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So I was perusing the Steam store and I saw Elite: Dangerous was on MEGA SALE. I've been feeling space-sim hunger pangs for a little bit now but I had some questions before I made the jump (I have no experience with the Elite series):
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Dec 12, 2018 19:18
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iospace posted:In order: Helianthus Annuus posted:If you liked Escape Velocity, you'll definitely wanna try Elite Dangerous. Arcturas posted:Yeah, E:D has no story missions whatsoever. It's all missions that you used to get at the mission board in EV, instead of anything in the bar that has longer term consequences. But if you loved flying around and trading and shooting stuff, that's exactly what this is.
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Dec 13, 2018 02:30
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Helianthus Annuus posted:I wouldn't call the game approachable lol. Plenty has been written about the game, but those guides go out of date pretty quickly. When researching stuff about Elite Dangerous it helps to use the date filter in google's search. Yeah, I caught on to the fact that updates have made a lot of things obsolete. Alright, once it's installed I'll fire it up and check out those training missions.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:51
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Blind Rasputin posted:This needs to be in OP as well, for the new people learning how to land: This is very accurate to my experience so far, although thankfully I have managed to not explode horribly. So far at least. My computer defaulted to controller binds in the tutorial, presumably since I had a DS4 plugged in. I think I'll try controlling things with keyboard+mouse later. This feels like the type of game where I'm going to want a lot at my fingertips (although I could always do controller+keyboard+mouse since I'm at my desk). I went through all the in-game tutorials as recommended and completed them just fine, aside from the advanced combat tutorial which I failed twice and didn't bother with after that. It seemed quite difficult to outgun the two....Eagles(?) that showed up once you killed the first one, which surprised me for a tutorial. They seemed faster than my Sidewinder and the AI was very determined to stay on my tail (which was the smart thing to do so that's cool) so I didn't bother trying to push through. Is that mission notably difficult or am I even worse than I feared? There seems to be an awful lot you can juggle (power allocation, multiple weapon presets, chaff, etc) and I have no idea how much of that I should be making use of and what I should be ignoring or setting-and-forgetting. After that I started up just to poke around. I saw that there was solo mode and open, can I freely transfer between the two or are the separate "saves"? In open, is there anything I should be aware of re: other players (ie: piracy etc)?
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Dec 13, 2018 09:25
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I just did my first planetary landing (to what I presume is a spaceport) and it was terrifying. It was on the night-side of the planet, so I was just flying into what effectively looked like a black hole. At first I didn't even realize the station was on the planet and was very confused. Then alarmed when I realized I was supercruising right into a planet. Then confused again when I dropped out and it was going to take 20 minutes to fly there (and a bunch of atmospheric navigation aides popped up on my HUD, furthering my alarm and confusion). So I tapped supercruise again, saw my radar get rapidly filled with a red field and an impact warning show up. Mashed the hell out of supercruise....18 minutes to destination. Gingerly went back into supercruise and nervously speed straight into this black abyss that filled up my entire screen. Then it dropped me out as I got close and after a little bit of adjustment (I wasn't sure if I could even hover in-atmosphere) I managed to land without killing myself or any bystanders. Success!
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Dec 14, 2018 02:08
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I am having a blast so far. My first real day of play has taken me from my humble little Sidewinder through various iterations of the Eagle and now I've got an A/B kitted out Adder and am currently supercruising to Hutton Orbital (straight up an IRL hour huh, drat) while catching up on my reading and watching NBA highlights. Space Truck Simulator is everything I could have hoped for. When is a good time to give mining a go? It seems like something I'd like to try out. Should I wait until I can afford the first real freighter (Type 6 I think?) or is it still worth it with a smaller cargo bay?
