Its been a while since I last blogged a capture guide

The first thing about these ships is that they dont give up ever. This means you have to take them by force. In order to do this several conditions need to be satisfied. First, you need at least one equipped ship that can board, second you need to work on the weapons, finally you need the marines.

Part 1 Essential equipment:
Your ship is the core of your capture efforts. The ship you are using should have several essential systems. First it should be well shielded or maneuverable enough to dodge enemy fire. You will take damage so they need to have shielding. It should have lethal and less lethal weapons on board. I also suggest you buy several "sacrificial systems" that have a chance blown up instead of your primary reload the game type systems. The list of those primary systems follows:

Cargo life support system - Every ship you take should have one of these on it. It gives your marines a place to live on board your ships. It gets destroyed bye bye marines.

Bioscanner - The ship you are in NEEDS this. This system allows you to see if there is any enemy marines on the ship you are trying to capture.

Freight scanner - The ship you are in needs this. This will allow you to see if the enemy ship has any nasty surprises ... Read more

For people like me capturing ships is my primary source of income in the x universe. Now every guide I've run across is the same thing: missile boat torpedo flail flail flail. This works of course, but it has no details further than what I mentioned. In this guide I will not only discuss the capture of capitol ships but strategies on the capture of capitol ships and fighters. This guide will cover capturing fighters. Methods Strategies and dangers.

Fighter capture is much cheaper than capitol capture and some fighters when repaired can sell for as high as 1.6 million credits a pop. There are 2 strategies in the "liberation" of enemy fighters. There are things you want to avoid when capturing enemy fighters.

1 Dont use 1-hit kill weapons. If its going to drop the fighter in 1-shot you might want to consider canning the ppc for something a bit less death-happy.

2 Do not use an overpowering ship. Same concept as #1 if you are in a Terran Osaka, with its 300 batteries even if you put a low power cannon in its turrets, you are still firing several shots at it. Not to mention it handles like a school bus which makes for longer space suit trips to claim your new prize (or whats left of it)

3 Capture chances are low and random. Ive gone 22-23 ships before I got a bail out, then there are times where ... Read more

Heyo everyone!

So, yeah long time no see. Had a lot of work going on for school and some personal BS to top it off.
Well, now Im hopefully back. A couple things changed, and a couple didnt. I still code, and I still prefer my operating systems to be Linux, but I got a copy of Windows 7 now, and a copy of X3 AP too.

X3 AP:
As some might know, Ive played only X2 and X3R, because they were available on linux. For X3AP, I actually installed a copy of windows, started a new game, and was pleasantly surprised.

GUI: The GUI redesign was a smart move, its much easier to play on 26inch screens now. I also seem to have less trouble navigating the menus (but thats probably just imagined. About the siderbar, well...I dont like it. it obstructs my view, and takes away some immersion. So, I keep "classic flight mode" on.
The sector map is now much more useful, especially in battles, the new zooming configuration is pretty neat. Station/Complex building still sucks, but we got FCC and Complex Cleaner installed for that.

There are a couple of things I would like to change, especially wing and fleet commands. Dunno about you, but Id like to have a sidebar option for configuring/commanding those.

Graphics:
Those are much better now, cant argue with that, and never will. Especially the new "big" stations ... Read more

You maybe wondering what ive been working on the past day, it is actually some flash code that displays the universe directly from the XML file that X3AP uses. The code only displays an universe map, however using the XML file it knows everything about the universe, so sector maps could also be done. Here's what it looks like atm.



I did not draw that map, nor put any of the links in - they are all worked out by the flash code. Another advantage to this is that it should work for all X-games. Scrolling is done via the cursor keys atm. Its crazy how fast my flash projects have been moving.. you could say.. in a flash... ... Read more

Hi guys, well I must say thanks to Roguey first of all for running the competion to win the X3 Terran War Pack and unlike my usual luck I won!!!

So a quick bit of background on me, I'm a gamer and have been for too many years to mention I love my stragegy games from Civilization to Supreme Commander and everything in between. I've been playing the 4X stratgey Distant Worlds on and off recently since a new pack was released.

