Deleth

Being hated by more then half the known universe, running out of cash and flying an ship about to fall apart there is only one thing an reasonable 12 year old boron girl could do, turn to piracy, drug production and distribution, illegal weapon deals, slavery and criminal acts in general.

But even being a criminal isn't as easy as it might sound, especially getting started. How to rob and murder people and in general commit piracy when you don't even own a weapon? How to sell drugs if you don't have any and can't afford to buy any to sell either? How to engage in illegal weapon deals when you don't have anything to sell? And how to sell slaves when you have none?

Whoever said being a criminal is easy obviously had no idea what he was talking about. Becoming a criminal is hard work.

But Lar Namina wont be discouraged by these trivialities. Making her way north the first thing she does is sell the space fuel to a pirate base in bright profit and aquiring some freight and speed upgrades. Now being completly broke she faces the problem of how to aquire at least a bit of a financial cushion to actually start her criminal carrier.

The solution to this problem however might be another problem the Terran - Argon - Warzone. With both sides going at each other there's bound to be a lot of debris, lost cargo and wrecks. The risk of accidentlly getting between the two warring factions is rather high and a single pilot deciding to take a shot at her might already proof fatal. Heavy risk... but the priiiiiize!

Surprisingly the way there should proof to be more dangerous then the actual war zone. With both the Split and Paranid hating her even friendly sectors seemed to be filled with hostiles that luckily for the most part did not pay her any attention. Aside from a single Split Merchant who thought I'd be a dandy idea to take a shot at the Boron passing by and with a single hit completely depleted the shields and damaged the ship itself. Luckily the second and lethal shot missed by a small margin or Namina's story would've come to an very early ending. That's it! No more misses nice squid! The Split have just volunteered to solve the "where to find slave" issue once Namina get's her tentacles on a few weapons.

It followed a near collision with an very small nigh invisible asteroid and a fight between a pirate and some law enforcement where the pirate ended up blowing both himself and his opponents out of existence by employing a massive warhead meant for fighting capital ships in close combat in direct vincinity of Namina who if a few hundred metres closer would've shared their fate.

The actual war zones turned out to be surprisingly boring aside from dodging the ocassional misguided projectile weapon and staying out of the way of capital ships who apparently don't care if they squash some of the smaller ships when making their way towards the fighting neither side payed Namina much attention as the humans were to busy murdering one another.

In the end it turned out to be the right decisions to come to the warzone as once the fighting in a sector subsides there is often a great many rockets and other stuff left to loot and sell to whoever wants to buy it. Apparently neither side minds Namina acting like a vulture and desecrating the corpses of their fallen. May the Human - Human war be a long, bloody and profitable one.

Finally making some money and being able to upgrade her ship to it's (not very impressive) maximal potential the questions arises at how to get back at the Split. Because even fully upgraded and armed a scout ship isn't the best choice if one wishes to stay alive when commiting acts of piracy and murder.

@Animasta said:

@Deleth: ...that's what I said in my first sentence? People was meant to mean other people and not me. There is a lot of racism in australia towards aboriginal australians, and that's a fact. unfortunately, this has led to white australians being branded racist without knowing if they are or not.

Actually racism while something bad is sadly also something very normal. The majority of people all around the world are extremly racist. The only ones who go out of their way to actually condemn and fight it are the western countries. Funnily enough those are the countries who in a few generations wont exist in the way they day today anymore. :D

@Animasta said:

unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in australia and people tend to brand many of the white aussies that way. I don't know you enough to say either way, but as long as you believe you aren't racist and don't treat aboriginals bad just for being aboriginal than you should be cool.

abos really are treated pretty bad though.

You do realize stereotyping white australians as racists is racist, right?

On Topic, the problem is that racism by now is something people shout to justify their behavior. As in "you're racist and you've offended me so that makes it alright if I beat you up and mug you!". Just take a look at the current "demonstrations" in the islamic world where people go completly berserk and murdered several Americans already over a small video clip.

Those same people who're constantly calling people with another religion and world view "swines and apes" and talk about how it would be best to kill them all. Screaming racism empowers the one who does it and cast them as the victim therefore justifying their every actions and putting blame onto the victims.

@9cupsoftea said:

My computer isn't great so I'm hesitant about space engine. X3 seems pretty good but it does seem to involve quite a lot of combat. I'll give it a try though, thanks.

No, not really. You're not forced to do combat for the most part and can pretty much instantly go to free roaming sandbox game. If you trade enough illegal goods even most pirates will eventually come around and have a friendly stance towards you. The only always hostile force as of now are the Xenon (and in Reununion + TC Khaak) and those only show up in their own sectors and one "migration routes" from on sector to another but are mostly taken care of by the race military.

The only part where you're forced to engage in combat is when doing the plots because at least part of them is made up by fighting missions.

Also "X3" is actually three games as of now. X3 Reunion the first, X3 Terran Conflict the second and X3 Albion Prelude. Personally I'd recommend Terran Conflict because there is no war between the Argon and Terrans and the game feels "most balances" while giving you a lot of options thus as eventually owning your own sector.

Though you have the Khaak as enemy in X3 TC, they're most of the time a non issue in the core/safer sectors though.

You should've made a poll. That being said, I'm kinda going to miss multiplayer. While I'm mostly playing single player I still enjoy the occasional game of multiplayer especially with friends.

