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NOT "held back" to put in an add-on disk and you won't see one in the mission disk coming out early next year.
Flyer missions:
If we do them, it will probably be a seperate product and not an add-on.
Can't say for sure, though. There is strong interest in doing one on the team.
Turning while moving slow:
You CAN rotate your Herc while it is stationary. You must be COMPLETELY stopped to turn in place (if you have even 1% throttle it won't work). When your herc is moving slow he is taking "baby-steps" which means it takes MUCH longer to turn then if you have a bit of speed built up (Hercs only have 1 size turning radius--BIG). There is a strategy for maneuving your herc that
I find works well: the "J" turn. If you want to get a guy in your sights fast, back up and turn in the opposite direction:e.g., if there is a guy on your left flank, back up while turning right (you would have your joystick all the way down and right). Also moving slowly is generally a very unhealthy tactict.
By the time you tweak your turret and get the guy lined up juuust right you will be Herc Pilot fricasse. Soo sorry .
Somone claimed they hit a Herc with 26 missiles and it didn't die. I have never seen anything approaching this level of absurdity in our testing process. Missiles have a blast radius and are detonated on contact with the a herc's shields, if any. In some rare cases a missile hit may do little or no damage to a herc. For instance: your target is running directly away from you at full speed with his shields fully diverted to the rear. I can't imagine this happening 26 times in a row, however. I think it's more likely that you missed a lot (especially with EO missiles--it takes awhile to get the hang of them).
Mouse Crash:
I have never seen this happen. I suggest you call Sierra Technical support, if other people have this problem they may have a fix (I doubt it, becuase I would probably have heard about it, but it might be worth a shot). I have used logitech and microsoft 8.xx mouse drivers with the game myself.
Weapons building:
In general weapons are built based upon need. If you are out of or down to 1 weapon of a certain type, it will build a new one for you. The maximum # of weapons built at 1 time is 5. It is generally a good idea to keep your hercs as fully armed as possible.
Scramble missions:
I am surpised everyone is having so much trouble with these...
To win the Rhino prototype mission you must save the base(60%) and at least
50% of the herc. You can still win the mission even if the rhino pilot is dead. I don't recall if this particular mission has a wingman or not, but
I usually have a wingman guard one side of the base, while I patrol the other on scramble missions. I check the HDD display frequently while in this "guard" mode. When the enemy appears he is usually close to one of us. I send my wingman the "attack my target" message and then charge in. You should always avoid chasing enemy hercs far from a base you are defending.
You will not get the tech release for the Rhino until the beginning of the next campaign if you lose this mission, but there is no other negative effect on the campaign besides this.
Campaign 2 mission 1:
Your main objective is to scout the waypoints, NOT to fight the enemy hercs.
Run away at the first hint of danger.
"Random" missions.
Certain slots in each campaign are filled by "random" missions. This means that if you replay a campaign you will not necessarily see the same missions in the same order. If you do get the same mission, your mission path, the
Cybrid herc types and locations can all be different. Some missions contain no random elemets while others are derived almost entirely from them.
Difficulty in career mode:
Is set to "BRUTAL."
Campain 3 mission 3 (radar towers).
This is actually one of the few missions that I still find challenging. I take a tomahawk with 4 ATC 35mm and 1 ATC 50mm. I have my wingman attack the same target as me so it dies fast, then when a radar tower's "guards" are dead, I have him destroy the base (so I conserve my ammo). I typically finish the mission with about 100 rounds left in each AC (10% ammo left). Since you are only fighting 2 guys at 1 time, shooting the legs on the mirimacs is a good strategy. Also, I think the briefing mentions that the enemy Hercs mount
ARM's (hafta look). Avoid using radar in combat on *ANY* mission if there are reports of cybrids mounting ARM's in the breifing. It is a sure way to die. ARM's can lock onto an ECM pod too.
Well, I think that is enough for now Thank you all for your interest in
Earthsiege!
Good hunting!
--DaveS
Dynamix
------------
Games RoundTable
Category 22, Topic 17
Message 287 Thu Nov 10, 1994
D.SELLE [Rude Boy] at 23:45 EST
Update from HRL HQ .
