I want to like this game. Its brilliant in so many ways, and I hate to walk away from it due to a game design issue, but I'm at a loss. Whenever exploring in space, or leaving a system, I often times come across the probes. With fully upgraded speed and turning, I can't really even outrun these probes in a straight line. They just keep following. And It is absurd to try to enter a system with these probes right behind my ship, because turning just slows me down.

Then, after hiding in a system..the probe is right outside the system and slams me immediately. One fight is enough to just about kill my entire crew on the earth ship, if I am even lucky enough to win the fight. Then, just as I'm getting moving again, I get slammed by three squadrons of Ilwrath....this is vexing beyond words. I haven't had a love hate relationship like with with a game in a very long time. I don't want to put this game down for good, so I'm hoping I'm just playing this game wrong. I can't fight, I can't run away....so what am I supposed to do?

I really would have thought that fully upgraded speed and turning would have served a point in this game...but if you cannot even escape a probe, whats the point? Not to mention running drains an insane amount of fuel. Dear god. Everything else is so fun, but a probe encounter becomes pure meat hook misery.

If you met a certain Spathi in Sol and still have his ship then you can use it to fight against the Slylandro Probes, they perform quite well against them and absolutely wreck Ilwrath Avengers (With practise you can kill dozens of Ilwrath ships without taking a hit to your Spathi Eluder).

If you don't have it then you can use several Earthling Cruisers (3 or 4 if you have the RU) against one probe by firing your missiles and then jumping out and then using another Cruiser and then another till it is weak enough for you to handle. This helps to reduce crew loss against the probes. This tactic isn't 100% reliable as the missiles can sometimes miss the Probes, but few save-loads (or having more Cruisers...) should guarantee a win against the probe encounters with less crew casualties.

Even if you have just one Cruiser you can beat a Slylandro Probe with about 50-50 chance (personal experience) so you could abuse save-load till you beat it and then transfer crew onto it from your main ship. That way you have a semi-effective ship to survive at least some encounters before having to return to Earth to replenish your main ship's crew bays.

Earthling Cruisers don't perform well against Ilwrath ships though, so this tactic won't work against them. Ilwrath space should probably be avoided until you have better ships to counter theirs (like the Spathi Eluder).

A fully speed-upgraded Precursor ship should be able to outrun anything (including the Probes) in hyperspace. I am not sure how you are caught by so many probes. Maybe my memory is faulty.

Unfortunately, if you are stuck in a system that is surrounded by hostile ships you cannot beat in hyperspace, you'll most likely need to load an earlier save.

Sorry for my English but hopefully it helps a bit.

You can get rid of the probes by visiting Beta Corvi 033.3 981.2 it is a prob program issue. The main issue I have is you can not just play the game and win if you do not follow the walk thru you will lose. I started to follow the walk thru after about a third of the way through the game and I still ran out of time. You do not have time in the game to explore the game out. to bad they did not have a beginners setting where you would have more time.