Darkwind - Viewing Topic: Leto's New Player Primer

ExLeto
ExMachina
Pedestrian
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Joined: Feb 19, 2009

Leto's New Player Primer

Hello and welcome to Dark Wind. If this is your first time entering the game then this will matter. Dark Wind is a turn based game set in a post apocalyptic world called Evan. The short of it is, the world fell apart. Between wars and dwindling resources an event called the solar apocalypse. Now we have something akin to a world severely lacking in technology. The survivors of the catastrophe slowly began to rebuild and the end result is what you see. Acid rains, mutated creatures, and now even mutated humans. This is where your socks get rocked, cause you are playing survivors in this, you take control of a gang of survivors edging out your own path in this new and crazy world. So what do you do with this. Well that's up to you, there are plenty of options for the path you'll take, but it'll take some time before you can make these choices and that's for someone else to tell you how to go about it. Me, who am I, I suck simple as that, but I've got a handle on this game and I can tell you what to do to get a handle on it too. So if I haven't lost your attention, give this primer a shot so you can at least get an idea about this game.

So where should we start. Well let's go over some of the basics. The tutorial teaches you how to play this game from the get go. How to control the camera, how to use the guns on your car, to actually drive the car, but it misses some concepts. The game itself has a sense of physic behind it. The developers really wanted to demonstrate this. You'll notice as you drive that the weight and momentum of your car directly affects how your vehicle moves. Take a turn too sharp, going too fast, and being too heavy is a recipe for disaster. Problem is you have to imagine every car is a manual, though you wont actually control gear changes, stopping quickly or turning on a dime is a bit of a challenge. You'll either slide or directly fish tail trying to fix yourself. You'll notice this in various settings, going up a hill you stand to lose speed, while going down hill you'll speed down it. If you hit your hand brake with the wheels turned you're vehicle will turn a little sharper then you meant too. There is a severe degree of finesse you'll find in this game, but don't worry, it'll become second knowledge to you in no time. Now after the tutorial it is recommended you read the help files. It's a lot to go over, but it covers a great deal of aspects to this game, however this primer isn't about the help files or the tutorial, it's about the nuances you'll pick up as you play. So now that this is out of the way, let's get to those nuances.

First off, you'll wonder where to begin. Let me tell you my mistake, I wanted to immediately start shooting. Take to the first death race I found and go nuts. That was how I lost my first gang member. It was messy too. See like I said plenty of things to learn. The best, absolute best place to start the game is to go to a Race. Just a race, ignore shooting for right now. Basically what you want to do is learn to control your car, take a turn. So look for a race to go into, non-league races are best. Here you'll get all the practice you need to drive a car. Do this until you got it down, you don't have to win your race, placing is nice enough and as long as you place above fifth you'll get a nice chunk of change for your troubles. What you are aiming for is learning to drive so you aren't hitting walls in every corner. Handbrake can be your friend cause let me tell you. Hitting a wall hard enough is just as deadly as taking a round of fire, specially if your hitting a wall every corner. Once you get down not hitting every wall you come across like a wayward construction worker now you head for Combat. Still no death race, but now you get to shoot stuff so, bonus. Here you'll learn how to control a fight that actually has someone shooting back at you. Understand that it all depends on the vehicle, but you'll discover that one of your worst nightmares is how recoil and impact can effect your vehicle. See firing weapons causes a bit of recoil taking an impact can bounce your car.
So how you ask, well imagine taking several hits from the right side, several turns or several rounds of fire. I've been flipped and flipped cars by doing this. Nothing quite like seeing a muscle car slide on one side as they tried to wheel past you to circle back for a flank. It's great, until you're the one sitting on your side. Not to mention it all depends on where you are hit. If you take heavy weapons fire from the front, you'll find yourself slowing down, or in some unlucky cases, unable to move forward at all. From the back you stand to get an extra boost of speed if the weapon is heavy enough, taking a car cannon blast in the back is great, up until you realize you lost five points from your rear armor or worse, that your rear end just bounced high enough for the next round to hit your undercarriage. You'll hear a term called damage juggling, that's when you move your car specifically so that each hit from an enemy shot is hitting a new piece of armor. It takes a lot of practice, but this can keep you from losing several points on one side. Now in combat you'll also notice your line of fire bar. These are the red or pink beams coming from your weapon to the enemy vehicle. This correlates to your chance of a good shot. When you have the management bar up, that is the button that opens up the screen above the steering wheel. This is where you assigned your gunners and your targets, under the guns you'll notice a bar that fills with purple. The more purple, the thicker the pink and red bars become. More importantly these lines will tell you how good of a shot and whether it will have anything that could obstruct it. For example, you could see one point in the line that thins out, that means a hill or something else will stand to block your shot. So there is a chance your shot will miss this turn or hit. Either way you'll notice these little things as you go.

More often then not you'll be in a teamed match. The system for this is pretty simple, you go into a match with a few AI team mates. AI sucks though so watch where you are compared to them, they stand to shoot you a round if you get in their way before they stop or you get out of the way. A round or two isn't so bad if you need to get past them, but consistent shots will ruin you. For every shot you make on an enemy vehicle you gain a number of points, consequently if you shoot your team you lose a number of points. The ranking system measures your points, the highest points get the best prize at the end, but it doesn't mean as much if you don't win, so aim to win. Last team, or last car as the case may be, standing wins, highest points decides your reward. Once you get some practice in this move to Deathrace.

