Thread: 2.5 what is your opinion?

The only real feature for me was that the DVD isn't required anymore to play the game. I'm always in one or another form in the universe. Flying and fighting isn't required, but it was a pain to fire up TC to test some things with constantly changing DVDs... yes, i love to hear my own music CDs/DVDs Also, the loading rate is improved, which helps a lot if you have to reload informations to the game over and over again.

I haven't paid any attention to the load times, but I will see if they've gotten better. I know for boarding operations, the biggest pain for me was having to wait a minute and a half for every reload. (I reload a lot when I'm capping, hehe.)

Thanks to all for the answers about marine training. I still think it's weird that ES didn't include ANY documentation about how the new process works. Then again, this is ES we're talking about, so maybe not that weird after all....

Also I never bothered with a DVD, because I play the Steam version. However, I also bought a DVD version a while back (because this game is so wonderful, I want to be able to play it in the future even if Steam goes out of business!)... I haven't installed the DVD copy yet, but I think I might go ahead and do it soon now that the copy protection is removed. That way I can have a second install to mess around with mods etc.

All in all, this has been a fantastic patch. It says a lot about Egosoft that they are still releasing such major, work-intensive patches a year after the game's release. They may not have as many customers as the bigger game studios, but they REALLY care about the small community they do have. I think they're one of the best game studios in the business.

it seems ES, in their wisdom, have tried to improve boarding. I agree it was too easy in 2.1, but they have gone way over the top and made it uneconomical to bother to train marines any more.

it seems you now need AT LEAST 10 marines to board anything easy, and should expect AT LEAST 80% TO DIE... and that's after reloading several times (something I find distasteful)... harder targets now take about twice as many marines as they can hold, again with at least 80% not surviving...

this means that 5* marines, on average will last no longer than 2 boardings, no matter they have taken an age and a fortune to train...

I am hoping the following will happen:-

that ES will see they have vastly over corrected, and find the happy medium in a new patch in the near future.

that the XTC guys are able to bring some sanity to this situation.

[rant]boarding SHOULD be fun, as the rest of the game, it shouldn't take 10 reloads to get a sucessful capture and a 95% marine death rate being the best result with little difference between trained and untrained marines! [/rant]

as for the rest of the patch, it seems good!

NOOOOOOO!! You're kidding me, right?

I haven't tried any boarding ops since the patch, because the FIRST thing I did was put all 10 of my marines in the "Advanced, All Skills" training queue, and they're still in there. And now you tell me they're useless, they're all going to die, and I can pretty much forget capping anything??

Where did it say ANYTHING about this in the patch notes? I saw the bit about "rebalanced boarding of XENON ships"... but if they "rebalanced" ALL boarding operations, then why did they put that word "Xenon" in that line of the patch notes?? Why not just leave that word out, at the very least?

Oh, well. The good news is, I managed to capture every ship that I REALLY wanted before the patch. All the ATF capital ships, the Aran, a Hyperion Vanguard, and an atmo lifter... I think that's everything. I guess I will never fly an Agamemnon, which everyone seems to think is so awesome. Bah.

I was going to try for a second Aran so I could have a bugged one and an un-bugged one, but I guess so much for that. (It was hard to capture BEFORE the patch...)

Grrrrr. At the VERY least, I wish I had known this before I wasted about 7 million credits on training. Oh, well... chump change.... but still.

Hmmm, this capping rebalance may be a real issue.

I started a new start fo 2.5, am wading through the plot lines starting to put things in place, just started training some marines - just.

And then I come to the Truelight Seeker cap mission. Nothing here should spoil anything, I hope. I have done this a few times now on different starts and it has always been one of the easier caps. Last night I rock up and scan the ship, it has 4 marines on it, 2 of them have 4 stars in fighting, and the ship has firewall software! It is going to have to sit there for a while before I can get marines ready to deal with that. Has anytthing been changed to increase the likelihood of running in to marines and firewall software? As I have never had any difficulty capping the TLS before, by the time I haave marines capable of boarding that I will be sufficiently through the game that the TLS will not be a particularly useful ship - kinda defeats the object!

Anyone else had problems with the TLS pre 2.5? Or is this an example of the re-balanced boarding?

no previous problems boarding it, I've boarded it once and claimed it once...

I boarded it successfully under patch 1.3. Well, you know, i was young and needed the money back in those days But they took away my fully trained marine squad. You know what i mean? I had a 5* rating on each of them, i did the Bliiiing your marine is now.. Bliiing....Bliiing thing. Yes, i did it back then. And it drove me almost mad. I even had a custom hotkey to kill these messages ... and now imagine my face when the Goners ran off with my COMPLETE marine squad.
I never did that again, i always claimed it by cheating, just to get pure revenge.

But reading and judging about the "balance", and as some people already suggested elsewhere, the "balancing" process ES does should contain a lot more alcohol to get a more adjusted view on some things