[X3TC] Are You Even Serious!? [PIC]

[AJR1]

A Very Easy $23,000cr Station Defense Mission and I have to deal with this, its just stupid!

Just to point out, yes, there are 2 x pirate centaurs (m6) 1 x yaki centaur (m6) theres 15 x M5's a couple of M3's.

Its just insane for 23,000 and classed as "Very Easy". Not only that but you cant even have your L + R turrets helping you because they might hit a station and then the whole sector will turn against you - again lame! needs to be addressed.

Its simply not possible to do combat missions at the moment, 1.2.1 did not fix the stuttering during combat, i'm still getting freezes, and im sorry to rant on but its damn disappointing when a "very easy" mission takes something of a miracle to do.



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[Grimm Spector]

no f-ing kidding, especially when you have a nothing more than an M3 of your own to fight with, and on top of that the "hotfix" doesn't exist for Steam customers still......

[em3e3]

What is your current combat rank?

[EventHorizon]

The ships you get are based on your combat rank. Can't remember what I am off the top of my head, but and easy defense mission for me now consists of at least 3 M6's, an M7 at least 2 M3's and a handful of M4's and M5's.

And I am still doing these in my standard Baracuda.

You have to prioritise your targets, the M7 (bomber) MUST be taken out...those Tomohawk heavy missilse can cripple a stations sheilds, then go after the M6's...remember different ships have different sheilds and weapons. I have found that it is best to take out the Centaurs first, low sheilds (compared to the Osprey) but they have PPC's...and make sure you are close to the station before acepting the mission, then take out as many fighters as you can while heading for the M8 (or the highest priority target that YOU have to identify - the game's orange target is often wrong). Also, if you piss the M7's off they will break the attack on the station and come after you...

[Carlo the Curious]

You have to prioritise your targets, the M7 (bomber) MUST be taken out...those Tomohawk heavy missilse can cripple a stations sheilds

Scan them first - quite often they have no missiles on board so they're not much of a threat and you can leave them until later.

[AstroExplorer]

You think that many enemies at once is hard?

Spoiler

Show

Wait until you start on Operation Final Fury, you have to escort transporter ships etc through an unknown sector and protect them from Kha'ak and during one of those missions there was literally like 200 Kha'ak attacking me and the transporters at once. My Argon Titan was crippled in like 3 mins, on top of the stuttering .

[Spamas]

Well, first of all this doesn't look like a station defense mission to me for two reasons. Firstly in my experience station defence attackers always spawn from a single gate not as distributed in your screenshot. Secondly they are usually of all the same faction not yaki/pirate (who will attack each other).

So I'm going to assume from this that it is a sector patrol mission and to that end I agree with you that the scaling in this regard is a little bit whacky. As stated above the game takes only your current combat rank as the basis for the difficulty and quantity of ships that it spawns which seems at the moment to be skewed toward being too high for the income that the player recieves up to that rank. There could be more than one reason for this too; the game is designed around both combat and trading and for those of us who focus on combat the missions scale up quickly to being too hard for the ship that we are flying in having gained money only through said missions. Which is the way up till now I've been playing too.

A week or so back I posted in a similar thread to this with regards to a sector patrol mission and at the time I was in a single M3+ craft with no support. Decided to take on a very hard patrol mission and the result was several (around 30) P class Xenon which was well... very hard. The story of that mission can be found in this thread.

But to continue that story, and to focus more on the way the game is balanced: I've recently aquired an m7 class vessel (A paranid demios) Kitted it out with a bunch of HEPTs on the front and Flak's on all the turrets. Suddenly this caliber of mission becomes very easy indeed even at the hard level 30 P vessels are no match (as long as you catch them early while they are spread out) and you rake in the cash very quickly. I think I ended up with around 18million from a mission of similar spawnings shortly after kitting out my demios. But this also came at a penalty. Having killed off so many ships in a short space of time, what was very hard in the m3 becoming very easy, my combat rank suddenly jumped another rank or two and now I'm getting K spawns (Destroyers) which again make the missions very difficult.

So I guess it comes down to this:

• It isn't a bug but maybe a balance issue.
• What was hard can suddently become very easy with a change of ship class.
• The game is perhaps not balanced around pure combat play as trade is a massive feature of the game. A more balanced approach may keep incomes high while combat rank relitivley low.
• There are several tips and tricks that can help you deal with multitudious ship encounters which I could name for you if you so desire.

