Topic: Infinite Space: Anger in a Box

[NWR_insanolord]

I actually own as many DSiWare games as I do WiiWare games now, and I'd own even more if the DSi had a storage solution like the Wii's.

[oohhboy]

ehh, the point is moot for the time being. I'm waiting to upgrade to the 3DS before I bother looking at that stuff. For me there is little reason for me to buy a DSi.

I actually finished Infinite space a little while ago. It's a little uneven. A couple of difficultly spikes, otherwise I was exploding ships at will.

The early battleships really suck. They really blow, up. A mildly upgraded cruiser, or pimped out destroyer tears through them like paper. A piss off weak carrier is more powerful in both utility and damage. They get better late game, but to call them the stars of the fleet is a real stretch. Good for taking damage though. Max out armour and HP, throw in some fire control for some extra damage if you can fit it. Crank up the gauge speed and do some research.

Carriers own. Chuck a pair of them out back with 60 fighters a pop. A BS with some of it's own fighters. Some support ships. If you're lazy, just sit back, otherwise you're free to nail them to the wall at will. Normal attack the small stuff, one shoting them, your gauge speed is through the roof giving you anywhere from 30% to 50% speed advantage which only gets better as the opfor fleet dies. Extra battle speed is good, but your fighters are doing most of the work. Formation foe + barrage/normal to snipe off carriers, but the computer never have enough fighters to counter yours.

Mid game ending was a great touch.

Melee is pretty awful and I can only hope if they make a sequel they make it something worth playing. Expanding the dungeon crawl a little would be nice. The last 1/6 of the story is a little weak. Not much of a payoff. Increased gameplay depth with the space battles would be most welcome in a sequel. As Spock would say in the Wrath of Khan "He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking". Better shop data base. Mission notes, better data bases in general.

It's an 8/10 game that would have fallen into nameless 7's territory if it wasn't relatively unique, but there are so many things and problems with depth of gameplay that holds it from true greatness.

[NWR_insanolord]

ehh, the point is moot for the time being. I'm waiting to upgrade to the 3DS before I bother looking at that stuff. For me there is little reason for me to buy a DSi.

That's the thing: the DSi has an impressive library, but there's really no reason to buy one at this point with the 3DS coming out (according to Nintendo's timetable) within the next 8 months.

[Crimm]

oohhboy, you're right about the carriers.  The biggest one is essentially an unstoppable force of nature.  I didn't add it to my fleet until late, instead opting to move onward and upward with battleships.  Let's be honest, the first few carriers were garbage, so my expectations for them was very low.

[KDR_11k]

I got the game recently and played through it completely over the course of the winter vacations (~40h on the clock). I didn't use fighters much, the problem is gauging their effectiveness because you cannot see what they hit or for how much damage. Once I got the Absoluta class I was completely unstoppable. You get that thing for beating the Zenito arc and it's a complete monster. Mediocre firepower (especially for a battleship) but it's got decent fighter capacity (you can stick 2 hangars in there and it has room for the biggest ones, I won every fighter battle with just that) and most importantly the NOS Command System. That thing gives your fleet a MASSIVE mobility bonus, even the best enemies won't land more than 1 in 10 hits (provided you boost your regular mobility to a decent level). The only danger came from special attacks that always hit but dodging takes care of those and in the final boss battle even when I was dodging the enemy couldn't hit me with normals. Other than that the best advice is to avoid the dodge command because with the NOS even barrages are pretty harmless. Using Kira or HELP as your first officer lets you recover health faster than enemies can deal it out.

The downside is that you have to fight a fleet headed by an Absoluta up to 5 times to unlock it. That was very hard, you get cut off from shipyards once you go into the Zenito sector and the shipyard worlds there have to be liberated first (2 fleet battles minimum).

For affordable ships the Junkyard was very good, HUGE room for modules so you can drop in a ton of recreational modules and whatnot, I traded my whole fleet against three of these once the second story began. Probably a good choice for extra mode.


I liked the melee combat, the secret to it is that the AI has set patterns for each battle so with a bit of observation you can predict its moves. I once had a battle where with a 1k start for both sides I lost troops down to roughly 300 almost immediately but still managed to win by adapting to the AI's pattern. Overall I think it's the only jRPG I've seen that uses an AI, most just have enemies pick actions randomly but e.g. in the battles against Rubriko I had to bait him into dodging, then pounding him with normal attacks to get any hits in but if I just kept charging up and using normals he'd stop dodging, I had to use barrages regularly to keep him scared of my red command bar.

