A strange signal have been detected coming from the Andromeda nebula.
It was powerful enough to be detected by all the species and factions of this galactic sector!
Ok, the stand alone mod introduce the battlesphere, a high tech ship who thorn apart any size=50[/size] ship in 1v1.
How many sphere can you destroy? And who can decrypt the code???
The Rebel fleet has received distress transmission and is preparing to intercept!
“This is Admiral Tek! We’ve managed to destroy a few but we can’t hold much longer!” A Ragnarok and Valhalla explode
“We’ve lost the rest of our escorts! Over 90% of our fleet is down and we’re next! All units to the escape pods!”
Analysis of the transmission is underway. While decoding will take some time the team thinks they have a lead for cracking the code. They really hope it’s just encrypted Galactic Standard…
EDIT 1: Our worries were true. There are far more than 26 “letters” in this message, and the code cannot be in Standard. If this is so then the code is more more complex than expected. A secondary theory has also been disproven. All that can be confirmed anymore is the first 3 words of the first and final lines are the same. An introduction? A warning? If this obviously important phrase is cracked then the rest may fall into place.
(Above stories are all true)
Interesting challenge. Gameplay wise it worked very well. I didn’t last very long, but it was still a good fight. It looks well done. The bitmaps folder still has the original XCF though.
The only thing I don’t understand is how “Maveth” manage to destroy 184 Battleshere with the Fed!
If you think it’s not in English, it’s false. It’s some good “old” English with a good encrypting (understand modern English…).
Good eyes! ^^
A small hint:
Don’t attack the battlesphere from multiple angle. The sphere got “four side” of firing, putting ship all around it will improve your time (it will take a fewer time to die ^^)
Panthers, 1 engine, max. ultra heavy armor as possible, max damage weapons, heavy fighter cover (all one-off designs). I actually started the scenario, and had to leave for a couple of hours – I didn’t watch it play out, so I can’t really speculate on how they managed to do so well – I didn’t think they would last long.
EDIT: Ah, I didn’t notice the “1v1” in the original. I had a squadron – I do suppose that might make a difference.
MORE EDIT: After pondering, I thought I might explain my methodology more. I played the scenario at first with some sacrifice ships w/ fighters, just to observe the attack patterns. I noticed that there were no fighters (at least none in the time I had), and that the enemy ships would expend 1/2-2/3 (sometimes more) of their shots at the escort fighters. So…that gave me an idea. I built a very, very fast fighter (all engine, no weapons/armor/etc), and deployed escort squadrons of them around my panther cruisers. The cruisers were basically very slow (speed of .02 or something like that) super-tanks with half of them designed to take out shields and the other half to take out armor . Evidently between their toughness, combined firepower, and the distraction of the many super-fast-moving fighters drawing away the majority of the enemy shots, this fleet did rather well. And this was just a one-off idea I had. It might have possibilities in other scenarios…
The thing I don’t understand is how you lasted that long!
Why my sphere waste shots at fighter? The order are frigate and cruiser only (If they are at firing range…)
The battlesphere got 120 armour penetration beam and 70 armour penetration torpedo!
5000 shield points (24 resist), 3000 armour points (60 resist) and 4900 hull points!
Range of 1000 on most of the weapons!
That’s not the kind of ship you can one-shot! It can fire back!
O.O
…
Can you send me your deployment? (and the ship you use too ^^)
They’re tough, but so is a well-armed battlegroup.
I was just as surprised as you about the 184 though.
Sorry. What I meant was, with 27+ letters, multiple symbols can represent the same letter, and therefore it’s not a simple “…o = A, …O = B, etc…”. Punctuation seems straightforward at least. 2 symbols have also been identified as either I or A, due to one-letter words.
Do the Federation’s analysts have any leads to share?
They paused their work because some anonymous give them the global message.
Transferring message:
[To] All cryptanalyst working on the unknown code
[From] A guy called Pi
[Subject] Here is an important decrypting!
Hello guys! You are slow you know? Here is the global meaning of the encrypted message the whole sector have eared …
Some guy call “High Commander Joralatan” leaded this attack, in the name of some Terraniarian Confederation
It’s only some kind of patrol group who made a “pre-emptive” attack cause we got weapons on our ships…
The bad news is that they request reinforcements…
The second bad news is that they know were we are, at the reverse is not true!
There is an other one I don’t know if it’s good or bad, they expect us to be tough. Does this mean that they will use caution, or unleash the whole fleet?
So?
What now?
-End of message-
If there is an other message, we still need a way to crack the code and not be to the good will of this “Pi”.
Anyway, there is a war coming this way, and the enemies seam to be quite powerful (and stupid to send ship one by one…).
I’ve been trying to create a chart to try and determine the words 3 letters or less. (Tried inputting a couple of the above terms, but they don’t seem work right) It’s tougher than it sounded… They’re very connected, but only enough to result in so many combinations. I keep finding new possibilities, and then those give the next link even more options. And then those next layers disprove previous layers and I have to remove those. This puzzle is starting to drive me crazy! bursts a vein
