Elite: Dangerous

[Malkevin]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Played a bit of CQC last night.

Basically you fly in a slow, fragile ship against other slow fragile ships that have instant hit lasers, which even the fixed ones have a large gimbal zone (without the dispersed shot grouping of actual gimbaled weapons (which are also in)), in 4 vs 4 TDM/CTF or 8 player FFA matches with a matchmaking system that often throws in a high level player into the match.

You can customise your ships but you need to do some level grinding before it'll unlock the different parts for you.

[peoplearestrange]

I don't see how basic first person shooter controls wouldn't work. WASD for your X/Y movement. Q and E for rolling, "jump" and "crouch" for Z-level movement.

Well because essentially you're "flying" in space. You need the ability to continual yaw, pitch or role to avoid or attack someone. The only difference to a flight sim is you need lateral for docking and you have no min airspeed.
There is a nice arrow thingy that means you move a cusour away from the mid point and it moves in that direction constantly. But its not amazing easy to use and also as Thanatos says, my emulsions! (which is a lot of this game for me).

[Saegrimr]

That doesn't doesn't really explain why my control scheme wouldn't work.

You've played Space Engineers with dampeners off, right? Same thing.

[peoplearestrange]

Oh man playing ED without flight assist on (dampeners off etc) is insanely hard... though can be useful for combat to trick people. Its nothing like SE, at least it doesnt feel that way.

[Timbrewolf]

I don't see how basic first person shooter controls wouldn't work. WASD for your X/Y movement. Q and E for rolling, "jump" and "crouch" for Z-level movement.

It's not that they wouldn't "work". You could definitely navigate around using those kind of bindings.

But when you're actually dogfighting with someone you're going to be either trying to hold down multiple digital inputs with one hand or you're going to be ignoring control surfaces of your craft.
It's inferior. You wont be able to use every function at the same time. You wont be able to redistribute your power while flying.

It's like, the same basic problem that using WASD to move has with also using the number keys for weapons. You have to stop moving in a direction so you can press one of the number row keys to make the swap. Even if it's for only a moment, you have to do something different than what is optimum to make that swap. In an FPS this probably isn't the end of the world. You just stand still for a second and then keep running to wherever you're going.

In a flight game movement is everything. It's all about how well you can control the thing you're in. Whether it's a WW2 prop plane or a sci-fi frigate.

I'm sure there are some folks who have practiced with M+KB a lot and put up a pretty good show on one but it's a worse input for this kind of game in every way.

[Braincake]

Spent about an hour fiddling with the M+KB controls, only to find I'd inadvertently re-created X3:TC's classic flight control scheme. It works well enough in dogfights against NPCs, but the computer starts beeping when I try to strafe diagonally whilst rolling and accelerating at the same time, which gets rather annoying. I've yet to get into a battle with an actual human player.

As for the game itself, it feels a bit empty around the non-starter places, even after last week; around Sol I rarely ran into another human player. Meanwhile, some Orbitals or Outposts in Eravate or whatever can have docking queues of a dozen people, who usually start ramming eachother out of boredom after ten minutes. I get that space is kinda big, but I figured these kind of obvious well-known areas would have more people. Is it the same around the Power headquarter systems?

[Malkevin]

CQC has made me realise space combat is a bit wank.

Air combat is a complex thing, you need to manage your energy: your speed and altitude, you need to know the limits of your plane: how much you can push your angle of attack without stalling and how much throttle you can get away with to keep up your airspeed without flopping over from engine torque, and you need to know your weapons: where their convergence point is, how much drop they have, how fast the projectiles travel to work out how much lead you need.

Combat in E:D is a bit wank, flying is a lot more forgiving because you don't run the risk of stalling your plane, losing tons of altitude, spinning out and then lawn darting. Maneuvering is all about keeping your throttle in the magic blue zone. Weapons are either instant hit lasers or you're using ballistic weapons that do the hard part of aiming for you. Not to mention that the massive power differences between the various craft.

[peoplearestrange]

Combat in E:D is a bit wank, flying is a lot more forgiving because you don't run the risk of stalling your plane, losing tons of altitude, spinning out and then lawn darting. Maneuvering is all about keeping your throttle in the magic blue zone. Weapons are either instant hit lasers or you're using ballistic weapons that do the hard part of aiming for you. Not to mention that the massive power differences between the various craft.

As they've stated lots of times. ED wasn't made/built to be a PVP game, it just wasnt built up that way. If i'm honest It doesnt really know what it wasnt to be, its a kinda space sim, which it does a lot of things well, but its also lacking in a lot of things. If it was somehow combined with the mechanics of EVE, like trading, stock markets, setting up bases, warp bubbles, corps, large groups, larger ships (carrier sizes) then it might be more in depth.