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Dec 14, 2018 09:44
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Well I did a bit of everything today. I ended yesterday in a Cobra Mk III which was fun but I wanted to try some of the specialist stuff out. So after work today I sold the Cobra and kitted out an exploration Hauler. I didn't really know where to go so I decided to go straight up. I went to the most remote inhabited system I could find and then just picked a random star a a couple dozen lightyears above that. I had done a little research so I had the Road to Riches route creator up, which helped a lot in terms of actually making a decent route, although I'm sure I could have been a lot more efficient than I was. Ended up futzing around up there for about two hours and came back with a cool 18 mil worth of data, which to me doesn't seem too bad for day 2. I decided to go ahead and do a bit of bounty hunting after that, so I bought and maxed out (as far as I can anyways) a Viper Mk III and flew to a nearby resource site, since I had seen a post on reddit about how camping resource sites was a good way to hunt bounties. Turns out it sure is, although the local security forces were all over it as well. It was a little tough to finish scanning the targets and then get some damage in before the police blew them out of the sky, but I managed to net about half a mil worth of bountues in 15-20 minutes of messing about. Is there any way to increase scanning speed? Maybe with one of the Engineers? I haven't messed with that at all yet. Also, should I ever bother vacuuming up the debris from a dead ship? I have no idea if that stuff is useful. After that I decided to try out mining. It seemed to me the best mining ship I could afford was a Diamondback Explorer, so I went with that. Turns out it's not the greatest at the role, since if you take two cargo bays (which felt mandatory to me) you have to choose between a shield generator or a detailed surface scanner. I decided to stick with shields since I just wanted to try it out. I flew headfirst into the nearest set of planetary rings I could find and quickly realized that you have to buy limpets manually. One round trip later and I was ready to go. My first few asteroids were disasters, nothing but liquid oxygen or methane or whatever else useless garbage, but on the last one (I had only brought 8 limpets, not knowing how many I would need) I managed to find a crackable asteroid with a low temperature diamond core! I cracked that baby and (badly) vacuumed up all the diamonds I could, then checked online to find the best price and walked away with ~5 mil for 30 minutes worth of work. I found exploring a little tedious but I think if I was more prepared (had some podcasts to listen to for instance) it could be a nice relaxing way to make some serious dosh. Bounty Hunting was fun, although I think I'd want to find a less patrolled place to do it in. Also feels like a big tanky ship with lots of guns would be the way to go for camping resource sites, since the bounties are coming to you and seem quite content to fight to the death. Mining was really neat, although my build needed a lot of work. In the end, I decided to sell the Hauler (although it was a great little ship for my first foray into exploration, highly recommend it) and covert the Diamondback Explorer into my exploration ship. Tomorrow I'll head out on a more proper expedition and hopefully come back with enough to pick up a Krait or a Python. That'll become an asteroid cracker and then I'll probably mine up a Chieftain or something for bounty and pirate hunting. I haven't engaged at all with the more meta-progression stuff (Engineers, Tech Brokers, and factions/Powerplay I guess?). When is a good time to start working some of that stuff in? Also, I've found a fair few resources online, but I'm still having a hard time knowing where to go for a lot of things. I'm sure I could be a lot more efficient in all my activities, I'm just not quite sure what tools/resources I should be using to get there, or even how to use them effectively. Game is hella sweet though.
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Dec 15, 2018 11:44
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Well, day 3 was interesting. I wanted to do some real exploring, so I set out in the morning intending to just go out until I found an unexplored system. Took me about two hours (scanning the systems and good planets that I came across) until I hit one. After that I flew back in and the round trip of ~3 hours netted me about 20 mil. Since I was saving for a mining Python with a price tag of ~77 mil, I decided to head back out on a Road to Riches route. I went for a 25 system round trip (25 systems with planets to scan, it was 98 jumps iirc). Completed it over the course of the day (plenty of interruptions, errands, etc) in I'd guess 5-6 hours of game time. Payout was about 50 mil. With what I had saved up from yesterday, that covered the Python, so I've just bought that and got it all kitted out. Tomorrow, it's off to the asteroid fields! Exploration is pretty neat but as a farming method I think I won't be going back any time soon. It's sitting in that annoying space where it takes just enough attention that I can't totally zone out during it. Which is rough when a good expedition is multiple hours long at a minimum. It's fairly engaging on its own though, so it wasn't all that bad really. If you are going out with the intent to discover stuff (rather than make a profit), I imagine it can be really engaging. I really like how you can get markedly better at it. By the end I was launching probes faster than they could regenerate and moving on to the next planet before the last few probes had landed. I also got way better at fuel scooping, it's really fun doing supercruise donuts around a star and just toeing the line between maximum efficiency and a fiery death. I didn't even bother learning the FSS codes (so I can just FSS scan the good stuff and ignore the 50 icy moons) or do any neutron boosting. Not to mention planetary exploration. Looking forward to getting some good rock-cracking time in tomorrow. Is picking up mining missions worth it usually? And how common is NPC piracy?
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Dec 16, 2018 12:57
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timn posted:No seriously, ignore the missions and just scan down a system or two with your ships' built-in FSS scanner. That will easily give you cash to buy a surface scanner, then start scanning and mapping planets for an hour or so and you'll have plenty of cash for a good starter ship. From there you can branch out into bounty hunting, mining, road to riches, whatever get rich quick scheme is hot right now, etc. , etc. It's never been easier to bootstrap yourself from nothing in this game. Yeah I just finished my third day of play last night and I'm already above 100mil net worth, having never played Elite before. You can make money really fast with exploring, which is where the lion's share of my wealth has come from. I haven't even gotten into the mining game yet, or messed much with any of the combat related stuff. Apparently you can bring in ~100mil an hour doing certain passenger tours as well?
