I´m gonna get bashed for this, but: X2 Problem

Well i have many photos of me and the regkey, one on the beach, the romantic dinner.... -:- You Wanna Revolution?

Chips the x2 expert eh, <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> so how big is YOUR empire? I have about 15 solo spps, 2 self-supplying energy loops, and a self supplying double loop which produces high end equiptment for me (btw drone fighters are the most profitable end-product tech item) An M6 (centaur - the best for OOS) patrolling every sector in which I own property, and a few TL´s, a titan and a captured Xenon K as my personal ship, with a wing of captured Khaak M3´s. Ok so I like to brag. Anyway, do you use the bonus pack, with all the signed scripts? It really helps alot with setting up loops and management of alot of property. Anyway, a tip, for the first &quot;big ship&quot; you get, BUY A TL (transport large) preferably a Paranid Hercules for 17 million...You wont know how you did without it, its awesome for mobile mining, a home base, a storage ship, or just going into a sector and commanding your 10 docked freighters to go and buy it allll out <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>. When you realise you have a reasonable combat rating, you should start to check the BBS for assasination missions, in the high levels they can pay millions each run...make sure you have at least a corvette though. As for the way I started, just start capturing pirates outside a pirate base, sell the ships but keep a bayamon to capture in...then either use that or buy an M3 and start capturing Nova´s...Nova´s are awesome to capture, depending on what they have they can go for around 800K each. Then, buy a solar power plant, and a freighter to sell energy and another to buy crystals, at the average price, so it buys from trading stations. Then just continue buying SPP´s and setting them up in profitable areas, a good first location is Kingdoms End if your unsure. Once you get the urge to fly about in something BIG, get a TL first! Then if you want absolute destruction, get a Corvette. It´ll be a long time before you can afford a capital ship, though. If you start to get bored of X2, run a money script, buy an M2, go into a xenon sector or somewhere with alot of enemies, set turrets to auto-attack, and watch...then once cured go back to normal game <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Edited by - Griffon_26 on 9/30/2005 7:12:33 PM

I don´t think I have spoilers in this post...... My Empire isn´t that big, but I have got myself 4 M2´s patrolling multiple sectors (including my Flagship, the Chipsakki), and about 15 M6´s too. Its more of a trading empire instead of a fighting one - so its firmly built with stations galore (all over the place, I don´t have a home sector as such...), TS everywhere, and patrols of M6´s and M2´s. Whilst there are plenty of defenses (haven´t lost a single TS yet, all have full loadout of everything - shields and cargo space - costs alot, but well worth it if you have the cash), I haven´t got overkill (meaning I haven´t got ships for individual sector defence, they all patrol at least 2 sectors, mostly 5 - which do overlap each others patrols, but its effective I find <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>). Only the orebelt has a dedicated M6 - simply due to the high volume of fighting that it does). I may get an M1 eventually, but after the last M2 purchase (which was the Teladi one, and a complete waste of 130 million credits in buying/outfitting because its useless), I may stick more with M6´s. I couldn´t believe 3 Ospreys beat an M2, heck - even 2 Ospreys can worry it alot in OOS combat! They haven´t got it set up right, when the M6´s are 1/10 of the size (more like 1/20 perhaps), yet have 1/3 of the firepower, and half the shielding! (and ten times the manouvreability). My personal ship is a Nemmy though, only sit on the capship when I am doing a seta session to while away time. Nemmy rocks, and can clear the Xenon sectors on its own without too much of a problem (when piloting it of course!). The Oddy (my flagship) is loaded with PSG´s - which of course kicks severe butt IN sector combat, but OOS doesn´t fair too well <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> I agree with getting a TL as first capship, its very good for moving vast volumes of cargo, storage of weapons and equipment, equipping new ships etc - and of course, moving stations. Whatever you do, never - i repeat, NEVER buy the 54mil aegis gunnery system. Biggest waste of cash ever - hasn´t actually improved a single thing - and it took forever to get the crew (that is with 3 dedicated bloomin TP´s with jumpdrives!) and alot of searching for the transports! p.s - The teladi M2 (forget names these days) - costs 94mil, and is a pile of junk! Don´t the the extra shielding deceive you, either buy an Oddy for personal use (as it mounts PSG´s which obliterate everything in seconds), or buy the Rays (fast and excellent firepower - and darned cheap!). Edited by - Chips on 10/1/2005 2:27:13 AM

you did remember to stock up on small fast turning weapons? Aegis switches to the smallest weapon while tracking so its much faster. Are you sure you activated it right? Also, get the military crew members so you can go on &quot;action stations&quot;..I´ve found both these help against fighters, but not much with capital ship combat.

