EOC with a copilot

Dunno if anyone else has done this before, but recently I've been fiddling with the control configs and I've set up EOC so that I can fly the ship with the keyboard and my little sister (age 7) can fire the guns and change the power distribution with a joystick. We've played through about half the campaign together, but mostly we do Instant Action with the Storm Petrel. Her favorite weapon is the Antimatter Stream, so I added one to the Instant Action Petrel to replace the missile pod. I also edited the flux.ini to make all the ships take twice as much internal damage, so sometimes our sensors or weapons will go down. It was still too easy, so I removed the shield too, and increased acceleration and maximum speed.

We've found an interesting exploit; if you fly far away enough from the L-point and the enemies follow you, more waves will come through and you can fight hundreds of ships at a time. Her reflexes are really good, and we can take out capital ships in just a couple of passes. Eventually the small ships swarm us and land a couple of hits, and it ends.

It's a ton of fun, much more interesting than playing by myself. I just wondered if anyone else had tried something like this before. Here's a screenshot of one of our death screens in Instant Action, I think we had something like 23,000 points. imgur.com/a/xro9d I can try to dig up more screenshots if anyone wants to see more.

The only thing I haven't been able to do that I wish I could is let her aim the guns with the stick while I steer the ship. I have no idea how to go about doing that. If anyone has any advice, or knows if that's even possible, please let me know.

That's how old I was when I started playing the game. I can see why she loves the sparkly-purple AM stream.

As for that exploit, I've used it plenty of times. I think I once ended up with over 20 capital ships present. Soon, of course, there were 0.

Screenshots are awesome. Go ahead and stick in a ton of them, but rather than link to the screenshot page, it might be a bit more convenient to use an image link so the image shows in your post. My filter is really picky sometimes. :dry:

As for aiming the guns, you can't do that manually. Technically, they don't actually rotate to point at the target. Assuming the enemy ship is withing the fire arcs, when you pull the trigger, the shot is positioned at the gun, its rotation changed to point straight at the little lead indicator, and the speed set to the .ini file's value. It's all hardcoded and can't be changed except by completely replacing the whole weapons system. (Which I once started doing, but never finished.) Sorry about that.

It's quite endearing to hear about you playing with your sis. I've never tried that since I co-operate horribly with people on-the-fly :silly: but it sounds absolutely lovely.

Oh, and if you're looking for some additional challenge in your opponents, this mod here will give them a bit more of an intelligence edge.

Kudos to you and your sis! o7

--IronDuke

I have kind of used a co-pilot system before. My brother used the joystick to rotate and fire, while I manned the lateral thrusters to keep him from getting hit. That's about all, though.

I have often wondered if it would be possible for there to be a multiplayer mode where players could control different parts of the same ship. Alternatively, it could be set up so that one player controls the ship, and another controls a t-fighter. When docked to the patcom or heavy corvette, the t-fighter can turn around to fire at enemies behind the ship, giving the pilot more to do than just pull the trigger when the reticle locks on. The t-fighter could be undocked as well.

Because of the way I-War 2 works, the only time when you would need to manually rotate the guns is if you were not using aim-assist. Then it would be useful to rotate the guns by hand so that you don't have to be exactly facing your target all the time.

Here are some screenshots. We use the outside view because she likes to see the ship and it helps my atrocious spatial awareness.

I hope the images show up; I'm pretty new to this forum.

Got a couple more to come; looks like there's an image limit.

The game saves screenshots as bitmaps, so I converted them all to png.