The Oxford missions

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fwadman

Spaceman
I failed the first Oxford mission and don't have a save game from before I started the pirate missions. Reading other threads here maybe I should buy an autotracker ;)

When I go back to the library I'm told to forget it. Is there any way I can make them give me a second chance?

As a side point - I went to Oxford IRL and have a Bod. readers card which should give me access to the library anyway....
 
I had to cheat to pass the 3rd oxford mission. Slowed down demons to 150 max speed and turning speeds of 10 degrees per second, by editing the units.csv file. Check the thread "modding privateer" for details.
Of course, once I cheated there, I kept doing it. Cheating is fun, I find. I gave my Centurion 200 armor, level 8 shields, level 9 reactor, and 4 powered-up steltek guns, all auto-tracking, as well as raised speed to 617 normal, 1234 with afterburner, added gun cooler, and capacitors you can't even buy. I finished the whole game this morning and didn't even have to visit the mechanic once since the exploratory service missions. Wholesale obliteration of all enemies.. ;-)
I can't stop laughing when swarms of retros or kilrathi come at me and turn into balls of fire from a single shot of my blasters. Sometimes I just wait till two of them line up, to take out two at a time with one shot. Cheating is great! ;-) I think I'll take a ride of the fronteer towns tonight, looking for kilrathi cap ships to plink...
 
I think it's good that the developers allowed cheating to be so easy. For some it makes their dreams of power and glory come true, for others it prevents that 'nth-time-reload for not bering able to make a mission, and for all, hopefully, it'll show at some point in time that it tips over the balance of a very good challenge and makes the game dull beyound bearing.
Cheating is good if you learn when not to do it. Cheating is lame if you can't live without it.
 
I remember that mission being hard as f*** in the original. I could only ever pass it with a Centurion and guns blazin' like mad!

If you don't want to cheat too much instead of changing the speed of the demons maybe change the speed of the ship you're escorting to make it faster. That IS the mission you're talking about right?
 
Oxford Missons

Okay - as I started this thread ...

I've now completed the Oxford missions and boy are they hard. But not as hard as what's to come later! If you can't complete the first Oxford mission then practice and practice again until you can. The good thing about defend missions is you only have a set amount of time to kill people so you have to be able to shoot straight.

Ship wise - Mil spec Demon. You must install autotracking on your gun mounts. I then like really heavy guns (but this means only a very short fire time) - get the boggy up close and let rip!

The other thing to remember is what missles you are taking with you. Against small craft you want missles. Agianst bigger craft missles are useless so load photons. This is where the Demon is a real let down - not enough missle room! Photon sshould be used 2 or 3 at a time - the demon can only hold 10.
 
Cheating is good if you learn when not to do it. Cheating is lame if you can't live without it.

The thing is, although I found the rare book collection escort mission to oxfors super hard in the original game, I was able to pass it without cheating. There are fundamental differences in the new game, though:
  • The attacking hunters ignore you completely.
  • Retros and Kilrathi get involved

Thus, in the original game, the way to pass this mission was to NOT lock and concentrate on one ship at a time, but to continuously switch targets and blast each one of them a bit at a time, so as to keep them busy and away from the cargo ship. In the remake, this does NOT work. Even as you're making them red with damage, they keep attacking the cargo ship.
In addition to that, wheras in the original game, random AI units at nav points are disabled at a nav point where you have a specific mission, in the remake they are there and complicate things. Many times I tried playing this oxford mission in the remake, I was sort of managing with the attacking mercenaries, but then retros and/or kilrathis would show up and start attacking the cargo ship as well. Well, that's just too much for me; specially since I was friends with the kilrathi at the time, so that they were not showing up when I was scrolling through H-ostiles.

As for cheating in later missions, it was necessary due to my carpal syndrome, if I may be so specific. Do you mind?
As well as the fact that in the last mission in Palan, and the Gamma exploration mission, you get swarmed, by Centurions, and kilrathi ships respectively, in both of which cases they seem to have aiming infallibility: No matter which way I turn, afterburner or not, they keep hitting me dead on BANG, BANG, BANG, non-stop. So, if the game cheats, why shouldn't I?

