R2-Opus2

Most of whats on this screen in RebED seems self explanitory to me, however in the upper left where you select between viewing sectors or individual systems, there's a checkbox for a "move mode". What exactly is this for?

Getting back to the topic for a moment, I found theforce.net's site, specifically their technical commentaries on the Mon Cal ships, to be enlightening. However, without knowing the specs of the other "anonymous" designs, or total number of cruisers present, we can't really get an accurate indication of the total number of starfighter squadrons at their disposal. All we really have are the specs of Home One and the Nebulon-Bs (although with the one designated as a "Medical Frigate", I do not know if it was outfitted to be that, thus cutting back on the fighter squadron total we know of to be 2 or not). Also according to this particular photo they have... http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/given/battle3.jpg Assuming the right most Mon Cal cruiser is Ackbar's, if you look just below and to the right of it, it looks like you can see 4 Neb Bs in profile (two below, two to the right), then what appear to maybe be two more Neb-Bs facing the viewer and presenting a narrower profile (looks like an "I" with the bulbous portion near the top). One of those is just to the lower left of Ackbar's ship, left of the two other side-view Nebs, and the other is between the trio of other Mon Cal ships (it overlaps the bisecting equatorial line of the DS II). So for the moment, by my count that's Ackbar's Home One at 10 squadron capacity, and allowing for the fact the Medical Frigate was "modified" taking away its squadron holding ability, that leaves 5 more Neb-Bs holding 2 each for another total of 10 squadrons. One other thing they posited about one of the other "wingless" designs, one of which was the second cap ship destroyed by the superlaser, might have been akin to Home One's specs, if so that might yield another 10 squadrons, but I think the evidence is still inconclusive. I don't think anyone even knows how many squads the winged "Liberty" type cruisers had, let along the rest of the wingless variants. And about those ship silouettes with Endor as the backdrop, they also have a pic, but I can't make out anything from it other than it appears to be 17-18 "blobs". Can't tell if its all rebels or what. http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/zs/rotj/flee1.jpg It just seemed odd to me now that I've seen these that they had this many cap ships. The superlaser took out one "winged" design (the Liberty, and one "wingless" one. In another shot it appears there was another "winged" cruiser that survived up to the point-blank attack as well as a couple more of the wingless ones. I say odd that they had so many, cause I can't recall seeing that many ships enter hyperspace from Sullust in that shot So I think besides Home one, there were at least 2 or 3 other "wingless" (one arguably with Home One's specs which would indicate Ackbar's ship was NOT unique) variants, and at least 2 "Liberty" types. I still believe the key to the Rebels victory lays with its starfighter squadrons more than the number of cap ships, but I couldn't speculate more on that without knowing the fighter capacities of the other ships. I'm going with 20 "known" squadrons at this point.

While the enthusiasm for the product isn't lost in the message, it just seems like its mixing sucking up to the guy with some antagonism thrown in for who he had worked for at the time. I'd keep the message's constructive points to address frustrations of the game, but I'd lose elements that probe the guy about "what he's up to", or any other things about why he couldn't respond fast enough for ya. Just my opinion, but I think there's something to be said for keeping things short, sweet, and to the point.

I've had frequent and infrequent occurances of new resources/natural disasters, and it didn't matter if I was doing well or not. I still try to get around them though through save games. Sometimes I've found that after a few times of loading and older game and playing up to the point it happened, at one point it'll stop repeating at that turn. its still only works though if you've saved enough turns prior (I ususally hope I've got one 10 turns before, but I've risked it at around 8 turns before the event). The only way to know if your doing it right is if each time the disaster hits, it strikes a different planet each time, not the same one. If its the same one your screwed (i.e. saved too close to the event). I just had one at turn 70, but it sucked in that instance cause the last time I saved was right after I began around turn 12

