Original Freelancer Playthrough

A agree with FF 100%. I remember how horrid I was when I started playing. You’ll pick it up quickly enough, and that’s when you’ll really start having fun.

Sizer wrote:
A agree with FF 100%. I remember how horrid I was when I started playing. You’ll pick it up quickly enough, and that’s when you’ll really start having fun.

Yeah, it happened to me too. This is one though game to catch! As soon as you will understand how and why you will enjoy it more.
Since I have no time to watch those 23:50 minutes I can’t advice you anything. Sorry. I can just say that when I first played Freelancer I just went on with the story. I just used the best gun I could find, and the best fighter I could buy. About missions (between storyline missions): I just did the one with best reward, since I’m experienced with simulators.

Another few comments from your latest video:

-Missiles add velocity to whatever speed you’re going. This means that going towards your target increases your missile’s speed while going away decreases it. Obviously, it is much harder to evade a fast missile than it is a slow one, thus you should avoid firing missiles when moving backwards with e-kill. Your best bet would be to tap the thrusters a bit to move forwards without disengaging e-kill, then fire the missiles.

-Missiles have a blast radius. This usually is good for you because it means what would be a near miss for a normal gun will explode and do splash damage to your target. However, “missile spamming” is discouraged because of this, since when your first missile strikes, its blast will damage the missile following it, starting a chain reaction that ends up destroying a lot of missiles without them ever damaging your target. You can have more than one missile airborne (yeah, bad term, I know, spaceborn maybe? ), but space them out enough for them not to chain detonate, otherwise they’ll be doubly expensive.

-Feel free to explore. You’ve been staying near Manhattan and wondering whether you can go somewhere else; the game is built so you can explore. If it doesn’t want you to go somewhere, it’ll lock the place down, for instance simply denying you jump gate access.

Exploration: Look for red crosses x at the navmap. Those are wrecks you can loot, which might contain goods or weapons or maybe even drugs.
Hint: The badlands might be a good place to start looking for them, they are dangerous so some ships might get lost there.
You need to shoot at them in order to let them drop their stuff. In the singleplayer you can only load a wrecks once in the game. Of course except if you die after you looted it but before you were able to save.

Oh, and FLHack/the single-player console from adoxa are great additions for the single-player:
http://adoxa.110mb.com/freelancer/index.html

I am not sure if they can used with old savegames, even though I think so, maybe someone here can answer the question? If you want to be sure simple copy the freelancer/my games folder in My Documents.

Those tools allow things like having multiple ships and so on.

FLHack also has a very high chance of breaking the SP storyline - don’t use them with that.

Plus, I’m of the opinion that most games should be enjoyed in their purest form at least once.

Welcome to your first excursion out of New York.

You’ve discovered Trade Lane raiders. Hostile factions will attempt to raid trade lanes, disabling them and engaging anything that comes out.

Your worth went down because you used nanobots/batteries

As FF said in one of his posts, only dock with things when you’re really close. You almost died when you docked with that tradelane from a distance. That’s what can happen.

The Drail - It’s one of the Liberty Rogue weapons.

Cruise Engines are what you should use to get around everywhere. Use them more than you use thrusters for travel. Its what they’re for. Thrusters are for combat. (I know, i’ve said it.)

To get to mission waypoints, dont use Go To on the last one, manually fly to it with cruise using Shift-W and drop out using S

And in combat, strafe more. It helps.

Just to reiterate for the last time before you play again, Don’t hold down the trigger. Burst when you’re in range and have a shot. Energy becomes really important when you get better guns.

Oh, and to help on your little top or bottom question - Look on the rings. Green and Red lights, do the math XD

And to clarify, you won’t find guns of an enemy faction on any base. They only sell their own guns (so Justice are Liberty Police, or LPI, guns). Going on Liberty Navy ships will give you access to their own stuff (including the rather nice Vengeance weapon line).

You can also note that while Drails do more damage, they cost more energy per shot than the Justices. That’s all detailed in the infocard on the bottom-left in the equipment dealer (the small paragraph you’d have to read ).

Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your missiles cost you 1,500 credits, which is more than half the payout of the mission you’ve taken… Kinda expensive. Don’t expend them too much or you’ll have a hard time getting your money’s worth from them (this is applicable at any level too, honestly for the SP where money makes you progress, I wouldn’t use missiles at all).

