Ever get tired of getting caught in an asteroid field? Privateer tips and tricks

J

Joker057

Spaceman
Are Retro, Pirate, and Kilrathi ambushes in asteroid fields getting you down? I have your answer right here. To get away and take the fight out into open space just kick in your afterburners and rock your ship up and down continuously untill you are clear of the field and BRING THE PAIN! For whatever reason this evasive maneuver works every time with a little practice. It also cuts travel time when passing through an asteroid field. I think this tenique also works in WC1 and WC2. Also for Privateer Riteous Fire there is a bounty put on Mordecai Jones head placed by the confeds for 80,000 credits!!! After your patrol of the Famine, Pestilence, and War systems looking for the Retro base don't go to Drake in Capella right away. Detour first to Perry Naval Base and talk to Admiral Terrel and he will offer the bounty on Jones. Then go to Drake Base in the Capella system and talk to the "informant" he will tell you how to find Jones. Ice Jones and you got the whopping 80,000 credit bounty in your account. If you like to smuggle, I suggest buying a Galaxy. Sherwood and Capella are both one jump away from mining and refinery bases. If you have the bucks, smuggle only Ultimate. You'll make about 20,000 or more per run. In order to fill your hold with Ultimate (which only usually has 25 units in stock an the exchange) just save your game after you buy some, then load your game again and the exchange will have a new stock of items. I beleive the most profitable run is the Sherwood-NewCaledonia run with N.Caledonia having refinery bases (pirate bases love weapons and medical supplies.) I hope this information makes your privateering experiences fun and not to mention VERY profitable. --Joker--
 
You know, that brings back nostalgic memories of when Privateer still worked on my PC...

Oh, um, thanks for the info... though its sort of old now.
 
The afterburner-in-the-asteroid-field bug/trick was great, fighting two kat heavies amidst the rocks was NOT fun... I ended up breaking my joystick, though, too much yanking.

It was a hellishly good game. When you upgraded from the Tarsus to the Centurion, life was good. I really hated the Tarsus' small view. It looked quite cool though, like a genuine old ship.
 
I decided to become a full time smuggler playing RF and found that a Galaxy with two fusion cannons with a gun cooler was plenty of firepower in almost any situation. I bought a Centurion just to hunt down Menech and Jones and went back to my Galaxy. After making enough cash I put fusion cannons all around even in the turrets. I played Priv and RF back in the mid 90s and I never tried out the Galaxy but I bought the game on ebay and I found that the Galaxy was a great ship no matter what the game guide says on this site. It cant hurt to have 225 units of cargo space available. Does that asteroid bug work in the later WC games? I played WCP but I don't remember spending very much time in asteriod fields.
 
Later WC games are, sadly, a product designed for the modern "if it's hard, I won't buy it!" market... asteroids became utterly uninteresting after Wing Commander Armada.

(To be fair, they went out with a bang - Armada's Proving Grounds addon had the neatest asteroids ever.)
 
They were not thinking about that market when they balanced the power of IR missiles on WC4.
 
Missiles in WC4 were absolutely brutal, for both parties. I still remember making my first journey to Tyr VII, thinking that a couple of Banshees would be no problem to deal with. I also remember taking a missile directly in the cockpit at point-blank. After that, I made it my goal to beat that mission on Nightmare without taking a hit. I think I finally pulled it off, but it took a while.
 
lol, ya, the going up and down trick is somewhat... old. Um... can't even remember how long ago it was when I did that lol. Expecially on the last couple missions in privateer when you had tons of retros or pirates on you but all you had to do was map the navpoints. Personally I used the keyboard for this and all the wingcommanders, priv 2 was the shock to me when I couldn't use the keyboard to fly anymore :D
 
The early WC and Priv asteroids were pretty retarded, they had a very popcorn-like look and feel to them. I like the later ones better, in the sense they could be navigated and used tactically, but the designers never made the fields dense enough. My personal favorites were the asteroids of the XvT BoP expansion, it was fun playing hide and seek in an X-Wing melee while trying to dumbfire each other with proton torpedoes.
 
The asteroid afterburner thing only worked in the very early games, and the only one I can vouch for sure is priv+rf. The thing is, the game engine can't track the 'roids position correctly when you're moving your FOV so fast. After they got a better engine, the trick probably stopped working. I do agree with LOAF that they didn't need to remove de dense asteroid fields altogether.

BTW, dealing with 'roids in KS is a lot easier, if you turn the cockpit off.
 
Asteroids are very hard on WC1. However, Halcyon casually tells you to navigate the KILLER ASTEROID FIELD OF DOOM on the first mission because it's the shorter route. Considering how risky it is, no one would navigate an asteroid field unless they really had to. Since confed officers are so concerned in keeping fighters intact, sending them needlessly through hazard shouldn't be the preferable tactical decision.