There are 8 campaigns in Earthsiege. 5 Main and 3 alternates. No one is hitting the alternates because they are playing all the missions until they win . If you want to try an alternate campaign, lose the last mission of campaign 1,2, or 3 (just quit as soon as you get in). This is a guaranteed way to fail the campaign. Note: if you lose 2 campaings in a row you will lose the game, so you can't do this twice. Campaign 7 (the fifth campain in sequence) has no alternate so if you lose the "fourth" one you will lose the game. Backing up your career on an alternate path will overwrite missions if you have progressed beyond that point on another campaign path--so you probably will want to avoid saving over the last mission of a campaign if you go "exploring." This will allow you to resume the "win" path at any time.
Here is what the campaign tree looks like:
Camp#-- 0 "First" campaign
|\
| \ (L)
| \
1 2 "Second" campaing
(L) /| /
/ | / (EOG if you lose 2)
/ |/
4 3 "Third" campaign
\ |\
(EOG \ | \ (L) if you \| \ lose 4) 5 6 "Fourth" campaign
| /
| / (EOG if you lose 5 or 6)
|/
7 "Fifth" campaign
(L) = "losing" branch
EOG = End of Game
Thus, 8 different campaigns (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7). The box also says 45 missions.
Actually Earthsiege shipped with 60 unique POSSIBLE missions, however you will only see about 40 of them per career.
Sorry if this is misleading on the box. Marketing asked me how many campaigns there were and that's what I told 'em. Number of missions was my best guess for a career at the time it went to print.
Next time we will put the campaigns in a straight line so that you have to complete ALL of them to win the game . Also, there is branching within many of the campaings themselves. For instance: if you lose the third mission in campaign 0 (the first campaign) you will get a scramble mission next, if you win it you will get a patrol mission. I can see that this didn't work out like
I hoped it would. I grew weary in X-wing of playing the same mission over and over again until I won it, but it seems like this is the kind of thing people want.
As far as the bug with the deleted campaign, I am pretty clueless. I have a career on the final version of ES saved up until the last mission of campaign
7 (fifth campaign) and I have replayed it many times. I have not seen anything like this bug in the shipping version, but there was a bug with careers a while back. It was fixed and regressed, but I will have someone check on this and see if it somehow got reintroduced. I would expect that it would happen all the time and not just the last mission if this was the case, however.
If you reboot or turn off your machine while it is transitioning between the sim and the shell or while you are backing up a camapaign it is possible that your career file could get messed up (if you have the bad timing to do it while it is writing this file to the hard drive). This could affect *all* your saved missions in an unpredictable and possibly fatal way, especially if you have Smartdrive installed. You could check out your hard drive with Norton
Disk Doctor or an equivalent utility to see if your files are okay. Beyond this I really can't think of anything else to try.
I would be interested to see if other people encounter this problem when they reach the last mision. If you are worried about this bug, you can back up the contents of your \CAR directory as a safety measure the next time you get to the last mission of the game.
TM stuff:
You need to have the red button on the WCS II set to "Digital" and the black button (hat) set to "Analog" to use it with Earthsiege.
We will begin working on a joystick patch to give people the option to switch the rudders and add keys for the throttle for WCS II users after the forein translations are completed. It is possible that we will add an increased "vanishing distance" for hercs in this patch as well. I have no idea what the timeframe for availability of this patch might be.
You don't get salvage for destroying bases, and you surely don't get credit for friendly bases the Cybrids have destroyed! Some missions will have a "salvage bonus" for killing certain bases (some supply buildings or hangars for instance), but this is a special case and not a general rule. It is possible that one of the mission programmers made an error and put a salvage bonus on a FRIENDLY base, in which case you would get salvage if your squad or a cybrid killed it. I strongly doubt anyone on our crack team of mission programmers could have made such an oversight (looks around innocently). The reason you get a lot of salvage on scramble missions is simply because there are a lot of enemy hercs to kill.
We have a pseudo vcr function we use in house to test most of our games. This is what was used to create the contents of the unfortunately named "\TAPES" subdirectory. It is a LOOOONG way from something that could be considered "consumer ready." There *may* be a vcr for Earthsiege sometime in the future, but it will not be ready when the first missions disk ships early next year. I too would like to see this in a shipping version of the game, but it is a ways off unfortunately.
Well, I gotta work on getting Battledrome finalled, so you probably won't hear from me again until late next week. Until then, Good Hunting!