Your flight’s definitely improved on part 9 - all you need now is to get practice flying and shooting

Just remember to use e-kill often because that lets you be on the move constantly at much faster velocities. You’ll notice that you get hit most often when you’re going at standard thrust (80), whereas while thrusting it’s much easier to dodge shots. E-kill makes you go at like 120-170 most of the time, which is way better, and you can just tap on your thruster to change course, which is very economical and throws the aim off of anyone trying to shoot at you.

Looking at your cursor though, you could always tweak the mouse sensitivity. FL happens to have that setting, which can be very useful if you’re shaking a little. If you bump it down a notch or two, you’ll increase your precision at a slight penalty in speed (which, to be honest, is negligible in single player).

Also, a little trick for the hotkeys:
WASD lets you move, you already know that. Think of cruise as an extension of your movement and then Shift+W will be a natural shortcut for it.

The shortcut for missiles is Q. This is just so you can easily access it from your normal configuration. Likewise, mines (when you get them, though they aren’t all that useful) are mapped to E by default. Cruise disruptors (which are a key component of PvP) are Shift+E and torpedoes are Shift+Q. You’ll run into them later on.

For the main actions, see it this way: F2, F3 and F4 are mapped to Goto, Dock and Formation. The buttons up top are in the exact same order and mapped following the same pattern (I know free flight isn’t F1, but apart from that!). This is a good way of remembering which key does what.

Also, I don’t think you’d want to do that in the video, but in the top right corner, one of the buttons which looks like some sort of star is your personal log. This contains a series of quick log entries which “you”, Trent, have made. They can offer additional insight into what’s going on if you feel lost, or merely curious. They’re a very nice touch that’s often overlooked. Same thing can be said about news pieces in the bars. While in MP they’re static, in the storyline they’ll follow events as they unfold around you.

And finally, I think people merely forgot about that battle near Willard. Trust me, you’ll encounter far, far bigger battles before the story ends

Doing much better. And I knew about Willard, but what fun would that have been, telling you.

Nice! So long since I played the SP, its really fun watching you

w0dk4 wrote:
Nice! So long since I played the SP, its really fun watching you

Yeah, the good times… I enjoyed the SP so much, I even played it about 4 times in different mods. Now I’m creating my own storyline… Its been some time since I last saw that starsphere in-game…

BTW It was the very same place where I started enjoying it too!
Say, why is your Nav-Map so small? Widescreen mod side-effects?

I hope you’ll like where it goes further: more action - more fun!

In case you were wondering, the order Walker gave you was to kill the Rhineland Bombers. You didn’t kill the bombers quickly enough (they were denoted with Rhineland Bomber instead of a pilot name and given special brackets), so they managed to kill a cruiser before you finished the fight. That’s why you lost money.

If you ever get lost on an obvious ordered objective, tap N.

4th Gun - Hell to the Yes. Having a missile at this stage of the game isn’t worth it, its just a resource drain.

I don’t know how much further you go with the story in this sit down, but before you go ANY further, GO TO THE BATTLESHIP MISSOURI, AND GET A DEFENDER.

You’ll thank me later.

Also, on the matter of ‘Current Worth’

Current Worth is based off of statics, like your ship, equipment, bots/bats, ammo. They are things that have set prices. Commodities, however, have a dynamic price, depending on where you sell them, that’s how much you get for them. The Current Worth counter wont count commodities till you’ve sold them, and then its just counting your credit total.

Also, I’ve noticed that after every kill, while beaming in cargo, you tend to sort of… pause… for a few seconds. Don’t do that, you’ll die. Always keep moving.

Also, you really need to just try out engine kill outside of a combat situation to see how it works. Right now you’re only engaging it to drift away, but the problem is that NPCs rarely follow when you do that.

What e-kill is used for is to use thrusters solely. Engage e-kill with Z, then do not touch S or W again. If you want to move forward, press or hold Tab. When you release, you’ll start drifting again at a high speed.

This is how you avoid getting obliterated in later levels. If you’re not always moving fast, you’re an easy target, and drifting away is slow.