Last year I finally played and beat FreeSpace and with my last two joystick purchases having been utter disasters I finally decided to just play it with mouse controls. And frankly those are pretty much perfect in FreeSpace, I think it's actually easier this way than even with a really good stick. Maybe just give it a try.
Agreed. Considering that Chris Roberts made the game it's mindblowing how awful the mission design is.

Good news, then. It's a pain to take a joystick with you on the road - partly because hotel desks can be really small.

The scenario described does necessitate for you to be fairly poor, I admit. If you consistently keep a big pile of money ready to blow on supplies, you're better off than I was with my approach of buying the best fighter available, upgrading it to max and being so bored by the repetitive non-story quests by then that I impatiently rushed toward the finish as early as I dared. Most people probably wouldn't end up with the same problem, but I think it's still likely enough (and so far into the story) to warrant a fair warning.

I have also played with a mod installed at some point (one that added a few ships and weapons, can't remember the name of it), but I'm pretty sure that the described happened in the vanilla game and could just as easily have occurred with the mod.

Your mom's poor! Oh wait, I misread that. Nevermind.

Frankly during my last playthrough I also always upgraded instantly and kept the optional missions to a minimum. I guess I was just lucky, always incidentally earning just enough to also afford some shield recharge thingies. Lemme add that my ship didn't get damaged a single time for more than half of the game. Only in ~the last 10% of the game my shields got pierced regularly. Maybe I've also been looting the stuff left behind by enemies more regularly than you.

Bit of an update. Some spoilers follow, but none of it is surprising for a space opera story.

I'm up to level 8 now, which is just after becoming a fugitive; I'm now flying around Bretonian space.

Levels aren't earned as in a typical RPG: the story progresses as your net worth increases, which presumably means you can afford a craft able to deal with the new challenges to follow. Once you reach the next net worth goal, the story line summons you to this or that location to meet up with so-and-so and they you fly around and bust some heads. Once the scripted heads have been suitably busted, you're then told to go wander around and do your own thing for a while. Make more money, reach the next net worth goal, repeat. Fairly typical scaling progression.

Trading opens up as you visit more and more locations, which should mean that the trade element of the game is something you might pursue. What I'm finding, though, is that it's more hassle than it's worth. Something I mentioned earlier is that you get pulled out of the trade lanes (like a warp tunnel for long distance travel) and thrown into random fights A LOT. Like 2 of every 3 warps. One encounter last night it was me versus 8 random fighters and I didn't stand a chance. See, in the storyline I was told to get to a certain shipyard to buy a better craft; problem was, I had to get there in my older craft and, while it's a decent vessel, it's just not quite up to the task of handling the newer enemy ships in those numbers. When you have to make 5 or 6 warps to get where you're going and you're going to get ambushed on at least 3 of them... And if you make it through the lane then you're probably going to encounter more arbitrary enemies that you need to take out in order to land at a base so you can reload your consumables.

So I mentioned previously that you don't get much info on the factions you encounter. Well, you get some in the character screen - about a paragraph covers the barest of info. You can flesh out the background by gathering info in the bars; talking with fellow patrons will net you some tidbits, and you can also catch up on the news feed. I bring this up because once I hit Bretonian space the bar info started mentioning a group called the Junkers. The gist was that they tolerate most anyone because anyone might be bringing in the next sale. They tolerate everyone except me, I guess, because they've been attempting to ventilate my ship from the get-go. I haven't met them yet, haven't attacked them. Nothing. I just showed up and that makes me Public Enemy Number One.

And speaking of that, here's how those encounters work. Let's say I fought my way through to a station and docked. Reloaded, repaired, maybe sold some stuff. Then launch to go on the next leg of the journey. Waddyaknow - enemy craft outside in battle with the local police, bounty hunters, whatever. As soon as the view changes to me launching again, I'm engaged - it's still playing the QTE and I'm taking damage, unable to defend myself for those few seconds. They've had about a second to figure out that there's fresh meat and then they all gang up on me, forgetting about the other ships that had been firing on them before I launched. A bit absurd.

