Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
It beggars belief that the junkyard 'office' is just sitting behind a single rectangular corridor of sensor posts and overpowered autogun turrets that you just happened to emerge from Hyperspace directly opposite across it from, and that rather than just fly the entire fleet way above or below the rectangle of doom, you have to sneak a few scouts across the very 'top' or 'bottom' of the map.
An entire field of turrets that splatter strike craft should mean that this is a mission for large ships. Then the Junkyard Dawg shows up? Yeah, nah. Hence, this mod.
Also remember my first playthroughs, the first being playing the game together with my dad at 10(?) years age and having to go to bed wondering how in the world we are supposed to solve the problem and the second being me (totally out of ressources) sending a group of fighters sideways past the field, then letting a few assault bombers suicide kill the sensors before going in with a cloak fighter.
Anyways i always liked the mission for what it was: more of a puzzle than a "salvage what you can and beat up the rest", (in retrospect) it was kinda fun having the "Nope, you'll need to get along without the biggies" experience before that first reload of the mission ^^
It's an absurdity on the face of it.
that's what i did on my second attept, my dad told me that it was a easy level and on like 3 enemys... so i was like ok that was cool... i went in and this ship came i fired with every ship i had... did hardly any damage and it strolled up to my destroyer tokk it and flew away... my face was like
Hence I made this mod, whacking it right in the face with a nerfbat, so it CAN be killed conventionally.
This by no means makes it EASY, and an insufficiently large fleet will still lose to the Dawg.
If you'd like to make it more challenging than that, try my autogun nerf, or even my replacing the cloak-sensors with probes mod. These both make it more difficult, but still possible, changing the focus of the mission from winning with capital ships to winning with strike craft.
(b")b
That doesn't mean they SHOULD be lockable with a gravwell generator. Neither should the Junkyard Dawg. It's half the size of an assault frigate, and has a massive, MASSIVE engine block. There's no imaginable reason that a gravwell generator should be able to lock it down.
As you would know, if you'd actually read, well, anything I've posted about it. I consider using the gravwell generator trick an exploit of shoddy coding in the game, that, or an intended, but illogical, hard counter.
It's a Corvette class, which is a strike craft...
Grav-well generators lock it in place. Had it killed inside of oh... 10 minutes?
Solution 2 is to exploit an obvious mapping oversight by going to the extremes of the Z axis and just floating past the turrets. But if this was REALLY meant to be an option, and ONLY the junk immediately between you and the junkyard "office" was supposed to be protected, then Fleet Command, or the Rebel Taidaan commander, would say "the direct route is heavily protected, fly around it," and the map would be wider.
Solution 1 is unsatisfactory to me, as the junkyard dog is enormous, has half the HP of a heavy corvette, and flies like an interceptor, so it obviously has insanely powerful engines. Even with my nerf, its engine power is insane.
1a is equally unsatisfactory, as to be quite frank, the Dog should just smash its way out of such a box, and it clearly has the engine power to do so.
The obvious solution to the turrets is to use warships, and the junkyard has a hard counter to warships. The obvious solution to the dog is to use strike craft, but if you try to smash it with strike craft without being able to deal with the turrets, unsurprisingly, your strike craft all die. And even with chronic, obsessive resource-gathering and "Recycling" of enemy ships, winning this fight through a battle of attrition will leave you in wrecked shape for the rest of the game, if you even have enough RU to do it at all.
There are two "standard" solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: exploit the way the Junkyard Dog is coded as a Corvette to lock it down with a gravity well when it goes to snatch a ship, then pound it.
Solution 1a is to use the box-it-in trick and then pound it.
The entire game up to that point was teaching you how to overcome your problems, most likely using quantities of piracy that would make the Turanic Raiders regret they didn't immediately throw in with you.
Then this level comes along, and it's not "more of what you know how to deal with," it's not "What you know how to deal with, but with a new twist."
No, it's just a field of OP superturrets that turn strike craft into fertilizer, and a ridiculously OP not-corvette that flies out of nowhere at impossible speeds, grabs a superheavy capship, and drags it away to be brutally molested in the dark space between standing hyperspace gates.
That's not a challenge, that's "no screw you."
Hell, I just wish I could've made it so that if you scrapped the Dawg, and the turrets, you could then go ahead and recycle all of the wrecks in the junkyard for mad RUs.
Junkyard Dog, the little piece of scrap metal that it is, has been a pain in my ass since the original game, and in the remastered, but now, you have given me the weapon i need to slap the bitch
I thank you so much, cause now, im just going to constantly play mission 13 over and over again just to kill the junkyard dog, and cry tears of joy while doing so.
And yes, I realize you CAN cheese the mission by flying over the top of the map, because that was a gross oversight on the part of a level designer in the year 1999 that they saw fit to faithfully reproduce.
This mod was designed to make it possible to beat this mission WITHOUT resorting to a cheap Hard Counter that has no right working, or to a cheap and cheesy map exploit.
In the remake, it's really, really frigging hard to just pwn him with a massive fleet, because of the way they went to HW2's engine. Now your shots aren't actually calculated ballistically, they just have a set chance to hit, and the chance for any capital ship to hit a corvette with its main guns - or for that matter, the chance for bombers to hit a corvette - is miniscule. Combine that with the Dawg's absolutely absurd HP and speed, and I threw a redonkulous fleet consisting of "I'll take that, and that, and ALL OF THAT" at the Dawg, and he still laughed it off the first time.
Then I whacked him in the face with the nerfbat and he actually couldn't just no-sell a gargantuatanic capital phalanx. It was not easy, even with this mod. But it took him down before he could get my heavy cruiser out of range.
Also, in the original, I was able to pwn him with a MASSIVE fleet before he could steal ANY of my ships... I didn't say it was easy; most of it was captured and breaking the unit cap. But the gravity well thing works too, MUCH easier...
First time I beat the game was the hard way: I took a fleet of stealth fighters up over the map, flying high out of the range of the guns. IIRC, I also needed to bring a few support corvettes due to fuel needs. Then I cloaked them and made them dive upon the 1 turret above the target hulk, then the 1 below it, then finally I docked 1 of them with the hulk. Took bloody ages... Tolling the dog right back was much more fun, and cathartic! (^_^)