Nexus 2 - Jupiter incident Sequel! - needs you

[chemical_art]

You're funny.  PayPal?  Minimize security problems?  PayPal is a nightmare.  It tries to act like a bank without any of the restrictions or responsibilities a bank has to follow.  It seems great until you run into a problem, and then it's the worst thing ever.  Good luck if you verified your PayPal account by linking it to a bank account that you actually use for anything else or did that so you could transfer money out of PayPal and then someone disputes a transaction because they were feeling like a dick that day.  Your life will potentially be hell for months while trying to sort it out as PayPal is completely uncooperative, unhelpful, and unresponsive.  Even if you only use it to make payments, that still means someone else is putting themself at risk in that position to be able to accept them.  The whole company should've died years ago with the way they treat people and the sheer number of horror stories there are about them.

Minimize problems. Does not eliminate them. I think giving anyone a link to your bank account could cause problems. The other problems you describe can happen to any service that I know of.

What I meant was that rather then have your card information in a dozen or more sites, you have it in one site.

[eRe4s3r]

Theres also that anyone who has your account details can take money from your bank account (By what we call a Lastschriftverfahren) that you can only get back if A) You notice it and B) you can prove you didn't allow it.

On Paypal someone can request payment or i can send/authorize payment, but payment is only authorized directly and uniquely ONCE. That means people who know your email address can ask for money via paypal, but if you ignore it they'll never get any.

And shops can never bill you twice (and if they do, you can contest a charge on paypal AND on your bank account) alone the treat usually makes paypal act very quickly.


What i would not do though is pay ebay stuff via paypal. But that's easy, i do not use ebay ;p

[Cyborg]

http://www.gog.com/news/release_nexus_the_jupiter_incident

Just thought I would bump this. Jupiter incident is available for purchase!

[Volatar]

When I first started playing Nexus I thought the game was hard scifi. Sure seemed that way.

Man was I proven wrong. Below is what I wrote right when I was playing it:

So right from the start the game stuck me as cool for one thing: it presented a hard scifi front. No magical ship drives. No artificial gravity. Most of the ships have spinning sections to make up for lack of gravity. No energy shields. Ships have engines on the front and back, and thrusters all over the place for maneuvering. Primary weapondry is mass drivers. And the main point: No FTL travel. The initial cutscene has the main character traveling from Earth to Jupiter, and the trip takes Eight months.

Image of one of the ships.

First mission has me arriving at a space station and just introduces movement commands.

Second mission has me intercepting the freighter of a rival corporation that has been pushing forward R&D tech by leaps and bounds lately. As I approach, it is revealed that the supposedly alone, unarmed freighter is not actually alone. Cue cutscene that slowly pans around the freighter until the second ship comes into view. Cue several of my ships crew yelling. The second ship is wildly different than any known human ship. It has an organic look to it, with elegant smooth lines and no visible thrusters, and engines of a completely different design. It is not a human ship.

Said ship then proceeds to activate an energy shield around itself, then begins charging something big, which then activates and sends the ship off. It has just activated it's FTL drive and buggered off.

Remember when I thought this was hard scifi? I was forced to eat those words.

Anyways, the human freighter is still around, abandoned by it's unknown alien friend. Words get traded around, and I end up fighting it. Sure are a lot of guns on a supposedly unarmed freighter. This doubles as the combat tutorial.

Third mission is a rescue mission. The rival corporation with the high tech has a nearby asteroid research base. It is sending out a distress signal. We want to get there first, using "any means necessary". This includes blowing two ships of a third rival corporation out of space on my way in. 

I reach the base, but the automated defense platforms are still active. My ship eats a missile before I back off an realize it would be a bad idea to try fighting those things. However, some wreakage of one of the rival corporations ships is detected. Turns out their own defenses started shooting at them. I grab the codes to bypass the defense platforms, approach the base, and send in a team of marines. They fight their way through the automated internal base defenses to find all the crew of the station dead already. Then they reach the main chamber. A ship, one similar to the alien ship we has seen earlier is inside. The marines take over the ship and manage to start it up.

Then the defense platforms in space reactivate and open fire on my command ship.    I make a snap decision to have the captured alien ship launch now and flee with my command ship at full speed.

The missiles start to rain in. I shoot down as many as possible but two get through and hit the command ship. Ow. We continue to flee, trading mass driver ships with the platforms. One of them explodes, it's own missile spelling it's doom.

Then one missile gets through and explodes right in the rear of the captured alien ship, disabling both it's main and secondary engines. It stops dead in space, just out of mass driver range from the platforms. Tense moments go by as I wait for the inevitable death of the ship. But no missiles come. The platforms had run out.

Several minutes later the captured ship manages to get it's secondary engine back online and limps away. Mission successful.

[keith.lamothe]

When I first started playing Nexus I thought the game was hard scifi.

I think that goes out the window as soon as you see that the ship is still accelerating upon reaching Jupiter, and stops after a relatively short burn from its (smaller) fore thrusters

It's not hard scifi at all, but it's a fun game.

