R2-Opus2

Well, I hope the modding community can convert some of these "multiplayer only" maps for use in single player. Or, when the editor comes, it can do that (i.e. supplanting the stock maps with ones you made). I see the points made about the SSD and such, the bigger units get the larger maps have to be or else every ship has to be scaled down (probably not fighters though).

I'm just thankful to see this kind of support for a Star Wars game, let alone a LucasArts property. Since I'm not much of a multiplayer, I'm looking forward to the editor myself. That's not to say I don't appreciate their patch updates and the occasional offical maps to mess with. i.e. if not replacement maps for the stock planets, I'll take skirmish maps.

Thanks for the update. Although I'm not sure how measurable it would be for me, since I do primarily single player stuff. I suppose I'll still grab it though for its LAN stuff - never know when that will come in handy. A question regarding the map editor for when you can answer it... Can we edit in where we place build pads for instance? Just seems on the avialable maps that some of these are a bit too spread out in some instances to be worth it, strategically speaking. Although I have to admit it now, that I probably have not seen an entirely built up map yet to know if all the build pad placements made total sense. I am curious to know if something can be done in campaign modes and others where it appears the AI won't build much beyond a particular tech level or build bigger stations.

With the Empire, it seems the rushing planet tactic you used as Rebel is pretty much the same with them. I see them fielding Acclaimers and loads of Tartans most times, so to get around that annoyance asap, I just have to dominate space quickly in the campaigns and game scenario parts. Something I haven't figured out has any effect, is whether using smugglers (while good for you if you need funds) hampers the enemy's industrial capacity at all. If it did, it might partially explain why they build such low level stuff all the time, but then, they seem to do that anyway.

What what?

Well I suppose unit experience can remain even without the commander, but mostly what I was putting forth was that some of those capabilites, probably should remain under the column of commander abilities. Otherwise I think we'd siphon too much worth away from their aspects to a point where a commander wouldn't necessarily be needed. Basically, that to use them might mean all the more difference in battle performance than straight up unit experience. What I would do, just to use the Force Commander "experience bars" analogy again: - Find the differences between 1 red bar'd unit acting alone vs 1 red bar'd unit plus 1 red bar'd commander. The reason I didn't particularly care to delve this deeply is because I think it'd take that much longer to tweak out all the balance issues over all unit types vs just giving the experience to the commanders. But going back to that example, what could the experienced unit be able to do without the commander's presence? I'm thinking slight accuracy improvement but no health or sight improvement for example. Point is, even if you have unit experience, what becomes of the role of a commander now?

Bah, I shoulda known this might not be true, at least not yet. Uh, considering its in general discussion? If it was official, I'd assume this thread would be in the stickied news section right? Anyway, here's hoping there'll be an offical announcement soon about it so we know what's what.

I got all the way to the Veers mission (I think that's the one after Geonosis or the Han Solo one). I haven't run into any problems that everyone else has had yet, but all I can recommend you do is try again from the beginning if a reload doesn't solve the problem. The one problem I can remember though is I had been doing my maintenance routine on my computer, running adaware and spyware etc. and cleaned out some files. It wound up cleaning out apparantly, the files associated with the game's key which necessitated a fresh install which sucked.

I think experience could matter more if persistant damage were in. It'd help to apply more worth to units I feel. And/Or, lump everything this thread is about and merge it with the capabilities of the commanders, this way, your managing less units overall, and just managing commanders (and perhaps whatever their ratings are i.e. where you might then deploy them in the conflict). The way I figure it, the commanders can be better focal points for this kind of thing. - Want your ships to be healed/repaired a little faster after a battle? Assign a commander - Want to have overall unit health improved? Assign a commander - Want persistant accuracy and sight bonuses? Assign a commander - Want to be able to selectively retreat certain damaged units without retreating from the overall battle to bring in fresh units in their place? Assign a commander - Want weapon hardpoints to slowy regenerate/be rebuilt or hangers to spawn fighters faster? Assign a commander - And anything else I forget just now Point is, some of these characteristics already exsist (granted, probably not very noticable on the face of things), but I think this area could be better improved. I mean, if the units themselves aren't to be lended experience over time, might as well make it a commander issue. Let these units gain experience instead and translate this better to all the units under its command. Then, there's more worth to the academy and constructing them, and after which there can be balance tweaks in terms of how much these commanders should cost to create. Personally, if even a fraction of the above worked and mattered a little more noticably, I'd jack their costs up another thousand or so. I thought Force Commander did an adequate job in this regard, i.e. experienced units over time would see 1, 2 & finally 3 red bars next to their unit icon. The units themselves might still seem throwaway in a sense, and yet, not so much with a commander assigned to a particular group. It'd be those we'd be paying more attention to anyway.

