recap..

Argon Prime (S) <------> Home of Light (N)
[Align Hub to Argon Prime (S)]

Argon Prime (S) <------> Hub(01A) Hub(01B) <------> Home of Light (N)
[Align Hub to Hub(01A)]

Argon Prime (S) <------> Hub(01A) Hub(01B)disabled <------> Home of Light (N)disabled
[Align Hub to Kingdom End(S)]

Kingdom End(S) <------> Hub(01A) Hub(01B) <------> Three Worlds (N)
Argon Prime(S)disabled <------> Home of Light (N)disabled


As you can see for 3 gate alignments, which is 6 hours and 30,000 E-cells, it's possible for me to destroy the linkage between two sectors entirely. And I only need 1 set of gates to do it with.

What I've elected to do is steal part of the universe for myself. Other potential opportunites for mischief could include isolating areas of the universe. Let say for example that your UT's have an annoying habit of wandering thru X347. No problem, knock X347 out of the gate network. Not only will that stop you losing ships but it'll put a stop to any Xenon patrols. In fact why stop there? Nuke out the links for all the Xenon sectors and pen them up for good.

How about reconfiguring the trade lanes a bit? There's some fairly busy trade routes, say the link between Menalaus Frontier and Ceos Buckzoid. Break that link and force all the trade traffic to go around. Not sure of the value of doing that but hey, chaos and mayhem has its merits.

How about splitting off a couple of sectors as a 'prison' for capturing ships in? All you'ld need to do is align your gates to a route your target takes and as soon as they enter your hub realign to your prison sectors. Suddenly your target has nowhere to go anymore.

[TBV]

Very clever. I think you just started the latest craze.

[Ketraar]

While very interesting they way you find to use your assets for your purposes, I'm not quite sure how the NPC will react to that. Since its Not Particularly Clever there may be some rather strange effects going on in your universe, sooner or later, my bet goes to sooner though.

Disabling connections between gates that used to lead somewhere, may have the bad side effect of NPC ships not knowing what to do, so if a ship is supposed to go from AP to HoL it will take the shortest route, which is through the S-Gate in AP. That it doesn't work may be ignored by the NPCs so if you start to have a rather bigger agglomeration of ships near to disabled gates, or just wondering around without purpose, you know why.

MFG

Ketraar

[Creston]

Sigh. As usual, X behaves completely different for me than it does for everyone else (apparently.)

I took a squad of well trained marines to capture myself a Yaki Ryu. The Ryu was foolishly flying by itself in Ocracoke's Storm. Jackpot.

First I engage it with my Hyperion, and get it to fire its Hammerheads at me. I didn't much fancy being in a Nova when it launches a hammerhead. Either I die, or the Ryu dies because my Ions cause it to explode.

With those out of the way, I fly in in my Nova. Dodging and Weaving between the ICBs, I Ion the hell out of the Ryu. It takes forever, but there is slow slow progress.

Strangely enough, the Ryu keeps stopping. It'll lie still for ~ 60 seconds, and then move forward again for a few minutes at 25m/s, then it'll stop again. Weird, but okay. I save at various intervals, to give myself some backup points. Since this is the first time I'm trying to capture a big target, I consider this a training excercise.

While the Ryu is lying still, I order the Hyperion to pirate the thing. Why not, it's lying still after all, right? The Hyperion proceeds by being a complete utter dumbass (hurray Egosoft scripting!) and turning circles at about 4kms out, at 13m/s. Well done.

I proceed with Ion'ing. Eventually, the Ryu only has two ICBLs left in the front turrets. It's also still not moving. Cool.

I move back to the Hyperion, keep the Ryu's shields down, and order the marines to board. They move out, and promptly get annihilated by the Ryu's fighters, which have so far been blue to me, but which apparently don't like the marines.

Okay. Murder fighters. The Ryu starts moving again. Sigh. I enter my Nova, and Ion the hell out of it. It stops. It still has one ICBL. Before I can move back to my Hyperion, it starts moving again.
Grrrr.

For the next fifteen minutes, I absolutely soak the damn thing in Ion Disrupters. Finally the final ICBL dies. The Ryu has nothing left on it except 1 200 MJ shield.

It, however, does not stop. It flies at 105m/s around the sector.



Whatever method of trying to get the stinking marines to board the ship, they fail. THey can't catch up with it. If I try to launch them from the front, they don't launch. (Instead, Ego's massively wonderful script engages the autopilot, and my hyperion proceeds at being a dumbass by flying circles)
If I move alongside it and match speeds, then order the Marines to launch, the Marines apparently insta-teleport 10km away from my ship and target. Why? Who the hell knows.

Can someone tell me what I could possibly be doing wrong? This is driving me nuts...

Creston

Edit : Btw, thanks for explaining that Hub thing Squiddy. That's just brilliant work there

I see some dark days ahead for the cursed Paranid empire...