0.97 Review - Spoilers!

[Yugi]

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Well, now that i've completed 0.97 (with a modded ship), i've decided to give a review, and here it is:

The new graphics that i've seen are high-quality, and they look like stations would if they were real. The Charons now have new and larger graphics for their stations, and the Domina station also has a new and unique graphic, which looks a lot more like a temple than the original one did.

The new sovereigns, the Urak, Dwarg and Teratons, are well-thought out, and have a little more stuff based on them than most other sovereigns do. The Urak seems to be a small race of miners like the ferians, while the Dwarg seem to be more similar to the Kobol Warlords. The Teratons are easily a great new addition to the game. They seem to be a race of mutated and rather barbaric people, who are meant to be an alternate version of the Ringers. They will pay you in rins for them to do experiments on your body, and each time you do this there is a 25% (I believe) chance that the experiment will kill you. One such experiment is having an eel-like creature implanted in your head, and another is to have a cancerous growth implanted in your chest. Each time this happens you are cut open without any sort of anaesthetic and the dialogue text is quite "descriptive". Also, every time you dock with a Teraton station there is a minute chance that instead of being entering you can be mugged by a group of Teratons and lose a number of items from your cargo hold. I highly recommend you only use the Teratons as a source of rins if you are REALLY desperate.

There are a number of new devices, such as weapons that slowly track you down and paralyzes you, and a number of weapons that have limited omnidirectional capabilites. There is even a weapon that fires many shots at a time, but each one is omnidirectional and fires at a different enemy. The Iocrym also have their own new weapon, though I won't give any spoilers on that, and they also seem to be able to turn a bit more quickly.

There are several new "Mammoth" shields that have a large amount of HP (200HP,300HP and 500HP), and they require a small power (25MW,50MW and 100MW) for their strength. There are also some recently hard-to-get shields such as the Invincible shield that are now much more common, and can be found in Commonwealth Fortresses. The Lazarus is still ridiculously rare.
Each of the new sovereigns have several of their own new types of armor, and a couple of new Rasiermeisser armors that need power to function correctly.

All three of the new sovereigns (Dwarg, Urak, Teratons) have their own new and unique-looking stations. The new Teratons have a research station where the above-mentioned experiments are carried out. The Dwarg have distictly spiky stations (and ships, I belive), while the Urak have slightly larger and more orange-tinted stations, and the windows are dark orange. You will be able to recognise the Teraton stations, as they are the gargantuan stations with a small main orange-viney section and three HUGE spikes coming out of it.
The new Trading station has a great new ability; You can order stuff from them! First you search for a particular item in their database. Next, you say how many of them you want, and then you must wait for a transport to arrive with the goods that you want. These stations are handy for getting stuff like Targeting ROMS. Unfortunately, there is a chance that the transport is destroyed en-route to the Trading post, and there are no refunds. There is also a new Taikon station that sells/buys items in rins, and a new Rasiermeisser station that not only sells items but also repairs items much like the Longzhu sphere does! The The Corporate Hierarchy is also now much more intertwined, and the old tactic of "blow up a merchants, wait for the corp cruiser to run out of ammo and loot to your heart's content" doesn't work as well. This is for two reasons; 1) when you are waiting for the corp cruiser to run out of ammo the ships that were guarding the station originally salvage all of the items from there before you can get them and 2) The same thing that happens when you blow up a Ringers station or Commonwealth station happens. If you dock with another Corporate station, you get arrested.

The only new sovereign without ships are the Teratons, and the ships of the Dwarg and Urak fit the same description as their stations. The Urak also have a very large and powerful-looking cruiser that is bound to be a high threat to any player.

The Charon system also has a large extension to it. Instead of a Commonwealth station that was there in previous versions, there is now a Korolev station, guarded by around 20 Ronin vessels. If you dock and go through everything, you will find out that the people there are planning an attack on the main Charon Pirate base. After telling you this, the Charons attack and destroy the station, which is highly difficult to prevent. I believe that it is meant to be destroyed, because. When you dock again, you find a survivor and she gives you a Map ROM of the Charon system. You're meant to destroy all the stations there, and continue. If however, you return later in the game, you will find that the Korolev station is being rebuilt, which is the station on the banner of this version.

