I'm sure I will get the "where is the video comment on this" but, its all good. Yesterdays game play was ordinary until the end. What was going to be an early night, with just a couple cargo runs turned into a 1am bed time for me. Which is definitely out of the norm, but, it ended up being the best gaming experience of my life.
I will not bore you with the mundane stuff, rather give a quick overview: We have solidified ourselves as a 3 man team. Player 1: Is a "I want to be efficient as possible and make the most amount of money as I can" type of person, so credits per hour matter. He owns the Connie and also purchased a prospector because it was taking to long to achieve his goals. So say $400 into the game. Player 2: Me, you already know about $550 into the game. Player 3: $65 into the game. The reason I bring this up is because it sets the stage for the next part. While I still disagree that it is pay to win, it is definitely pay to maximize fun from our perspective.
So the session started off pretty regular, BHing NPC's, Running Cargo loops, and the 1 mission that I enjoyed was Thief Recover. Basically, track NPC ship (fly to coordinates), fight NPC (explode ship), take their cargo and return it to the owner. Lots of work for 270 UEC. After we made some money and did this for a while, we decided we wanted to do a Jump Town run. We did three JT runs in total, with the first 2 ended with in epic failures. One of our members made it all the way inside the building and was executed at the terminal. So he rage quit.
Fast forward after great family time for me, not sure what they do, and kiddos are in bed. We group up around 9:15 my time. We putz around doing some more tasks, learning new features and the rage quitter (who cares about credits per hour) decides (while he didn't buy SC for the FPS aspect) he was going to gear up. So we drop about 20K on his gear, and another 10K on player 3's Rail gun and other stuff. So we need to recover our money, as member number 1 is hell bent on increasing his credit value. We do a couple runs in the connie and 600 and we are back to even ish. That's when we decide to load my cyclone into the connie with the intent of doing a ground assault on Jump Town (we had to change our TTP's).
Jump Town Initial ground infiltration operation :
When we got to JT, their was a massive org vs org battle going on! There were two hammer heads (which appear to be fully staffed, as all turrets are blasting each other), sabers, super hornets, titans, cutty's, and probably more but I didn't see them going at it. We land about 1 terrain feature away and drop the ramp on the connie. I get the cyclone out with two of us on board and the third member is getting off the connie when it explodes! (It was awesome, the shock wave was seen all around us). We thought we were seen, but, we were not. Then an aerial fight breaks out over our head, so we are not longer assessed as the primary threat, while the JT occupiers clean up the aerial battle. Lesson one: The cyclone can only hold 2 players, we tried to put the 3rd guy in back with a Light Machine Gun, but, every time I hit a bump he fell out. We got about 500m from where the Connie exploded and decided we were going in on foot. So we abandoned the cyclone, this turned out to be a great decision. The Occupiers were now actively pinging the area, which means the cyclone was detectable. With in a minute or so, they were on the cyclone. But, instead of blowing it up, one of their players jump into it and drove it to the front door of JT. Now we know how long our walk is! Lesson 2: either leave abandoned gear, or blow it in place. Well we now know that we are walking 4.8KM to jump town, which is about a 15 minute walk/run without being searched for. We all decide, we didn't come this far to be upset with a 15 minute hold down W task. While we walked to the objective, the occupiers did several low passes with lights on in our direction, so we had to evade that. Lesson 3: We down graded our gear midway through the 4.5km walk to undersuits so that our stamina would last longer, as we were all in either medium or heavy armor. We stayed like this until 500m out. Thus far during the walk, we were in a fire team wedge, that way if 1 was spotted the others could still accomplish the mission.
Actions on the objective:
At 100M, we encircled the outpost. With our Railgunner / sniper over watching the front door, while me and the other member ran to the objective. You can low crawl under the outpost as it sits on low stilts. With luck, the other org finally wiped out their occupying orgs air defense. (Watching a HH explode was great too). Then they landed a single ship with two players and got out. We executed them immediately. Our ground surveillance revealed at least 2 people in the building (their are windows you can look in). So the plan was simple: My self and member 1 would go into the building while the Railgunner / sniper would provide overwatch for space craft and external snipers.
Actions inside JT:
As the number 1 man my job was simply to die and try to take as many as I could. The reason for this: I own the 600i, which has better shields and firepower than the Connie and we will need aerial support. So no matter what, I had to die to get my ship from port Oli. Well it worked, we took out their 3 defenders and I died.
Defense of JT: (daylight operation)
We of course talked mad smack on the open channel chat, and knew they were coming back. In our defense, they had no idea how many members we had. They kept asking what Org we belong to, I believe they wanted to look up the org on the website. So we just talked smack and told everyone that JT was closed until further notice. They were able to get to JT before me (obviously) and started planning their assault. They killed off our sniper, so he was behind me in his ship and I was going as fast I could to our last man standing. When I got to JT, they had 5 ships total and not all in the air, a saber (threat 1 in the air), 2 super hornets (threat 2 and 3 in the air), a titan (threat 4 in the air) and a titan on the ground (ground force threat 1). They were so focused on JT, they didn't realize that I was inbound, at 1700m I shot and killed the saber. They reacted, but, to late, my next rounds took out a super hornet. Then they were on to me. They wanted to face tank me, which was ok with me. I took my 3rd shot and grazed the next super hornet. My weapons were now overheated and I didn't have a crew member on board to run power to weapons. I ended up killing the next hornet while member 3 killed the titan. I killed all the vehicles on the ground too (when your enemy goes to ground, kill their escape means). Our guy inside JT took out their assaulters and had about 100 rounds left and used 4 of his 5 medipens.
Our planned haul out:
With the 600i dominating the air space, we decided we didn't want to hold JT again, so I landed and filled up on Widow. We kept member 3 in the air, so he can actively ping for inbounds ship, member 1 provided overwatch on the ramp of the 600 and I went into buy the goods. As I was coming out, our airborne surveillance detected a threat and we needed to high tale it out of their. At their 4km out, I was landing gear up and off the surface with full afterburner and boost engaged for maximum escape velocity. We all got away clean, except we all have a 5 out 5 crime stat.
Cargo off loading:
We made it to a rest stop about 6M miles away, so we would be out of site / out of mind. During the jump, we announced over chat that JT is open. Once we got to the rest station and within 2km I was under heavy fire from the rest stop. We jumped out. At this point it was almost 1 am!!!!!! did the night go? I decided I needed to get off, so we jumped to port Oli to bed down the 600 and pull out our start ships for tomorrows (now today's session).
Planned session:
We need reduce our crime stat and off load the cargo. The 600 will stay safely tucked into port oli and we will either peacefully go to the security station and hack the terminals, or we will occupy it by force! Then we need to distribute the cash.
Over all: Amazing game play, but, if you are in it for credits per our, it sucked! We did 3.5 hours ish and will only make 20K UEC. No game out or in Alpha today (and SC is not out, got it) that I know of, allows a player to go from pilot, to driver, to ground force, to pilot. All of which are in freaken space with AMAZING graphics and fidelity.
As you correctly guessed: awesome amazing stories totally not matching any streams with nothing to back them up doesnt do it for me. Especially when you are willing to spend a lot of time typing about it rather than click the five buttons needed to record it and upload it to youtube. Sorry. It is so easy to just show us if it is really true, you cant expect people to take your word for it given how it doesnt match the plethora of counter evidence. The obvious conclusion is: probably dressed up a lot.
Tl;dr while some here are unreasonably negative, you seem unreasonably positive.