Okay, fight them off, hit the trade lane, get 'randomly' pulled out of warp yet again, fight off the 3-8 ships, get back in the lane, arrive at the next spot, another battle, land, rearm/reload/repair, launch, and another instant fight where you seem to be the only target. Geez, and that's just one leg of your journey.

So that's why trade doesn't really work in this game, at least not up to this point. There are certainly some lucrative routes but given the number of trade lanes you'll need to hop in order to reach that far destination, you're going to get jumped so many times along the way that it becomes frustrating. The only stuff I'm trading is that which gets picked up after a fight. "Let's see, I could make about $1,500 if I buy those and take them to that place, but I'll spend $2,200 on munitions, supplies, and repairs along the way." Pass.

Let's go prospecting instead. Small asteroids can be shot and destroyed to cough up some random goodie. One nice spot has silver, worth quite a bit, and I think there is gold, uranium, diamonds, water, and some other crap. You may have to blow up 100 or more rocks to find one bit of 'ore' so it can take some time. But then you get random encounters. Except they're not really random as they hit almost like clockwork, about 2 minutes from the end of the previous encounter. 2 ships show up, and then 20 seconds later another 2 ships show up. Shoot out, about 100 seconds of prospecting, prepare for next fight, repeat.

Kinda curious about the occasional piracy but with all of the not-so-random fights (literally, every 2-3 minutes) I don't really feel like piling on more enemies.

So far, I don't have interaction with the other factions. I mean, you don't hail another ship and set up a trade or see if you can tag along for mutual protection. They're just there for the most part. Bounty Hunters - if they don't kill you on sight - can be helpful when you're prospecting: just do your business with them nearby and they'll help with those clockwork encounters, but other than that there isn't any interaction. Same with the trade vessels and the rest. Basically, if they're not red (enemy) then they almost may as well not be there at all.

If you want action, this game will give it to you. Enough so that it comes at the expense of the trading aspect. Gonna see if I can play all of the way through but there are some other space games (notably Privateer 2) calling my name.

I feel the same way about most of your points. The game didn't quite live up to Roberts' vision, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, despite some of the stuff like too frequent encounters. I still play through it every couple years.

Ah, have you played Privateer 2 before? I just finished it recently for the first time myself. I loved Wing Commander: Privateer, but this was a fair bit different.

First, even though it's ostensibly set in the same universe as Wing Commander, it's so far-removed that any connections are tacked on at best. There's almost nothing in the game that implies it's set in the Wing Commander universe.

Then there's the trading. I disliked trading in WC: Privateer, but here it was a little more interesting to me. At least at first. I found a simple, very profitable trade route, just 2 jumps apart, but after a while enemy encounters became more frequent and more deadly. I found out it's because the game calculates difficulty based on how much money you have, how many story missions you've completed, and how many enemies you kill. After a certain point, pirate ships were making short work of me or my cargo ship (in this game you must hire a cargo ship to trade goods). Since you cannot jump to another sector while enemies are present unless you travel several thousand clicks away from them, you have to finish them off quickly because more ships (hostile, neutral, or mixed) spawn more frequently at higher difficulties, and sometimes you can be overwhelmed by seemingly never-ending waves of enemies and unable to get anywhere. It became so brutal that I had to turn on invincibility for the rest of the game. The way sector-jumping was handled and the difficulty spike were my only real concerns with the game.

The vanilla version of the game suffers from severe slowdowns, but the unofficial patch can cause occasional crashes, the mouse wouldn't re-focus after ALT-TABing, and de-interlaces all the cutscenes which causes some very ugly artifacting. I'd still recommend using the unofficial patch.

Interesting contrast there :)

You don't have to fight the enemies when you get pulled out of a trade lane. You can book it instead. Hit your turbo; since it barely moves the power meter.