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Dec 16, 2018 21:19
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Didn't have a ton of time to play today but I got a good two hours of mining in. It's really good. I followed this guide: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/244228-The-popular-guide-to-mining which I found very helpful. At first I started by getting some missions and just going all-out, mining everything that lit up. That was pretty fun, you get to use the full suite of tools and its neat circling around an asteroid with your mining lasers going while you snipe out the surface/subsurface deposits. But it was pretty slow going in terms of actual profit. So I switched to just hunting for crackable rocks and that was extremely profitable. The hardest part was finding a good place to sell all my rare poo poo, the best prices (according to eddb) were all insanely far away. I eventually found a station with decent prices (~600k for low temp diamonds) that wasn't in the rear end end of nowhere. After that it was pretty smooth sailing, I just mined in systems a jump or two away.oXDemosthenesXo posted:I'm trying to decide if I should play this game. I just started a few days ago, and I'm having a LOT of fun. As for your questions: -I'm playing on a Dualshock 4 and it works great. I didn't have to rebind anything on the controller itself, feels like a well-thought-out controller setup. However, I did find having easy access to my keyboard+mouse useful quite often. There's a couple specific actions (things like changing targets or setting your throttle to specific breakpoints) that you can't really justify binding on the controller but are really useful. Also having a mouse for navigating things like the galaxy map was pretty handy (although it's totally doable on controller). I play at my desk so it was easy for me to do that but I dunno what your setup is. -I ran through the in-game tutorials first and was up to speed pretty quickly (the advanced combat tutorial is apparently BS so don't worry about that if the second part is wrecking you like it did me). Actually playing the game isn't that hard in terms of flying your ship around etc (although landing in stations is pretty hairy for a while). The real trouble is figuring out where the hell to go once you want to break into the more free-form activities like mining or exploring. I had to do a fair bit of research on that stuff and I've still got a long ways to go. The game is also really persnickety about crossing your t's and dotting your i's, it's fairly simmy in that regards. For instance, if you take a delivery mission, you need to make sure you actually load the materials (from the mission screen, not the commodity screen) into your ship. It doesn't do it automatically. -I was exploring really quickly. You can kit out a Hauler (the earliest available cargo ship) as a great little explorer in maybe a half-dozen hours at most. Exploring is also really lucrative and is the main reason I was able to earn over 100 million by day 3 (which means I've got a pretty wide variety of ships and loadouts available to me). One great thing about the game is that there's very little depreciation in terms of your ship and modules (none at all for the modules). So it's super easy to constantly switch things up. -I've mostly avoided combat and it really doesn't force you into it at all. You can get interdicted out of supercruise (in-system FTL travel) but the mini-game to avoid the interdiction is pretty easy, I haven't lost one yet. It doesn't happen that often either, generally only if you are jumping into unsafe systems with a big haul (some delivery missions and stuff seem to spawn enemies as well). If you're exploring, combat is basically a non-issue. You've got no cargo, which means no one will bother with you, and once you're out in uninhabited space, there's no one to bother you anyways. I'd say it's a pretty easy sell at the sale price. It's definitely a slow game but not soul-crushingly so. The atmosphere more than makes up for that and they've added a lot of clever little gameplay hooks to otherwise mundane activities. That's one of the advantages of how little the game holds you hand I think, even something as banal as landing becomes interesting because it's all on you. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Dec 17, 2018 |
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Dec 17, 2018 08:18
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Goddammit, quote isn't edit.
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Dec 17, 2018 08:37
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I don't think that's right about not needing to do Detailed Surface Scanning when exploring. From all the research I've done on it and my own experience (~12 hours of road to riches exploration) the big money comes from DSScanning rare planets. Specifically: Terraformable High Metal Content Worlds, Water World's, Earth Like World's, and Ammonia World's. Doing the full DSS on those can give multiple millions per planet and it's a way higher payout than just using the FSS. I'm still fairly new to the game but that's been my experience and it's what all the 3.3 exploration guides mention doing. The other main thing I've been doing is mining, so I have some advice on that too. From what I can tell, just searching for crackables is a significantly higher payout if all you want is credits. I prefer Ice Rings for cracking for two reasons: there's only really high payout stuff in Ice cores (LTDs are the lowest payout) and also you can search for good prices on LTDs on EDDB and you'll probably get good prices on all the other Ice core stuff at the same station. I've been making round trips to a station that is buying LTDs for 700k and everything else for even more and getting about 70-100mil an hour just cracking Ice Cores. I don't even think the planet I'm using has pristine deposits.