What bothers me the most about this argument is the bragging, as well as condescending, game machismo attitude of some people. A game should have various levels of difficulty one can set to one's satisfaction. If you want a game to be so hard, then play it at a hard level. Period. And if you think turrets and auto-tracking are spoilers, then ask for the ability to turn them off. Why do you ask for them not to be there at all? It would seem to me that you want the game to be too hard for ME to play, more than you want the game to challenge you. And this attitude really angers me, because 15 years ago, I could buy just about any game, and be able to finish it. Nowadays, it's become pointless to spend money on a game, when I know I won't be able to get past the first half. And it's all because of this noisy minority of braggards complaining that the games are "too easy". How I wish they would mind their own business (set their difficulty to high, or insane), and not be always trying to control how difficult games should be for *others*.

And I also find it insulting to Privateer that so much argument should orbit the issue of difficulty, when the thing that makes Privateer different (and better) than all the other Wing Commander series, was the art, the dialogue, the complexity of the story, the trading, the randomness in space and in the mission computers, not to speak of the music. For years I've been having pangs of wanting to go back to that world. Never you mind the stupid fighting...
 
dan_w said:
In addition to that, wheras in the original game, random AI units at nav points are disabled at a nav point where you have a specific mission, in the remake they are there and complicate things. Many times I tried playing this oxford mission in the remake, I was sort of managing with the attacking mercenaries, but then retros and/or kilrathis would show up and start attacking the cargo ship as well. Well, that's just too much for me; specially since I was friends with the kilrathi at the time, so that they were not showing up when I was scrolling through H-ostiles.

If you were friends with the Kilrathi, why was it a problem to have them around? Just ignore them. I do ;-)

As for retros and pirates, what I've found useful is to launch from Oxford *without* taking the mission and kicking their butts. Then land and take the mission. That should give you the lowest chance of a retro/pirate infestation.

That said, I do find the book-mission quite a bit harder than in the original. Someone on another thread was claiming that there is a bug with weapon effect ranges and that they're basically 10% of what they should be. As I commented at the time, that would certainly explain a few "problems" I've been having.

What bothers me the most about this argument is the bragging, as well as condescending, game machismo attitude of some people. A game should have various levels of difficulty one can set to one's satisfaction. If you want a game to be so hard, then play it at a hard level. Period. And if you think turrets and auto-tracking are spoilers, then ask for the ability to turn them off. Why do you ask for them not to be there at all?
Because many people are asking for a faithful remake. This in *addition* to a recreation of the broader universe, including other canon ships, weapons, systems etc.

It's kind of like doing a remake of PacMan. You might think it were cool if PacMan could "jump" or shoot lasers, but it wasn't in the original, so I wouldn't want it in a remake. That doesn't mean that having him jump or shoot lasers wouldn't produce an extremely entertaining game that I might actually spend more time playing than the remake... but I would still want the remake to be true to the original.

As for difficulty levels... well, that's a personal preference. There are two settings in the Remake (easy and hard - note you'll get hard by chosing anything from "medium" and above in the settings).

Personally, I strongly dislike most implementations of difficulty levels and tend not to play those games. I like a very clear and distinct differentiation between AI level (or starting funds) and *opponent cheating*.
 
fyodor said:
If you were friends with the Kilrathi, why was it a problem to have them around? Just ignore them. I do ;-)
The problem is that the Kilrathi will attack the merchant that you are escorting.
 
dan_w said:
As for cheating in later missions, it was necessary due to my carpal syndrome, if I may be so specific. Do you mind?
As well as the fact that in the last mission in Palan, and the Gamma exploration mission, you get swarmed, by Centurions, and kilrathi ships respectively, in both of which cases they seem to have aiming infallibility: No matter which way I turn, afterburner or not, they keep hitting me dead on BANG, BANG, BANG, non-stop. So, if the game cheats, why shouldn't I?

dan_w said:
Cheating is fun, I find. I gave my Centurion 200 armor, level 8 shields, level 9 reactor, and 4 powered-up steltek guns, all auto-tracking, as well as raised speed to 617 normal, 1234 with afterburner, added gun cooler, and capacitors you can't even buy. I finished the whole game this morning and didn't even have to visit the mechanic once since the exploratory service missions. Wholesale obliteration of all enemies.. ;-)

Am I so dazed and confused by old age that these are two different people talking here? :eek:D

All I can do is repeat my statement:
Cheating is good if you learn when not to do it. Cheating is lame if you can't live without it.