Or to be honest larger, multi pilot ships could be awesome, or some idea of a carrier that you can dock small ships into.

As for the game itself, it feels a bit empty around the non-starter places, even after last week; around Sol I rarely ran into another human player.

Yeah I found that too, maybe more obvious trade routes, with NPC cargo ships would be nice to help it feel more "crowded" and give you something to hijack.

Also Sol system is probably empty ish as you have to get a permit to travel there. I've yet to visit it, which is a real shame cause I kinda want to see how they modelled it all.


Hopefully planetary interaction will add some more interesting things.

[Timbrewolf]

CQC has made me realise space combat is a bit wank.

Air combat is a complex thing, you need to manage your energy: your speed and altitude, you need to know the limits of your plane: how much you can push your angle of attack without stalling and how much throttle you can get away with to keep up your airspeed without flopping over from engine torque, and you need to know your weapons: where their convergence point is, how much drop they have, how fast the projectiles travel to work out how much lead you need.

Combat in E:D is a bit wank, flying is a lot more forgiving because you don't run the risk of stalling your plane, losing tons of altitude, spinning out and then lawn darting. Maneuvering is all about keeping your throttle in the magic blue zone. Weapons are either instant hit lasers or you're using ballistic weapons that do the hard part of aiming for you. Not to mention that the massive power differences between the various craft.

It'd be a little more interesting if they modeled G-forces on the pilot/craft. As is you can boost full speed in one direction, then rotate while maintaining inertia, and boost in the exact opposite direction.
IRL this would splatter the pilot all over the inside of the cockpit and likely crumple/bend critical portions of the ship's structure. In Elite nothing happens, you don't even white/black out.

Some kind of temporary stun effect for overstressing yourself would be cool. At the very least there should be some kind of visual effect. This is one of the few things Star Citizen already has implemented and works.

[Malkevin]

There are actually pilot g-limits in game, but about the only thing that can achieve them is a boosting vulture - and even then its only the when diving at full deflection do you exceed the safe negative g limit.

[Malkevin]

Finally caved in and bought an X55 to replace my failing x52 after seeing the x55 available for only £132 from Wildarc (http://www.wildarc.co.uk/saitek-pro-fli ... 50002-02-1)

And its not that bad of a stick, only issue I have with it is that the top rotary button sticks a bit if I have it fully twisted counter clockwise - something to do with the friction lock mechanism, managed to wear it in a little which has mostly removed the issue but so far so good, all the inputs are smooth with no spiking.
Ergonomics definitely aren't anywhere near as good as the x52, throttle hats and stick hats are too close together and thumb button on the stick is a bit too low down for my liking. Throttle is very very stiff, even with the tension turned all the way down.

Build quality does feel fairly solid, although the throttle halves have a lot of wiggle room (not really noticeable whilst using the throttle), and I wish the pinky switch was made of metal instead of this cheap feeling plastic, the locking collar that attaches the stick to the spring system is also made of plastic instead of metal.

But the buttons! Oh god the buttons!
If you thought the x52 had lots of buttons you'll be dumb founded by the x55 which has almost double that of the x52.
Including the hats the stick alone has 18 buttons, the throttle then adds another 31! buttons.
Suffice to say I have more buttons than functions.

[Timbrewolf]

Jelly. That throttle quadrant looks ballin'. All that shit would be great for DCS or Falcon BMS

[Saegrimr]

This hot garbage is on sale for $15, which is close enough to my "Cheap enough for a game I was somewhat interested in to drop money on" limit.

You guys still doing this or whats the deal here? Am I in for rad dogfights in space or Euro Truck Simulator 2555?

[Cik]

get into atmospheric flight simulators instead

[Saegrimr]

get into atmospheric flight simulators instead

Which one is that?

[Cik]

dcs: pick a module, falcon 4.33, il-2 sturmovik:cliffs of dover

there are many other ones of course, depending on what kind of planes you like and how far you're willing to go back into the past.

[Malkevin]

I bought this early last year, played for a couple of months, took a break mainly due to my old stick being knackered, came back recently and been playing for a few months again.

Progression is a lot better now, bounty farming and exploring and mining (which has become far less tedious) are on levels with trading so now you're not forced to play Space Truck Simulator if you want to make bucks.
I'd even say bounty farming is more profitable than trading at the moment.

[Timbrewolf]

Oh yeh?

Reinstallan

[Saegrimr]

Yeah i'm sitting in a dock with no jobs available to me and no immediately obvious way to make money outside of posted bulletins.

Although jumping to 4 different systems to find a station that would even let me dock was pretty cool. I hope that novelty doesn't wear off too fast.
I'm actually surprised how well this game runs for how pretty it is.