First, and I have no way to compare, I just figure safer than sorry in this case, but I always have a fleet commander. If the corvettes are numerous, I find a lot of the time I'm clicking ctrl+a to select everyone to pound 'em down in a concentrated way as possible. Admittedly it makes things difficult when there are Nebs and Assault frigates present. In any case I find I shift everyone to hit one target at a time depending on how much I'm getting slammed.

My thought process has been that if you don't have persistant damage, there isn't too much of a point of having individual ship retreats. Personally I'd like both as I think they'd work better hand in hand. The way I was thinking retreat could work would first be a matter of: 1. The Engine hardpoint needs to still be there for it to be open to your units like it is now. 2. Keep retreat viable as is for the entire fleet if its selected (i.e. Ctrl+A then clicking the retreat button) 3. Single fleet retreats could work where selecting a unit, then the retreat button only retreats that vessel while not ending the battle. Barring all of that however, it would at least be nice to have either self destructs on all ships capable of it that might cause some damge to the enemy when it dies - Or if its engines still work, telling it to ram a target. I figure if you can't leave, might as well go out in a blaze of glory

I think your right Throxx. For example, I started playing futher along in the Empire Campaign, and just completed the mission to Geonosis. Now on other maps most of the time you can get to Geonosis by way of Tatooine, and from Geonosis to Ryloth. Before I did the mission though, I could have gone straight to Geonosis by way of Eriadu. Anyway, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, you can't go to Geonosis from Eriadu in another mode. I think this was campaign specific.

From what I can tell, in conquest, the routes are always the same. Its when you do campaigns or whatever where the routes may be changed. They're not always consistant between modes given that not all planets are available.

I never ever move those robot spotters into harm's way. I always put them in some obscure as-out-of-the-way spots on the map that I can, since its scanner can target any section of map without having to be there. The artillery pieces I keep in the rear, just behind a force in front of it of infantry/Plex, TB-4s or TB-2s - basically I use a strategy of overlapping protection. If I have them as well, I may have a flight of 3-6 airspeeders for things that slip through my lines. In short, I use units that can actually fight as my artillery units' true "spotters", and only occasionally ever need to use the ones it comes with for things such as bombing run targets still under fog of war.

Perhaps it is a bit excessive, but this all depends too on what the enemy is fielding at the time, what planets they keep trying to take back, and overall pop cap. True about the planetary garrisions for ground units as Rebs. Yes, the Empire can't raid, however, I'd rather have troops close to where they are needed than subject them to long travel times at the last minute from systems in the rear. The other thing too is that after a while, I wind up with credits to burn, so usually frontline systems generally end up being the only defended ones with maybe one mine or two on the surface. Personally though, I think the Empire should get the ability to raid systems later in the game myeslf. Its one of the only foils I can see to the way I play.

I've been playing the Rebels recently, and have been using bigger fleets on my planets that border the Empire, while I have smaller garrison-ish forces on my worlds right behind the frontline systems (systems I know the Empire can't jump directly to . So that they are only one jump away from bolstering the front lines. In my last game I had something like this... Front Line: 1-2 Mon Cal Cruisers (if access to them isn't there, substituted in assault frigates) 4-6 Corvettes 2-4 Gunships 1-3 Assault Frigates (depends on the first factor) 2-4 Marauders Fighter Wings: 6-10 of X-Wings and Y-Wings 1-3 A-Wings All Frontline fleets where possible have at least 1 fleet commander (I don't know yet if having more than one in a single fleet helps even more or not other than redundancy) Backup Systems to the Frontline: (This depends on the size stations present on these to some degree.) i.e. -- If lvl 1 Station: I tend to go with 1-2 Assault Frigate, 1-2 Neb, 2 Gunships, 4 Corvettes & aprox. 6 of each fighter type. -- If lvl 2 through 5: I simply augment my garrision to bring them up to the first example w/maybe more fighters or the occasional Mon Cal cruiser. Since the advanced stations eventually come with 2 corvettes and 2 Nebs, I may only put one Assault Frigate there w/perhaps 4 Xs & 4 Ys & 2 Gunships. I may scale the Corvette/Gunship numbers based on how many anti-starfighter ships I see the enemy fielding on the front line. Frontline Planetary Garrisons ususally get something like this for Rebs: Units: 1 Infantry, 2 Plex missile dudes, 2 T2-Bs, 1 airspeeder, 1 Field Cmdr., 1 artillery & 2 T4-B tanks. Surface Structures: Usually an Ion Cannon, and I try to make room, slots permitting for Turbolaser towers and a shield. The other structure types I build more or less willy nilly as needed unless there's some planetary perk involved. The planets in the rear bascially become credit generators.

