August, 2012 | Gildargaming

06Aug

X3AP Humble merchant: Finding things to trade

Posted in Stories, X3: Albion Prelude | Leave a comment

When the game starts, you find yourself in space in your Mercury freighter. The first thing we want to do is to get into our discoverer. We can do this in space, but I decided to dock to change ship.

We also order our Discoverer to go to the same place.

Once we get there we switch ship

Our universe map doesn’t look like much yet, time to do some scouting.

I start journey going through the south gate, since I know there’s a shipyard in Argon Prime From playing TC. Once I’ve found the shipyard I order my Mercury there to wait for me to finish scouting. I proceed to scout out the surrounding sectors with my Discoverer. Takes some time, but will save time later.

After scouting for a while, I realized I should’ve upgraded my scanner, A duplex scanner would’ve helped.

When done scouting my universe map looks like this.

I figured this will do for a while.

Now we move to the shipyard And sell our Discoverer.

We now have 45K. I decided to spend some of it on upgrades and save most of it for trading.

I spend about 9K on trading system extension, a better scanner and engine and rudder upgrades.

It’s now time to start trading.

05Aug

X3AP Humble merchant: Introduction

Posted in Stories, X3: Albion Prelude | Leave a comment

I’ve been playing x3: Terran conflict for a few weeks now as a trader. Even though I really like the game. I want to have some of the new features available in Albion prelude. I checked some forum posts when I started playing the game, and most people recommended starting with TC until you know more about the game. Other reasons to play TC is that AP doesn’t have as many plots as TC does. Despite all of this, I want to give this a try, using the same start and see where I end up.

The humble merchant scenario.

I feel that this is the easiest start, and I think I can take whatever route I want further into the game.

This series will contain quick updates on how I progress in my game, it may contain spoilers later on but for now, it can serve as a guide on how to get started in X3: Albion prelude as well as X3: Terran conflict (This starting scenario is pretty simular in both games).

Let’s get started.

I start the game with 2 ships, a Mercury (Argon freighter) and a discoverer (Argon scout ship). First I jump into my discoverer to scout the nearby sectors. My plan is, to find some good things to trade using the discoverer, then sell the ship and use the mercery until I get enough money to get more ships.

04Aug

Smite – FIrst impression

Posted in First impressions | Leave a comment

A week ago I got invited to the SMITE beta. For anyone who doesn’t know what SMITE is, it’s a traditional MOBA style game, except the in-game view is third person instead of the usual isometric view.

I’ll start by saying that I’m not a huge MOBA fan, and the only moba game I’ve played is League of Legends. The genre gets repetitive after a while and the community surrounding these games makes casual gameplay a very unpleassent experiance. That said, if you enjoy the competitive nature of these games and don’t mind getting yelled at by teammates when things go badly, this type of game might be for you.

The above applies to MOBA games in general, and I expect the same from SMITE, however during my first 10 or so games, I haven’t seen much of this.

Despite all the negative stuff about the MOBA scene, I enjoy this game a lot more then League of Legends. The gameplay feels different enough to appeal to me. Another great thing is the whole theme surrounding the game; in SMITE you play Deities from different mythologies instead of champions that doesn’t seem to fit into any kind of big theme. I know there’s some lore written for the champions in LOL but after having read just a few of the champion backgrounds, the lore is crappy at best.

Enough rambling, let’s talk a bit more about the game itself.

Interface

If you’ve played other MOBA games you’ll probably be familiar with the interface. It seems like the developers have simplified things a bit compared to LOL. For example, the game will auto buy skills and items for you as a new player.This really helps when you’re trying to get into the game.There’s also a quick comunication system that schould simplify teamplay a lot. Overall the interface feels really smooth and easy to use.

Graphics

I’m not sure what the final system requirements for this will be, but it looks very good for the most part and runs really smooth on my 2 year old system.

Audio

Nothing to complain about.

Gameplay

The game is a MOBA, so in that sense it plays like any other MOBA game. There is a few differences though. First of all, the game is in third person perspective instead of isometric. This makes a huge difference in what you see and how the game plays, also, from what I can tell, there’s no targeting: you’ll have to aim all your skills by yourself. In LOL terms, every skill is a skillshot. There’s also other more subtle differences that enhances the gaming experiance. E.g. Minotaur instead of the LOL nexus, phoenix instead of the last line of towers ans so on. Overall the third person perspective makes you feel more immersed.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in MOBA games at all, I see no reason not to try this out. It’s kind of fun, and it will be free to play. It’s nice to see someone taking a different approach to this genre.