Hi, I bought GSB a couple of days ago, and have a bunch of questions:
How do I start over? I think I’ve made some bad choices when it comes to spending honour (see question #2) and I’d like to reset the game state, o that all unlocked things get re-locked and I get my honour back, and I start over with the various scenarios. I tried uninstalling the game, rebooting my laptop, and installing it again, but I just got back to the same game state as before.
Another situation where this would be nice is if the game is played by more than one person (living in the same home). There simply doesn’t seem to be any game account handling
Why do I EVER want to unlock new ships? I haven’t progressed past the first race yet, but their unlockable ships don’t look at all attractive; they’re only as good as the ones I can use from the get go. They aren’t even “different but equal”, but rather just more of the same. Perhaps this differs from the later races, but seriously: Why would I want to unlock the unlockable ships of the first race? What can they do that my existing ships can’t?
I read in an old thread that hangar bay modules were broken and fighters would never use them. Is this still the case? I’ve experimented a little with one or two stationary “Base” cruisers with hangar bay modules, and my fighters don’t seem to use them, but there can be a lot of reasons for that. Is the reason that that game AI aspect is broken, or has it been fixed?
How do I get my fighters to protect my cruisers? If I set tactic to “attack fighters” and “protect”->specific cruiser, then my fighters will zoom out into deep space to fight with the enemy fighters far away from my fleet. I want them to stick around, but if I delete the “attack fighters” order then I fear that my fighters will needlessly attack enemy frigates and cruisers when they attack my cruisers, instead of only attacking that which they are equipped to fight: other fighters.
In general, how do orders work? I read the descriptions, but it’s not very clear, and the AI doesn’t seem to follow them too well. Especially “Coordinate attacks” seems to not work very well. And what do the priority percentages for attack fighters/frigates/cruisers mean? Is it like a 1d100 dice roll, so that if I set 85% priority then when the ship’s current target is destroyed, there’s an 85% chance that the ship will follow that attack-class order, and a 15% chance that it won’t? What happens then if the attack priority orders add up to more than 100%? The orders are simply insufficiently documented.
Is there a hotkey to turn music on or of during the game? I mean if during a battle I’d like to switch it without abandoning the battle?
The modules unlocked, scenarios completed and honor is saved inside C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles, just erase that folder and you can start all over again. But I think there’s no need to do that because everything can be unlocked repeating played scenarios to get more honor (if you use less money you get more honor, you need to lower your budget ‘highscore’ in that map to earn more).
Knowing that GSB stores the savegames inside your user folder with creating another windows user would be enough to play the game in the same computer by different people.
Mainly unlocking new hulls adds more visual variety to your fleet. More or less all hulls in a race are balanced between them but their slight differences can be big if used properly.
You need to use the cautious order in your fighters in order to force them to go back to a carrier bay and be repaired when damaged. The quantity of damage at which they will retreat is determined with the slider of the order.
Protect only makes that the ships with it will attack any enemy attacking the protected ship. If you want to keep your fighters or other ships close to your cruisers you have to use the escort order.
Cooperative doesn’t seem to work because turrets will only shoot to enemies within range and won’t aproach all a single enemy that your ships are attacking, that means they will only concentrate fire if they have the same enemy in range.
The priority percentatge is that ship shooting priority, the ships will always shoot the first enemy they’ve got in range but they will head to the highest priority nearest target in the map. If they have the 3 different ship types in sight they will lock and follow the one with the highest priority.
I’m not really sure if my answer about the priorities is completely correct but that’s how I understand how it works.
There is basically an unlimited amount of honor available in the game, or at least more than you can ever use.
After unlocking absolutely everything I have something like 300,000 honor still saved up. You can earn more honor by winning a scenario with a smaller fleet. The smaller the fleet you win with, the more honor you get.
Keep refining your strategies and you will have endless honor. You could probably win every scenario without unlocking anything at all. You start off with enough basic guns, and the tutorial cruiser is a solid design. Rockets to drop shields, and beam weapons to carve up the hull. Its a potent combination.
Each ship has several components. There is the driver that determines where the ship flies. The driver only selects a new target if the current target has been destroyed.
Weapons will automatically engage the easiest thing to hit within weapon range if you give a ship no orders at all. You can influence their priorities with the sliders so ships will engage what you want them to engage even if its not the easiest target.
For example, I usually put frigates to 100% on my cruisers. This means that cruisers will preferentially attack frigates, because frigates have an annoying tendency to move in close and blast my shields to hell with their ion cannons. I want those frigates dead, even though the big fat cruiser next to it is far easier to shoot at. Putting frigates at 100% and leaving cruisers at 50% or so means that the gunners will always prefer to shoot at frigates over cruisers, even if this sometimes backfires.
If someone makes a frigate with all engines, flying at a speed of 2.0 or higher, the gunners will still try to shoot at it even though they won’t be able to hit it.
In particular in the file: My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles\unl.dat
edit that with notepad and add or remove any unlocked items or give yourself as much honor as you want.
Some ship hulls have more or fewer hardpoints, or different bonuses, different costs, even different hull lengths. All of these can make a difference in terms of how effective a given design based on that hull can be. The unlockable Panther hull for the Feds is one of their more useful hulls for certain designs, because it can mount a lot of weapons in a small frame.
I was just using it as an example of how a target frigates above all else order can be used against the cruiser. You can force them to target frigates at all costs, and they will, even if they can’t even hit the frigates.
Most frigates are carved up very nicely by cruisers though. They also move slow enough for cruiser guns to hit them. Regular beam weapons slice them apart with ease. Don’t even need to worry about dropping the shields.
The differences are small, but they exist and they do matter. Different combinations and placements of hardpoints, different bonuses, different sizes, etc.