X2 is really daunting to get into... im really stuck. I want to do the story, but i want to set up an empire as well. Maybe i´ll do the empire thing. Time for a restart! Any guidance from the rather knowlegable ones known as Chips or Griffon_26? -:- You Wanna Revolution?

Leave the story alone, its gay. The best advice I can give is go to http://www.egosoft.com, the forums, either find the &quot;ultimate guide to everything&quot; post or click on &quot;search&quot; its sorted into sections where it displays the most useful guides and posts on a particular topic. Once you have enough money set up a solar power plant in kingdoms end, or somewhere to your choosing. That will be the basis for your empire.

Any way of removing the storyline? so they dont dbug you about it? -:- You Wanna Revolution?

Just don´t turn up at all. Unlike FL, they won´t actually bug you about it all if you don´t turn up for missions. It may be worth perservering with the story until the point where you get the mercury since that gives you a good bursary to get started with, but it´s really not necessary. I found it far more enjoyable to start out on my own and ignore the storyline, especially since the cutscenes look like as$. <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> A TL is a good capship to buy first, especially for trading. You can basically buy all the products from a station (e.g. 5000 units of energy cells) and then transport them around with the TL. If you buy a couple of mercurys (or equivalent) and have them escort the ship, you can get them to ferry commodities from the ship to each station that wants them, and you´ll find yourself earning money at a fantastic rate. The best way to do this is to use the script editor and write a script for the transports - savs you babysitting them the whole time. I now have 4 TL´s roaming the universe with a full complement of mercurys, and they simply buy up all the cheap goods and sell them later on for a profit. Another piece of advice - don´t buy an M1 (carrier) until you have bucketloads of cash. It may make a good capship and look very impressive, but it´ll cost you about 3 times the price of the ship to outfit it with fighters and defense wings. Without escorting ships it´s actually a very easy target - lots of shields but very limited firepower. Regarding your first factory, I would definitely go for a solar power plant in Akeela´s Beacon. The presence of about 5 stars in the system means that the SPP´s will be incredibly productive and therefore profitable. There´s also an Argon Centaur and (I think) a Split Dragin patrolling the system, which helps protect your investments. As a warning though, once the Khaak start to become more prolific they will target the system more and more frequently. Once you get a smallish empire going you´ll be dealing with about 20-ship clusters every 5 minutes or so, so you´ll definitely want some defenses in there. Lasertowers are excellent for this, as are M3´s. Don´t bother with anything bigger, it won´t be able to track the fast Khaak fighters and they´ll end up swarming it. As Chips said earlier, capturing enemy ships is an excellent way to make money. I wouldn´t recommend it in an M5 - you can´t even worry transports in an M5 - but once you get a decent fighter you can make good money from forcing the pilots to eject and selling their ship. Note that if you capture a Khaak M3 with some weapons intact, resist the urge to sell it. The Khaak M3 is an amazing ship. Another good way to make money once you get a half-decent fighter is to venture into the Xenon systems. It may look scary when you come through the gate and can see entire fleets of Xenon ships, but you can actually outrun mosdt of them if things get hairy. An excellent tactic I´ve found is (if you have a jumpdrive installed in your ship) to enter the system by one gate and get them all riled up. When the Xenon destroyers and carriers have manuevered towards you and are moving in for the kill, activate the jumpdrive and jump to the other gate in the system. It will then take the ships ages to reverse course and come back at you, giving you time to take out a few ships and escape afterwards. If you get a chance you should definitely accept the Xenon invasion missions when they appear. They are probably the best-paying missions around but they are extremely hard and very rare. You usually have some time to rally your ships and prepare to defend (unless you accept just as the ships begin invading), and you´ll need every second of it. You´ll need at least a squadron (say 10-12) of M3´s, and preferably some capital ship support as backup. Depending on the difficulty you can have anything from a small figher wing to a battle group composing several destroyers and carriers invading the system, and you get paid credits for however many ships you manage to repel. I forget the most vulnerable systems at the moment, but I think you get asked to help defend the Boron frontier systems (e.g. Menelaus´ Frontier) a lot. If you are offered sector map data in exchange for credits then it is definitely worth it, especially at the start of the game. Make sure you don´t already have data on the systems before you do obviously, but it´s far easier then exploring all the systems yourself. Especially when you accept a ´taxi´ mission and the guy needs to go to a system that you´ve never heard of, and you end up running around frantically trying to find the system before the time limit runs out. I´ll stop talking in a minute, promise. A common trap to fall into is to build your first factory in Ore Belt. This system is simply a massive asteroid field and some of the asteroid have a huge yield, but unfortunately it´s also a prime target for pirates and Khaak. Buy a mineral scanner and scan all the asteroids (if you have the patience) - a there are a couple of asteroids in here with yields of about 500 Ore (I think, don´t hold me to that <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> ). Don´t begin mining the asteroids here until you´ve progressed reasonably far into the game though, otherwise you´ll spend all of your time defending your property. Once you build up a reasonable fleet take a squadron to the very north of the system, beyond the upper limit of the normal system-map. There´s a pirate base up here, and if you destroy it then you´ll go a long way towards preventing the pirate attacks in this sector. Be warned that you´ll need some heavy firepower to take it out though - every time I´ve been there it´s been guarded by at least a couple of dozen M3´s. Once more tip - avoid the unknown systems until you get a well-shielded ship. The systems are highly radioactive (or whatever) and will eat away at your hull remarkably quickly. I took my M1 in there with plans to colonise the system and had to scramble it out quickly - it only just made it and cost me about 30 million in repairs. <img src=smilies/icon_smile_sad.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Edit: One final tip. Stay the hell away from Khaak captial ships. You´ll need about two or three M2´s to take out a Khaak destroyer - the weapons are unbelievably powerful. Best way to do it is to get a flight of smaller fighters to run interference and distract the gunners on the Khaak M2, then get your destroyers to move in to take it out. It will often try and attack the fighters instead and will prevent too much damage to your captial ships, but you will still lose a lot of fighters. Make sure your capships are stocked up with hornet missiles, and as soon as the Khaak shields drop order them to launch everything at it. There´s no real way to take these ships down easily due to their weapons - if you ever salvage a Gamma Kyon Emitter then never EVER let it go. <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Edited by - Accushot on 10/3/2005 3:53:37 PM