If your carpal tunnel syndrome is giving you trouble with the game, I certainly understand that you might use some creative editing to achieve what would otherwise be impossible.

But I don't quite buy that talk about bragging gamers who take the fun away from you.

I don't say that I'm that good - I have taken several tries for some missions, and even in the original game I remember weeks of frustration for not making that crucial cargo run. But I also remember of sitting down and realizing that Privateer does give you that immense freedom of going off any time you like to make enough money to buy better equipment, or to shift your relationship with the factions. Even creative solutions like fyodor's sweep-first-then-take-mission are possible.

Now, to your last argument:
And I also find it insulting to Privateer that so much argument should orbit the issue of difficulty, when the thing that makes Privateer different (and better) than all the other Wing Commander series, was the art, the dialogue, the complexity of the story, the trading, the randomness in space and in the mission computers, not to speak of the music.

I couldn't agree more. Just one thing: There are many many people here who haven't played the original, or do not remember it all that good. They ask questions like "What should I do next?".
It doesn't help them or the complex, artful, wonderful story very much if anyone plainly tells them: "Do this". If people want a Walkthrough, they can go and get one anywhere, there story is the same as in the original. It also doesn't help to tell them what they've done wrong and how they can do better. The game has so much freedom that everyone can find his own style - an old friend of mine all but finished the original in a Tarsus because he misread the price for other ships and always thought he didn't have enough money.

It is a good game, it resembles many of the possibilities of life.
 
Personally, I strongly dislike most implementations of difficulty levels and tend not to play those games. I like a very clear and distinct differentiation between AI level (or starting funds) and *opponent cheating*.

I'm 100% with ya there. I don't like "game AI's cheating" at all. The problem is usually the difficulty of programming AI. Most game software companies neglect research on AI and then resort to cheating to make the games more challenging.
Without going too far, just the fact of being outnumbered 15 to 1 is a form of game cheating. If the game AI were any good, in any game, you could not possibly be outnumbered 15 to 1 and survive, no matter how good you are.
In the case of Privateer (the original) I was very annoyed by how the enemies seem to know when you're turning close enough to get them back on screen, and at that moment they switch to flying the other way. It seemed to me it was just a cheap trick to have me go to the hospital with carpal syndrom from moving the mouse too much for too long; only to then fly away in a straight line, for them to be blown away. As if the whole purpose of the exercise was not to defeat me, but just to just make my arm fall off, in real life. Unfortunately, the remake follows the original here. I wish it did not.

But so, it seems to me we're getting good ideas from all this debating. If we agree that game cheating is no good, and that crippling enemy AI is no good either, then maybe the answer is to, for all difficulty levels, keep AI maxed out, keep cheating to a minimum, and change something else that changes the difficulty. And what could something else be? Number of enemies? Strength of their blasters?

This is a topic I've given some thought. I read somewhere that in the original Privateer, the strength of the enemies gradually goes up after you upgrade your guns. I hated it when I read that. That meant that all my attempts at making the game LESS difficult for myself by buying more powerful blasters was self-defeating, so next time I played the game I stayed with lasers till the end, but improved everything else. And it worked!
But I simpathize with the programmer's dilemma: How to make the game challenging. I just think they chose a bad solution. Because a game should not assume that every player wants to be challenged. I did not. I wanted to upgrade the ship so that fighting enemies would be easier, and STAY easier.

Here's a possible solution that would a) do away with the need for difficulty settings, and b) do away with the assumption that every player wants the game to get progressively harder:
Have some systems far away from the fronteer with the kilrathi, say from Troy to New Detroit be fairly quiet and peaceful, but with not too much profit to be made. Make trade to fronteer systems very profitable. Then, a naturally challenged player like me can choose to stay away from trouble and make money slowly, and only venture into the hot zones after having upgraded the ship and equipment to make it overwhelmingly powerful. For the less challenged players, have a score system that is greater the shorter the time they take to finish the game, so that they can compare scores, like "I finished the game in 5 days"; "Oh yeah? I finished it in 4 days and 9 hours." I'd be happy to finish it in two months and let them brag about their scores.
Meanwhile, the enemy AI is the same for all players, and the level of challenge follows geographical location, instead. And to make things more interesting, other than the kilrathi fronteer, there'd be higher pirate concentrations to the south, and higher retro concentrations to the north, or something along the lines; and you could become a pirate or a retro, of course.