[eRe4s3r]

play the community campaigns? Some are hard-scifi yes, without energy shields ;P

But energy shields are there because anything more complex -> SOTS2 armor? is broken by design. Humans can not keep track of 9 different armor layers a dozen fields of depths and width for each.

And that is assuming you even only had 3 sections of your ship. If you simulated armor realistically it would be as if you were not simulating it at all. And to circumvent this issue, energy shields exist. They add a layer of strategy and some buffer for player error, and that is the whole reason they exist. Without energy shields, a single torpedo could kill you.

[keith.lamothe]

And that is assuming you even only had 3 sections of your ship. If you simulated armor realistically it would be as if you were not simulating it at all. And to circumvent this issue, energy shields exist. They add a layer of strategy and some buffer for player error, and that is the whole reason they exist. Without energy shields, a single torpedo could kill you.

Yea, finding a realistic model that isn't "you get hit, you die" is trickier than it seems at first.

I like the model in the Honor Harrington novels: sure, that multi-ton missile's possibly coming in at over half the speed of light.  If it were to make actual physical contact with your ship, you'd be toast even if your ship was literally just a ball of armor, let alone anything trying to be a useful military starship.  Frankly, a hardened planetary installation would have trouble with that.  But realistically after hundreds of years of experience people have figured out how to make it basically impossible to actually get a contact-hit even if the missile still has drive time.  As a result, the modern missiles don't even try for that, they just get close enough and use nuke-pumped lasing rods to translate the energy into beams of coherent light that can hit your ship.  Those lasers are orders of magnitude less powerful than the actual kinetic-kill potential of the weapon, and are actually susceptible to sidewalls (artifical-gravity deflection, basically) and armor.

Sure, the whole artificial gravity physics in there is a total fabrication, but that's the "fi" part of the scifi   And generally it tries to be "realistic" from there on once the fictional premises are granted.

[Cyborg]

For someone who is really curious about the Jupiter event, is this something that a strategy buff should pick up? Is it a shallow game, or is it going to give me a real experience? I don't mind single player experiences, as long as they have something that will stimulate my brain and have some depth. If there is a repeatable tactic to win, I would not be interested. I need challenging scenarios that ask me to think on my feet and make tough decisions that will make or break the game.

[Volatar]

Don't get me wrong. While I find hard scifi cool in some respects, in general I do not like the stories/games it creates. I like the "hardish" scifi, where the author establishes the differences from reality and then works within those bounds. David Weber is really good at this.

Honor Harrington

A fellow fan in the wild! 

[keith.lamothe]

For someone who is really curious about the Jupiter event, is this something that a strategy buff should pick up? Is it a shallow game, or is it going to give me a real experience? I don't mind single player experiences, as long as they have something that will stimulate my brain and have some depth. If there is a repeatable tactic to win, I would not be interested. I need challenging scenarios that ask me to think on my feet and make tough decisions that will make or break the game.

Oh, you definitely have to think and make tough decisions both in battle and between battles (loadouts).  And if you mess up it hits hard.  There's definitely some minmaxing that can be done where if you know the numbers certain decisions are pretty obvious, but in general the game doesn't yield easily to just doing the same simple thing over and over.

I had a hard time keeping the 3D situation in my head when fighting battles and felt I could have gotten more into the tactical depth if the basic facts were presented in a way easier to wrap my mind around, but that's about the worst thing I can say about the game.

[keith.lamothe]

Honor Harrington

A fellow fan in the wild! 

Yea, my wife and I are huge fans.  It's a pity AI War as a game is so totally outside the envelope of what could contain a thoroughgoing tactical simulation   Though another problem would be explaining to players "Yes, as a matter of fact missiles are way more useful than beams, and this isn't a balance problem.  It's part of the game."

[Volatar]

Honor Harrington

A fellow fan in the wild! 

Yea, my wife and I are huge fans.  It's a pity AI War as a game is so totally outside the envelope of what could contain a thoroughgoing tactical simulation   Though another problem would be explaining to players "Yes, as a matter of fact missiles are way more useful than beams, and this isn't a balance problem.  It's part of the game."

I have stewed over the various ways to make a game in that Universe. It all boils down to:

Whats the coolest thing in the series? The elaborate tactical space combat.

And how the heck do you emulate THAT?

[keith.lamothe]

I have stewed over the various ways to make a game in that Universe. It all boils down to:

Whats the coolest thing in the series? The elaborate tactical space combat.

And how the heck do you emulate THAT?

Yea, the main thing I keep running into is: what's more frustrating than playing a tactical naval model with light-speed communications across light-minute or light-hour distances?

Programming one.

Even with the alpha-wall-interface FTL comm it's still delayed, and that'd be a pain to model.

Not that it could be all that close to the actual HH mechanics for copyright reasons, etc, but even the general idea makes for stuff that reads well (and even Weber didn't keep doing the long-drawn-out descriptions of the battles later on) but playing it would be... well, too much like work