Balance of Power Plot Walkthrough (Page 4 of 4)

Written by Spike

Balance of Power Plot Walkthrough, written by Spike

The Endgame


You know where to go and who to pester on the comms by now.

We're getting ambitious. Next they want a Vali. We've got to talk to a fellow about it but no sooner do we get going, Terran forces start pouring through the gate. If you have any ships docked to the Dark Space Installation, now is the time to get them out of there. I mean, NOW. RIGHT NOW. Don't worry about the attacking Terran ships; what happens next happens fast, so watch it.

All that hard work, gone! Betcha didn't see Dark Space double crossing you coming, did you? Well, Evans certainly didn't. Last mistake he's going to make, unfortunately. Now that you've got no base in the Outer Solar System, you've got to find Captain Matt Roberts again. He's in Nathan's Voyage on a do-fancy space station.

The Argon Secret Service might be really bad at picking names with decent acronyms, but they certainly do know the business of enough shady characters. Darren We is a black-market arms dealer who has some Terran equipment that we'll find useful; he's in Heretic's End. Dock, chat, pick up the goods, and it's time to get moving again. Deliver the goods back to the Secret Service outpost in Nathan's Voyage and call up Roberts when you dock. He wants something else.

More hull plating; 200 to be exact. At least it won't be too tricky to get hold of. Send a freighter on the rounds and get it back to the Outpost. You need 150 Teladianium and 100 Computer Components as well. When that's done talk to Roberts on the station.

Dark Space have relocated to Maelstrom. Damnit, we've been there before. When you jump in, you'll find an Argon Colossus waiting for you with Admiral Jarren Hayla on board. They can't find the Pirate Base using normal scanners, so they've rigged a special sensor that beeps with a frequency dependent on how close you are to the base. Fun game. You'd have thought that they could manage to triangulate a position on their own, really, but apparently not. My suggestion for solving this puzzle follows.

Get in a Kestrel equipped with the Map Sector commands (Navigation I IIRC). The simplest way of finding the base is to tell your ship computer to execute a sector mapping run for 200km with the point of origin being the PBG forge at the centre of the sector (if this has been destroyed, simply use the centre of the sector itself) and listen to the beeps; as you spiral outwards using triangulation it'll quickly become apparent roughly where the base is. Only you can find the Pirate Base; you can't simply scan the whole sector with five scout ships. There's a HOWTO for triangulation in the second post (link). Of course, if you don't want to use triangulation and just want to unintelligently map the sector and go to sleep with the sound off whilst it finds the pirate base for you you'll be struggling; you have to be within 10km of the base and there's a high probability that the Map Sector command won't take you quite close enough.

It just so happens that the base is visible in the HUD whenever you're within scanner range. It appears as an Unknown Object with the dot symbol of a civilian ship. Flying in close reveals it to be what it really is.

When you find the base, the Colossus will start to move in and Pirate ships will start chasing you down. An advantage to being in the Kestrel is that you can outrun them and hide behind the Colossus, which will do a pretty good job of wiping out the Pirate forces all on its own.

When the Colossus arrives at the Pirate Base, having wiped out all the defending Pirate forces bar the Laser Towers, the Pirates will try to flee with their Fenrir and Mjollnir prizes. They will head for the West gate at quite a slow pace, their ultimate destination being Gaian Star; if you fail to catch them in Maelstrom for whatever reason then look for them there. With most ships you should be able to catch them, despatch the Pirate ships escorting the ATF fighters (in my case, two Elites) and then you save the game and have a go at forcing both pilots to bail. The Argon Naval fleet will deal with the Pirate Base and any Pirates that make for the North gate. You may get a couple more Pirate ships coming after you once you engage the convoy heading for the West gate but they should arrive after you've wiped out and capped what you need to.

As soon as you have both ships under your control and the Pirate ships destroyed, you get a message telling you that the Terrans are attacking the Argon Secret Service outpost. You are to get back there and defend it. Don't bother about it yet though, your first priority is to get your prize ATF fighters to safety. Do not send them for RE-ing. I repeat, DO NOT send them for RE-ing at the PHQ; just park them somewhere. If you do not own both at the time that you complete the plotline then you won't get the two additional prizes at the end.

Also, get your most powerful M2 sat by the North gate of Nathan's Voyage. You'll need it.

When you are ready and your fighters are safe, jump to Nathan's Voyage North gate. You'll arrive just in time to see the Argon Secret Service installation get blown to bits by no less than four ATF Tyrs. Your new objective is best summed up with 'RSLG'; for those of you unfamilliar with DiDs that means Run Screaming Like a Girl. You could engage the four Tyrs; and with a Boreas it wouldn't even be too hard to destroy all four of them in a straight fight. Problem is, these are the first ships in the plotline that are actually associated with the Terrans, and destroying even one of them will demolish your Terran rep. This is difficult; these Tyrs will persue you wherever you go until you, or they, are dead. Whenever you jump into a new Sector, these Tyrs will jump in around you, so you really don't have an obvious escape.

That means that you've got to deal with them somehow. There's five options.

The first option is to jump to Kha'ak space and hope that the locals pick on the Tyrs and not you. Relatively unlikely, and the Tyr is a powerful ship that will brush off almost all AI attacks against it; the AI is too dumb to attack a Tyr successfully.

The second option is to cap the ships, which incurrs no rep loss. You ever tried capping one Tyr? You have any idea how difficult four will be?

The third option is the no-rep-loss-missile-trick, where you bring in an M7M, launch a volley of torpedoes at the target, switch ships and make the M7M jump out before the torpedoes hot the target. It counts as an NPC kill; no rep loss. Relatively straightforward but still a little tricky to accomplish. However, you could eliminate three Tyrs and cap the fourth once it's on its own. Be warned however that Egosoft have not yet fixed the bug that capped ships will continue to follow AI scripts that were running prior to the cap. If you cap the Tyrs they'll continue to follow you everywhere forever.

The fourth way, discovered by foszae, is to double jump. You may have noticed, when flying through a Gate, that if you hit the turbo button as you arrive in the destination Sector you hit the jump field and end up being thrown back through the gate. It just so happens that this double-jump breaks the Tyrs' follow command. So, jump through the North gate and keep your finger on the Turbo button. When you arrive in Black Hole Sun you'll immediately be thrown back through the gate to Nathan's Voyage. Let go of the turbo button; you'll watch the Tyrs jump to Black Hole Sun and stay there. You're free, though you'll have to deal with those Tyrs somehow.

Credit to Ognjen85 however, for finding the easy fifth way of getting rid of these Tyrs. Activate your UFJD. You'll appear in a random Sector and the Tyrs will appear around you after a few seconds. Activate your UFJD again. If you can succesfully evade the Tyrs for ten seconds, you'll jump out and the Sector along with the Tyrs will be erased from the game's active memory. Death by cache memory termination; Ognjen85; I salute you, sir!

That is the end of the plot, and before you start mourning the loss of Evans, Roberts, and if you feel so inclined, Torres, who would have been killed in the penultimate battle against the ANF, you get a message from an unknown agent who's been watching you all along. He points out that there's no-one left alive who knows that you've swiped two ATF ships, and as of this moment, managed to pick up both the Thor (comes with the Mjollnir) and Valkyrie (comes with the Fenrir) blueprints. They're yours. Forever.

That's your plot reward; and that, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls, is the Balance of Power plotline.
- Spike

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