[Tycow]

.. and on top of that the "hotfix" doesn't exist for Steam customers still......

Blame Valve for that, not Egosoft. According the to mods, the patch was sent to Valve a couple of days back.

[Hob Anagerik]

You think that many enemies at once is hard?

Spoiler

Show

Wait until you start on Operation Final Fury, you have to escort transporter ships etc through an unknown sector and protect them from Kha'ak and during one of those missions there was literally like 200 Kha'ak attacking me and the transporters at once. My Argon Titan was crippled in like 3 mins, on top of the stuttering .

Tell me about it. That mission is pissing me off right now. I have another plan from a thread I opened in spoilers that may work. But constant M2 spam is NOT fun. I think there are many things in this game that need to be addressed and one of them is balance, in all things it seems.

[PreSpawn]

Hard? it tell you whats hard, playing the for a couple of hours taking a patrol mission and what i'm up against is this
http://scimitar.bplaced.net/x3screen00002.jpg
MANY Xenon, ALL coming after me, an in the middle khaak jumping in ...
after that i saved before taking any more patrol mission, out of fear from the xenon ... but when against 20 pirate centaurs it isnt easy either, at least there are always pirates and yaki, and they attack each other ...

Completing the Khakk mission is simple luck, one of the freighters went the wrong way and for a whole while up to 6 Clusters spawned on top of him ... many km's away, letting the rest of the convoy escape... after two hours of play i got ONE remaining osprey to safety, but it was close ...

- use plasma burst generators against the clusters .. 3 shots an all scouts are destroyed
- when up against a too big a force, reload, with luck the next time only a few enemies will spawn

[pja]

At Vindicator rank I have seen over 50 M6's spawn which is doable in an M7, I have also seen 10 K's spawn in the next one I took on, not so good in an M7.

[ezra-r]

those missions are neat and fun to do in M6 though and its not just that little pay since the more targets you kill the more credits get added up to the base payment

[eldarmark]

I've killed 10-15 Ks in a single mission in a M6 or M7. They aren't the problem. The problem is when 6 or 7 Ps group up -- those HURT, especially with the bug(?) where after you get 20-30 someodd targets on screen at once you lose the HUD markers on some of them -- making it hard to target them.


When doing Xenon Invasion / Xenon Defenses I find it's MUCH smarter to go kill the Ps as they spawn rather than the Ks -- the Ks are more or less just big floating targets in comparison.

[pjknibbs]

especially with the bug(?) where after you get 20-30 someodd targets on screen at once you lose the HUD markers on some of them -- making it hard to target them.

That's not a bug--it's simply designed to stop the entire screen getting cluttered with the HUD markers, making it impossible to see anything.

[Rmaccc]

spawn counts are bizarre in almost all missions in this version of the game.

has to be a bug/oversight.

many times i win a big battle and get a failure too,

i sense some serious tweaking going on in the egosoft basement where boris the bugger scratchs his hump and wipes away eye juice trickling from his weeping socket where once sat a droopy infected eyeball.

[Dreamwind99]

I have to agree alot of the spawns make no sence at all if you think that was bad try fighting 90 xenon fighters over a dozen Xenon carriers and 24 M6's, in a M7.

All off a 200k mission.

Was so bad the entire script engine shutdown it couldn't handle the insector activety.

Only hope in hell of doing final fury seems to be in a PSG ship if your careful with LOTS of support fighters.

Which of course ends up costing you 100's of mil for nothing.

And you can forget about the so called frigates for the most part as most of them have bugged turrets that refuse to fire, especially the cerberus and deimos, not check the others although agamenon (not in game) ironically seems to be about the only one that I've found who's turrets operate correctly.

[Arakiel]

I agree totally. What makes it worse is the decision to hand out combat rank like it was free candy. Shoot down a couple M4's and suddenly the game thinks your The Red Baron is space and starts throwing J's, Q's and P's at you.

[Makita]

I agree totally. What makes it worse is the decision to hand out combat rank like it was free candy. Shoot down a couple M4's and suddenly the game thinks your The Red Baron is space and starts throwing J's, Q's and P's at you.

lol good one

[Zarjazz]

I agree totally. What makes it worse is the decision to hand out combat rank like it was free candy. Shoot down a couple M4's and suddenly the game thinks your The Red Baron is space and starts throwing J's, Q's and P's at you.

Funny coz its true