Deathrace, the time has finally come for you to take to a race track locked and loaded. Here you combine all the aspects of what you learned from the other two events and trust me you'll need it. Here you aim to be number one, finish first to gain the biggest prize, but the catch is, being a the front is the biggest target, you may or may not be able to fire back and trust me, everyone will fire at you if they have the chance. Don't worry this is it, this is what you've been training for. Juggle, turn, brake as needed, and blast away when you can. When a car takes too much damage it will resign, once that happens that car is out, it stops driving and you shouldn't even bother shooting anymore. Each race is different, giving you different cars, different weapons, and different tactics. This is where you'll really start learning your trade so buck up cause things are about to get wild.

So you survived, if not, my condolences to your loses, but remember the previous statement, buck up. You are doing it though, slowly, but surely. By now, if you haven't had too much trouble, you should have some money for yourself. This is good, greed is good, see with money comes the ability to rent your first vehicle. This opens the doors to an all new heck for you. Scouting. The wiki on the website has a few tips for this. It actually has a lot of tips if you look on the front page of the wiki, including, but not limited to Top Ten Tips and Advice for scouting. Take a look at it, it's pretty good, but it tells one bit of information, one nugget that is worth all the information I can give you.

Your gang members are worth more then every car you own. Even the crappy ones with terrible stats cause of their growth potential. You make a car, say for example a Moose, a common sedan capable of handling heavy machine guns to plow through your enemies like tissue. Well guess what, it means nothing because you don't have a gang member who can wield these guns. Why you ask because as you may have seen there is a number of stats and each gun corresponds to one of those stats. Gunnery covering most weapons, Large Guns covering rockets and heavy weapons, Ballistics for mortar style weapons. The more you use a weapon in these categories, the more you train that skill. I can go into a whole separate guide to give you the full details of the skill system. For this though, you have to understand. You can get a new car ready for scouting in an hour or several, you can buy or recruit new gang members, but it'll take you a while to retrain a good gang member. Weeks, months, and maybe in some cases years, of time spent to groom a new member into someone tough as nails. If you don't think you can win, run. If you can't run, surrender. A gang member having to walk back home, or worse get out of The Pit (A gladiatorial slave arena.) Is nothing compared to having to train them back from the start. There is an option in an event, beside the timer there is a drop down menu. In it you'll find stuff like Timeout and exit event, but also Resign or Surrender All. Clicking Surrender All, surrenders all vehicles. When all vehicles have surrendered in an event the event ends, hopefully before your gangers start bleeding to death. If you right click a car you can surrender it, but keep driving. Enemies will keep shooting you, but you steadily drop in priority with all the other potential targets.
Spare your gang members another volley of bullets by just letting go. Lose your cars, but your gangers still might make it.

Now as for actual scouts, you stand to get some nice loot, namely cars. However until you have the money to really fund running your own cars the best plan is to keep one or two and sell the rest. To decide which ones you keep, click on the cars name in the website under your cars and see what it looks like. Namely look at your chassis's health. This effects to a degree, handling and armor. The more damaged the chassis the worse your armor can take a hit, the harder it is to keep control. Now there are two types of damage Regular and Serious. Everyone has a different opinion on what is too much to make it worth keeping. I've asked a few people, the general consensus is that if it has anywhere between 5-15 serious damage, not worth it. Serious damage requires Chrome to fix and even then it can only be fixed so much. Like in real life, if the frame of a car is badly damaged it is totaled, you can try to fix it, but you can only fix it so well. Don't worry though, a good scout is one you drove away from, or walked as the case could be. There is a good chance you wont get a good enough car to keep for a few scouts and when you tally up the costs of fixing your armor, reloading, refueling, and any minor damages you stand to spend anywhere between 5k to 20k for a repair so if you have to just scout in rentals there is nothing wrong with that. Eventually though, you'll find a car that you like, one that fits your style of play as it is. Course you wont be ready for your own scout yet, but you will be able to take your car out to scout with others and get your own loot back.

This is the final basic event that I can give you information on, how you want to proceed opens up now. You could focus on building up your own skills, set to hunting raiders, running your own player manned services. Collect cars, join a camp, run a camp (This is expensive so it will take some time.) Explore Evan, move to other towns, and join factions. I hope this primer helps you, it's supposed to have the basic concepts down so you can start working forward towards whatever goal you have in mind. As much as this worries me, by all means comment. Add to it, this information was as much my learning experience from plenty of vets as it was things I learned as I went along.

......................... vet wv
Posted Nov 2, 2014, 7:35 am

*SmokeyKilla*
The Wolf Spiders
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good write up :cyclops:

note.......rockets and missiles use gunnery skill except heavy rocket and RGM

......................... vet wv marshal paintball semiprocombat pvp5
Posted Nov 2, 2014, 8:27 am	Last edited Nov 2, 2014, 8:31 am by SmokeyKilla