Star Wars Squadrons - PC/PS4/XB1/VR!

[Darwock]

3 days until the end of the operation, and last nights victory left me about 50 points short of my target (Valiant 1).

 

First round tonight was another victory, but it only gave me 47 points, lol. Next round, one of our team dropped out and left us short. Lost 50 points from that so I ended up marginally worse than where I started. Third round was a win, gave me about 20 points back so still one win short.

 

The final round was a no hoper from the start, there was a level 318 guy on the other team and one or two others rated higher than anyone on our side. The match started as expected, we were just being torn to shreds. After my first death I saw we were down to 4 players again. I pretty much gave up and was just going through the motions. They wiped out both our frigates and started on our Flagship. Then surprisingly we shifted back to attack. I died and saw we were back to a full team. Every time they got us back on defense we turned it around - and won the damn match! From way behind, outnumbered and outclassed.

 

It took me over the threshold and I earned the shiny bronze helmet rewards just in time before the reset.

 

So it took the whole duration of operation 2 to get from Hero 1 to Valiant 1. I have to hope for better initial placement in operation 3 so I can have a crack at the silver prizes.

[Darwock]

I had an amazing session last night after getting into a group with a guy in Romania who was a natural at calling the shots. I learned quite a lot about when to attack and so on, but it takes a certain personality to be able to communicate that in game (especially when the majority of your team usually don’t respond). It’s a skill I don’t have, so I made the most of the opportunity and stuck with him from 10pm until 1am. We didn’t lose a single round, including one we absolutely should have lost - the opposing team were all leveled in the 200-400 range and we had only one who was over 100 (me). They threatened us a fair amount once they reached our flagship (our subsystems went down fast) but by that stage we had enough of a head start to beat them to the win.

 

Things I need to remember going forward - after wiping out both cruisers/frigates don’t proceed directly to assault the flagship, you will throw away the morale and lose the momentum - strengthen morale first. Ignore the targeting subsystem (I always thought this was a decent target before but it’s fairly pointless). The order should be shield generators, power, and then just focus on breach points. You can win the game even in a defense phase by taking an interceptor with a jammer all the way to the enemy flagship and just hitting breach points, so it helps to tell your team mates where they are. Also you can flip the initial phase really quick if you have someone going directly to strip shields on the raider/corvette, and another player waiting to drop bombs on it (farming AI while waiting for shields to drop).

 

Something I still don’t quite get, he asked everyone on the team to call out when they were in trouble, because that highlights your position to the team so they can provide assistance. He covered my retreat several times where I really shouldn’t have survived. I guess I suck at using the radar because I rarely have any idea where my team are, unless they are directly in my field of view.

 

I had a vague goal of getting my win ratio to over 50%, and I’ve been stuck at 0.45 for a very long time. After last night it’s now at 0.49.

 

(watch it tumble all the way back down again once I’m back at the mercy of random team match-ups)

[Darwock]

4 pages down for this thread now, so am I the only one still playing?

 

I have gotten into a daily routine now where I log in on my playstation after my kids have gone to bed, and join up with a hotel manager in Kentucky who plays on his (sleeping) sons x-box before he goes to work. Between the two of us have a small pool of trusted players to call on so we roll with anything from 2-4 and an occasional 5 in a squad, play for between 1-2 hours and see how we go.

 

It largely depends on the opponents we are matched with and whether our random squadmate dies too much for us to counter, but my win rate is creeping up. I’m at just over 50% now. In terms of rank though it’s usually 1 step forward, 2 steps back as the points gain/loss rarely seems fair, even though we win more than we lose. Still plagued by losses through disconnecting team mates too.

 

I’m getting glimpses of the meta game, where people fly in ridiculous constant drift patterns (think snaking in F-zero) and exploit features of the rules to ensure they win, but at heart I still just want to pilot starfighters and not ‘game the system’, so I try to ignore all that stuff and get walked all over by the teams that do such things. I hope they are having fun...

 

As a person who has always largely played solo, offline games - even when I had regular gaming mates our tastes and skills didn’t really align so multiplayer stuff rarely took hold - this game, right now - with VR, a flight stick and an actual squad of mates to fly with - this is what I would imagine games in heaven to be like when I die.

 

You know, one day this war’s gonna end.

[Benny]

I really do want to get back to this, but games like Guilty Gear Strive just keep popping up and taking over my online sessions...

[Darwock]

Squadrons received it’s final server side balancing patch a couple of days ago, which was just a couple of tweaks to the boost activation costs of the X and Y wings. The devs have all been moved on to other projects, so for the game to have any legs going forward it has to have been left in a good enough state.

 

Sadly (for me) the cross play feature which should have been, and was, one of the strengths has turned out to be a bit of a curse. PC players have access to control bindings, exploits and macros that essentially break the PVP game, and console players don’t have. Due to the competitive nature of the game and the fact it has become an eSport (there’s a tournament tonight with a 20,000 dollar cash prize) using these techniques has become necessary to win, and has been labeled ‘high level play’. It should be called ‘cheating’ but as it’s not policeable, we’re just pretending it’s something else. The devs are aware but as there have been no possibility of client side patches for several months now, we just have to live with it.

