Fighting Against Capital Ships
This guide deals ONLY with non-player capital ships. While there will be a lot of similarities and even completely identical mechanics, at this time, player capital ship mechanics are still NOT in place.
What are capital ships?
The big ones. Everything above a gunship class is considered a capital ship in Starpoint Gemini 3, which includes freighters and freightliners. Generally, cap ships are handled in the same manner as smaller crafts, with a few key differences / additions.
Weakpoints
Capital ships feature massive hull values (hitpoints if you wish). They are very very VERY resilient, and as they grow in size, so does the hull, of course. It’s here that weakpoints come into play.
Weakpoints are actual locations on the ship and firing at them is done in the same way as shooting at anything else. Point and shoot. That’s it. What you do get as an added bonus however is a hefty additional damage, especially when a weakpoint’s hitpoints drops to zero. Destroying weakpoints is the fastest way to destroy a capital ship!
Another bonus for destroying weakpoints is that in some cases, this will trigger something else, a penalty for the capital ship. Knocking out a capital ship’s Weapon systems weakpoint will temporarily disable the cap ship’s turrets. Quite handy when you’re being spammed by weapons fire. I encourage you to check out what else can happen when you destroy a weakpoint. The effects vary and can get quite interesting.
An important thing to mention here is that while you can definitely knock out any weakpoint, the crew of the capital ship will not stand idly. They will react and do their best to repair the structural damage and get the sub-system back to operational status as soon as they can. In other words, weakpoints are constantly (slowly though) repaired!
When you lock on a capital ship, you’ll notice the weakpoints marked with red target indicators. If a weakpoint is currently exposed to your direct weapons fire, meaning if you have a clear shot at it, the name of the weakpoint will also appear. If the name is not visible, then the weakpoint is either partially or completely occluded.
Abilities
If weakpoints are marked as red, then what are those yellow bits? Those are abilities. A capital ship usually has a built-in ability that gradually charges up and when it’s full, you can bet something dangerous is going to happen. Much like weakpoints, there is a nice variety of abilities, so it is best to keep an eye out for the yellow indicators.
Attacking and hitting an ability point, reduces its charge-up state. This is a perfect way to mess with the cap ship and prevent it from using its special ability. Naturally, you’ll have to avoid weapons fire while doing so, but is should be worth it.
The most boring aspects of modern space sims? Not being able to fly every ship class.
SG3 is a dumbed down arcade shooter masquerading as a space sim, your choice of ships is so piss poor might as well be flying a block of cheese. There is nothing memorable about what you fly in this game, in some ways its even worse than Freelancer which it seems to copy out of the box.
Terrible things off the bat:
* Horrible voice acting just down right annoying, luckily you can kill the voices with in the games options if you don’t mind not hearing chatter.
* Missiles are not just overkill, they are essentially the best weapon in the game. Just stock load your ship with missiles and spray your foes clean.
* Gate travel is really freak’n annoying, par that with t-gates and you want to bash your screen.
* All ships move relatively at the same speeds, this is good its space for crying out loud. With only strafing and turn rates being annoying, they at least nailed traveling through space right. Traveling does feel like a chore though, your piloting a ship not a canoe takes forever to get to places.
* Horrible spawn cycles for local traffic they get dropped in your face when traveling anywhere, same with foes they appear out thin air like a hornet nest thrown at you.
* Vague to little actual help when it comes to completing missions, I find myself fighting with mission completion more than enjoying the game.
* Horrible mini drone puzzles, why they needed this is unknown just takes away from immersion.
* Dogons really are the poop critters of space dwelling freaks. But I hate pirates even more they are everywhere, the amount of piracy per capita seems to exceed the living the universe.
* Ship load outs really are just meh, I mean yeah its nice the first five minutes then it becomes boring when you realise almost every other roll out sucks on a ship you spent millions on thus making 90% modules useless.
* They copied X Rebirth with capital ships take down, shoot hard points to weaken the vessels. Why this sucks cuz normal weapons take forever, just stack up on missiles like I mentioned earlier. There’s the problem you don’t even need too much effort.
* The game has factions but beyond story mode, everything falls flat after completion. There is no real logic to factions, their constantly at war. This also plays into the fact you can’t really do any other jobs other than “pick up, find, shoot, collect bounties” its a very hollow game experience with zero replay value.
* You can’t land on Earth 🙁