I'd like to see: 1. More characters 2. Luke playable on the ground - perhaps in command of a flight of airspeeders. His secondary special ability wouldn't come into play until he was shot down - but I was thinking he could take out AT-ATs as in TESB. Or just sort of transfer the infiltrator concept to him when on foot i.e. planting bombs. 3. Ship damage having some recovery time (not unlike when Ackbar's ship dies but he lives, it takes time for him to come back to action) - Perhaps relating to this, the ship needing to repair needs to be on a world of yours with a station that can build that model (or you have to get the world its at to spec for faster results if it isn't mobile). I'm thinking put that blue timer "overlay" you have for characters out of action, and just put that over a ship that's damaged, separating it out into a free fleet slot so you can see them individualized (not in stack form unless the damage to the ships-of-same-type is the same). i.e. Well maybe all damaged ships would be in Fleet 3 for example, but if you had 3 Neb-Bs damaged, but only 2 had the same damage, they'd be together with a x2 symbol over it, while the third with different damage amount would be near it in the same fleet. The droid alert can tell you when a ship is repaired (and if it isn't there already, being able to select the droid's message to where a 'go to' thing happens where: A. The menu menu closes and B. The map zooms in on the relevant system from the message. Or better yet, use the red crosshair point of interest symbol used in the tutorial for things like that in galactic view. When a ship is repaired it moves it from the "damaged pile" to a fleet slot with unhurt ships or an open one so the player knows he can now move the unit. 4. Bigger galaxy 5. More maps 6. Different era units to facilitate fan-made campaigns etc. 7. An ability for players to add missions as per what missions do when enabled. 8. Playable factions other than Empire and Rebellion with their own units Can't think of too much else atm, so many good ideas here in general. I wouldn't mind seeing diplomacy and sabotage using characters as others have pointed to. I wouldn't mind seeing the Empire or any additional faction eventually be able to raid planets like the Rebels do too (for some, maybe they can't until a level of research has been done, or even that knowledge stolen). Edit: Figured I'd edit just to keep my thoughts together better... 9. An idea to help the persistant ship damage idea out: ...A. Keep the overall retreat option viable as it is now (but now, Ctrl+A, then clicking retreat button for all). ...B. With relation to damaged ships (which still have an engine hardpoint), allow them to retreat separately if selected out singly i.e. Just said ship gets to jump without the battle ending. This allows fresh reinforcements when the player sees fit, not when waiting for the cripled unit to die. ...C. Vice-versa, if a ship's engine hardpoint is gone, grey out the retreat button when it is selected (may already be there, just don't remember). ...D. Damaged ships that manage to retreat are singled out as per #3 when they fall back to the last planet. Retreated ships go straight to the last captured planet of yours nearest the battle initially, and do not que up in the reinforcements window during battle. 10. A supplemental idea in relation to the above, the option of a crippled ship (albeit again, must have an engine hardpoint intact) being able to ram a target to go out in a blaze of glory, if not a self destruct. Perhaps only an option as well if all shields are gone and the option only comes up if it has below 50% hull left (realize this may be a delicate balancing act - however given that engines are a primary target next to shields and hangers, well, perhaps not as bad as one would think) i.e. another requirement could be that there needs to be a fleet commander present in battle. 11. Something perhaps for higher difficulties? Allow the Rebellion to spawn fighters from their Mon Cal Cruisers & Nebulon-Bs. In addition, perhaps a weaker fighter replenishment idea in the form of escort carriers might be nice too for both sides (or even for all faction types). 12. A starship unit, expensive to come by, that could allow for stealing vessels. Give it a decent pop cap requirement so that it cannot dominate a mixed fleet arrangement. Fighters that would spawn from those ships with hangers previously would revert to the fighter types of the side who now owns it to further distinguish them (i.e. an ISD spawning X-Wings or pirate fighters obvisouly wouldn't belong to the Empire). In addition, to keep stolen variants from being overpowered, randomize the special abilities or the number of hardpoints the stolen unit would have after being repaired fully after the battle in which it was first aquired. Also by default, I believe that when a ship is stolen, it should be treated by the AI as a prized possesion such that, in the battle when a side first gets the unit, that unit goes to hyperspace (i.e. treated like point 9D). 13. We need something done about Fleet Commanders. i.e. If more than one is added, they spread out to other ships (except fighter squadrons) rather than all of them going to one ship. Maybe one way to do this easier would be to assign a ship to the fleet commander, just as the Piet or Ackbar characters represent their own ship in space combat. Maybe these "lesser" commanders can be associated with a medium ship such as a Nebulon-B or Acclaimater. The pop cap I'd reckon can stay the same, but I'd probably raise their cost to train one up. Basically I'd like to see them used similarly to how ground Field Commanders are handled, they land on the ground with a few soldiers for added protection. In space combat's case, associate them with a vessel type of some sort of their own.

