Have you guys noticed that the Rebel ships always seem to be a lot stronger than the Confederation? The Mantas are stronger than the fighters, the destroyers are stronger than the Confederate ones, all up until you get to the Carriers. I pirated until I could buy a Kestrel, captured more escorts which I captured a Rebel carrier. I let the A.I. take care of it and they got smoked. I took over five other ones so I had one escort space left over. I upgraded my carrier with the blue weaponry, armor and shield stuff. I then went to take over a Confederate carrier. My escorts were anything besides alive. The lone carrier pretty much smoked them. I was surprised by how strong the rebel ships were up until the Carriers.

Has anyone else noticed this?

@g-spark, on Jun 2 2008, 03:37 AM, said in Ship strength:

Have you guys noticed that the Rebel ships always seem to be a lot stronger than the Confederation? The Mantas are stronger than the fighters, the destroyers are stronger than the Confederate ones, all up until you get to the Carriers. I pirated until I could buy a Kestrel, captured more escorts which I captured a Rebel carrier. I let the A.I. take care of it and they got smoked. I took over five other ones so I had one escort space left over. I upgraded my carrier with the blue weaponry, armor and shield stuff. I then went to take over a Confederate carrier. My escorts were anything besides alive. The lone carrier pretty much smoked them. I was surprised by how strong the rebel ships were up until the Carriers.

Has anyone else noticed this?

That might, perhaps, be the case in the EVN port. But in the original game, such craft mutually disabled or destroyed each-other, more often than not, and when there was a victor in such 'bouts, the margin of such was narrow indeed.

Thing is, I wasn't playing on the Classic port. I didn't have Nova registered at the time. I downloaded Escape Velocity then did as I mentioned above. Well sure my escorts killed the ship, but really what I meant is the time it took for my escorts to disable a Rebel carrier and a Confederation carrier. The second lasted many times longer than the Rebel one.

This post has been edited by G-Spark : 06 June 2008 - 07:52 PM

@g-spark, on Jun 2 2008, 09:43 PM, said in Ship strength:

Thing is, I wasn't playing on the Nova port. I didn't have Nova registered at the time. I downloaded Escape Velocity then did as I mentioned above. Well sure my escorts killed the ship, but really what I meant is the time it took for my escorts to disable a Rebel carrier and a Confederation carrier. The second lasted many times longer than the Rebel one.

Do you mean... the Rebel Cruiser? If so, that would be because the Rebel Cruiser has far worse shields (500). while still having truly good shields (its one of the only 2 ships in EV that actually has good shields). The Confederate Cruiser (hint: its not a carrier. Its a cruiser. Carriers are awful for general fighting, and are only good at launching huge amount of fighters, which makes them good. ) has 800 shields, which is utterly crazy by the ultraconservative, overbalanced, and uninteresting- game- making Matt Burch standards, and which means the ship is practically indestructible in AI vs ai fights. I havent seen a Rebel Crusier beat it once. Not once. Only heavily damaging it... I think to about 40%?. And this is all original EV... in fact, this happened on a Macintosh (wouldnt that be the ultimate in proving this is real?), even if that doesnt matter.

Does that explain enough, Sparky (Sparkling drinks come to mind, lol)?

@g-spark, on Jun 2 2008, 02:43 PM, said in Ship strength:

Thing is, I wasn't playing on the Nova port. I didn't have Nova registered at the time. I downloaded Escape Velocity then did as I mentioned above.

The first two games don't scale well to faster computers than were current when they were designed, so it may be that your current computer doesn't replicate Escape Velocity 's original behaviour accurately.

On the whole, the Rebel ships are unimpressive. The Manta is a Confederation cast-off, the cruiser has merit but is underpowered for its class, and the carrier is a joke (Mantas on a bulk freighter? ). The one exception is the destroyer, which is excellent for the simple reason that it's a modified version of the superlative Argosy.

Er, opps. Edited this post on accident. I forgot what it said, but I think it was along the lines of "This is a different computer than what I had the original game on."

This post has been edited by G-Spark : 06 June 2008 - 07:59 PM

AFAIK, there is only one Confed carrier and it only shows up in the "Destroy escort carrier" mission. It's a modified bulk frieghter, and it's crap. Very easy to kill. The big confed ships are the Confed frigate, and its larger and similarly shaped cousin, the Confed cruiser.

Right.

@captjosh, on Jun 2 2008, 11:53 PM, said in Ship strength:

AFAIK, there is only one Confed carrier and it only shows up in the "Destroy escort carrier" mission. It's a modified bulk frieghter, and it's crap. Very easy to kill. The big confed ships are the Confed frigate, and its larger and similarly shaped cousin, the Confed cruiser.

The ship to which you're referring is the Rebel escort carrier, which appears only in the Confederation storyline (and is indeed highly unimpressive). The reason it plays such a minor role is that it was a later addition which didn't even exist in version 1.0 of the game.

There are no other ships in Escape Velocity that are called carriers.

Been a while since I actually played the storylines in EV. I've been working on Clavius rEVisited. On an interesting note though, the idea of carrying fighters in a bulk frieghter that way seems to have made its way over to the Raider Wars campaign for The Babylon Project, a Babylon 5 total conversion for the FreeSpace 2 Open Source engine.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 03 June 2008 - 09:03 PM

What I meant was that most of the Rebel ships seemed to be stronger than the Confederation ships all up until the largest class that is normally seen. There's the Manta, the Destroyer, then what ever is larger than that.

