X3TC Walkthrough Video Tutorial Series

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Sat, 16. Jul 11, 17:30

Updated: Re-made Video#16 using updated information from forum feedback. Thanks again.

Vim Razz · Post by **Vim Razz** » Sat, 16. Jul 11, 21:38

Big improvements on the second round.
I guess I should have been a little more specific than just "Add an M8", though.

Learning how to use them effectively takes it's own little learning curve.

You had one Gladiator charge right into the mouth of a pair of Q's, completely on it's own (clearly visible at 23:20 in the vid), and another try to charge down an N for a dogfight (27:45). The one charging the Q does make a good demo of the strength of the Tomahawk, though -- on missile took the Q's shields down by 25%.

Generally speaking, you want your M8's to sit in the back of the fight and shoot from afar rather than charging in. The Tomahawk's range is over 40km so it can easily hit targets from right near the gate.

EDIT: Since writing this the first time, I've realized that the behavior in the following paragraph (re-colored for clarify which info is wrong) was related to mods I was running at the time I got into the habit of doing this. It's not vanilla behavior. Sorry for any confusion
If you use a few of them in a wing, like you did, you want to command the Front Turrets to "attack capitals", while positioning the ships themselves somewhere out of the way. This doesn't use them to their full potential by any means, but it's an easy low-micromanagement way of dealing with them when you've got a lot going on. Just be careful of fire-paths and the risk of friendly fire.

The most powerful tool of the M8, though, is the barrage: 8 Tomahawk missiles fired at a time doing up to 5 gig's of damage in one round. Very few ships have good enough missile defense to shoot down every missile in a barrage before it hits (I've only seen done by khaak ships, myself), so you're pretty much guaranteed damage.

The barrage command is accessed through Additional Commands in the command menu (where you find mosquito missile defense or launch all marines), where you can select the target and number of barrages. The Tomahawk will automatically select a new target when the first primary target is destroyed, so you can fire several barrages at the nearest capital, and later barrages will automatically target the next enemy ship.

So in the raid you had there, for example, 3-4 barrages fired at the front Q would have likely cleared out all 3.

Eisenkalle · Post by **Eisenkalle** » Sat, 16. Jul 11, 22:02

Vim Razz wrote:
Generally speaking, you want your M8's to sit in the back of the fight and shoot from afar rather than charging in. The Tomahawk's range is over 40km so it can easily hit targets from right near the gate.

Should I start laughing hard???

I wish it would be that easy in vanilla, without using scripts (Codea, if I remember right). Reality shows the behavior you described about the M8 chasing the Xenon N.

The M8 acts like any other stupid AI controlled ship and goes kamikaze into a fight. Well it simply forgets, that its only weapon is a PAC in the rear (if even mountable!). Making use of the main weaponry? Why? Suicidal tendencies are a common reaction in X3TC AI behavior.

Yes I wish they had implemented something like the carrier command software for special ships, like M7M and M8 (call it "Distance Missile Attack Software" or something like that, just generally "use barrage"+"keep distance to target"+"avoid close encounters+avoid dogfight"+"use drones"). The blastradius of certain missiles used by AI, also pulls down your fun to the bottom. I often witnessed (and more often died!), how a Xenon M3 for example, shot a Hammerhead and I was totally in the blastradius... now guess what?

Vim Razz · Post by **Vim Razz** » Sat, 16. Jul 11, 22:23

umm... I find that it generally is that easy in vanilla as long as you don't allow the ship itself any attack commands (either issued to it, or "picked up on it's own" when attacked), keep it protected from stray fighters, and keep an eye out to where they might wander.

That's not to say they don't misbehave from time to time, though. Spotting M8's doing something they shouldn't just gets to be a habit.

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Tue, 19. Jul 11, 02:34

Not to hijack my own thread that was placed in the sticky's but I'm starting a "Let's Play," by request, of X3TC using the Bankrupt Assassin start. I'll post the links here to start with and guess that I'll start a new thread for that series in a bit. I make no claims of mastering the game, so by all means, please watch for entertainment value and chime in with suggestions (the nicer the better

so that we all can learn from them. The videos are quite a bit longer and take a while to upload. As soon as the current (4-hour) upload is finished, I'll update the links.

Enjoy.

/r,
Dave

Sp@c3Ch!mp · Post by **Sp@c3Ch!mp** » Tue, 19. Jul 11, 09:47

omg that's awesome! I'll keep an eye on your YT account

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 00:27

Updated: 1st "Let's Play X3TC" video posted

Farcough · Post by **Farcough** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 01:04

Thanks for the videos David.

They've really helped explain things within the game & given me a good launch pad.

Post by **Nanook** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 01:08

You should really start a new thread for your "Let's play" and keep this one strictly for the video tutorials. That way you can keep it in the Guide sticky and immune to being 'necroed'. Guides aren't locked due to their age as long as they're current and on topic. Adding off-topic stuff to it can change all that. Just a friendly word of warning.

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 01:10

Thanks, thats good to know. I'll move it.

Eisenkalle · Post by **Eisenkalle** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 01:28

daviddowner wrote:Thanks, thats good to know. I'll move it.