I'm still confused because I'm sure game difficulty must be a factor to some extent, but even on hard games where most of the system sectors are medium/medium or high/high (visibility/importance), I've still hardly seen him leave, though I know he has many times in my previous games. I think I'm beginning to narrow down my problems with AI and how it ranked characters. I believe it must have something to do with how I've set leadership/and or combat stats. In my game before, I touched no character stats except leadership and even though many characters ended up with Mon Mothma stats, at least I was seeing admirals/commanders/generals on fleets and planets as I should, and more often. When I went to make my "jedi game", I maxed leadership on all sides and up'd everyone's espionage, diplomacy, combat (I didn't fool with loyalty really since i turned off traitors). and everyone is easily over 100 in all stats. Then once detected as jedi, those go up even more. Its just a theory at this point, but I think AI rank preference is determined by combat and/or leadership (which might be why I'm seeing only generals on fleets). I'd like to get some confirmation on what I'm seeing from any of you who are messin' around with Rebed. I'm going to try another test, but leave the couple of characters I've set up to be jedi at the beginning intact on each side...One game where everyohe's stock stats are left alone (minus the exempt coupla jedi characters, their probability will stay at 100). Sorry to get off on a tangent, but I think the way I'm modding my games has something to do with AI rank preference, but also character movement. I may need to do a few tests for each game difficulty, one stock game each, and one modded game each (but keeping the two jedis on each side as exceptions through all tests), and also plugging in low/medium/high imporantce/visibility. I know the AI will typically keep Empire characters in the core until its dealt with first with diplomacy, however if a characters stats at diplomacy exceed or rival that of Palpatine's, that may be one major reason why he never leaves his comfy chair. If anyone does any of these tests, also pay note to what those two jedis are up to, and take note of whatver ranks the game assigns them. If I'm right than I suspect if the game assigns them one, it'll be a general, and if that's so, I need to lower combat and/or leadership (or not give so many people jedi powers heh).

Its been a long time since I looked at mine, all my books and things are in boxes stuffed in my guest room while I repainted my office. Sounds the same as the chase camera to me though, I'll check it out.

I know there's a centering toggle for whatever it is your targetting, so if you wanted to have the camera follow the Y-Wings movement, all you'd have to do is select whichever fighter group it is then the center nav button then zoom in. This I know about, but I havn't found a "cockpit view", how'd you do it?

Now that's a new one, Palpy on sabotage missions, still never seen him do that in all these years heh:)

Update: Trying out my second game (my second since a reinstall). This time I didn't touch the variances in skills, but somehow the AI went back to putting its characters in command more often like it should so I reckon this mighta been the source of that dilema. It makes no sense to me if this is why it screwed up before, but oh well. I also gave everyone jedi potential, but to counter some of the drastic variance trouble I had, I tacked on anywhere from 100-150 in each skill (on both sides, almost half of the characters had "Mon Mothma" stats *shudder*). Also since i'm dubious whether the AI will use Palpy or Vader to train Jedi, I decided to up the jedi rank of a couple of characters on the Empire side, and also gave one of those the ability to train. I'm curious to wonder if for some reason the AI won't do those missions with those two key characters at all...but might if a secondary character could train...we'll see.

Curious to wonder what might influence the AI to move Palpatine around doing diplamacy or anything else. In one instance, I saw him lead an abduction mission against Han since no one else was available (or maybe there was, I can't remember), but mostly I have seen him leave Coruscant to do diplomacy. However in these last couple of games, he kept his flabby self parked on Coruscant the whole time. One development that happened with him that I have not seen with any other character, is when I had Coruscant blockaded after he was located somewhere else (Balmorra I think it was), nonetheless he still attempted to go there. The only other time I ever see a character go to a system that's been blockaded is if they had been on a mission...Palpy wasn't on a mission, he just wanted his throne back in this case I guess. Anyway, just wondering if certain events trigger certain preferences out of the AI (or if its something else inherent in how Rebed is setup). For instance, I already had Luke get captured by Vader, and I let him take Luke to Coruscant to meet the Emperor. Luke confronted the Emperor and captured both him and Vader together even though the encounter injured Luke. They wound up on Uvena, and afterwards, I had a fleet blockade Coruscant, and since I wanted to use it to build up my characters (I maxed out energy slots for it and HQ), I had to be sure that I set one or both of them free first. Vader's still hanging out on Balmorra, but the first thing the Emperor wanted to do was to risk the blockade and go back to the capital. Weird. Nobody takes his comfy chair I guess.

Luke has to be a Master yes, but in order for him to train Leia specifically, he has to confront Vader at least once to uncover his heritage. But as a Master he can train anyone else he's detected the Force in.

In the beginning yea, I use mostly smaller faster vessels that deal with starfighter defenes rather than battling fleets head to head. Btw, I seldom tweak ships from their standard stats, but a typical tweak for me is on the maintenance side of things most usually. When I have tweaked cap ships though, it's generally been to give ships firepower on arcs where they didn't have anything at all. However I stray from lowering maintenance too low, cause when I get into tactical mode, sometimes the fleets are so huge on both sides, watching the battle is like watching a slide show, there's too much going on and too many objects hogging the screen, but I chalk that up to my system, it's quite old, but oddly, it's way more qualified to handle Rebellion than my first computer.