[oohhboy]

Junkyards are fantastic pocket battleships that can take on almost any role.
 
 Fighting Absolutas isn't difficult if you just fighter lock them. With one dedicated carrier, you can just send them and plink most fleets to death if you wanted to. With fighters, regardless of speed, you can always dictate the tempo of the battle. Never got an Absoluta myself as I was already out speeding, dodging, shooting, healing and creaming everything I was coming up against. So it would have been over-kill and a little boring.
 
 The game complete modes are very dry and unsatisfying due to how much of an after thought they are. I really can't be arsed playing it again just so I can unlock the missed story arc ships and modules.
 
 I look forward to a sequel, if they ever make one, but Sega/Nude maker/ Platinum Games needs to polish this diamond in the rough. I feel fairly lukewarm with most of the games on the 3DS, but a sequel to this would seal the deal.
 
 Oh, here is the second Anime short that was made to promote the game. The first is the same as the intro to game. There are 4 in total, Japanese and english dubs. Produced by production I.G, so it's a guaranteed feast for the eyes. They are a little spoiler-ish, but contain so little information only a person who has played the game would understand.

[KDR_11k]

I had the Absoluta range-locked by pushing it against the far boundary of the battle area, the problem is hitting the damn thing, even the destroyers in that formation take a ton of attacks before they go down. I wasn't very well equipped for those fights when I went into the Zenito sector so I was stuck with a sub-optimal fleet, those battles were hell. Getting the ship greatly improved my dodge rate though, I didn't even need Kira as the first officer because enemies just did so little damage. Plus I could use 40 fighters on a ship with twice the durability of a carrier.

I wasn't using fighters because the carrier I used (one of the bigger SMC ones) proved to be more of a liability than an asset, fighters were just way slower at killing stuff than the fleet's main guns. Of course it's extremely hard to tell what the fighters do, all you see is that after some time an enemy ship explodes.

[oohhboy]

Fighters attack the ship you are viewing. Little damage points tick off every second or so. With 40 fighters, that isn't much more than a CAP (Combat air patrol). It's too few fighters to be of much use than harassment and to lock down the opfor fleets postion. I used 2 Full carriers that could house more fighters than the game would let me buy(60 each). I also had a battleship that had a hanger or two so that brought the total to 138. I would use the fighters to tear the smaller ships apart or weaken them so badly that that the all aspect weapons would finish them off or vis versa. I also never use bombers since the anti-ship bonus they have is tiny compared to the space superiority fighters excellent all roundness.

That leaves the capital ship to deal with. With it locked in position, you can move in and out of range to goad the AI into using it's special attack. Then you can either respond in kind or use normal attacks while they are dodging.

But for most of the game, unless you are grinding money, you are always sub-optimal as you can ever buy the ships you want and out fit them at the same time. I would just upgrade what I had unless something came up that was that much better even with an incomplete set of modules fitted. Even around the end game I just didin't have enough money to make the fleet I wanted.

But Battleships and Carriers aren't worth the trouble until you leave SMC. In SMC you just stick to Cruisers and destroyers giving you a nice high speed low drag fleets. But when carriers do become available, you must have something that can launch fighters so you do have a CAP since AAA weapons blow an unbelievable amount of arse compared to their utility and restrictions on use to almost any low end Carrier.

[KDR_11k]

Sub-optimal in this case meant my loadout wasn't geared for close combat (you have to engage Zenitoans at sub-12k ranges to avoid their biggest guns, they suck at close range) and accuracy (Absoluta = almost no hits).

The fighters I used on my Absoluta were those 500G multi-role ones, they dominated any fighters the enemy had. With regards to bombers and fighters I think that may be very hard to judge, the anti-ship stat is only the accuracy, the damage output depends on the weapons.

Also it seems outside the SMC the multi-shot weapons (the ones with damage denoted like 3x110) are practically worthless when you aren't using Final Roar. They have very crappy armor penetration.

I wish HELP would tell you what the ship specials do, no idea what Impact Convergence System means and whether the radar ship has any use outside of a specific plot event.

[oohhboy]

Yeah that was one of my issues with the game. There was a lot of information and databases, but most of it was fluff. You would know more about some random star than anything about any subsystem on a ship. I still don't have any idea what the Impact Convergence System does even though I have it.

