DescentBB

Man I loved playing D2 single. I just recently installed D2 and use D2x and I'm loving every minute of it. Amazing I can remember the levels like when I first played them. I'm sure as I get to the higher levels I wont' remember them all but so far I remember all the first 3 and I know I remember level 4.

I love level 9, it's one of the coolest

Here, thiefy thiefy...

WELL HELLO

I thought the water levels were pretty. They still are in an esoteric, boxy sort of way. There's just something about flying around in Seaspring Gorge with Type O Negative's Haunted in the background that will always bring up great memories for me.

Yeah, D2 had some really nice level design. And it's really different compared to D1.

D1: Find blue key, find yellow key, find red key, destroy generator, find exit.

D2: Find Guidebot, find blue key, find the switch which unlocks the forcefield that guards the blue key, find yellow key, KILL THE BL**DY THIEF, find red key, find secret switch, fins secret way, find switch destroying the forcefield which guards the red key, find red key, find like 5 switches which unlocks doors, find generator, get killed by mines, revive, fins generator again, destroy it, find switch opening the door to the exit, find exit.

It's simply much more complex, and I really loves that.

Thiefy.. I love him. He is always fodder to my Smartmines. I wonder what's wrong with the levels where he respawns, though...

Thiefbot is hard-coded to respawn in secret levels.

Thought so... makes things helluva annoying in Secret Level 5, where he's like, the only bot there.

I hacked the D2 datafiles to double the power of the Fusion cannon so I've been playing D2 SP again... Yeah I'm a bad person.

So far I've only been messing around in hotshot mode, I blasted through levels 1-7 in no time yesterday. And even with the renewed D1 damage Fusion cannon I still find myself resorting the Gauss a LOT, and Helix against the more armored bots. There are already a couple bots that can survive a full charge Fusion shot even at double damage. By comparison only two robots (fusion hulks & homing hulks) and the bosses in D1 can survive that.

Even though the double damage Fusion isn't quite the superweapon it was in D1, I'm kinda liking it since it gives another effective alternative to the Helix and Gauss cannons (which are basically all I've ever used to beat D2 SP). I'll have to keep playing and see how everything balances out, otherwise they could have left all the original D1 weapons out of D2 and not lost much.

It's been 10 years since I've flown half these levels, I'm having to resort to looking at the auto-map more often than I used to...

I think XL has a slider for tweaking fusion damage, actually... although it might apply to the damage you take as well. (Well... actually there is no robot version of the fusion is there? So I guess the fusion they fire would do more damage anyway.)

Yeah, I'm aware of the slider in XL but I already had D2X-R installed and configured so modifying the datafiles was the only way to do the same thing. In D3 you just use a table file editor to make any changes you want, in D2 its a lot harder since there are no editors that can do it, and in D1 its unnecessary and I think its hard-coded into the game engine anyway.

I'm pretty sure robot fusion is separate, all robot weapons are because they cause varying amounts of damage depending on the skill level. Player weapons are the same regardless of the skill level, but the capability is there to make them vary as well.

Were there any robots that fired fusion at you in D2? I forgot if there were and I'm only on level 12 at the moment.

Even so, I'm used to D1 on insane where getting hit by just one shot from a fusion hulk cost 90 shields (and they shoot at least 3 at a time).

When I'm in the mood to play Forsaken3, I fire up D2X-XL

Otherwise I use D2_3dfx or D2Xr

Actually, if you look at the fusion hulk in dle-xp, you can see it has player fusion. (The class 1 driller also has player vulcan).

Um... not in the original D2 campaign, no. Vertigo probably has some since it mixes robots from D1 and D2, then adds a few of its own.

If you don't want to set up XL, yeah that's your choice. I usually use it for playing single-player since I like all the pretty lighting. (Among other things.) It can co-exist with Rebirth, incidentally (have done it before), although if memory serves some arm-twisting and duplicate copies of files might be required.

I like solving the puzzles. Helix on level 2, Gauss on level 3, Omega on level 13 and 14, etc.

in d1 the damage data i think it is stored in the *.pig file. -may be wrong though.

Actually, fusion hulk shots cost 60 shields on every difficulty (maybe except that 90 shields on Insane as you said). Even on Trainee, 4 shots with full shield and you're dead. And no, Descent 2 has no bots with Vulcan and no bots with Fusion.

Still pretty hard, though.

It has bots with homing missiles though, which is arguably worse.

The Lou Guard is used very, very sparingly throughout Descent 2. It's probably so the pilot gets accustomed to new hazards like those mercury missile shooting Stalkers etc. IMO, removing fusion and vulcan shooting robots from D2 cut its difficulty a notch. Vertigo is the ultimate level set for Descent 2, and there you have them. There you have everything, it's an epic level set.

I've heard that vulcan and gauss are the only player weapons that ramp up damage on difficulty levels (I heard it's the same on Trainee and Rookie, but higher on Hotshot, Ace, and Insane). Only D2 has robot vulcan, for the internal tactical droid and the itsc.

There is no robot fusion except possibly in D3, for the Thresher bots and the fusion tanks. If you try to assign a new weapon to a robot in RBotEdit, there is only Player Fusion. Robot vulcan is called \"light vulcan\", I think.

A little off topic, but Bulk Destroyers wouldn't suck so much if they had Player Gauss.

Light Vulcan is nothing like Vulcan. Much, much weaker and less dangerous than the thing that Class 1 Driller shoots at you.