Smoke on the water

[fragger]

I found out last night that it's not just the mercs' ground vehicles that routinely outperform my own.

I was at the Marina in Bowa and wanted to go into Port Selao, and deciding to dispense with the usual merc minuet on the lakeside road I elected to go by swamp boat. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon as I happily puttered out of the lagoon, but no sooner had I passed under the road bridge than I found the patrolling fishing boat beyond coming right at me with the merc on the bow gun intent on ruining my trip. I thought, "Well, here I am in a zippy little swamp boat while they're in a slow and cumbersome fishing boat, so I'll just outmaneuver them and leave them behind". I did the first part of that OK, but then they turned to come after me, and that's when the fun started.

First off, despite me getting my swamp boat up to full-throttle, the mercs began gaining on me in their fishing boat, which elicited a heartfelt WTF from yours truly ???? Then the gunner got a bead on me and opened up. My engine absorbed a lot of the rounds that were sent after me until it began to belch white smoke and my speed began to drop, and by this time we were way out in the middle of the lake. I should point out that I'm playing on Infamous so I couldn't afford to wear too many hits :-\\ Finally my engine cut out altogether as ominous black smoke began to pour out of it, signalling an imminent detonation, there were these infernal mercs closing fast in their infernal fishing boat and there I was in a disabled vessel with nowhere to hide and neither the time nor the inclination to attempt repairing the engine.

So I jumped overboard, and once I was underwater the mercs stopped firing. I swam below the surface to their boat, which quickly coasted to a stop. Upon surfacing next to it I was surprised to see the hand icon appear - I never realised before that you can climb on board a fishing boat while mercs are still on it. When I did so I found myself right at the wheelhouse doorway. One SPAS-12 blast blew the driver out of the wheelhouse, while the apparently deaf-as-a-post merc on the mounted gun was still facing forward, no doubt thinking "Duh, where did he go?" or something along those lines. The next shottie blast ensured that he never did find out.

Then my pre-loved swamp boat blew up so I took the fishing boat to the nearest landfall, which turned out to be the southern coast of Schlakalase Island and not far from another swampie, which I commandeered to finally continue on to Port Selao.

So it seems that the fishing boats also magically acquire turbo-boost when mercs are on board.

[mandru]

Cool story fragger.  :-X

Don't try that trick with a swamp boat though or you can get pinned between the driver who will stand up to shoot at you and the gunner who will let go of the mounted weapon and turn to face you with his carry.

Pinned like that between them you can be trapped so that you can't get past them to jump back overboard and all you can do is trying to shoot back at them at too close of a range to get a good aim or blow the boat up under your feet with a grenade.

Neither option is a good one when playing on Infamous.  ???

[Art Blade]

very nice read, fragger :)  :-X

Although I knew that you could board a ship with mercs still on using that hand symbol, I almost never did it because said mercs usually went submarine with said ship as soon as I stopped firing all that I had at them and basically never made it in time to even try  :-()

[Jim di Griz]

...Don't try that trick with a swamp boat though or you can get pinned between the driver who will stand up to shoot at you and the gunner who will let go of the mounted weapon and turn to face you with his carry...

:) Found that out yesterday too when hang-gliding along the river from the rail xing bridge to get that diamond case. They shot me out of the sky and I landed in their boat - even with a machette in my hand they managed to get me first - though that could have been due to a long fall first 

An interesting find Fragger

[fragger]

Thank you, gents :)

Can't say I've ever fallen into a swamp boat from a hang glider Jim, nice one :-D I probably couldn't do that if I tried...

Incidentally, it's possible to get that diamond case without the glider. You can approach it from the other direction and with a few run/jumps in the right places you can get up and around to that ledge. It's tricky though, and hard to explain just where to jump without some visual aids. I don't bother using the glider to get that case anymore since I found that out :)

[PZ]

Good one fragger  :-X  I've never attacked mercs that way before.  :-X

[Jim di Griz]

...Incidentally, it's possible to get that diamond case without the glider. You can approach it from the other direction and with a few run/jumps in the right places you can get up and around to that ledge...

Indeed - the same with the one just north of Goka Falls - I saw a YouTube vid of that, though quite how that player managed it, is beyond me...maybe he had a Spider-Man mod?  ;)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Indeed - the same with the one just north of Goka Falls - I saw a YouTube vid of that, though quite how that player managed it, is beyond me...maybe he had a Spider-Man mod?  ;)

You mean this one?

[smg id=92 type=av]

That's mine, no trick, you just have to run and jump a lot in exactly the right spot.

[Jim di Griz]

Cool - that's the one  :-X

You're definitely better at it than me then - I think I tried for half an hour and even got a jeep half way up that slope to try jumping from that...guess how that ended.

Cheers for that, I'll try harder next time  :)

[mandru]

The sloping hill side just to the North of that ledge with that diamond for me personally has always resembled having the shape of fingers running down it.

If the fingers are the raised ribs that run up and down the hillside then the darker spaces between the fingers (the low scooped out areas) are the path you want to go up as you will reach more height there than on top the top of the fingers.  Once you've reached as much height up the hill side as possible then you can begin to crab sideways to the left towards where the ledge is while still pushing up/forward on your controller to avoid loosing any height.

Good luck.  :)  :-X

[nexor]

Good one fragger  :-X  guess what i'm gonna try next  :-D

[fragger]

Thanks nexor, good luck :)

I'm gonna try getting that diamond case north of Goka Falls without the glider next time around - I never knew that could be done. I was under the impression that there were just two cases that weren't gettable without a glider - that one and the one WSW of the Crash Site. Looks like the Crash Site case is the only one then, unless someone knows a way to get it without the glider... ????