[peoplearestrange]

I've been trying to play with a joystick, and Jesus Christ my brain just isnt mapped that way. Which is a shame because I can see it being way easier in the long run.

Also planet landing comes out reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal soon! Exciting!
We should get a wing together and shoot some ships.

[Malkevin]

Oh yeh?

Reinstallan

Yep, once you've got around 10 mil for a Vulture and equipment you can rake in about 2-4mil/hr in a high res.

Mining and exploring still don't pay as much but they're a lot more relaxing than bounty farming and aren't as sleep inducingly boring as A-B loop trading.
Once you get the hang of mining (that is: find a pristine metallic near a station, only bother mining the 3Ps) I was making 2-3mil/hr in my Fed Dropship. There was a couple of mining CGs over the last few weeks, I've gone from about 20 mil in assets to over 100 just from zapping roids.

Now I own a Python thats worth around 85 million credits
My rebuy cost is over 5 million.


Only problem with big heavy shielded ships is that shields take an age to recharge (all shields recharge at the same rate of 1MJ/s), so I've ended up blinging out a cobra gone shootin stuff up with that instead.

[ThanatosRa]

I've been finding my alliance base pretty profitable. It's all be going well. I still pop in.


Recently traded out my diamondback scout for a cobra to do a little exploring and trading with. I'd decided that I needed more versatility and the Scout, while awesome, was best for exploring and killin. I need exploring and trading since i already have my Viper for killin. Flying dat Alliance Green. (Or stars n' stripes. Or VIVE LA FRANCE. On both now actually. The cobra has the flag skins).

[Malkevin]

Apparently one of the upcoming features of Horizons is that other players can hitch a ride on your ship, which means they can either pilot a small fighter craft popping out a big ship (python/anaconda/T9) or you can dump them on a planet in one of the SRVs so that they can attack the anti-ship defences ground bases have then you can come in and bomb the shit out of the base.

[ThanatosRa]

Oh neat. So someone could ferry you to a distant ship if it's needed.

If transactions between players are allowed at some point it sounds like people can start ferrying other players for a fee too.

[srifenbyxp]

Every time I back log this game I always land on a planet and assume my pilot is doing odd jobs while hunting greytiders, then he gets back in da ship and do spess things.

[Saegrimr]

Speaking of landing on planets, new update today that lets you actually do that. Sort of. In a limited way. That'll be $60 plus tax.

[peoplearestrange]

Speaking of landing on planets, new update today that lets you actually do that. Sort of. In a limited way. That'll be $60 plus tax.

Airless planets currently.
It was also way less if you pre-ordered and had a copy of the game already.

Also for a game as large as EVE in scale and requiring large scale servers to run, with no subscription i'm pretty happy to pay a bit extra for new content.
It adds a fair bit to the game and its obvious a lot of work as gone into it. People gotta get paid after all.

[leibniz]

It's 50% off now until jan 4.
I'm considering buying it.

[ThanatosRa]

I landed on a planet outside the bubble then went on vacation. I should be ok. Right?

[Grazyn]

Ship disappears when you log off

[leibniz]

The new player experience is abhorrent.

[Saegrimr]

The early game was the only fun thing. Figuring things out, docking and undocking for the first few times.
Shoot some pirates, try out mining before realizing its the biggest waste of time ever. Try out missions before you realize half of them don't work, pay fucking garbage, and have zero variety other than the flavor text when you accept the mission.

Then you realize after your first 10 mil earned that there's nothing else to the game, and you just fully kitted out a combat ship to do the exact same thing you've been doing except moderately faster for the same reward.

[IrishWristWatch0]

The early game was the only fun thing. Figuring things out, docking and undocking for the first few times.
Shoot some pirates, try out mining before realizing its the biggest waste of time ever. Try out missions before you realize half of them don't work, pay fucking garbage, and have zero variety other than the flavor text when you accept the mission.

Then you realize after your first 10 mil earned that there's nothing else to the game, and you just fully kitted out a combat ship to do the exact same thing you've been doing except moderately faster for the same reward.

Just hit about 40 hours in ED. This is pretty much it.

[Malkevin]

That's true of most mmos though

[leibniz]

Yeah, from what I heard, it's disappointing that they made a sandbox and they failed to put fun content in it.

But anyway, I found the start frustrating. The default controls are dogshit. They cant really expect everyone who buys this to have a joystick.
Using the mouse to roll? Who came up with that shit? Why arent there some sensible presets available? The game was out for more than a year, didnt it cross their mind that this should be fixed?
Having to look up random guides for control layouts shouldn't be required if they dont just want people to refund the game after 10 minutes.
Another thing is the lack of information. Like, cool stuff should need to be discovered but if I just want to do some basic missions, I shouldnt have to fly from system to system until I happen upon a station that offers easy ones. Same with basic equipment.
Also, from what I found missions are fucked up and the best way to start is going to resource extraction sites.
I guess I'll try the CQC thing, it sounds fun.