As the difficulty of the enemies increases, you start to learn more about that "balance". :)

BTW If you attack as many Bounty Hunters as you can; while not attacking anyone else you don't have to, should slowly have your "rep" getting better and better with many of the other factions that attack you. That will help when landing/taking off (nice to have "only" bounty hunters on your ass instead of who knows who)

It's a good thing to have a "universe" that "lives it's own life" whether or not you're there - that's what all those other ships "are there for" - giving life to that universe. And, even though you can't chat it up with; or "join" those convoys, you can attack them and demand their cargo - so you can pirate if you want. It's a choice that you have in the game - the ships aren't just completely "for nothing" or just "set dressing". And they also fight each other based upon their own faction likes/dislikes.

I get it, you don't care for the game. But it does look like you knock it for one reason - then knock it for the opposite reason later. No power balance; no nuance - oops got my ass kicked. :)

I loved this game. Easily one of my favourite games. I like it more than Wing Commander. The problem with this was that it came out something like a couple years later than it was supposed to. It was also very unfinished, but somehow released in a fairly complete form. Roberts' unfinished game is somebody else's polished work, I guess.

I love Roberts' vision for the whole techno-space future. It's always so connected to the present. It draws from present-day cultural influences, admittedly, to the point bordering on stereotype sometimes, but I think that in this game it comes off with a sort of pulpy feel which only serves to accentuate the differences and make it more interesting. I loved this game's universe, and also really liked the gameplay.

I remember failing the secondary objective on one or two early missions, but other than that I didn't find the game very hard. I think you're supposed to freelance as much as possible before you go do the mission. Basically, when they call you back you're supposed to say "I gotta handle some things." and then they get all huffy and pouty but it doesn't affect the game. I don't know if they force you to do the mission at some point but I don't recall that happening.

The mods for this game are unbelievable. I actually started creating assets and fixing various things in the game myself to use with one of the mods. It was good stuff. This game's best mods are in that very rare class of mods that don't actually change anything, or contain anything garish, but instead just expand on the original design and style of the game to a point where it basically just becomes a complete improved version of the original. In fact, some of these mods contain more stuff in them than was in the entirety of the original game. Really good stuff.

SPOILERS If I recall, the best trade route in the vanilla game is the beryllium - hull panels run from Stokes to Planet Pittsburgh. You can take a massive shortcut through the derelict Liberty Navy Magellan Long Range Test Gate/commandeered Lane Hacker jumpgate. Or maybe it's Pittsburgh - Southampton. Don't remember. I think it's Stokes.

The mods let you fly transports and things, and add some gameplay features, but as of a few releases ago they can't really be played in Single Player. They're designed for multiplayer so you'll have to run a local server and connect to that. As I recall, this game can't work with ipv6 so you'll have to forcibly disable it every time you do that. good game, though.

Only part of it. Bought it new waaaay back when but my machine couldn't really handle the game at the time, so when the action picked up my PC packed up. It'll be another perspective look when I do play it again. I'm tempted to fire it up and play them side-by-side.

A couple more things after playing this morning:

- forgot to mention this earlier but your nav route can be set while you're still docked. This is really nice, especially in hostile territory, so you can have your route planned beforehand instead of having to do that while dodging enemies. Makes perfect sense, anyway: no reason one couldn't plan the route while sitting at the bar and then upload it to the ship just before launching.

- explore. Just go out and wander around, outside of the trade lanes and the rest. I just found an unknown planet (unknown to my nav system, anyway) with a battleship orbiting it, and picked up a nice heavy fighter and some weapon upgrades. Was flying around after trying some prospecting (the LD14 uranium field turned up nothing) and saw a planet in the distance. Flew over, saw the battleship, docked, and there you go.

Level 14.

I now have access to the Japanese faction sectors, which has opened up the trade possibilities quite a bit - they have some really cheap stuff that sells for a mint elsewhere. Of course, that typically means long-distance travel; the last big trade, where I cleared around 30k with my meager 35-slot cargo hold, required 33 waypoints. Ha!

