Tips and Tricks

While the basics of operating your vessel are extremely simple, becoming skilled is deceptively difficult. If you think otherwise, please refer to the Online High Score Database and note how the very best you can do is being laughed at by the top pilots.

That said, there are common mistakes that new pilots make, and this page is meant to get everyone over the initial hurdles as quickly as possible. Following is a list of tips and tricks that might prove useful.

General Tips

• Don't die.
• Seriously though, you should primarily be avoiding enemy fire and collisions. You have limited defenses, and losing primary weapon levels due to bad piloting is only going to make things harder. Often destroying enemies is the best way to avoid damage, but you should never confuse these priorities.
• Hypothetical situation: you have a weapon that is very powerful, does splash damage and generally rocks. Now ask yourself, do you use this weapon or not? Back to the point, missiles are an extremely important part of your arsenal, and they are almost never overused. Skilled pilots will launch them every few seconds in certain areas. Get good at single-fire missiles, and never neglect this weapon!
• Always pick your primary and secondary weapons based on the situation. Certain weapons are simply ineffective against some enemies; play some challenges if you don't believe us!
• Try to proactively avoid bad situations. Many "no-win" scenarios can be circumvented by an alert pilot.
• Related to the previous point: don't sit in one area of the screen (uhh... space) for too long or you could find yourself cornered by enemy fire.

Levels

• Prevent your own destruction.
• Levels are generally very pattern-based, so get used to the patterns and figure out the best spot to be at every point.
• The same goes for the bosses: find their patterns and exploit them.

Skirmishes

• While skirmishes are largely random, there are still some patterns to when certain enemies come. Familiarize yourself with each of the missions and prepare your weaponry for the next section ahead of time.
• Skirmishes often have a slight lull between rounds; use this time to recharge your shields (don't fire).

Challenges

• Keep telling yourself that you only need to beat these once.
• Don't send hate-mail to the developers.

Advanced Tricks

• In single-fire mode you can swap which side the next missile will fire from by double-pressing the "Toggle Dual-Single Missiles" button.
• You can take out incoming homing missiles with your own missiles by launching one just as the enemy missile is about to hit your ship. Even if you launch from the wrong side, you can quickly move out of the path of the incoming homing missile and it will slam right into your missile that has not yet picked up speed.
• Lines of enemies that are going back and forth across space are most easily destroyed if you align yourself to shoot at them while they are turning. Put simply, attack the extreme left and right sides of these patterns.

Hopefully these tips will help you to enjoy piloting more, and maybe to become a more competitive Galactic Gladiator!

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Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Lauritzen and Chris Iacobucci.