Original Freelancer Playthrough

I know you havent played again since I think you said up to episode 9?

But I have to comment on Ep 5.

On the left side of you screen at the equipment dealer, it tells you what the maximum weapon class of the slot is. You’ll see on the starflier that it has the first two slots as Class 2, and the third slot as Class 3. That’s why you could never buy class 3 weapons, as you always had the class 3 slot filled when you tried to buy em.

Also, try and keep your guns homogenous. Mixing weapon velocities will mess with the aim.

Also, Someone’s probably mentioned it, but ONLY fire when you have a shot. That means only fire when you can see the crosshair.

Also, I know someone has said this, but to reiterate, USE YOUR THRUSTER. Not for travel, it’s for combat. Ever notice how sometimes, your target outruns you? Thruster.

Also, next ship you buy, go to Battleship next to Norfolk Shipyard. It has the Defender Heavy Fighter. Take a look at it.

Also, now that you’ve discovered Missiles, Q is the default missile key. It will fire all equipped missiles.

I’ve also noticed that you seem to use the interface alot…

F2 is go to
F3 is Dock
F4 is Formation

IIRC, H and G are battery and nanobot

Shift+W activates cruise

Hit Escape to get out of Go To when you’re near a combat area.

I was going to comment, but Sizer’s summed it up quite nicely.

My only additional tip is about missiles. You’ll have noticed there were 3 level 1 missiles. Yours, the Stalker, is the guided missile. There’s also the Eraser, which is the shield killer, and the Javelin, which is the unguided missile.

If I’m not mistaken, all levels have new unguided and guided missiles, but only certain ones have shield killer missiles. Unguided missiles are the strongest, but have weak tracking. Guided missiles are weaker but move better and will lock on more often. Shield killers behave in between and will nearly only do shield damage, but most of the time kill shields in just one blow.

I think at your level, missiles might be a little of a bad idea. First, they’re rather pricy. 30 credits might not seem like much, but if you consume 30 missiles in a fight that’s nearly 1,000 off your bank account. Second, you don’t practice your aiming. Missiles can become a crutch very easily, even though they have disadvantages, especially in MP. If you want to improve your skills, you should try to avoid using missiles at least until you’re a bit more familiar with things like aiming and energy management, which missiles don’t require quite as much. Then you can learn missile-specific stuff like timing.

And yes, it might be annoying, but learn the shortcuts. You’ll really benefit from them. You can also avoid losing time in a lot of cutscenes by pressing Esc repeatedly. Similarly, you don’t have to hit dock from 10k away. People do something called “speed docking”, which just involves actually flying to the target manually, lining up with the docking bay by yourself and hitting dock there. In things like tradelanes, that just means recognizing the direction you want to go in, getting close to that ring and hitting dock there. If you do the whole thing in cruise, you can quickly save time, since the autopilot tends to cut it off early.

When turning to face something that’s offscreen, get your crosshairs right to the edge of the screen for maximum turn rate.

Switching targets is inefficient, pick one and stick with it till it’s down, move on, etc.

I envy you for being able to play through SP without knowing the whole script word for word. ^_^

I don’t know for others, but I don’t feel infuriated by your ways. It’s actually rather fun to see somebody new to Freelancer, reminds you of how you were when you started. Most of the people around here are old guard with all that comes with it

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