The life and possible death of Lar Namina, a tale of courage and cowardice, of success and failure, of greed, murder and fraud!

I'm currently fairly bored soI've decided to start a new game of X3:Albion Prelude. To spice things up I'm going for the DiD mode. That means if you die once everything you've accomplished is gone and no matter what happens or goes wrong you can't reload.

Since the game does not have a real "goal" as it's an open ended sand box game I've set myself two goals for the time being:

http://www.giantbomb.com/achievements/it-was-about-time/174901/

http://www.giantbomb.com/achievements/survivor/174923/

I will keep this going untill these two goals are reached or Lar Namina will die a horrible, painful and grusome death. The second one being far more likely as in this game about everything is trying to kill you. Including the auto pilot, asteroids, giant ships coming through jump gates while you're trying to enter them and space flies.

As for Lar Namina. Lar Namina is a 12 year old girl trying to go out into space making a name for herself and find her fortune. Yes you've read that right Namina is only twelve years old. Apparently Boron parent's expect their children to move out and make a living on their own at an fairly early age. At least they've seem to have sponsored Namina an Boron Octopus (ship) instead of expecting her to venture out into just wearing a space suite.

Sadly weapons weren't included but in all honesty who in their right mind would give an 12 year old girl armed weapons afterall? Instead however they gave her two bottles of space fuel. An illegal drug. All in all I'm wondering how the Borons could survive for so long, they seem to be pretty bad at parenting.

Namina's starting point is on the very bottom of the right side of the map. Somewhere Namina for various reasons doesn't want to be such high pirate activity, xenon, hardly any bussiness opportunities, sectors being ugly and having silly names. Where Namina does want to be is the top left of the Map where the core sectors of Argons, Borons and Teladi are located.

The problem however is that as a Boron 2 out of the 6 mayor races hate Namina by default, the Split and Paranid. This wouldn't be as much of an issue as it is if these races weren't extremly trigger happy and would box in the sectors currently available to Namina. As you can see the way on the left is completly blocked off by an batch of red Paranid and Split sectors.

The north on the other hand looks relatively safe, sadly it isn't. Sure Namina would only have to pass through a few pirate sectors to reach the Allied Argon sectors. The problem with this however is that the central Argon sectors aren't actually safe because the Argons are currently having an all out war with their Terran bretherns and these sectors are the main battlefield. So the Boron being Allied to the Argon brings up our enemy count to 3/6 mayor races.

So Namina's first goal being to reach the core sectors one should have a look at what kind of resources she has at her disposal to accomplice this.

- An small Boron Octupus M5 scout ship with no weapons but an 1MJ shield an maximum speed of around 171/ms (upgradable to around 490/ms) with a hull strenght of 1.800 and 1000 shield strenght and only 5 cargo. (to put that into perspective, where Namina's ship has 1000 shield strenght, an average destroyer has around 10.000.000 - 16.000.000 in shield strenght and their smallest weapon could insta gib Namina, an average freighter has around 10.000 - 14.000 cargo)

- Two units of space fuel worth around 2400 credits.

- 1000 Credits in Cash.

Well, that's not much to be honest. The current max speed of her ship means that some destroyers could run her down , she doesn't have any cargo space to actually transport things so that's out of the window, not having any weapons means that any kind of fighting is impossible aswell not that doing fighting in an scout ship is a great idea to begin with and Namina doesn't even have enough credits to be able to work as a taxi for people wanting to travel as she can't afford a life support system for her cargo hold. Oh well.

Edit. I'm not quite sure where to exactly put this. As it's not really about Albion Prelude but about Namina and my DiD. Well whatever!

@ahoodedfigure said:

@Deleth: I think you're more running off what the comments were than what I wrote. This really isn't about DA2 very much, it pointed out a specific aspect, the sexual conqueror stuff, that seemed to push in that direction. The rest of the story wasn't part of the discussion, and as others have said, the main character itself goes in an anti- direction, especially at the end.

You were calling Hawke an Mary Sue weren't you? Yes you were! You then went on to give a faulty explanation as for why it is like that. So please don't tell me you didn't and it was only the comments of other people.

Dungeon Lords. Back when I played it shortly after release it DIDN'T HAVE ONE. Imagine Skyrim without a map and gras about as tall and trees everywhere, enjoy.

Hawke a Mary Sue? Hawke is a catastrophically failure of epic proportions. No matter what Hawke does S/He ends up failing badly in the end. The whole plot of DA2 is one long chain of depressing moments and failures on Hawke/Your part with nothing ever going right and when it finally seems you've won you get told that you're missing.

Even the romances aren't really Mary Sue like, while I personally despise Jennifer Helper for her impact on the whole franchise it's not like you could get all of them at the same time and they're worshipping you groveling at your feet.

In all honesty you seem to have a very very weird view on what is a "Mary Sue" and how it is defined and what it's traits are. To me it seems more like you wanted to ramble on and on about Dragon Age 2 romances (hell I don't mind that, I hate DA2!) but please at least don't do so based on a false pretense based on a very weird analization.

Funkydupe, depends. Let's say you're playing on a hard (the hardest) difficulty in very late game and the chance to be insta gibbed/get unlucky are extremly high and even the loss of a single trained and equipped soldier would mean you're completly screwed as you're unable to train new ones due to them being to weak. You wouldn't reload and instead give up on all the hours/days invested into your current game?