[Saegrimr]

That's true of most mmos though

Yeah but unlike other MMOs, you can go 100 hours without seeing another human player ever.

I found my FIRST human player about 90 hours in. We winged up and shot some NPCs because we were both surprised to see anybody.

I can stand doing boring repetitive shit as long as I have someone to play with, even just random pubbies. Even if you do meet random pubbies that piss you off, you can't shoot them. I mean you can but they can just alt-f4 with zero consequence.

[Malkevin]

Yeah, from what I heard, it's disappointing that they made a sandbox and they failed to put fun content in it.

But anyway, I found the start frustrating. The default controls are dogshit. They cant really expect everyone who buys this to have a joystick.
Using the mouse to roll? Who came up with that shit? Why arent there some sensible presets available? The game was out for more than a year, didnt it cross their mind that this should be fixed?
Having to look up random guides for control layouts shouldn't be required if they dont just want people to refund the game after 10 minutes.
Another thing is the lack of information. Like, cool stuff should need to be discovered but if I just want to do some basic missions, I shouldnt have to fly from system to system until I happen upon a station that offers easy ones. Same with basic equipment.
Also, from what I found missions are fucked up and the best way to start is going to resource extraction sites.
I guess I'll try the CQC thing, it sounds fun.

Yeah... its game that harks back to the joystick era - which is a good thing. If you want a space game where you click around with your mouse play EVE.
You don't need an x52/x55/rhino to play the game, you can get a cheap thrustmaster HOTAS for around £39.99

Alternatively you can pinch the gamepad off your xbox and plug it in and play with that.

[mrpain]

[youtube]3hPCNOTgyUo[/youtube]

Wait a very long time to buy Horizons. And only on a sale. Like, Summer sale at the earliest. Probably ideally the winter sale a year from now.

Yeah I give up on embedding. There ya go. Fixed it.

[Saegrimr]

Wait a very long time to buy Horizons. And only on a sale. Like, Summer sale at the earliest. Probably ideally the winter sale a year from now.

Yeah I give up on embedding. There ya go.

Just put the 3hPCNOTgyUo code between the youtube tags.

Anyway I don't think i'll even get horizons if it goes on sale for $10.

It doesn't add anything other than more MINING which gives fucking nothing as far as profits. I guess a supercharged FSD warp is cool in theory but I have no idea how sustainable it is. Why would I spend 3 hours mining for special snowflake materials so I can jump a little further like.. twice?

[leibniz]

..

Yeah... its game that harks back to the joystick era - which is a good thing. If you want a space game where you click around with your mouse play EVE.
You don't need an x52/x55/rhino to play the game, you can get a cheap thrustmaster HOTAS for around £39.99

Alternatively you can pinch the gamepad off your xbox and plug it in and play with that.

I'm glad that it's fun to play with a joystick, I was merely complaining about the default MKB controls.

[Malkevin]

Wait a very long time to buy Horizons. And only on a sale. Like, Summer sale at the earliest. Probably ideally the winter sale a year from now.

Yeah I give up on embedding. There ya go.

Just put the 3hPCNOTgyUo code between the youtube tags.

Anyway I don't think i'll even get horizons if it goes on sale for $10.

It doesn't add anything other than more MINING which gives fucking nothing as far as profits. I guess a supercharged FSD warp is cool in theory but I have no idea how sustainable it is. Why would I spend 3 hours mining for special snowflake materials so I can jump a little further like.. twice?

They can also replenish your ammo, with a 30% damage bonus for the good mats

Which could be useful for missiles seeing as they cost so much per round they're currently useless

That said, horizons is very very dull at the moment
But they'll be releasing more content through out the year

[Screemonster]

Which could be useful for missiles seeing as they cost so much per round they're currently useless

Reminds me of Privateer 2. A torpedo cost 10x as much as the bounty you got for dropping a pirate capship so until you got decent lasers you were better off just boosting enough distance away that you could jump.

Another thing is the lack of information. Like, cool stuff should need to be discovered but if I just want to do some basic missions, I shouldnt have to fly from system to system until I happen upon a station that offers easy ones. Same with basic equipment.

And yet you play SS13 with our glorious lack of documentation for even the most basic things

[Malkevin]

If you're looking for a bit of instant gratifaction pew pew arena shooter, the CQC mode has been rebranded as Elite: Arena and can be bought as stand alone game for only a fiver (or free if you own the full game)
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=232840