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Dec 18, 2018 18:32
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Montalvo posted:I earned around 28 million for a 120 jump trip where I scanned almost every system, but only surface scanned a handful of water planets I found. I think that supports surface scanning, since I had a 96 jump RtR route where I DSScanned all nearby (within ~2k LS) valuable worlds and the route was worth about 74 million. It slows things down a bit but it's a huge increase in value. I've seen planets worth 4-5 million by themselves (if you stack the efficiency bonus for using fewer probes, you're the first mapper, or even better the first discoverer).
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Dec 18, 2018 19:43
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Fuzzysocksucker posted:Soooo this is probably a bug, you might wanna get on it before Frontier discovers you're having I found this entirely by accident the day before yesterday and I can confirm it's really silly. I've done a couple 1hr barely-paying-attention deep core trips to the nearest icy rings and made 160 mil over the last two days. If you are quick with your cracking you can make insane amounts of money. Probably going to put in some serious time tomorrow if it's still around. And if not, c'est la vie, I think a fully kitted out Asp Explorer, Python, and Mamba with 130 mil still in the bank is a pretty good haul for my first week in the game. I'm almost an Elite-rank explorer too, so I'll get access to that cool station. Does it always have all the modules? I spent a good 30 minutes today searching around before I finally found a station that had 6A reactors in stock. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 10:12
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Frog Act posted:How difficult is it to unlock a new ship? is it like a month of eight hour days? I started playing this game a week ago and I can afford to buy the most expensive ship in the game and max it out*. Part of that is taking advantage of a bug (some stations aren't adjusting their demand for things, letting you just constantly sell commodities to them for big profits) but even without that I would have still earned 60-75% of what I have (the bug just makes finding a place to sell your stuff faster, you still have to go mine the stuff in the first place), which is enough to buy the vast majority of the available ships. The latest big update made earning money a lot easier from what I understand. There's several ways to go about it now that are very lucrative. You can still earn money by running missions, trading, bounty hunting, etc. However, they've improved the exploration and mining mechanics and payout, both of which are now interesting activities that generate a LOT of credits. I was worried about the pace of progression as well and it hasn't been a problem at all. The credit-based progression at least, which is what governs your access to most ships and equipment. *With what you can purchase with credits anyways, there's other progression systems that I haven't engaged with yet. Blimpkin posted:The game is immensely rewarding, and at sale prices is just a complete steal. Yeah getting this amount of content for $14 or whatever the bundle costs right now is just crazy. I had some Steam credit left over from a refund so it was even more of a no brainer, I think my out of pocket was like $5 which is a pretty drat good $/hours-of-enjoyment ratio. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Dec 19, 2018 |
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Dec 19, 2018 21:16
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Parkingtigers posted:For the fresh newbies, I would caution against skipping over the small ships. Some goons insist the first thing you should do is make a ton of cash in the first day doing whatever, and getting into the medium ships right off. Usually a Cobra III in the first hour, then player's choice with all that loot. Now that's all fine and good, and you do you., but... well, all the small ships are fun as hell, and apart from novelty builds you'll have little reason to ever go back to most of them, and some of them you'd never touch. Yeah, I've only been playing a week but some of the most fun I've had in that short time was exploring with a simple Hauler build. Doing easy combat missions with an Eagle was a lot of fun too. I like that there's enough unique characteristics to ships that they generally don't get completely invalidated. Even the few ships that do just get completely outclassed by a later ship can be made to be totally serviceable, thanks to how much power is invested in modules rather than the ships themselves.
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Dec 20, 2018 08:32
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Apparently FDev made a post about Void Opal pricing: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/466571-Please-don-t-nerf-the-new-mining?p=7278008&viewfull=1#post7278008 tldr: They aren't changing anything, how it is currently is intentional. They did point out that the background simulation tracks cracked asteroids and they remain cracked, so it will force people further and further out if they want to keep getting the good stuff. My understanding is that it's actually a 2-week respawn on cracked asteroids (although I don't have a good source on that, just some chatter I saw), which would make sense because if they never respawned it would be a lot harder for new players to engage in mining down the line. The other thing that I'm still unclear on is if the way Demand is currently working (ie: it doesn't seem to be) is intended or not. But at least that should provide some reassurance to people that they won't be missing out entirely if they can't play right now.
