I rented this game and I'm enjoying it, but this is my first Armored Core and so I'm still experimenting with all of the various combinations of weapons and such. One of my brothers commented that this is "dress-up" for boys; I spend hours assembling the perfect AC and spend maybe five minutes in action each mission. I think it's fun, though.
I'm currently pretty far into the game, I've gotten to #2 in the rankings which leaves that one mysterious guy Genobee as my only opponent left; but I'm stuck, and wondering if I could get some tips, 'cause this is annoying the heck out of me.
There are two missions I can select at this point. The first is a mission in the West Abax Plain where I need to "Support OAE Invasion," where I have to fight relentless waves of these MT units that steadily get more and more powerful. The other mission only features three ACs, but the two first ones usually whittle me down so that when I face the third one, I'm too weak to stand up against it, and it's a heavier yet extremely mobile hovertank leg style so I need to keep my heavy weapons for it - but by that time I'm drained.
I've been only playing with two ACs in particular, a heavyweight model using tank legs, with a heavy machine gun in the left arm and a dual laser rifle on the right, and I've been mixing and matching the back components. The other one is a lighter-weight model with a solid shell EO and decent mobility, usually pair it with machine guns and it does fairly well. The first is too slow, the second is unable to put out the firepower I need.
I'm also looking for recommendations for decent AC designs, as I'm using a normal leg design and a tank design, though sometimes I've used hover legs when I have to deal with water.
Awesome you're an AC dude. Great, AC:N is one of my favorite PS2 games ever. I think I can help you. "Support OAE Invasion" and Genobee is a punk, so I advise you to have very mobile AC with like a machine gun(hopefully in one of the open arenas). I could barely beat him to be honest, but as you get better you'll learn how to conquer cheap AI ACs. ^_^ As for Ac types, i'd suggest a somewhat balanced middleweight. They're very hard to make, becuase usually i'll go too heavy and end up having a heavyweight or going to light making a lightweight. Anywho, hovers are pretty useless, they have no defense(but I used to make tons of different hover types). I haven't used Reverse-Jointed since AC3, but I think RJ might be good if you want middleweight. And if i'm not mistaken the level with the three ACs is in the desert and it is hard, i've only beaten it once. lol Well nice to find another AC guy and if you need any more help i'll be sure to help you this weekend(when i'm actually supposed to be on online). BTW, Armored Core Ninebreaker comes out tomorrow(or today) for PS2...completely arena. =P
Thanks for the advice, though I'm returning the game today after having gotten through it. Turns out that all I had to do was just grit my teeth and put on weapons that would do as much damage as possible and just lay it on ASAP, on the mission with three ACs. I barely managed to pull it off and was able to continue through the rest of the game more easily. Double back-mounted rocket launchers ended up doing it.
And you have to fight Genobee in that other mission on top of all those high-level MTs? That's crazy, though with Genobee I just used the same general strategy with the dual back-mounted rocket launchers, which are devastating at close range if you can get them caught on a building or something long enough to fire it. Of course, having tank legs helped since that made it easier to fire, and my heavy AC type has served me very well.
And yes, finding a good balance for a middleweight AC was hard, and I eventually settled on either my heavy tank or my lighter two-leg AC which eventually turned into a hover model because it was faster and had more armor than the two-legs. Was very helpful on the one or two water missions that had to be dealt with, like the one mission where you have to defeat an AC and then dodge out of the way of all the missiles (far easier to do when you can hide behind a pillar on the water than trying to dodge the missiles on land!). Also helped me get through the last situation with Nineball, who was really giving my tank trouble because he was so mobile and my tank was not, so I tried my hoverleg design (Sealion legs, with the lighter shell-based EO core and a pair of machine guns) and managed to beat it down.
Overall it was a challenging game, but also fun once I got the hang of constructing my ACs. Although I find it ironic that I ended up beating the game with the hover legs, as I'd honestly like to be more of a "traditionalist" and go with two legs - after all, that's the cool part about mecha and defines them from other vehicles. But at the same time, I wasn't about to deny myself the extra AP and protection that my heavy tank had - able to survive missions solely by grinding through them! I like mission-oriented combat better than the arena battles, since there was something to do, although I sincerely wanted more missions that weren't so sensitive or just outright hard (one mission had a long hallway of mines and tanks with grenade launchers - I ended up doing another mission to pass this one by because I couldn't figure out how to dodge/destroy all of the mines and still have enough ammo for the enemies I was trying to get at!).
So there you go. Don't see why this topic couldn't be used to talk about AC in general, since it doesn't seem like there's a topic for it. I may check out some of the other games.
Wow seems you went through that game rather fast. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Actually before the "incident" I think I had made an AC topic, like near the end of last year. It doidn't really last too long, guess there aren't many AC fans outside of Japan. Anyway you know Ninebreaker came out this week, you can transfer your data from Nexus to it. Maybe you should check it out. 
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I like mission-oriented combat better than the arena battles, since there was something to do, although I sincerely wanted more missions that weren't so sensitive or just outright hard
I'd recommend checking out Armored Core 3 and Silent Line then. They're my two favorite games in the series, both with plenty of interesting missions, and are probably slightly less difficult than Nexus. If you were to try both, I'd recommend starting with AC3, since you'd be able to import that game save into Silent Line. The recently released Nine Breaker is pretty nice as well, but the main focus of the game is the arena, so you may not like that one as much. It also has over 100 training missions to play in addition to the arena, but while they are fairly interesting and worth playing, I find that I like the normal missions+storyline from previous games better. Which is why I'm definitely looking forward to Armored Core: Last Raven...
Concerning the Nexus rental, did that include both discs? I don't know how they do things with rentals, but the game is also supposed to come with the second "Revolution" disc, with several more missions to complete (unrelated to the disc 1 storyline). They are either remakes of, or based on missions that took place in the earlier Armored Core games for PS1 (something I'd been hoping would happen for years), but even if you've never played those they're still a lot of fun just as some extra missions to complete.
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Anyway you know Ninebreaker came out this week, you can transfer your data from Nexus to it.
You can, but I might recommend you just start from scratch, depending on what parts you had in Nexus. Importing will allow you to use some parts early that you would otherwise have to unlock, but you'll only have the parts you bought/earned in Nexus. Since there's no Shop or money in Nine Breaker, starting a new file will start you with a massive amount of parts at your disposal, with the ability to unlock more by completing training missions and arena battles. If you import from Nexus you won't have access to many of those parts (depending on what you had in Nexus), and I haven't heard if there is any way to get them when using an imported Nexus save.
I found it to be quite a bit of fun to rebuild my ACs from scratch anyway, since I ended up changing and/or tweaking several things, and ended up with better designs than I had previously.
The rental did have both disks; I was trying to do those after I had finished the first disk the first time through, but I had to give it back before I could finish them all. How it worked was that you needed to take your parts from the first disk into the second disk; otherwise you had no shop, no way to gain money for new parts, etc. Fortunately it seems to be all on the same save file, so you could go back between the two disks as you like with no loss of parts.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll keep those in mind.
So Ninebreaker's the expansion to Nexus? What's Nexus the expansion to?
ZeroSky-that may be true that you lose certain parts in the expansions when you import old files, but some people (like me), get used to the feel of a certain configuration and like to use said configuration, which would not be normally possible in standalone.
Terg-Play AC2. fregging evil levels towards the end.
Well Nexus isn't really an expansion..it's just a sequel. It takes place so many decades after AC3:SL.