There is the Confederate Fighter (Forgot name), the patrol boat, the confederation destroyer (Different name I think. Not just destroyer) then the ships that are larger than that. All the rebel ships seemed a lot stronger up until that last ship size.

And it's been a while since I've played the first game also.

The Confederation ships are:
Patrol Ship, Gunboat, Frigate, Cruiser, upgraded Cruiser (extremely rare)

The rebel ships are:
Manta, Destroyer, Cruiser, Escort Carrier (extremely rare)

The rebel destroyer is, I think, better than the Confederation's frigate, being an upgraded derivative of the excellent civilian Argosy. In no other class is the rebel ship genuinely superior, though they may be more suited to some players' styles.

In AI vs AI fights in each class, I always recall that:

A Confed patrol ship would nearly always beat a Manta, simply because it had an extra missile.
A Confed Frigate and Rebel Destroyer would have an extremely close fight, coming out something like 50/50. It generally came down to who landed more torpedos or heavy rockets.
A Confed Cruiser would pretty much always beat a Rebel Cruiser, because it had way more shields and the AI makes poor use of the Rebel's superior maneuverability.

In the hands of the player the two Rebel capital ships were generally better, I found - but the AI in the original EV was so thick that it nearly always came down to pure firepower/shield strength because they'd generally just unload all their secondaries then conduct repeated head-on firing runs on each other til one was dead.

@david-arthur, on Jun 4 2008, 08:10 AM, said in Ship strength:

The Confederation ships are:
Patrol Ship, Gunboat, Frigate, Cruiser, upgraded Cruiser (extremely rare)

The rebel ships are:
Manta, Destroyer, Cruiser, Escort Carrier (extremely rare)

The rebel destroyer is, I think, better than the Confederation's frigate, being an upgraded derivative of the excellent civilian Argosy. In no other class is the rebel ship genuinely superior, though they may be more suited to some players' styles.

@mazca, on Jun 4 2008, 10:19 AM, said in Ship strength:

In AI vs AI fights in each class, I always recall that:

A Confed patrol ship would nearly always beat a Manta, simply because it had an extra missile.
A Confed Frigate and Rebel Destroyer would have an extremely close fight, coming out something like 50/50. It generally came down to who landed more torpedos or heavy rockets.
A Confed Cruiser would pretty much always beat a Rebel Cruiser, because it had way more shields and the AI makes poor use of the Rebel's superior maneuverability.

In the hands of the player the two Rebel capital ships were generally better, I found - but the AI in the original EV was so thick that it nearly always came down to pure firepower/shield strength because they'd generally just unload all their secondaries then conduct repeated head-on firing runs on each other til one was dead.

Thank you two. That's what I've been looking for. That makes sense, but it's just odd because all of the A.I. Vs. A.I. fights I remember seeing the Rebels came out victorious up until the Cruiser.

The speed governor on the original EV and EVO was, as has been said, a little dodgy. Variations in computer speed and what speed setting the game is set to make a very real difference in how well the AI performs in different situations - I particularly recall that the outcome of a Confed Patrol Ship vs Manta fight could often be altered by the speed setting. At high game-speeds the accuracy of guns seems to increase, giving the swivel lasers on the Manta much more of an advantage.

Extensions of this can probably explain most of the differences you remember - EV does really behave differently on different computers.

Huh. Doesn't make much sense to me, but if someone else agrees with it then it must be true. I've never really altered the game speed, nor can I remember what type of computer I had it on even though it's sitting on a shelf right next to me.

The problem with the speed slider is it just doesn't work properly. If you, for example, turn it down to 50% you should find that weapons only have half the range they're supposed to.

Huh. You don't say. I've never even considered messing with the game speed in any of the games because I got so used the the standard speed that it was hard to even consider doing anything else. When I started playing Nova for the first thirty days I had it on my dad's computer, I always played at standard speed non-Caps lock. Then when I got it on that mac that I had the original on I again used standard for most of those thirty days, but then started using Caps lock for the last few. (A couple days longer because I decided to take on Hector a little. Didn't get very far. Not a very good ship. Now I miss the bird. Our never ending dogfights were pretty fun. I've got to take on ATMOS again.) Then with Nova I'm using Caps lock all the time except when firing the Arpia Laser. (Doesn't work with Caps lock on. Something to do with the reload.)

Anyway. I never knew the thing about the speed

It's very likely that the difference is due to the fact that you're running the port; it might come down to rounding errors in weapon damages, differences in AI behavior, or the game speed quirks that people have been mentioning. Either way it certainly isn't going to work exactly the same way as the original game did.

As I can recall, on an old PowerMac running the actual EV game, the Confederate ships almost always beat their Rebel counterparts -- though there were occasional lucky victories due to a Patrol Ship firing a missile into an asteroid or a Rebel Destroyer landing a few extra torpedoes.

It certainly makes sense that this should be true in general, the Confederates having newer ship designs, though in the hands of the player, the extra maneuverability and agility of the Rebel ships does give quite a bit of an advantage.

Starts banging head on desk

Quote

is due to the fact that you're running the port

Quote

Thing is, I wasn't playing on the Classic port. I didn't have Nova registered at the time. I downloaded Escape Velocity then did as I mentioned above.

Quote

And I didn't have this computer with Classic. I'm typing on a Windows now. I had the original on an mac laptop.

Still had the shareware demo. Didn't even think of registering Nova until I had saved thirty bucks which I kept spending on something else. Example, I've been wanting to buy Darwinia, but keep spending my money on other games. :laugh:

No Classic port. Haven't even touched the folder since I downloaded it except to play Heart of Darkness. :laugh: