campaign and game progress

[hgabreu]

I've been playing vegastrike for while, but I have some doubts on how the game progress works.
I started ignoring the hauler in Atlantis and just went to the wild for some practice before the campaign.
I like being a merchant, so I started with cargo missions and regular trade. When I got good money and skills I got back, did the hauler missions, denied the "Patron" offer, helped the confed guy in Ataraxia and it seems to be over. I can't find more finds to do. I fooled around a lot, did a lot of bounty hunt on pirates and luddities, but I don't killing other factions because if I get too many enemies, business becomes impossible.
So my question is, what do I do next? Do I have declare war against someone? I've make a lot of money, bought many ships, but nothing seems to happen in the universe, besides regular rivalry and casual strikes between factions.

[klauss]

The campaign is heavily underdeveloped, so if you're done with it already, the dynamic universe indeed is all that is left.

From time to time, you may experience the occasional all-out assault between factions - they're fun. But they don't happen often, merely by pure chance usually.

If you want to be near the action, be certain to stay close to the frontier where most skirmishes are more likely to happen.

I've heared you can create your own mini-empire by buying cap ships and fitting them with fighters, which you can launch (not entirely sure how - in fact I believe I've seen some bug reports about it mentioning the feature to be somewhat broken) to become wingmen on missions, but all that is quite experimental and needs a lot of cash - millions and millions usually.

Anyway, when you build up like that you can start taking on the bigger missions, like those clean sweeps of aeran systems and stuff like that.

Honestly I've never got there without cheating, and when I do only to debug stuff, so I'm not the best one to give advice here.

[hgabreu]

Thanks a lot klauss, I think I'll try that.
I have a billion credits already (yeah, honest commerce can make you rich), so money is not a problem anymore.

I have trouble finding new ships and sensors, I went to aeras bases once, but were not able to equip any ship with cloak. Also never found a clydesdale or any really powerful ships to buy. Do you have any tips on that?

[klauss]

Do you have any tips on that?

Nope... perhaps someone else?

(I could cheat and grep the data files - but that'd be cheating)

[pyramid]

Sensors: Depends on the VS version you are using. They were broken up until recent svn revision 13106 and were nowhere to find. If you update to latest svn, they should be fairly common to find.

If it wasn't changed meanwhile, the big capships were not available for sale.

[klauss]

Well, depending how big.

The Mule is huge already, and it's available.

Clydes and bigger ones, though, I hear they've been removed - but mostly because they were impossible to fly.

[hgabreu]

Thanks pyramid. I was using svn revision 13042, which I grabbed last month. It impressive development you guys are doing! I thought this project was kind of forgotten (based on the dates I saw in the threads here), but, fortunately, I was wrong.
By the way, the biggest military ship I found was a Vigilance.

@klauss as a good merchant, I have a mule already ;) I like flying these "complicated" ships.
I had a problem with big ships (like the mule), which happens when respawning/undocking from stations.
The "engine" tries to reposition the ship so one can easily fly away, but for big ships, it "overlaps" with the station and get stuck, then it starts causing damage until it explodes, not a very good experience.
It does not happen when re-loading or when I am very careful on docking, looking for the greater distance where it's still possible to dock.

[travists]

... I went to aeras bases once, but were not able to equip any ship with cloak. ...

I debated a new post or answering a post, may still make a new cloak post. Anyway, I have hacked the files a little bit and have descovered some things about cloaking and cloaking devices.
1: Confed experimental cloak has been removed.
2: Most ships can't equip an aera cloak because they introduce shield leakage. Remove that value and you can mount them.
3: At present when you cloak it seemes to turn hostiles nuteral, and you don't visualy cloak. (Not that it realy matters as long as the AI leaves you alone, right?)
4: power consuption needs to be revamped, it does not seem to take much to cloak indeffinantly.