 

The game is still alive, and my regular group still plays, but we lose just about every round - to the point that it’s really not fun any more. All the other ‘play for fun’ types appear to be feeling the same way so less and less people are coming back, which just means the pool of enjoyable opponents is shrinking rapidly. 90% of games start with me looking at the opponent list and going “oh well, we’ve lost this one already” and then not having any motivation at all to participate in the match.

 

This has actually turned out to be a contender for my favourite game of all time, so admitting that it is effectively dead, even while it appears to be still online and playable, is a hard thing to do. It’s made me quite depressed to be honest. I’m taking a couple of days off to see if I get my mojo back.

 

Otherwise I guess I just pray hard for a sequel, which EA will allow to be supported (they should have included sales of cosmetics to allow the game to generate some revenue) and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

 

 

[Benny]

I keep meaning to go back to this but I think to be honest the single player mode gave me what I wanted. On PC at least there is definitely very little recourse for players screwed by the matchmaking.

[Darwock]

2 hours ago, Welrain said:

Whhhaaaaaaattttt.

Cosmetics don’t hurt anyone, incoming profits keep the accountants happy, and maybe they wouldn’t have treated the best spaceflight/dogfighting game in the last couple of decades like a failed passion project.

 

The community at large has been begging for some paid DLC, or anything that would allow them to show support in exchange for continued developer engagement to stop the community drying up. Unfortunately without corrective patches for all the exploits, that’s exactly what has happened.

[Darwock]

1 hour ago, Benny said:

I keep meaning to go back to this but I think to be honest the single player mode gave me what I wanted. On PC at least there is definitely very little recourse for players screwed by the matchmaking.

Matchmaking was boned in the early days, but they actually made a reasonable job of fixing it a while back. If they’d fixed it earlier perhaps those players from the first few weeks would have stayed on - but this was never supposed to have had any ongoing support, so it took them a while. Didn’t realize what a gem they had

 

edit - forgot to add the important part! It *was* fixed, but it’s ballsed up again now because there aren’t enough players in the pool to make it fair.

[dumpster]

How does this stand up as a one player game? Just seen it's £15 in Asda and thinking of dusting off the PSVR. 

[Vespa Alex]

Easily fifteen quids worth of entertainment. 

[Benny]

I agree. And I didn't even play in VR. And at 20 quid.

[Darwock]

It’s coming to PS plus next week, which given that it’s already on Gamepass and EA play, makes for the last chance to bring new blood into the game. I want to encourage anyone who tries it out to stick with it, so thought I’d post some basic stuff to help people win matches. Some of it is counter-intuitive to what people might think you should be striving for.

 

Ranked fleet battle is the main gameplay mode of the game, all of this is about that, because that’s where the real awesome stuff happens.

 

First thing to know is, player kills don’t particularly matter. You are going to see some ridiculous levels of evasion from skilled enemy players, but they are just distractions and don’t always need to be shot down to win.

 

Morale determines who is attacking and who is defending. If you kill a player, you get +10 to your morale bar. If you shoot down an AI fighter, you get +3. The thing is, the AI fly in packs of 5, so if you wipe them all out in one go (Goliath missiles can do this) you get +15 morale. In a race for morale, the team that kills the most AI the fastest is going to win. If you chase down hard to kill players instead, you are taking longer and allowing the other team to keep damaging your capital ships for longer.

 

Next thing that the game doesn’t really tell you is that ion damage is crucial. Ions strip shields. Proton weapons do zero damage to shields. Doing ion damage doesn’t earn any points on the scoreboard, so the person stripping shields off capital ships will not get any glory or recognition, but without it, everyone else’s proton torpedoes and missiles will do no damage at all. If everyone just wants to see their name at the top and goes for player kills and/or pure damage, you will not win the round. Someone has to strip the shields first, and fast.

 

You only win by damaging the capital ships. I’ve seen players with a 40:1 KDR for the match lose the round, because they weren’t doing enough objective damage. Good strategy can easily beat fancy flying, so don’t necessarily worry about having a good KDR or being top of the scoreboard.

 

Spoiler

Also - bombs only connect if you drop them from point blank range. Took me ages to figure that one out.

 

[shirubagan]

I played the first two missions this morning and this is a textbook example of tedious bullshit onboarding/tutorials. It could have all been explained in 1/10th the time. Awful. 

[Sarlaccfood]

Quite enjoying this after downloading it from PS+ last month. 
 

I’ll probably just do the story mode and leave it though as I imagine I’ll just get fucking wrecked in multiplayer. 

[Darwock]

Since it got added to PS plus there are a lot less one sided wreckings actually (in fleet battles). They do still happen, but it used to be all you would get. I’d definitely recommend the multiplayer though, it’s the real meat of the game. I’ve been playing less since VF5us, wish I had time for everything.

[Sarlaccfood]

Hmm okay maybe I’ll dip my toe in then once I’ve done the story.

[Darwock]

When you do, make sure you turn on the voice chat, and use your mic. It’s all about the communication!

[SharkyOB]

This looks incredible!

 

 

A total conversion of TIE Fighter in the upgraded X-Wing Alliance engine.  There's a really thorough installation tutorial available here:

 

 

Downloading now so will report back asap....

[Benny]

RIP retro folder.

[SharkyOB]

Oops, just noticed the thread.  Strange the mod wasn't mentioned here though, I would've thought there'd be a bigger audience.

[Lochenvar]

This is free on the Epic Games Store at the moment:
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/star-wars-squadrons