The funny thing is that Maniac, of all people, is freaking out because of the asteroids on WC3, the game when they are so easy to navigate.
 
Considering how risky it is, no one would navigate an asteroid field unless they really had to.
Click to expand...

That doesn't really hold up in a tactical sense. No side can deem an area of space 'too dangerous' to patrol - since the other will take advantage of them using it...
 
Bandit LOAF said:
That doesn't really hold up in a tactical sense. No side can deem an area of space 'too dangerous' to patrol - since the other will take advantage of them using it...
Click to expand...

Of course, but a patrol would fall into the "have to" category. :)

The thing here is that, "universe-wise", asteroids are as dangerous on WC3 as on WC1. The game universe probably doesn’t acknowledge such game engine changes.

Maniac: Oh, no, asteroids!
Blair: Don't worry! For some reason, it got way easier to go to asteroid fields. The asteroids are bigger, slower, there's lots of space between them, and our autopilots even enable in the middle of the field!
Maniac: Neat. You suck.

EDIT: Someone could rationalize that the systems on WC3 have all equally different, easier asteroid fields than all the equally hard fields from WC1, but I don't think that would be the case, given Maniac's dialogue on the game.
 
Probably people on Origin thought it would be more fun to gamers if asteroids weren't an issue anymore.

I always wanted to fly in a 'roid field just like the hornet in KS's intro. But that's not really possible in the games. Pitty;
 
The Arrow in the KS intro just got too close to the asteroids and stripped off two sectors of shields - nothing to be too proud of and something ive done all the time. :(It was also moving EXTREMELY slowly @ the time which makes me think that it was a Maniac sort of trick, fireworks sort of thing...)
 
I think the asteroids thing had more to do with the fact that WC3 and on were fully 3D engines. Especially on older systems, the number of polygons you can push limits how many otherwise useless objects (like asteroids) you can put in one scene. Also, the 3D probably made "pop-into-view" asteroids a little less fun, because they'd be so unrealistic. Admittedly, the pathetic 4-5 asteroids that float forlornly in one of the WCP(?) missions is an all-time low in my book (heck, did they even have collision detection on?). They even turn (visibly) into single pixel dots at long range--lame.

Incidentally, system limitations also explain why you can burn through pop-up asteroids--it was probably considered a waste of memory to remember where all the asteroids were so that you wouldn't be able to dodge them like that. I don't think they didn't know about how easy it would be circumvent, especially in the later games, since I know I figured out the "afterburner" trick pretty much on my 1st or 2nd attempt (basically, I got frustrated of flying through fields of rocks over and over again while getting shot at, and just decided to go REAL FAST AND CRAZY!!!--and surprisingly, it worked).

Of course, I guess Armada was also 3D, but I've never played it so I can't comment on it (incidentally, the Shiraak in the ships database looks a bit pixellated, kinda like a WC2 ship... is that a mistake?). Regardless though, I'm betting with today's machines, you could throw in tons of asteroids without making the game chug (or maybe not--since those asteroids would probably be shaded and specular lighted and multitextured and tesselated and buzzword-ified up the ying-yang... I know the asteroid fields in I-War 2 didn't seem appreciably faster than the ones of old). Maybe you could test it out with Vega Strike or something, if somebody hasn't already...

Oooh, speaking of which, that reminds me: there's a blurb over at www.sciam.com about how they think they've discovered a solar system quite similar to ours (with a Neptune-like planet at a Neptune-like orbit) around Vega, a mere 25 light years or so from here. Coincidence? I think not. The SETI project should be picking up the Kilrathi any century now...
 
hey, the way that hornet rolled and fired its afterburners was quite cool. It wasn't just going up and donw in a wave-like movement, he was actually circumventing an asteroid bigger than the ship itself.

And damn those buzzwords. they would beautify the asteroids for sure... but why? You only see them zooming past! a simple grey-brown solid would be fine! =)
 
The asteroid fields the UE team could achieve were pretty sepctacular. At full asteroid density (take the Confed fighter gauntlet in the sim for example), it gives my WC computer a run for its money and you can do alot of the "circumventing" of the asteroids (bouncing off of them, using them for cover, etc). I'd like to know if the Vision engine can do tons of smaller asteroids with a few of the large, "capship killing" variety instead of alot of big ones, ala WC1 and what everyone seems to be after :).

C-ya
 
What I really don't understand is that sometimes in Privateer you'll run into Kilrathis in the middle of an asteroid field and they'll have a capship there with them... what did they have to go throught to get that big-ass ship way in the middle of an astertoid field? Considering that sometimes there isnt even a jump point there why bother?! It seems like it would be way more trouble than its worth. Don't you agree?
 
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