--Dave Selle
Dynamix
------------
Flyer missions:
If we do them, it will probably be a seperate product and not an add-on.
Can't say for sure, though. There is strong interest in doing one on the team.
Turning while moving slow:
You CAN rotate your Herc while it is stationary. You must be COMPLETELY stopped to turn in place (if you have even 1% throttle it won't work). When your herc is moving slow he is taking "baby-steps" which means it takes MUCH longer to turn then if you have a bit of speed built up (Hercs only have 1 size turning radius--BIG). There is a strategy for maneuving your herc that
I find works well: the "J" turn. If you want to get a guy in your sights fast, back up and turn in the opposite direction:e.g., if there is a guy on your left flank, back up while turning right (you would have your joystick all the way down and right). Also moving slowly is generally a very unhealthy tactict.
By the time you tweak your turret and get the guy lined up juuust right you will be Herc Pilot fricasse. Soo sorry .
Somone claimed they hit a Herc with 26 missiles and it didn't die. I have never seen anything approaching this level of absurdity in our testing process. Missiles have a blast radius and are detonated on contact with the a herc's shields, if any. In some rare cases a missile hit may do little or no damage to a herc. For instance: your target is running directly away from you at full speed with his shields fully diverted to the rear. I can't imagine this happening 26 times in a row, however. I think it's more likely that you missed a lot (especially with EO missiles--it takes awhile to get the hang of them).
Mouse Crash:
I have never seen this happen. I suggest you call Sierra Technical support, if other people have this problem they may have a fix (I doubt it, becuase I would probably have heard about it, but it might be worth a shot). I have used logitech and microsoft 8.xx mouse drivers with the game myself.
Weapons building:
In general weapons are built based upon need. If you are out of or down to 1 weapon of a certain type, it will build a new one for you. The maximum # of weapons built at 1 time is 5. It is generally a good idea to keep your hercs as fully armed as possible.
Scramble missions:
I am surpised everyone is having so much trouble with these...
To win the Rhino prototype mission you must save the base(60%) and at least
50% of the herc. You can still win the mission even if the rhino pilot is dead. I don't recall if this particular mission has a wingman or not, but
I usually have a wingman guard one side of the base, while I patrol the other on scramble missions. I check the HDD display frequently while in this "guard" mode. When the enemy appears he is usually close to one of us. I send my wingman the "attack my target" message and then charge in. You should always avoid chasing enemy hercs far from a base you are defending.
You will not get the tech release for the Rhino until the beginning of the next campaign if you lose this mission, but there is no other negative effect on the campaign besides this.
Campaign 2 mission 1:
Your main objective is to scout the waypoints, NOT to fight the enemy hercs.
Run away at the first hint of danger.
"Random" missions.
Certain slots in each campaign are filled by "random" missions. This means that if you replay a campaign you will not necessarily see the same missions in the same order. If you do get the same mission, your mission path, the
Cybrid herc types and locations can all be different. Some missions contain no random elemets while others are derived almost entirely from them.
Difficulty in career mode:
Is set to "BRUTAL."
Campain 3 mission 3 (radar towers).
This is actually one of the few missions that I still find challenging. I take a tomahawk with 4 ATC 35mm and 1 ATC 50mm. I have my wingman attack the same target as me so it dies fast, then when a radar tower's "guards" are dead, I have him destroy the base (so I conserve my ammo). I typically finish the mission with about 100 rounds left in each AC (10% ammo left). Since you are only fighting 2 guys at 1 time, shooting the legs on the mirimacs is a good strategy. Also, I think the briefing mentions that the enemy Hercs mount
ARM's (hafta look). Avoid using radar in combat on *ANY* mission if there are reports of cybrids mounting ARM's in the breifing. It is a sure way to die. ARM's can lock onto an ECM pod too.
Well, I think that is enough for now Thank you all for your interest in
Earthsiege!
Good hunting!
--DaveS
Dynamix
------------
Games RoundTable
Category 22, Topic 17
Message 287 Thu Nov 10, 1994
D.SELLE [Rude Boy] at 23:45 EST
Update from HRL HQ .