Anyways, I'm not proposing the above, merely suggesting that there can be better solutions, and worse solutions, to the problem; that the various tastes of different players can be accomodated without necessarily having "levels of difficulty".
 
Am I so dazed and confused by old age that these are two different people talking here? :eek:D

No, same person. What's confusing? In the first quotation I was explaining why I had to cheat to move on with the game. In the second I was relating the fact that I had fun doing so, so I stayed with it. No contradiction at all, or is there?

As for my argument about braggards taking my fun away, I stand by it: Back in the days of Doom, Duke Nukem, Descent, most games were finishable. Up until StarCraft. When the add-on sequence to Starcraft came out, I forget what it was called now, I was playing each mission again and again for a week, until I got to a mission, less than a third of the way through, which I tried for like two weeks and finally had to say "enough for me"; yet while looking for walkthrough help I'd find reviews by volunteer reviewers saying it was "too easy".

Sure, I had a friend who when he played Starcraft, it was amazing to watch how fast his hands danced on the keyboard, and how vigilant he was about what every unit or group of units in the map were doing at each moment. I just can't produce that much adrenaline, or maybe I can produce it but not utilize it as effectively perhaps. But do I dream of acquiring his skills? No. I do like a bit of challenge, but I'm a bit too old to grow new synapses. I must have replayed Starcraft 25 times, just for the fun of trying different strategies, but not trying to get faster at it. Same as I played MOO2 a gazillion times but seldom raised the difficulty level above easy. I can have a lot of fun without necessarily hurting my arm or falling off my chair. But in more recent times, games have been getting so hard I can't even play the demos! And why is that? Because game reviewers, just like movie critics, are too critical; because if they say a movie or game is good, and some other critic says it's bad, it looks bad on them, so they play safe by being too critical; and the worst criticism lobbed at games is to say they are "too easy", so they all say every game is too easy, so as not to be alone at saying it's okay. And who's driving the "too easy" stigma? The braggards, of course. Who else?
 
dan_w said:
a game should not assume that every player wants to be challenged. I did not. I wanted to upgrade the ship so that fighting enemies would be easier, and STAY easier.
I have to ask this... what do you want in a game? I mean, when playing a game such as Privateer, what makes it *fun* for you? What makes it thrilling?

With regards to AI and cheating, I would personally prefer two adjustments: One for AI and one for cheats. Then I could set the AI as high as my skill level would allow me and in the (hopefully) rare circumstances where that wasn't enough, I could add some cheating ;-)

(I say "hopefully", not because I don't want to be good, but because I would hope for the AIs to be sufficiently well-made).

Increasing # of opponents would, in my oppinion, be borderline "cheating".

Extra damage for their blasters, modifying the damage they receive etc. would all *definitely* be cheating. As would giving them any "information" they should not have.
 
Exactly. 100% agreed. When I was speaking agains "game-cheating" I meant the game AI cheating against the player, by the way. And what I said is exactly what you say: erradicate it!

But, by the same token, as you are implicitly admitting, Privateer is already cheating against the player, by arranging enemies in such numbers.

As for what I want from a game, I'd say 'immersiveness'. A bit of challenge is necessary for immersiveness; but so much challenge that I often have to play a mission many times before getting through is NOT conducive to immersiveness.

To me, playing a game is a passtime, like reading a scifi novel, with the added bonuses of sounds, graphics, and my own participation in the story. I think games are great new art medium, not yet perhaps recognized as such. What I do not want from a game, is for it to be like an exercise machine for eye-hand coordination. Thank you very much. In this sense, I prefer turn-based strategy to real-time strategy games.

Privateer is my favorite game of all time because of its immersiveness. And this immersiveness is the highest for me on planets, rather than in space, while deciding what upgrades to get, or planning my trade routes. This is not to say I'd do away with fighting altogether. But fighting is just the incentive needed for the rest of life in Privateer's world to be justified, not an end in itself. That's how it is for me, though; I'm not in any way suggesting that others should feel the same way.

Similarly, when I was playing MOO2, my favorite part of playing that game was ship design.
 
Seriously? I didn't know they had stories. I only played the demo of Prophecy, and thought all WC games other than Privateer were just about fighting.

