Victory.... at ... what... cost

[Lutwidge]

This is the story of the (Red-Tail) Starship PC_LOAD_LETTER and her crew, consisting initially of myself (John), Bjork, Gerald Depardieu, and Michael Bolton.

It is not a pretty tale. Indeed, it is filled with miscues of practically every sort - tactical, strategic, moral, even nutritional. Those looking for advice on how to improve their play would be likely better served consulting a VCR repair manual.

The tale of PC_LOAD_LETTER starts with, as seems to be the case with Red Tails, everything going fine: the lasers are perfectly cromulent weapons against weak shields, the crew can easily handle boarding parties, etc. Then comes the first shop. For me, the first shop is generally the moment where everything goes wrong, mainly because I invariably spend all the scrap I've been hoarding on some weapon that can't be powered, especially after having spent all my scrap on some weapon that can't be powered.

This time I bought a teleporter.

In theory, this made some sense - it requires little power and I've Gerald Depardieu (a Mantis), and myself as a fairly effective boarding party (Michael Bolton is flying the ship, Bjork the Zoltan is manning the shields). In fact, during the next three jumps I had a blast boarding ships and, well, blasting their crews. At least until I got carried away on my fourth jump and damaged the ship I was boarding down to a single remaining hull plate... in an asteroid belt.

Oops.

OK, so now my ship has just Michael Bolton and Bjork. I'm dead and so is Gerald Depardieu. On the other hand, PC_LOAD_LETTER has a ton of scrap now and manages to get drone control and a Mk 1 defense drone in the next sector. Also, gratuitously enough, a boarding drone schematic was found soon after, followed by the weapons that this ship will use for the rest of the game: a Mk 1 Burst Laser, a Mk 1 Hull Laser, a Hull Beam, and a Small Bomb. At first, this seems a rather modest catalog of firepower, but it actually worked out fairly well: the bomb brings shields down to something manageable, the lasers then punch through either the shields or weapons, and the Hull Beam mops up quickly thereafter.

Actually, in retrospect, I suppose it was immediately after losing both me and Gerald that the ship really hit its stride, at least until a group of rockmen decided to teleport over. Helpless to fight them directly, the crew resorted to ushering them (via lots of open doors) to the med bay where Michael Bolton would be waiting to somehow absorb their relentless assault. This plan is in theory a good one (or really the only one), except that after somehow overcoming this pugnacious pair of pyrite pirates someone turned off the oxygen instead of the med bay and didn't realize until it was pretty much at zero. This was especially embarrassing as by then the ship was actually at a store and came about two hit points away from losing its entire crew while shopping.

After averting this particular debacle my crew found itself augmented by a pair of rockmen who would constitute PC_LOAD_LETTER's new boarding party. Unfortunately, I must have been in Rock Country for more or less the rest of the way, for each time they teleported over they would find themselves facing their rockmen brethren and were generally unable to achieve anything outside of a generally tedious impasse.

**

Erm.

OK, I have a confession at this point - I stopped writing this account about a month ago and have by now completely forgotten what happened next. I suspect it might have involved getting my rockmen killed on some misadventure against whatever the big Rebel flagship is called (sorry, haven't played in awhile). Perhaps they teleported over and went down with the ship much like myself and poor Depardieu.

Anyhow, stumbled across this story of mine in a notepad document while waiting for my Antivirus software to update and thought I'd share.

Cheers,

- John