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[sambojin]

WTF? How long has robot crew been in the game?

Bye-bye weekend......

Girlinhat, Don't listen to anyone. You scan once, maybe twice, then you land on a planet. If it's not completely batshit-crazy-exotic-lava-death world, or swarming with life-forms, you explore it by foot. Letting some time tick over at the start isn't a horrible thing to do. Bonuses get bigger, stuff you can buy gets better, and stuff.

It's a slow game at the start. But when people say "explore", they mean get your arse down to the planet and grab every resource you can. Get a full map if you can be bothered. Investigate every damn plant if you want. But wander around collecting resources.

It's slow. But it works. The interesting stuff comes after about the first 20-30 planets explored.

Save your game. Make a backup. Whatever. It even let's you save scum. Then you won't have to do it all again.

The stuff I said to buy wasn't in any particular order. Buy Binoculars, a drill and 2 hover platforms. In that order. Plus a few extra space suits. It gets you heaps of resources. Then other stuff. Maybe........

It's not only a possible roguelike to beat, it's a likelihood to do so, as long as something doesn't bug out or you don't take a gazzilion years getting going. There's a few good endings. And an ultimate one (or is it two?)

[Girlinhat]

Gonna try that advice...  What would you say is the 'transition' out of explore/resource and into the combat/larger game?  Like, amass money to fit everyone in armor and rifles and go for it?  Should I be aiming for a specific place to be in order to get pass out of the starting setup?

[Hanzoku]

Once you have a crew of 20+ and decent (0.5+ weapons, 5+ armor) equipment for all of them, you can start shooting native lifeforms fairly successfully (and then perform taxidermy on them.)

Once you have a pilot with decent (3+) skill and a ship with a solid hull, you can also start exploring the edges of nebulas. You need to keep an eye on your hull and not venture in too deep, as nebula damage can rack up quickly if you're unlucky.

Finally, as sambojin says, save often. Especially before you try planets with unique descriptions - the special planets range from the safe and interesting to the murderous hellholes.

[puke]

I still can't tell if these stupid robots are shooting anything.  Things seem to be easier to kill with them on the team, but when it tells me how many crew are participating in each attack, it is only like half.

I'll have to run an empirical test, leave the rest of the team on the ship and try to squash a spider or something.

I had found a Heavy Explorer rusting on a planet a while back, and got it patched up and flying.  Ship of my dreams, that is.  Rather have it than a battleship, any day.  Extra crew and better sensors and 50% more fuel are worth the trade against one more shield/engine/turret.  Though maybe the crew capacity is a wash against the turret?  Do they add 5 or 10?  Cant remember.

I'd crewed up enough at that point that I was able to crack some of the very hostile worlds.  Sitting on the pad on one of them was an ACSC, but I didn't think this was a big deal because rusted ones show up occasionally.  Maybe a source of artifacts.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But it was repairable!  I've never seen a repairable ACSC outside of those planets with the active forcefields, so this was a pretty big shock.  It needed a 22 science roll and then a 17 engineering roll (not sure what the difference is, but I has a +12 to the first and only like a +7 to the second) to get it working, and of course you only get one try.

haha, now we're cooking with gas.

I'm not sure how you get those good endings, Sambojin.  No mater what I do, I always seem to get the one where humanity gets a bloody nose and decides to hole up instead of expanding.

[Graknorke]

There's endings other than retiring with money? That's news to me.

[Gabeux]

I can't really remember about endings, I played a lot of this in different versions but I don't remember.

By the way, does anyone play without savescumming and enjoy it?
It's so easy to lose some officer you've been training for long and all the other bad things that can crush your progress.

[Hanzoku]

Spoiler: Good End? (click to show/hide)

I know at one point I had asked Magellan about this, and from what I remember from many builds ago:

There is an end where you find a robot-world where you can destroy a device that was hiding the planet the robot ships are spawning from. Find that planet (now looks completely different then it did before), fight your way to the bottom and destroy the control computers, and you can retire knowing that humanity can safely expand into the sector.)

As an aside, all this talk of Prospector has gotten me playing again as well. I've had a good run of luck, finding an abandoned, intact heavy transport and taking it over, along with finding the Squid homeworld (with a couple Squidsuits I had found elsewhere in tow) which had a derelict alien ship, empty of enemies. No weapons, but I did pick up a few suits of adaptive body armor and some cryo units.

[Neonivek]

And once you collect enough Cryo units you can pretty much forget entirely about unit storage.

[sambojin]

Yeah, I was talking about the robot ending.

There may be a crystal one, but I've never seen it.

Then there's the mega-rich, friends with people from another galaxy one that was mentioned. Need the alien scout ship and heaps of stuff I think.

[Majestic7]

It would be nice if we could start our own colony in the future, giving intermediate goal in the game, doing things to support them to thrive.

[puke]

Yeah, I was talking about the robot ending.

There may be a crystal one, but I've never seen it.

Then there's the mega-rich, friends with people from another galaxy one that was mentioned. Need the alien scout ship and heaps of stuff I think.

Retired with an alien scout ship and buckets of money, no effect.  Even when you have the ACSC, it gives you the text that you have to sell your ship and book normal long-haul transport to get back to civilization.

I've never seen a negative ending that involved crystals, so I'm not sure what a positive one would be.  The only ending I've seen is the one that closes with mention of encroaching robots and humanity holing up. 

I will have to try to follow Hanzoku's tip and see if I can stick that ending.

[sambojin]

Perhaps the crystals *are* the outside aliens. I'm pretty sure you have the option to be nice to them when you find the crystal tower (or at least, not blow the hell out of it).

If you do that, nuke the robot forcefield generator, shoot Apollo with your ship weapons, do some other plant/squid/insect/pirate related things and manage to take out the robot factory computers, good+good ending?

[gimlet]

Hey are there some tips for mining robots?  I bought some, and it worked great the 1st time - I dropped one off near the ship, spent a bunch of time exploring the planet, picked it up and it had 250 credits worth of resources iirc.  So I bought morte, next 6 times, with multiple robots, I do the same and they always have 0 when I pick em up - doesn't seem to matter where I put em, near mountains, ON dug out mountains.  Am I missing something?

[Hanzoku]

Huh, there's some pretty serious AI errors or bugs in R176. Specifically, it seems none of the NPCs either have ranged weapons or know what to do with them. Couple in the fact that they stop moving if you start shooting them at distance 2+, and as long as you can engage them in a one-square corridor, even defense robots will succumb eventually to being plinked at by a 15-man crew.

[Neonivek]

I thought the Mining Robots mine while your off planet.