Its a coincidence we're talking about this, cause I just found out that injured characters CAN try to escape on their own. Its unusual in the sense that I thought a character's ability to escape on their own had to do with NOT being injured as well as if their combat ability was too low. Now I am not so sure which variable it looks at...I'd need to see if I couldn't injure somebody who's espionage might have also gotten real low from an injury, but I suspect instead that escaping has way more to do with leadership than any other stat. Welp, I have two characters captured so far, Garindan and Dorja. Dorja was injured and in captivity for several hundred turns so far. Its now around turn 1100 or so and he made a break for it, busting out of Tangrene and fleeing to Sarka. I had a fleet based at Tangrene with an Admiral and Commander (If one of them had been ranked General, maybe that's the rank to have to have an extra chance to stop escapees?) and immediately sent that on to Sarka to pick him up again. I do have characters abilities tweaked, but I'll get to that in a second... After arrival I performed an espionage mission to verify he was there so I could recapture him. Dorja's stats was at 0 combat by the way, but he still had espionage, and his leadership stats were about where they were, but both were lowered somewhat due to his injuries. As to the characters, I messed up with my last game session, I had wanted to make all of them jedis to have a tougher game but forgot to boost each secondary character's probability to 100...this time its set that way but with everyone's leadership boosted as well 200 reb/300+ for Imps (their bonus, besides whatever variables were in place). Some of you saw in other posts recently that I had an anomaly where the AI wasn't assigning ranks as liberally to their characters...all I was seeing was generals on fleets...no admirals or commanders, or generals or commanders on the ground, just generals on fleets. Anyhoo, reinstalled, retweaked but this time left the variables for the secondary chars alone and that seemed to do the trick. Anyway, sorry to go off on a tangent, but long story short, Dorja escaped despite being injured, and after I ran the espionage mission to spot him and pick him up, I saw no spec forces or other characters at Sarka...I think this guy escaped solely based on his leadership ranking.

Yep the Empire has it rough. They've got to defend a fixed location.

Characters don't just escape due to a rescue mission, sometimes any number of them can randomly try to. These attempts will happen regardless of where they are, how built up the facilities there are or whatever. Whether they'll succeed or not is a different story, but they will attempt to flee on their own at different times. I doubt however that any injured character can try to flee, I believe those must be rescued but I can't confirm this.

I have a similar loadout with my roving fleets, only heavier on the escort carrier/neb-b/corvette/gunship..this sort of fleet is often on the move, and all it is meant to contain is enough fighters to take out the enemy's interdictor and run if I have to do that, but essentially these are your typical hit and fade kinda groups. The fighter count on this kind of group for me is anywhere from 50-100 depending on how I've set up Rebed at the time (for instance if I've made any particualr ships that hold fighters cheap enough on the enemy's side that I have to have more of my own). Average fleet here might be approximately 10 escort carriers, 6-10 neb bs, 10 corvs, 10 gunships. Enough stuff to draw in enemy fighters, knock as many out as I can with at least one free squadron dealing with any inderdictor trouble if I have to flee. If I think I might need more bombarding stuff in such a fleet, I just add a few assault frigs to it. Fleets I want my characters to be on are a tad more robust. Again, depending on how cheap I've made cap ships on each side determines the sizes, but character fleets will have maybe 10 more of each type above (doubling up on corvs, gunships, & neb-bs especially), but with the addition of 10 mon cals, halve a dozen or so assault frigs with some cc-9600s, a few Daunts or Liberty and maybe a Bulwark or two to give the group appropriate punch. My HQ fleet on the other hand I go nuts on depending again on resources and how cheap I've made things. (i.e. I double the average number of each cap ship found in a different typical character fleet). Fighter count here is at least 50-100 more squads than the largest Imp fleet I might've run into. Sometimes I just forego an HQ fleet altogether, making sure instead that three is at least one interdictor and plenty of fighters based there.

If you can injure a character, and not kill them, the odds of them ever escaping are also reduced. I don't know if the chance of them escaping is at 0 or not, but it is significantly low. I've never actually witnessed an injured character escaping on their own.

True enough Ric, I also send espionage missions out with specforces while my characters are doing their thing, and if your using Coruscant to boost your characters up, you get a more complete assesment of the Empire's planets, including outer rim ones. I love it too when an enemy system has built up a ton of specforces and they're just sitting on a world not being used. Best places to expect a good surplus of specops is on worlds the AI has built up mostly training facilities. Those also tend to have some of the highest troop counts, and unless you have an insane amount of infiltrators or commandos with you, best just to bombard the troops away, and go to work on the rest of the specops stationed on the planet and whatever items are left standing. This tactic is only good if you expect you'll need to hurry up and move that group elsewhere, otherwise you can actually take more time to take out each troop regiment in addition to everything else.

I think you might be right about the KDY helping to thrwart missions, I believe every unit has some detection value, so even if it is not that wonderful at defending systems, at least its good at detection as well as being cover for evacuation. That's about the only use I see out of them. The main planets I use them on though are only ones where characters reside, especially Coruscant and Rebel HQ. On these last two, I tend to go with tripple defenses across the board compared to other important systems. With Rebed I made my game so Rebel HQ and Coruscant were maxed out facility-wise, making them stronghold type worlds (approximately 130 energy slots). I have anywhere from 6-9 of every shield and gun battery and up to four times the troops and fighter squads of other important systems.