Higher level means tougher enemies, of course. They're making more use of mines so combat has become a bit more interesting. And they show up in greater numbers now and there were a couple encounters against 9+ enemy craft. I'm also now a target for pirates - you get about 20-30 seconds to dump your cargo else the group attacks you. Screw that: you're not getting my cargo. Well, you'll get the cargo in my missile bay - delivered via air mail - but that's about it.

I have yet to try piracy like Martek suggested. I'll get around to it one of these days... You can use O to scan the cargo of ships but I'm only finding the "Train" ships to be carrying anything. And that's in enormous quantities in the tens of thousands. I have yet to find, say, a Clydesdale with any goodies. One downside is that you don't really get much time to check out the passing vessels. From playing around it seems that the range is 2k or less, a distance that can be covered in a very short time. Once out of that range you can't see what they have. Likewise, ships are quick to enter cruise speed so you have to get on them quickly else they're gone in short order. Thinking of doing some test runs, maybe joining formation with a cargo ship to see if that gives more time to investigate.

I mentioned earlier that it's a good idea to simply wander around outside of the established trade lanes to find new bases. Well, found another reason. There are at least a few secret stashes of cargo and equipment sitting out in the middle of nowhere. The two I've found so far were derelict ships. One was in a tight mine field and I had to fly very slowly to avoid them. Got a couple new weapons that I can't use yet but there doesn't seem to be any penalty for simply keeping them unused on your ship - they don't take cargo space.

Enough for now. Next time I'll talk a bit about some combat aspects, and also about equipment. Juni is calling - time to go see what she wants.

Level 17, I believe.

If I didn't cover it earlier, here's how leveling works: Every other level (the even-numbered ones, I believe, is a story mission (though that's only how it has been thus far. Could be different later). You fulfill a story mission, and then you're instructed to go fly around and do your own thing for a while. Once your net worth reaches the next level, you're then instructed to meet up somewhere for the next story mission. If you don't feel like advancing the story at the moment, then don't; just keep doing your own thing.

Levels are requirements for some equipment upgrades. I think only the weapons specifically require levels but in a roundabout way ship hulls and other equipment do, too, in that you might not have access to further available upgrades (you're locked out of systems, for instance) until you get to some part in the story. Anyway, it all scales. Typical game mechanic that we're all used to by now.

Combat, um, I was going to say something about that. And then forgot what it was.

Anyway, it still isn't particularly complex but it has opened up a bit. And it's still action-packed. Mines are being used more and more against you, as are missiles. You can shoot them down, which makes for a satisfying kill when your weapon fire hits a mine right as the enemy releases it and the blast takes out your target. It's rare but has happened for me a couple times. Missiles themselves are pretty easy to avoid. The countermeasures seem to stop almost all of them, and turning and using turbo takes care of the rest. Later on, I assume that more badass missiles will come along and those tactics won't be as effective.

The enemy AI tends to work things a couple different ways. First, it likes head-on attacks. You both charge in, guns blazing, take damage, and the AI goes 'chicken' first. Second, it uses turbo a lot, which is a smart move since it causes you to make low-percentage deflection shots. Really, its best defensive move is variation in velocity. And it's effective.

My missiles have been mostly useless in a chasing mode. Fire at a fleeing enemy fighter and I rarely get a hit, if ever. Bigger ships, sure, they often hit. Where you use missiles is during one of those head-on attacks. The enemy charges in and you launch at about 250 away, before the ship turns away. Almost guaranteed hit. For the double-whammy, drop a mine at the same time - they are seekers and you'll get a hit about half the time. A missile/mine combo will really put the hurt on a ship.