I'm often found on BF3 and cut my fps teeth on CS beta 7 and HLM.

My first PC game was Tie Fighter and I've always loved space sims: Elite on the old 48k, Frontier on the Amiga and Freelancer. I've also spent some time on EVE but I've always had a blind spot for pay MMO's.

I've haven't played TC but I have dabbled with previous X3 games so I'm really chuffed to get both TC and AP.

Before playing AP for the first time I had a trawl of the egosoft forums and saw there were some issues with frame rates due to a bug but just as I was thinking about leaving it for the patch - steam popped up and installed the lastest patch with the fixes and improvements. I also saw the bonus (signed) plugin and popped them on for starters.

I've looked at a few plugins on the forums but I think I'll keep the game unmodified for a while.

I'm ... Read more

Its took a long time to buy up any serious money in the Terran Commander. Most of it ive been spending on my complex, which is now 50 stations large.

I built my complex in Megnir, which seems a fairly safe Terran sector (this sector has gates you can jump too). Carbo Cake seems to sell fairly well, although just 4 or 5 L factories seem to cope with demand (price set at 31cr), however my main seller is Poltergeist missiles (price set at 1 less than default). I have 10 of these stations (in the complex) and the missiles are normally always brought by the NPC ships.

After much time and many kill missions, I wondered what to buy at the 30-40 million range. M7's seem good but kind-of wanted more turrets, M2's are a bit of a stretch but are the most powerful fighters (but are rather slow)... after much thinking I decided on a Split Cobra:



My reason for this is that its the second fastest M7M (speed can be important in M7M's), which is able to use boarding pods to board other ships. Boarding pods make boarding so much easier, as you send your marines in a missile like projectile rather than kicking them out of air-lock and letting them fly up-to the ship.

One little tip: if your setup for boarding in your M7M, angry the ship you wish to board ... Read more

The Terran Commander has definitely been a hard start: no plot mission, war all around, no Terran police license and such large sectors making travel very long winded (trade is near impossible). I managed to get some money together by salvaging stuff then went exploring. I noticed the Terran Springblossom (M6) has got a crazy top speed, so I headed out looking were its sold... Aldrin. So I ditched the Katana (which has just 1 extra shield) and brought one (at 6.5mil its a great buy, with top speed of 360m/s!).

This new ship allowed me to travel across those hostile sectors where Argon ships jump in and start shooting at you. Once I got away from those Terran and Argon sectors I could find some friendly sectors. This is were I started making real money because of the fight missions.

After a few missions I headed on over to Cardinals Domain. I shot down an Argon ship there, then thought the local police would go hostile... nope.. nothing. hmmm.. has my paranid rank gone up?... I shot another down.. yup! The Paranid actually like me for killing Argons?!? This makes Cardinals Domain for me a great place to capture M3/4/5's.. there is even a shipyard there to sell the ships!

After awhile the money started building up, so I starting getting marines and training them. I didnt get them ... Read more

A while back I started X3AP on the Terran Commander start. Since then Ive been exploring and looking for ways to make money. I have made some money, so I started looking at building my first complex in X3AP. However there isnt many safe areas - apart from inner-most Terran sectors. I plan to write a small guide for this start sometime soon, as its a hard start.

In this start there isnt many TL's ships floating around, so I had to buy my own - A Paranid Hercules (a nice and cheap TL that is a great work-horse). You can indeed buy stations from the Terran shipyards, and deploy them.

I took a quick look around, and Megnir took my eye. Its got it own shipyard and some great rocks to place a few mines on. The sector itself seem fairly safe too, no big ships but no enemy spawns there. So I built 2 silicon mines (both L's - M mines are not worthwhile!).

Now my money was down, however a few kill missions later I made to get a enough for a L sized power plant. It built fine, however I had a problem when linking the stations together...

Atm there is a bug with Terran Complex construction kits, however non-Terran kits work fine. The bug is that when you got to link two stations, it doesnt play the little cut scene, nor is the stations linked. However quick jump to a Paranid shipyard, and ... Read more