Oh yea, my next goal as I'm playing Rebs right now, is to use Coruscant as my place to boost characters. With Rebed, I gave each side the max number of facility slots to make them a stronghold worlds, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130 energy slots loaded with target opportunities Anyway, its fun to keep seeing the cinematic of Coruscant getting overrun as I do the risnse/repeat process

I should note also that sometimes I build up characters first, before seeing if Vader or Luke detects them to be jedi if they havent already. Sometimes just being detected raises their stats significantly, but even moreso if I've worked on them first. Right now I'm trying to get each one to about 130-150 in combat before sending them to where Luke or Vader is. With others I'm doing a similar thing, blockading a system, removing resistance, but having them boost their leadership through insighting a revolt. If I have no where to use that group of characters or fleet in question, I continue to use the same world as one to boost leadership. One way to make a neutral world turn sides is continue to send missions to it...espionage and recons. Soon the world will turn sides, however it takes much less time to bring the world back to neutral than it would if the world was fully to one side.

One of my favorite ways to build up characters relatively fast is to blockade a couple enemy systems in a sector, preferably with the highest energy slots there are (maximizing target opportunities), making sure I've already taken the others. What my blocade fleets consists of is largely escort carriers, maximizing fighter support in case the enemy comes my way, in addition to a few transport ships minimum for troops. I put an Admiral, General and Commander (whichever chars I'm wanting to boost up first) onboard each blockading fleet. With the remaining worlds in that sector, I have one character on each doing diplomacy. They'll be continuing to do that mission for awhile as I rotate to each fleet one of these characters after another is build up where I want them. Here's what I do...I assault the system with troops, then I use construction yards in that same sector to build mines and refineries on those occupied planets. When they're full up, I send the troops back to the orbiting fleet, thus returning the planet to the enemy while still keeping the system blockaded. Then I have a character going to work sabotaging what has just been built, rinse and repeat. I assault again, build up the world, remove the troops when done, and send that same character or another to sabotage. Each time troops are sent back up to the orbiting blockade, that lowers popular support in the surrounding planets, hence the diplomats. The main downside is one sector is tieing up a significant number of characters and a coupla chunks of fleet resources...in my current case 8 diplomats on the surrounding planets + 6 characters on the fleets...3 to each. The fighter defenses in each fleet I have go up as I gain new info on similar enemy fighter defense averages from their roving fleets when they make appearances. I use the remaining characters in other roming fleets of my own, those I build up as I can, though they're progress is much slower than my other chars in that blockaded sector. When possible, I also use Han to shuttle characters around to save time, rotating the more strengthened characters out to those other fleets.

You could be right, I'd have to go back and try counting ships There is another shot I need to examine closely too, and that's the shot of Wedge leaving the DS ahead of the fireball. There's a shot of him blasting out, then a quick shot showing his direction headed back to the fleet. I couldn't tell if their ships were still engaged with the Imperials' at that point but you could see their silouettes I think with Endor as the backdrop. I think they show the shot again of the fleet briefly after the Falcon exits. It goes by fast so I need to try to see what I can make out of those ship silouettes. If those are not Imp ships still battling the Rebs, then the Rebs committed some backup forces we didn't know about late in the game. As for the transports, you raise another point, and that is if they weren't used as bombs as I posited, then the only use they could really serve is to bolster the strike team only if they ever got the shield down. That's a huge gamble in its self, not to mention a waste either way if their tactics didn't call for point blank attack. Another reason to have them there might be that if they did turn the tide, they have ready troops to seize any ships they managed to disable...probably something not possible during the conflict, but only after it since we know they did take a few (referenced in a novel or two...usually describing them as not ready for service heh). As for casualties, I don't know what ships that were there were destroyed or damaged, but in terms of what the superlaser took out, those were much larger ships (one looked like a mon cal cruiser, and another resembled the Dauntless cruiser in the game), at least going from memory. But this is what led me to wonder what other tactics they might have employed, since the loss of those two ships seemed to me anyway, to reduce what they had significantly. I tend to think they had more starfighters there than was visible on screen and that those ships were modified to maximize hanger space. Its all I can come up with why they had such a paltry capital ship group compared to the Empire and still won.

Well, as soon as I have a traitor, I separate them out from others doing missions cause I know they'll almost always foil it. Best to send them out on their own doing stuff, preferably away from important systems.

If they do I've never noticed. I've always thought that you tend to have more traitors if your winning than if you are losing.