When you are fighting against the Luminous or Dwarg and you are winning the battle, some of their ships may "convert" to your side. They seem to tag along with you and fight alongside you against their original sovereign, and possibly others.

The modding possibilities in this new version have been expanded greatly. We can now use our own dockscreens, make our own sovereigns, and - easiest of all - we no longer need to define entities that are already in the main xml. The new types of weapons also allow us to make our own versions of them, and combine them with already great ideas. Something else handy is that the main Transcendence.xml has been split into many related xmls, such as a Black Market.xml, a Commonwealth.xml, and pretty much all sovereigns have their own .xml.

This new version also has a new feature; If you attempt to start a new game when you already have a savegame, a small screen comes up reminding you that starting a new game will delete your savegame. This is definetely a handy improvement.

There have been a huge amount of additions, modifications and changes to Transcendence in 0.97, and I believe I speak for all of us when we say "Well Done!" to George for expanding the already wonderful game of Transcendence.



I'd also like to take the occasion to say that playable versions of the new Urak and Dwarg ships are available from either the UTF or my Fichikai Industries site.

[Czert]

- - - Warning! Spoilers below! Read only if you have finished the game or don't mind having it spoiled!

You finised game in 1-2 days ?
This is impresive, and I not start playing it.

ps. I don´t read yours post, except fisrt part.

[Yugi]

Well, I did use a powerful modded ship. That's why i'm not going around saying "Woohoo! I finished before anyone else!" etc..

[evilbob]

yugh cheated (mod ship) and ressurected.

[Yugi]

Yeah, I already said that. Also, aren't you resurrecting too?

[evilbob]

no, I did 0.96a with res, but now I play no res.

[Yugi]

You mean now that you've had a lot more practice at the game?
I only played with a powerful modded ship for the purpose of getting info for the review. I also looked through the xml.

EDIT: Wel, it's xmls now

[george moromisato]

Great job on the review, Yugi. I think you've covered most of the new features in 0.97.

[Yugi]

Thanks I'll probably make one for 0.98, 0.99 aaaand 1.0! (and possibly beyond).

[Icabod458]

Well done Yugimotomanager! I have not spent much time with 0.97 yet but I hope to do so in the near future.

Would you mind sharing which ship you used and how it was modded? I have to assume it was a Fichikai Industries ship. Not all of your mods but any unique weapons or shields or reactors?

[Yugi]

Actually, I made a ship specifically for the new version, making use of the new weapon capabilities. You can download it from my Fichikai topic (link in my sig). It's called the FK Monitor, named after the Monitor lizard.

[Czert]

And yugi, is possible to find/recruit Rama(or others) from start to end of game, or only in certain systems (stations) as in previos version ?

[Yugi]

I'm not sure. I assume so, as the coding for Rama is still there.

[Clear Air Turbulence]

I've only got as far as the system right before Charon. I haven't crossed to Charon yet because I've read about what's there and I want to upgrade my ship some. Currently my Sapphire has XMH (or whatever it's called) armor, monopole deflector screen, some level 3 mass driver (not the arbalest), omni laser, and my newly beloved Morningstar. I also have that cannon enhancer and the +75% damage on two of my guns is pretty sweet. So far I'm liking what I've seen. The biggest impact on the game has been the tougher bases. There's been many times where I've engaged a base and had to pull out before it destroyed me, barely getting away. That never happened before, because I could always kill a base if I had a decent-ranged weapon and I got rid of it's defense spaceships. I've found myself making more use of cover to hide from the long range base weapons.

I was wondering if anybody else has experienced any performance problems? Before 0.97 the worst that would happen would be a bit of slowdown in a really big battle, but only for a fraction of a second and not constantly. Now there's lots of times when I'm not even fighting and the game starts running slow or running in a rhythmic fast then slow manner. I also had the sound go out on me once.

[OddBob]

I was wondering if anybody else has experienced any performance problems? Before 0.97 the worst that would happen would be a bit of slowdown in a really big battle, but only for a fraction of a second and not constantly. Now there's lots of times when I'm not even fighting and the game starts running slow or running in a rhythmic fast then slow manner. I also had the sound go out on me once.

If anything the game performs better for me. I don't get slowdowns except in nebulae. The LRS is moving faster now. It used to update only about twice a second, now it looks real-time except in autopilot, when it reverts to it's 'usual'. I have made no hardware changes.