The radar ship is only good for that plot event and I didn't use it. The event half's your range, shrinking your accurate firing envelope, making it a bit more dangerous and more of a hassle to fight as your weapons will always out range your radar forcing you to engage near the minimum's. Fortunately, the fleets you fight don't take advantage of this.

I am surprised you had issues attacking at sub 12K range. I booted the game to check a ship that fought during that same period and it had a min range of 6-8k for the largest guns. So you might lose the absolute biggest guns if you didn't want to pop out for a full strike, but it still leaves you well under heavy stuff they mount. With fighter lock, you can set what ever distance you liked without pressure.

The only time I had a issue similar to yours was back in SMC, but I got some warning about that encounter from this thread. That was the only time I swapped out my whole weapon set.

The all aspect weapons are only good if you mount them on your medium or small slots since they tend to be mediocre regardless of what you mount there, so you use multishot as it gives you better than even chance of killing off the small stuff including cruisers in 1 - 2 attacks with fighters. However, this advice only hold true depending on where you are in the game. The balance moves back and forwards between different weapons as you get new blue prints. As times I had no multi attack as the tech in those had fallen behind too much.

The large slots are for your point target weapons with high accuracy (85+) and staffed with AS geniuses. Boost that with your Battleships 2 AS fire control modules, well you will still miss as it is the nature of the game. But I am assuming you are paying attention to formations. Targeting the ships in the back, IE the flag ship comes with drastic to hit penalties. Without formation foe, it's pointless, but fighters ignore formations (And armor!). So, spend a couple attacks clearing off the picket ships, then stomp the flag ship at leisure.

Or you can shove them into the corner(IN SPACE!) and plink them to death with fighters. The fighters regenerate based on the maintenance/hanger module. But with only 40 to work with I would have ran out of patience.

[KDR_11k]

Either way it doesn't seem like either of us had "anger in a box".

I always stick fire con and AS con on a ship and only target the front row (unless I'm using Formation Foe) but the Absoluta's fleet is still extremely hard to hit. Even with a Normal against a Dodge I'd have maybe a 50% hit chance. Due to the formations I'd usually have to chew through the light ships first anyway so sending fighters after those wouldn't save much time (they usually die in 1-2 attacks, waiting for the fighters to make up the difference takes longer than simply hitting them with another attack).

I used the radar ship during the plot event, it's cheap and I just went up from 4 to 5 ships capacity without much cash in the bank at that point so I figured I could just as well get it, assuming it has some sort of positive effect on the fleet.

[Crimm]

The anger title came from the mid-game boss, sneaky S.O.B.


Firing range: exceeded mine
Fire power: exceeded mine
Armor: duh
Fighters: Oh God, he's let out the swarm!


I think I beat him by deadlocking him against the wall with a bunch of missile boats in what must have been the longest battle of the game. I probably lost to him 20 times before that.

[ymeegod]

Also the total lack of common info, Help wasn't all that great so alot of it was trial and error.  Reminds me of another game, Demon Soul PS3, for it's steep learning curve. 

Still gripping about losing 70K or something at the halfway point --that's what pissed me off the most; I was struggling while saving up all that cash and got zero for it other than a kick to the nads.

I'll still glad a few others have joined the ranks and completed this game, it's a rough diamond but if the developers took a big more time it could have been a gem.

PS:  I know what's Crimm talking about; really hated those random fights after a major boss battle.  Restarted quite a few times because my fleet was already dented in from the boss so a minor fleet was able to defeat me with one standard volley.   
 
 

[KDR_11k]

The anger title came from the mid-game boss, sneaky S.O.B.


Firing range: exceeded mine
Fire power: exceeded mine
Armor: duh
Fighters: Oh God, he's let out the swarm!


I think I beat him by deadlocking him against the wall with a bunch of missile boats in what must have been the longest battle of the game. I probably lost to him 20 times before that.

Which boss was that?

Still gripping about losing 70K or something at the halfway point --that's what pissed me off the most; I was struggling while saving up all that cash and got zero for it other than a kick to the nads.

I could have sworn I kept all my money there.

PS:  I know what's Crimm talking about; really hated those random fights after a major boss battle.  Restarted quite a few times because my fleet was already dented in from the boss so a minor fleet was able to defeat me with one standard volley.   

I never had that happen, my fleet either left a boss battle at almost full power or died. Once I start losing ships the boss battle usually ends badly anyway, I think I only had a very small number of wins despite heavy losses. Also I don't think I ever encountered an un-escapable battle after a boss fight, might just have been luck but those are pretty rare.