Terran Defender - How would you advise a new pilot?

[Bill Huntington]

I just tried my least favorite Gamestart - Terran Defender. This is supposed to be the first Gamestart for beginners, and it is so difficult to do as a new person.
I’ve played for a while now, so I enjoyed it.

I got lucky the first time and there was a Goner Ranger in the same sector. I ignored the Terran missions, and gathered a few things and got out of Terran space as fast as I could. The Sabre is a good ship but Terran weapons are terrible for capping, which is what I do. I don’t buy my fighters, I cap them. But the EMPC knocks the hull down 15% a shot. When I got a Commonwealth M3, everything went smoothly.

The next few times I did it this way: Sold the Poltergeists, sold two 5MJ shields and one EMPC, bought what I needed, and left, without doing the Terran missions. I went all the way to the fourth Unknown and picked up all the software I wanted. Everything is there except the Jump Drive and the items specific to each race. I left a basic Rapier in the Saturn Shipyard, so I could use it from another sector. I sent a basic Rapier to Heretic’s End Solar, so it wouldn’t disappear, and also the Solar in Elysium.

I got the Terran Rep I needed with the buying/selling thing. You dock. You pick one item. You check your rep. You buy the item, as much as you can. You sell it back. You buy it again. Sell it again. By the eighth or tenth time, you usually have a rep gain. Then you undock, dock again, and do it again with another item, for another rep gain. You get the highest rep gain at the lowest rep level. And this is when you need it the most. I got Fight One, which you really need early in the game. And I had the rep to buy the Transporter and Cargo Life Support when I got to the fourth Unknown. It seems like a probability thing, whether you get the rep gain from buying/selling. So if it’s probability, you repeat it until your number is good. You can do this in each sector. I think it only work once with each item in a sector. When you get to higher ranks, it still works, but it is only a 7% rep gain at Licence level.

The message drone thing is bogus. I happened to catch one coming by in Neptune. You can’t kill it. It’s invulnerable, and hull doesn’t go below 92%. It’s part of the game that the Nova kills it.

One nice thing the Terran Defender start does is make it easy to get the first Commonwealth fighter, by capping an L in the Follow Pirate Nova mission. The 4 Ls hanging around have low morale, and bail pretty easy. Many times you can pick up 25 MJ shields and weapons. And the mission repeats, so you can pick up as many Ls as you want, at $.5 Mil each.

So a beginner could have a good game if he/she knew all this. But would it look like a real space simulation game?

How would you advise a new person to start Terran Defender? How would you start it now, after some experience?

[Nanook]

Your issues seem to be focused around your desire to cap enemy fighters. Most beginners needn't worry about that, since just by following the mission sequence, they get several new fighters, both M5's and M3's, not to mention a nice, shiny, somewhat used M6. It's actually fairly easy to progress if you let the Terran NPC's do most of the fighting for you.

[ancienthighway]

In TC, there's pretty much no reason not to do the Argon Plot as soon as you are able. It can be interrupted after completing each step if some new shiney catches your attention. With any of the Terran starts, I'd complete it, the prerequisite plots to get into the Adrin plot as soon as I was able, as you can't buy Terran stations until that plot is completed.

Due to the lack of MDM on Terran ships, I'd definitely look at building CW rep during the downtime in the Argon Plot with an eye on picking up a CW fighter. You don't want to make enemies with them because of the amount of CW space you have to traverse in the other plots. As a bonus, you can start getting stations sooner to build your economic and supply base.

I've always been wary of missions in Terran sectors, simply because of the size of the sectors and the crippling sizes of the collision boxes around stations and gates. You might have a fully upgraded Kestrel, but on autopilot, you have a speed of 100 m/s for a 20km approach to a gate.