EDIT: By the way, excessive challenging is not the only feature in a game that may detract from immersiveness for me. I liked Privateer 2 much less than Privateer 1, and I had to do some pretty hard thinking as to "why?". The graphics were better. The sound was better. The art was amazing. Well, there were a number of things I did not like about it but the top two, I'd say, were,
a) Excessive number of pirates everywhere.
b) The movies.

I HATED the movies. Not that there was anything wrong with them as movies, but the fact that they were movies at all. If I'm in a world of polygons and gouroud shading, the last thing I need is the bucket of cold water of a movie that reminds me what real life looks like. It was a complete break in the virtual reality continuity for me. Had Privateer 2 had cartoon faces with rolling eyeballs, I would probably have liked it 10 times better. They totally killed immersiveness for me.
 
I just encountered the 3rd Oxford Mission.

Bleah.

I never thought I'd say this, but the mission would be easier if the enemies would actually shoot at me!

Plus, they don't show up in my hostile targets list so it's tedious to try to find them.

So do you gives give chase or stick around the Drayman and fire at them as they come in?
 
Admiral DeRuyter said:
I just encountered the 3rd Oxford Mission.

Bleah.

I never thought I'd say this, but the mission would be easier if the enemies would actually shoot at me!

Plus, they don't show up in my hostile targets list so it's tedious to try to find them.

So do you gives give chase or stick around the Drayman and fire at them as they come in?
If you find out, let me know :(

I've tried the mission about 20 times now (with break to acquire and outfit a Centurion, to see if that would help) with no luck. I haven't even come close.

Sometimes, the demons take down the drayman in close to 60 seconds real time! Other times, it takes 5 or 10 minutes.

This isn't my problem, though. My problem is, quite simply, that I cannot kill Demons. With the rare exceptions where they suicide on me (or decide to lie perfectly still and wait for me to shoot them), I've *never* beaten a Demon. I've tried in a Centurion. I've tried with an assortment of weapons, including the confed tachyon cannons. I've tried with IR missiles, I've tried with Heatseekers and I've tried with photon torpedos.

I just cannot kill them.

Maybe I suck - well, a good argument could be made there, but I would like to interject that I've only died a single time before the Oxford book mission (and that was to 11 talons). I haven't even come close to dying more than once or twice.

TO ANYONE WHO CAN CONSISTENTLY KILL A DEMON IN LESS THAN A FEW MINUTES REAL TIME: How the heck do you do it? In what ship? What weapons? What strategy? I would *really* like to know.
 
I know. I spent a whole day trying to pass that mission. Then I went to Palan, hunter-hunting, in order to make the hunters my enemies, so that they'd show in my radar as such. Then I realized that retros and/or kilrathis were also attacking the ship. I was friends with the kilrathi at the time, so they wouldn't show on my screen. So I went hunting kilrathis to make them my enemies, only to find out that now the hunters loved me 100% because of my killing kilrathis. So then I went hunting hunters AND kilrathis, but I found that killing a kilrathi would gain me more love from the hunters than killing a hunter would lose me. So I had to kill 2 hunters for every kilrathi until they both hated me. Then went back to oxford, and now I could target them, but it did not help because they would not shoot at me except momenterily while I was insulting them by pressing [4]. I could hit on them until killing them, and they just kept attacking the cargo ship...
About 3 days I spent on that mission, and finally cheated. But I'm sure there must be many who've been able to pass it without cheating. If I could keep tabs at all times where the cargo ship is, to stay close to it, yet conscious enough of my position and orientation to not hit it, and could therefore fight each of the attackers just enough to cause them to go away, and be able to work on another attacker as it approaches the cargo ship, maybe then I'd pass it without cheating. But I can't do all that. Too much adrenaline and I start to lose coordination, get disoriented, bang against the cargo ship myself... and it's not a fair mission, in the remake, anyways. Too many fundamental differences with the original:

In the original Privateer, attackers are always red on the radar. It doesn't matter if you are friendly with their faction: If they are attackers in a plot mission, they appear as hostiles. Not so in the remake, or at least not in this mission.
In the original, if I attacked them, they'd fight me. In the remake, they keep attacking the cargo.
Random AI units, like retros and kilrathi, also attack the ship. In the original, there were no random units mixing up with plot mission units, in any mission.
 
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