WC4 question

G

grasshopper10

Spaceman
I am playing and dropped down to Veteran level. I am right on the tail of a fighter hitting it with lasers. I am hitting it hard because I can see the graphics of each hit. Also, the back end is red colored on the display. Meanwhile, Maniac is behind me and has taken out 3 fighters in the same time I have been attacking this 1 fighter. He comes in and shoots for 1 second and the ship in front of me is destroyed. I get no credit for shooting it for 20 seconds.

Why are everyones laser weapons better than mine? I didnt notice this the 1st go round in 1995 or whatever, but I guess it is there.

This is my last go round with WC4 and then I officially name Tachyon the best space shooter for the last decade.
 
Aww, don't give up so easily. Seriously, missiles in WC4 are so powerful that things like this can happen. It's entirely possible that Maniac toasted 3 ships with missiles while you were busy trying to kill one with guns. Also, as I said before, you have to train quite a bit before you can reliably hit enemy fighters with guns.

Furthermore, wingmen like Maniac and Hawk are very good pilots, and they can take down your own targets quite easily (probably because you're keeping your enemies busy - they aren't skilled enough to both avoid you and defend themselves against your wingmen).

After a bit of training, you should be able to take down fighters faster than your wingmen. Most of the time, anyway.
 
A few suggestions:

- Switch from lasers to full guns (G cycles through your options); lasers do the least damage of any of the gun types.
- You can usually choose to fly with a less experience (and/or more responsive) wingman. The wingman selection is on the loadout computer before you take off (after your briefing). Maniac (and Hawk) are great, others aren't... and with many you can just order them back to base or to stay on your wing.

(I never really fought for kills in Wing Commander IV -- there's no glory in killing other humans...)
 
It's not like there's any glory in killing Kilrathi either, is there? Usually players fight for "kills" to show that they are good pilots, not because they want to obliterate everything. But anyway, one of the (many) things I like about WC4 is the Leech weapons. You can choose to spare many pilots, even if the game tends to glitch (there are problems with additional waves). :p

About the "more responsive" thing - I believe there are only two unresponsive pilots in the game : Maniac, and Seether.
 
Usually players fight for "kills" to show that they are good pilots, not because they want to obliterate everything
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I had this train of thought when I was replaying WC1 recently, that true combat pilots often consider their enemy a 'target' rather than a casualty - but I think in the case of the Kilrathi, there was a genuine kind of vengeful blood-lust on the Terran side, for glory against the 'evil' Empire.

WC3 especially made me really hate the Cats, although portrayed elsewhere as intelligent resourceful beings, seeing Thrakhath put his claws through Angel with a look of sheer hatred upon his face, certainly gave me a desire to obliterate all of his foul kind forever. Does this simulate racism? Against non-human beings? Sometimes the wonderful WC universe asks some deep questions.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
A few suggestions:

(I never really fought for kills in Wing Commander IV -- there's no glory in killing other humans...)
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What about mutants from GE program? At least few times I have been actually blowing up ejection pods from Dragons after Telamon...
 
Say, has anyone ever tried to do a full "Pacifist Run"? As in, finishing the game while taking care to destroy as few ships as possible? Talking about all this makes me want to try it.
 
Sharpshooter said:
Say, has anyone ever tried to do a full "Pacifist Run"? As in, finishing the game while taking care to destroy as few ships as possible? Talking about all this makes me want to try it.
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I think I'll do it on one of my next runs through WC4, which won't be for awhile, as I started the series over now that I have a joystick, but haven't had much time to play, and have been focusing much of that time on Phantasy Star Online. We need to figure out what the "minimum" number of necessary kills are, based off when you have ships that have leech guns, and things like the Vesuvius. Anyone happen to know?
 
Apparently, you've got to destroy a lot more ships than I thought - sometimes you don't have enough missiles to be able to leech everything (in some Confed missions), sometimes you can't win if you don't destroy at least a few targets (like the mission where you have to capture the space lab), and sometimes you've got to destroy everything if you want to win (like that mission where you have to rescue the BW convoy). Of course, you can afford to lose some missions, but in some cases it doesn't really make sense (I mean, would anyone let a BW convoy die just because they really wanted to leech everything?).

Anyway, I got as far as Peleus, and using leech tactics here is proving to be suicidal, especially in the second mission.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
A few suggestions:

- Switch from lasers to full guns (G cycles through your options); lasers do the least damage of any of the gun types.
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Alternatively, use H in the Banshee to switch over to the Scatter Gun. I never had much luck with the strange fire distribution, but I know a number of people on here swear by it.
 
You just have to get close enough to count the individual rivets on the target's fuselage, where the spread is minimal.

Mind you, by the time I was done playing through, I'd ran through half of the UBW's annual paint budget, just by them having to replace paint scraped off from getting too close. :D
 
Remember, like other's said, to switch to full guns or your other guns.
Also, if you have a StormFire (use 'H' to select alternate weapons), it can be very useful!

My last play through I experienced some kind of strange collision detection problem where weapons would seem to pass through ships without scoring damage. Maybe this had to do with 'collisions turned off'. I'm not sure.

But if you're seeing shield flair ups, then you just need to make sure you're hitting them with enough oompth often enough to make sure they can't recover.
 
Actually, after complaining, I am wrong. Certain missions are actually harder than others no matter the settings or wingmen. In some missions, you can tag down fighters with just lasers. In others, you must use missiles. I always wanted WC4 to be relevant, but often forget it was written in a code they probably study in history now. There are no randoms. Each mission played a certain way will produce like results..
 
Sorry for the double post. I got a Bearcat with auto aiming. I sat behind a fighter and blasted. Not 1 of my shots hit. I had him flat plane against my guns. Nada.

So only missiles work in this game. Wow, what a waste of a joystick.
 
The bearcat's guns are way out on the wingtips, and the auto-aim will happily send shot after shot to either side of the smaller targets. And you go up in Arrows in the Bearcat missions, so there are plenty of small targets.
 
I think IV is the game I least enjoyed. I remember not really liking the game engine very much (I thought the WC3 one was better) and only really played it to see what was going to happen next.
 
grasshopper10 said:
Sorry for the double post. I got a Bearcat with auto aiming. I sat behind a fighter and blasted. Not 1 of my shots hit. I had him flat plane against my guns. Nada.

So only missiles work in this game. Wow, what a waste of a joystick.
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The Bearcat's gun positioning is very strange so it's likely your shots were flying to either side of your target. It will take some time to get used to them. This doesn't mean that you can ignore missiles, they play a very important role in WC4 and jockeying for a good missile shot against that priority target can be just as much of a strain on your joystick as a gun only dogfight.
 
Lorien said:
The Bearcat's gun positioning is very strange so it's likely your shots were flying to either side of your target. It will take some time to get used to them. This doesn't mean that you can ignore missiles, they play a very important role in WC4 and jockeying for a good missile shot against that priority target can be just as much of a strain on your joystick as a gun only dogfight.
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The bearcat... the Confed version of the Dralthi. :D
 
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