There are um, four or five (?) weapon types so far: laser, tachyon, particle, etc. And there are various shield types that protect better against one type of weapon and have a weakness against another. This means that if you've equipped the shield that's weakest against the prevailing weapon type in that sector, you could be in big trouble. For instance, now that I'm mostly bopping around Kusari (read: Japanese) space, they use lasers a lot. So I pick a shield type that defends best against lasers. Now, the AI, knowing that lasers are the weapon of choice in the area, will also choose a shield that works well against lasers. So for weapons, you would go with those that can blast through that type of shield with ease. I've had a few fights where I was equipped with the proper shield and was able to battle with near impunity.

Now, I'm the type of player who can't be bothered to switch and swap all the time, especially when bouncing between Kusari, Bretonian, Liberty, and Rheinland space. So I have several different gun types equipped to keep the options open. Whatever shield type I encounter, it's not going to last long.

On the equipment side, you can carry all sorts of stuff aboard without penalty. I have two different shield generators so I can swap whenever landed on a base or planet (need to find a third type). The spare doesn't take cargo space so there's no particular reason not to have it there. Ditto a couple weapons I found that my ship can't yet mount. The only problem that might come about is when you buy a different ship, but even then I think the weapons and equipment still transfer over to the new vessel - they just won't be equipped. This means that you can have in your ship the equipment necessary to take on a variety of poblems - just gotta remember to change your loadout when you land.

Back to combat for a second... as it relates to the arcade nature of combat, the AI vessels are not regenerating their shields, nor do they use their nanobots to fix physical damage. What this means is that you can ding an enemy badly, switch to another target for a while, and when you go back to that damaged enemy he or she will be in the same state as you left him / her. Oddly enough, they'll drop shield batteries and nanobots when they go all explodey. But hey, that's how it is, and it's good that they drop this stuff because ofttimes you'll need replenishment mid-mission.

I did do some pirate-like stuff, but it's somewhat story-related. Got access to a new system and decided to go exploring. Stumbled upon some navigation beacons, and then found that some of those huge 'train' transports were following them to somewhere. Decided to attack one and it went boom. Didn't drop very much, but I found that more transports were coming through the same area with regularity. Hmm... And there are storage depots along the route. Hmm... Later I need to go back and follow the beacons to one end of the trail or the other, because, surely, they must lead to something important.

Also found another 'secret' derelict ship, but I didn't pop it open since my cargo space was full. The location of a secret stays on your map, even after you loot it, so it'll be no big deal to find it again.

And the nav maps. Some buttons up top. A couple of interest: first, "Mineable areas" shows places where you can shoot at rocks to pick up raw material, be it silver, oxygen, water, etc. Second, "Patrol Routes", where you can see the patrol paths for neutral, friendly, and enemy craft. Obvious usefulness. Want to blow stuff up? Go play around the enemy patrol routes. Want to avoid the enemy? Avoid their routes.

Now, I'd still like more interaction between you and the traffic you encounter. Not the shooting kind of interaction but just general chatter and maybe hints about good trades (there is a little bit of this in the background chatter but it can be hard to notice) or dangerous areas. I'd also like for the scanning range to be increased, so you have more time to learn about the ships around you. But you can also pick up attack warnings in the chatter, which is useful in those areas where your sensors aren't working well.

Anyway, still enjoying this playthrough more than I did the first time around a decade ago. Now that I'm along in the story a bit, I think I gave up on it back then and didn't give it a fair shake. And as I play now I'm encountering little details that I didn't notice at first. Maybe more about those next time around.

Curse this thread, now I want to play it too.

Just bought a copy on ebay before this game gets even more expensive. :^|

I did get stuck a bit. The story has taken a turn to where it's no longer 1-mission and then go fart around on your own for a while - somewhere around level 14 or 15, I think. Now it's several quite tough story missions strung together, with limited opportunities to restock / repair. I guess my ship isn't powerful enough (or my skillxorz aren't good enough, or both) so I need to go backward a few saves, build up the cash reserves, buy the badassin'est ship I can find, and load it for bear.