Yea, I finally got a glimpse of the asteroid field and saw that the Empire kept going back and forth with 1 troop unit. I'm going to try this one again on medium and hard. For one, the Empire had only tried to take territory a few times (maybe that's why it was set to easy or something - maybe I didn't followup on the mission in a timely manner in order to make the AI do something different?) but I've seen more agressive AI on easy before in the other campaigns. A few more things I noticed: - Only saw the Empire using Tartar cruisers and Acclaimers. - Only a few worlds it turns out has any stations - usually low tech 1s and 2s at most - When the Empire did build a fleet in bulk, it was always the Tartar cruiser (I faced fleets from 20-26 of them). - I never came across any Imperial character yet in this one and presume they're all having tea on Coruscant as they giggle over the ineptitude of their Tartar cruiser captains. And those couple of troop shuttles I'd seen. I'll probably do my final push tomorrow just to see what they've built. Very few worlds in this scenario weren't developed by the AI. I'm curious to wonder too if they're not doing something because the game was on easy, or because I had changed the parameters of the game in the advanced settings or something (starting tech, credits and whatnot). After that, I'll switch sides and see how the AI manages the Rebels on Easy with this scenario before switching difficulties. I'll probably keep the parameters the same if I can.

I haven't had anything that bizarre yet, but I've used a fleet with Ackbar in it, Antilles, Han & Chewie, Luke, a handfull of big ships and about 10 squads of X and Ys. Autoresolving on two space battles quickly widdled away the fighters but I didn't lose any big ships or the characters. I guess I was lucky that time

Don't know yet if this is a bug, as my game hasn't flipped out too terribly other than this anomaly. Seems more an odd occurance I can't explain so it probably fits best here for now. I'm still in the middle of it, but I'm playing the second biggest (the one with 35 planets or so) campaign game as the Rebels, on Easy w/missions thing enabled. Anyway I was chugging along pretty good, when the droid message alerts get my attention. I kept seeing every game day or so this message... Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Neutral to Empire Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Empire to Neutral Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Neutral to Empire Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Empire to Neutral Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Neutral to Empire Control of the Vergesso Asteroids have gone from Empire to Neutral etc., etc. For now I don't have the range to send a spy to see what's going on, but at first I'd thought the Empire must have been having a big battle with pirates or something, but I think its a case of the Empire expecting to meet me there but I'm not there and so keeps checking. The system was probably defaulting to Neutral because it didn't build a station there. They've fought me in a couple of other places, but seems to be stuck in a loop over in that system. Gonna finish this one up later today and see if I can't see the fleet it has. Ok, so this sounds more like a bug

My guess is you'd have to treat the Death Star in the space portion as basically a "planet destination" (a replacement or an addition for the scenario (in terms of galactic view) - either one really), such that you'd see the surface textures better, and the DS its self could basically be a planet sized representation like with other planets seen in the space battle view. A superlaser that works against big ships would be nice, could be substituted in for the ion cannon or hypervelocity shots. Not sure what the ground portion for the interior of the DS should have, but my guess is if its meant to be foot soldiers only, the more garrison structures you have on it the better, and probably anti infantry turrets and bacta stations would be the only things you could purchase on the build pads (maybe repair if your allowing for speeder bikes zipping down the corridors). There could be secondary structures like they have for the indigeonus units on planets to make it more challenging. If you wanted to get more mission objective oriented here, you could have the droids go with you playing as the rebels to hotwire something.