I set up my empire - and after 20 gaming days I tried the rest of the storyline. Throughout the storyline, they will tell you to go away and make money here and there. You can literally do a mission, wait a couple of days to build stuff up - do another mission etc. I kinda liked the storyline towards the end, the missions were different and fairly tough too <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Until then they were mundane affairs - but in all honesty I wouldn´t do another restart. When you restart, you start with nothing. Right now, you have something. It doesn´t matter if you´ve played 10 days already - and are still in an M4... no-one cares, and you don´t get extra points or promotion for doing things as quick as possible! I meandered around throughout my main game - simply because I was trying stuff out. If you don´t want to start in Akeela´s beacon, then i suggest herrons neb. Its one of the most profitable placements for a SPP according to a moderator over on Egosoft, and its safe as houses (has capships patrolling in Herrons Neb, Argon Prime etc. There are plenty of crystals appearing in trading stations for 1684 credits (probabily the cheapest you can get them for to be honest) - so your ship should find plenty to keep it going within 2 jumps. Furthermore, Akeelas beacon has alot of light (450% compared to Herrrons 150%) - all this means is that the process of creating energy cells is faster - it still costs the same Crystal wise. It makes more money simply because it produces more/faster - but if you don´t have the crystal supply... Up to you though, Akeelas should surely be a more exciting placement (and it is fairly well defended with what I thought were Boron and Argon M6´s). It will only make as much as it can sell though... pricing is everything (best off having a ship to sell E-cells for max profit. Ack, run out of time - gotta go! Stop restarting, start playing <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>