[nexor]

I think you right about that one, only once did I manage to get the Goka Falls diamond the hard way, it took me a long, long time and many rests before I got it   :-\\

[nexor]

[smg id=4582 type=av]

Almost got my a$$ burned off on this one, I'm convinced I heard sssssst....as I hit the water    :-D

[mandru]

Cool vid nexor.  :-X  I could hear the damage to the boat ramping up from the merc's shooting and was wondering why he didn't come for you or vice versa.  When I heard the flames start to crackle and you made your lunge for the gunwale and escape I realized that was what you were trying for.  ^-^


I spent the better part of an hour last night going around and around that hill near the Crash Site with the diamond case trying to any possible route up to get the diamond without using the hang glider.  First I made the circuit on foot where I did find a couple goat tracks that started out promising but one ended up impassibly blocked by an invisible wall and the other on the backside of the hill had a final jump that very well may have led to success but I couldn't clear it by either brute force or crabbing left and right for a slightly higher purchase to leap from.

Then on the next pass around the hill I brought mt AT and lodged it in various places to try to leap from the roof or from a quick approach at speed drove as far up a slope as I could, then setting the parking brake climbed out on top of the AT and tried run-jumping from the hood.  All attempts again had no success.

I have to conclude with out the hang glider or a trainer allowing high jump the Crash Site diamond case is just out of reach.


On the other hand I went to the ledge top diamond case North of Sediko that is reachable with the hang glider from the nearby cell tower and with out a lot of effort found two ways to get up on the ledge with out the glider that I never knew existed before.  :o

The far right side of that ledge has a series of narrow rock shelves that ramp right up to the top and the far left has a crevice that an AT can be wedged into and a successful jump up can be accomplished from the gun turret.

Amazing that there's still things to discover in the old tried and true FC2.  8)

[fragger]

Nice one nexor :-X Original approach!

Great minds, mandru :) I too mucked around last night to see if it was possible to get to the Crash Site case without the glider and came to the same conclusion - it doesn't appear to be.

But I did find something else. To do the exploring around the Crash Site case location, I'd loaded a game which I'd saved whilst on the mission to get the bomb fuse from the chopper wreckage. After giving up on the case I went ahead with the fuse mission just for the hell of it, but I approached it from a direction I hadn't tried before by following this route:
[smg id=4583 width=600]

With much jumping and scrabbling around that rock formation I found I could get myself up to this nice high vantage point which provided a panoramic view of the area (note the bodies and the burnt-out patches - I'd already de-merced the area before I started taking these screenies):
[smg id=4584 width=600]

I ended up here:
[smg id=4585 width=600]

A good dollop of sprint/jumping was required to get there, but I got there. Just a matter of sticking to the rock face starting from the northern part of the massif while keeping an eye out for the occasional grassy foothold bit as I went around.

Amazing that there's still things to discover in the old tried and true FC2.  8)

Just as you say :-D

[mandru]

Nice spot fragger.  :-X

Were you able to reach the top there undetected by the area's three snipers?

[PZ]

Nicely done, gents  :-X

[fragger]

Thanks PZ :)

mandru, I must admit that I took the snipers out from the north end of the rocks at the start of the climb, just to be on the safe side. This of course alerted all the others, but they didn't cotton on to where I was until I ran out of darts and switched to grenade launcher. From then on, what I lacked in stealth I made up for in firepower >:D It was a case of climb a bit, deal with a merc or two, climb some more, and so on. I got lucky with the flammables around the site when they got set off by the grenades, starting fires and barbecuing a few of the baddies. By the time I got to the top of the rocks the mercs were pretty much all down, although I did have some fun at the summit with the patrolling GLAT. They drove back and forth wildly after coming under fire, then stopped, got out and ran around like headless chickens until I was able to wear them down with MP5 (used up nearly all my ammo though at that range).

[mandru]

Ammo shop just down the road to reload and a nifty new set of wheels to get you there.  What a deal.  ^-^ :-X

[Jim di Griz]

Absolutely excellent find there fragger - I love high places in games even since finding Fuel and accepting the challenge of getting to those seemingly impossible places. I found FC2 to be full of surprises like that and these latest posts about how to get places without the glider are all great - cheers all.

[fragger]

Thanks muchly Jim :) I too like to get high :-()

During the courses of their exploratory jaunts, some OWG members (including this very one) have found the occasional hole in the map whilst poking around and getting into places that the devs obviously didn't intend for anyone to get into which will drop the unsuspecting player into one weird twilight zone or another. Be warned... be very warned...

You can read about a couple of them here and here. More have been found and commented upon but I can't find the relevant posts just now (for instance there's another one near the hang glider location overlooking the Chemical Dump which I think Dweller_Benthos originally discovered).

Just be sure to save your game first if you want to check any of these holes out because once you pass beyond their event horizons there is no return...

The above reminded me of something I meant to report on myself a couple of weeks ago but forgot to... I got clobbered near the GP north of the Airfield in Bowa and had to be rescued by Nasreen. After I'd been picked up and dragged off by her, looking on with bloodshot eyes as she dispatched a bad guy at close range with a Desert Eagle along the way, I reached the patch-myself-up stage only to find myself kind of stuck inside her, so to speak, and when I tried to break free I dropped into one of the aforementioned subterranean parallel dimensions and couldn't get back.

There must be some kind of archetypal Jungian anima/animus object lesson in there somewhere :-\\

[Jim di Griz]

Thanks muchly Jim :) I too like to get high :-()

 

...There must be some kind of archetypal Jungian anima/animus object lesson in there somewhere :-\\

  :-X