Yeah, what Boobi-err, Bobbias said. One little clarification about the bypass levels -- you need either the level that they're using or above. If you want to get the level of the gear that the remote site is using without having to connect to it, buy the IP Probe. It'll scan the server and send you a mail with the security systems that they have in place.
Lol, yeah, I've been making sure I've got huge sets. I'm also using servers I get to come back to for missions, so when I go wipe the logs for my current mission, I wipe all previous logs too, breaking them in more than one place. I have enough time to wipe the logs on the active hack, as well as on interNIC.
I wouldn't worry about wiping the logs on the active hack. All it does is waste time since, by the time you do the mission, the active and passive traces have both passed that point.
The one thing that I'm not sure about right now is whether passive traces start where the active traces left off. I'll have to look into that. I bought the developers CD, so I have the source code at my disposal for finding such things out.
Also, what are the orange colored servers on the map? Immutex Computers International Bank is orange, and I don't think it was before my last mission.
That introduced that in one of the later versions. I haven't played with them as much as 1.31 and earlier, but IIRC, the orange dots are your current mission targets.
EDIT: Jesus Christ this game is hard. I got to the point where they wanted me to destroy mainframes, and hack the criminal database, but I couldn't get it done, and got caught.
Yeah, that sort of thing is hard when you're first starting out. The decrypter software takes quite a while to run, so your best bet would be to either do an exceptionally long bounce path or to upgrade your CPU. Fortunately, a 200GHz processor can be had fairly cheaply (12000 credits, I believe), so I'd go with that method. Make sure the decrypter is upgraded to the highest level.
After you break into the system your time will probably be limited. What I generally do is go into the security menu as admin, shut off the security systems, and disconnect. I zap my logs from InterNIC real fast, then connect again. With the monitor out of the picture it takes a bit longer for them to start tracing you, plus the admin password wouldn't have been invalidated if you went quickly enough. You can do a surprising number of missions with the stock gateway by doing things like that in stages. The only reason I generally upgrade mine is so that I could put more memory into it.