There are 8 campaigns in Earthsiege. 5 Main and 3 alternates. No one is hitting the alternates because they are playing all the missions until they win . If you want to try an alternate campaign, lose the last mission of campaign 1,2, or 3 (just quit as soon as you get in). This is a guaranteed way to fail the campaign. Note: if you lose 2 campaings in a row you will lose the game, so you can't do this twice. Campaign 7 (the fifth campain in sequence) has no alternate so if you lose the "fourth" one you will lose the game. Backing up your career on an alternate path will overwrite missions if you have progressed beyond that point on another campaign path--so you probably will want to avoid saving over the last mission of a campaign if you go "exploring." This will allow you to resume the "win" path at any time.
Here is what the campaign tree looks like:
Camp#-- 0 "First" campaign
|\
| \ (L)
| \
1 2 "Second" campaing
(L) /| /
/ | / (EOG if you lose 2)
/ |/
4 3 "Third" campaign
\ |\
(EOG \ | \ (L) if you \| \ lose 4) 5 6 "Fourth" campaign
| /
| / (EOG if you lose 5 or 6)
|/
7 "Fifth" campaign
(L) = "losing" branch
EOG = End of Game
Thus, 8 different campaigns (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7). The box also says 45 missions.
Actually Earthsiege shipped with 60 unique POSSIBLE missions, however you will only see about 40 of them per career.
Sorry if this is misleading on the box. Marketing asked me how many campaigns there were and that's what I told 'em. Number of missions was my best guess for a career at the time it went to print.
Next time we will put the campaigns in a straight line so that you have to complete ALL of them to win the game . Also, there is branching within many of the campaings themselves. For instance: if you lose the third mission in campaign 0 (the first campaign) you will get a scramble mission next, if you win it you will get a patrol mission. I can see that this didn't work out like
I hoped it would. I grew weary in X-wing of playing the same mission over and over again until I won it, but it seems like this is the kind of thing people want.
As far as the bug with the deleted campaign, I am pretty clueless. I have a career on the final version of ES saved up until the last mission of campaign
7 (fifth campaign) and I have replayed it many times. I have not seen anything like this bug in the shipping version, but there was a bug with careers a while back. It was fixed and regressed, but I will have someone check on this and see if it somehow got reintroduced. I would expect that it would happen all the time and not just the last mission if this was the case, however.
If you reboot or turn off your machine while it is transitioning between the sim and the shell or while you are backing up a camapaign it is possible that your career file could get messed up (if you have the bad timing to do it while it is writing this file to the hard drive). This could affect *all* your saved missions in an unpredictable and possibly fatal way, especially if you have Smartdrive installed. You could check out your hard drive with Norton
Disk Doctor or an equivalent utility to see if your files are okay. Beyond this I really can't think of anything else to try.
I would be interested to see if other people encounter this problem when they reach the last mision. If you are worried about this bug, you can back up the contents of your \CAR directory as a safety measure the next time you get to the last mission of the game.
TM stuff:
You need to have the red button on the WCS II set to "Digital" and the black button (hat) set to "Analog" to use it with Earthsiege.
We will begin working on a joystick patch to give people the option to switch the rudders and add keys for the throttle for WCS II users after the forein translations are completed. It is possible that we will add an increased "vanishing distance" for hercs in this patch as well. I have no idea what the timeframe for availability of this patch might be.
You don't get salvage for destroying bases, and you surely don't get credit for friendly bases the Cybrids have destroyed! Some missions will have a "salvage bonus" for killing certain bases (some supply buildings or hangars for instance), but this is a special case and not a general rule. It is possible that one of the mission programmers made an error and put a salvage bonus on a FRIENDLY base, in which case you would get salvage if your squad or a cybrid killed it. I strongly doubt anyone on our crack team of mission programmers could have made such an oversight (looks around innocently). The reason you get a lot of salvage on scramble missions is simply because there are a lot of enemy hercs to kill.
We have a pseudo vcr function we use in house to test most of our games. This is what was used to create the contents of the unfortunately named "\TAPES" subdirectory. It is a LOOOONG way from something that could be considered "consumer ready." There *may* be a vcr for Earthsiege sometime in the future, but it will not be ready when the first missions disk ships early next year. I too would like to see this in a shipping version of the game, but it is a ways off unfortunately.
Well, I gotta work on getting Battledrome finalled, so you probably won't hear from me again until late next week. Until then, Good Hunting!
--Dave Selle
Dynamix
------------
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