I think I saw this both before and after the patch at least once each, but I know what your talking about. I haven't yet fooled around with the control settings for mouse scrolling, maybe there's an arrangement in there that helps.

Just an aside to the above, Bilbringi was in Rebellion But I love the idea of Myrkr especially. Imagine the one place Jedi powers should be muted, or only useable outside of forrested areas (I think that's when Luke could use his, not sure). I suppose the effect I'm thinking of in relation to this game that is, is how certain ship functions cease when in nebulas for instance. i.e. I had Ackbar's Home One graze one one time yesterday in battle and I noticed his concentrated fire and boost shield ability was gone inside. Maybe something similar can work for Jedi characters on the surfaces. That element aside, there's also elements of this planet that make sensors ineffective or dulled in range. Oh yea, plus there's those ravenous lion-dog things I can't spell About packing the galaxy view with more planets. I'm thinking one way to do it is probably sort of like Rebellion had, with sectors, such that, when one is selected, or in the zoomed in (in this case, the zoomed out look in the current view) in order to move units around. Unless of course the galaxy map as is can just be expanded in an outward pattern so you wouldn't have to worry too much about zooms as might be the case with a sector arrangement. Although I do wonder about how hard it might then be to select planets from the mini map in galaxy view - those dots would get awefully smallish I reckon.

I think that tweaking things to let the Empire increase its fighter garrison in addtion to whats on its stations is possibly a good counter to letting the couple reb ships spawn their own. Personally I think only Nebs and Mon Cal cruisers should have hangers though, if the waves can be made respectable enough and spread out. If the balance is still in the Rebel's favor here, let the Empire build a fighter besides the scout that can hyperspace with its fleets. I'm not that creative when it comes to modding games in general, so maybe people who have can shed some light on the possible peformance issues. It may be that the best mod would be to enhance the Empire's scout ship somewhat since it can already hyperspace with the fleet and is already deployed when the space map loads.

I haven't yet narrowed down a good mix for my fleets, I just sort of have a little of everything with a ton of Y-Wing backup. Tonight I began to play around more with assigning some of my fleet elements to hotkeys and that began to help a lot as well. I had a lot of these fighters fall to the Empire's Tartan cruisers and IPVs, so I approached things more cautiously as enemy units became visible when the fog lifted. I sometimes forget to utilize the Y's ion cannon ability but found that helped a great deal against their anti fighter ships' shields as my other forces could pick away at those while I advanced my Y's further forward. I've yet to play around with some of the other attack commands on that bar, for now I've just been right-click attacking (or single left click? for when I've selected a unit's special ability), and using the guard command, but more often than not, against a hardened target like a station or VSD or something, if I have Ackbar for example I try to save his concentrated fire (which works best if all the units are focused on the same target). What I have been able to prioritize going up against the Empire's fleet target wise for me has been: 1) Take down shields 2) Take out hangers (takes out the fighter spawns) 3) Use Antilles and the marauders to saturate an area high in enemies 4) Any units left over can support the maurauders attack or can be freed up gradually to be diverted someplace else in combat. 5) Playing single player so far, pausing time is your friend I've found those work pretty well for me so far but its hard to divide which fleets get characters to help it at any given moment. This is part of the challenge so its all good. What I'd like to know more about is whether or not we can stack the abilities of the Field/Fleet Commanders if there's more than one in a ground or fleet battle. Right now I'm suspecting they can't, that its just a redundancy thing. Now, playing the Empire on the other hand, knowing full well the Rebels can use raid fleets on its worlds in range of them, I've found I had to play a slightly more defensive game. I suppose this is a good thing though, just not very used to playing the Empire just yet but I have been using those 5 things above in terms of using those stand off cruisers in my fleet mix. The only thing I think is missing for the Rebels is giving the Nebulon-Bs a hanger. I think it'd be one reason why you might weigh keeping one in your fleets and not replace them all with assault frigates later. Someone corrrect me if I missed anything along these lines, but I think only the Mon Cal's cruiser can spawn fighters right? (stations notwithstanding)