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Dec 20, 2018 20:43
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goatsestretchgoals posted:I fast forwarded through 2 pages for this hot take but: Yeah the interplay between good mining->good piracy is really neat and seems to have fixed two playstyles with one stone (or one Void Opal in this case). I'm glad I hit this game when I did, I don't know that I would have survived the old rate of progression. Having messed with some of the combat and trading systems, I hope they find some ways to spice those up as well. There being actual value to smuggling would be really neat in particular. Combat is better since it's combat and more engaging and varied kind of by default, but the current system of farming infinitely respawning waves for bounties/rep is kinda weird and at least the Res Site bounty hunter stuff is pretty immersion breaking. It seems highly unlikely that a constant stream of pirates would just stroll on in to be obliterated by a bunch of bounty hunters and space cops. Apparently Thargoid hunting is good and cool though, which is great to hear. Blimpkin posted:I was flying out of the mass lock from the ring to my station only 20Ls away in my Type-10 loaded up with Monazite when I started to get scanned. The CMDR requested I drop some of my ore, I disagreed with his request and hit the boost. I've been mining in a Python and after a similar encounter I swapped my build to one totally focused on cracking+fighting. Works really well on the Python since I only need to use the two medium hardpoints for cracking. Leaves me with three large hardpoints for weapons. It cut into my cargo space and jump range but it's nice being able to blow would-be pirates out of the sky and then go back to my Player vs Rocks experience. Edit: Oh I forgot to post my question: How much of the Engineer stuff will I not be able to accomplish in a large ship (Anaconda in this case)? I want to start the Engi grind but I've also just finished up my A-rated generalist Anaconda and wanna use it. I'm just wondering how many are on smaller stations I guess. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 07:38
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Viktorenko prices are dropping fast so it's time to start looking for the next boom station. I wonder if Ice will remain the way to go or if different booms will call for different rocks. drat, I'm just 100 million off Elite too. I decided to hold off on my Anaconda buy until I unlock Jameson Memorial. Oh well, even without a real boom that shouldn't take too long. Edit: From a brief perusal of Inara, it looks like some stations to investigate might be Patterson Enterprise in the Sirius system, Powell High in the Wolf 359 system, and Levi-Strauss Installation in the Barnard's Star system. I don't know if any of those stations are unusual in any way (ie: permit required etc) but they're offering well above average prices for a wide range of rare mining materials. I'll have to go check it out after work. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 20:04
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Alright, I'm sitting pretty in Jameson Memorial with an Anaconda (Generalist/Mission Runner), Mamba (Bounty Hunting), Python (Cracking), Asp Explorer (Exploration), all rated to where I want them with 600 million still in the bank. This game has been real good to me over the last eight days. I'll start messing with Engineers and all that jazz tomorrow I think. Really happy I picked this up when I did, it seems 3.3 turned it into a game that I can really enjoy. Looking forward to getting into real long-distance exploration and Thargoid hunting once I've progressed down the Engineer/Guardian Research tracks. To anyone lurking around wondering if they should pull the trigger, I can't recommend this game enough, especially while it's on sale. It really scratched that Escape Velocity itch for me in a way that no game has since, well, Escape Velocity and it's sequels.
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Dec 22, 2018 06:41
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Yeah I'd love to see an expansion in ship types. There's definitely some variety already, flying an Anaconda is a hell of a lot different than flying an Eagle, but the guy upthread who said everything is essentially a guns-forward dogfighter wasn't entirely off the mark. Even the biggest flyable ships are essentially that, aside from maybe the Type-10 (which I haven't used yet) I guess. Getting players into real big stuff like fleet carriers (which we know are coming) is really going to take the game to a new level. Especially in terms of the cooperative elements (I really should join the goon group, I've been lazy). I really liked using the fighter with the small bit of Anaconda testing I did, it's a really fun little extra. Shows the potential the game has for those kinds of systems. I hope this sale is a big success for them because I'd love to see more from this game.
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Dec 22, 2018 07:49
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I've done a ton of mining over the last week and here's my thoughts on it:
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Yes I am in fact aware of how to do hyper drive things, thanks One thing I found with route plotting in the Galaxy Map was that if you *Selected* the end point, it would have that selected in your nav computer, instead of the next point on your plotted route. To check if that's your problem just see if it's trying to jump you directly to your endpoint or if your next jump target is actually the next point on your route. If it's doing that just select and unselect the end point, maybe cancel and redo the route too. It should work then. I think the routing just won't work if you don't have enough range to get to a system by any route, rather than make you an impossible route. AttackBacon fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 19:57
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