Yeah I also think you should split (lol) them. You should start adding the the links to your threads into you signature.

I will enjoy your "let's play" later on!

Sp@c3Ch!mp · Post by **Sp@c3Ch!mp** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 21:47

I'm confused, he needed to split the lets play from the tutorials, so he does that. Now they are together again

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Wed, 20. Jul 11, 23:05

The moderator contacted me and we both figured out the misunderstanding. The "Let's Play" isn't a savegame, but rather a continuation of the tutorials, so they said it was ok. I'd rather have them all in one place anyways, easier to manage

GCU Grey Area · Post by **GCU Grey Area** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 00:40

Just finished watching the new vids. Very entertaining to watch. Pirate approach to the game is certainly fun & can be very profitable.

Suggest though that you be a little more selective about which ships you hunt & take advantage of racial emnities - e.g. since your planning to hunt Borons, it's best to do that in Split sectors - the Split dislike Borons so the police will turn a blind eye to your activities (indeed attacking Boron ships while they're in a Split sector will actually improve Split rep). The oposite also applies (i.e. hunting Split ships in Boron sectors) & there's a similar setup between Argons & Paranids who dislike each other. Best to avoid targetting Teladi ships since none of the main races really dislike them & also avoid doing piracy in Teladi sectors since they tend to disapprove of anyone shooting at their customers.

There is also another approach to piracy you might want to try - going after the cargo rather than the ship. If you hunt weapon & high tech traders it's also one of the better ways of acquiring new gear for your ships without having to pay for it. One item of equipment which is essential for this is the Freight Scanner, so you can check before shooting that the target actually has something worth stealing. If it does it's a basic 'stand & deliver' approach to highway robbery - shoot them up a bit so they know you're serious, then open communications & demand that they dump their cargo. Whether you let them go afterwards is entirely up to you.

Would like to wish you happy pirating & I look forward to the next episode. Yarrr!

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 03:16

Thanks GCU, great point about the conflicting race couples - I had really forgotten about them. I'll check out the freight option soon

Updated: through Episode 6 Let's Play

ninja_zombie_jesus · Post by **ninja_zombie_jesus** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 08:44

hello and thanks for these tuts. I've been playing my game of X3TC for about 6 months now, off and on, and have followed some guides here, but watching your tuts (3 chaps so far) has already taught me a couple of little knick-knacks and tricks that have been helpful.

I'm not sure if this was resolved yet, but on the first page you mentioned having a headache with your uploads due to size.

Virtualdub, or vdub, is an excellent piece of open source software that can compress your videos to a manageable size. Also I recommend installing on your machine the open source xvid codecs, alternative to divx. It's completely free and once installed on your machine you can use vdub to compress using this codec. The interface is really really simple and easy to figure out.

If you have any questions about it don't be shy to ask.

Just a mention. I rendered out an image sequence of an 3d animation I made for a project, completely unrelated to the X Universe. It was a small 3 second animation, uncompressed AVI was 72GB. Running it through Vdub, using the xvid codec, on double-pass setting I brought it down to 2.7mb and retained near identical quality. The software is rock solid.

-n

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 13:13

@Ninja: Although the process I'm using now is MUCH better than what I was doing in the beginning, I have to say that's a pretty impressive compression result you're getting. I'll definitely look into it. 3D animation eh?? Sounds like stuff I'm interested in. Learning Blender 3D myself at the moment

ninja_zombie_jesus · Post by **ninja_zombie_jesus** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 15:14

Blender 3D is awesome because it is open-source and is quite a complete package for content creation.

The modeling tools, however, make we want to tear my eyes out of my head, stomp on them repeatedly, digest them and crap them out. And that's putting it mildly.

Personally I use a Modo - zbrush - Modo pipeline for most of my work, then hop over into blending if ever I need to do character animation (Modo doesn't support this, although it should be coming with the next release).

Keep in mind that the 75 GB I mentioned was an image sequence at 24 frames per second. Total rendered animation was about 5 seconds but I only needed 3 out of those 5. The image sequence was also in .tga format which can be quite large in 1080p, but I prefer the 'rawer' image formats as there is little to no compression when they get spit out and can house a number of alpha channels other than rgb, which I use as masks in post. All in all, though, a friend recommended vdub because I was having issues compressing out of both after effects and premiere. I was very impressed and very satisfied with the results.

Anyway, again if you have any questions don't hesitate. If I have the answers I'll gladly give them up.

-n

Yibby · Post by **Yibby** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 16:22

I watched Video 5 and was going to buy a Mercury L, but they got nothing in stock. So i flew over to Rolks Fate to discover the 25MJ Shields, went back and Mercury L ships were available.

daviddowner · Post by **daviddowner** » Thu, 21. Jul 11, 16:27

@Yibby: I hate it when that happens. So much so, that in my main game, when I buy a ship that I use a lot of (such as the Mistrel), I usually buy them in lots of 10-20 at a time so I always have a 'pool' of ships to finish equipping when I need them.

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

X3TC Walkthrough Video Tutorial Series