Clay
2741
Ok, awesome. Thanks! I was attacked by a pirate and blown up on my way to try to find some. Ugh.
Interesting thread hereon the forums, it looks like, by a couple of players majorly helping out a minor NPC faction in the game, that NPC faction is starting to “move” in some sense (i.e. things it’s doing are appearing on news feed for everybody), and it seems like it’s moving to expand, so more players are joining in. This seems like incredibly cool emergent gameplay.
Been stuck at work all day today. I’ll be home too late to play. I’m so chomping at the bit to get back into it. I’ve purposely chosen what I think will be the most boring activity first, thinking of it as “paying my dues”. I have a 2 bin refinery and a mining laser, and I traveled 87 light years to a Pristine reserves system. The four slots in my sidewinder’s cargo hold are just itching to be filled with some precious metals. Hopefully I can get this mining activity out of my system on Monday and maybe Tuesday, and be able to afford a couple of Class E beam lasers so that I can get my first try at some combat.
No, wait, scratch that. I already had my first brush with real combat, sort of. While I was mining some worthless mineral, there was some fighting going on in the backdrop. Sitting there in the silence of space, watching the nearby light show, I continued to mine. But a half hour later there was another light show. I eventually got curious. Who was fighting? Why on earth were they fighting here in the rings of a gas giant? So I closed my cargo hold door, and turned my attention to my contacts list. Let’s see: 3 federation officers after one sidewinder with a bounty on his head. That sounded like a safe enough first foray into combat. But as soon as I fired at him, he started running away pretty darned fast. His shields were down but by the time I diverted power to the engines to chase him more effectively, his shields were starting to come back and we’d left the Feds far behind. I caught up and quickly got his shields down again, then proceeded to melt his hull like butter using my mining laser.
Take that fellow sidewinder! That’s what you get for fighting next to a gas giant. A big helping of mining laser up your rear.
I’ve been working in the Frey system, doing stuff for Frey Free (or maybe it’s Free Frey?). At any rate, I was sent into a neighboring system on a delivery and I noticed that all of a sudden Frey Free has a presence there too - in the original system they’re marked “Expansion” so there is some mysterious (to me) set of conditions where in cultivating faction you make the guys you’re working for expand. Don’t know how long that will last and whether or not it’s permanent, but it’s pretty neat gameplay.
Hey nice, maybe I’ll run into you at Frey Charlatan. That’s where I set up shop too, for now. If you see me, don’t shoot. I come in peace.
Man, what a round of bounty hunting. 5 anacondas today, plus however many sideys and cobras. I’m exhausted.
I found a prison colony last night on the edgeward frontier. There was a civil war going on between the prison guards and some yots, but it only spawned a High Intensity warzone (I prefer low in my Viper).
Riddick says hi.
Neat, I’ve yet to see a warzone spawned. Good hunting there?
geewhiz
2749
Whoops - I thought you had the CH HOTAS but you actually have the Thrustmaster medium priced version. That has its own management software.
My problem right now is I loaded the one I found but I do not yet have the throttle so not sure if the joystick part will work right. At the moment the screen is spinning around and around! Have to go read some more. Man, this is like what I had to go through for Wing Commander and memory management software etc to get it working.
I caved and bought it. Yeah. This is good. I love the sense of achievement from actually making it somewhere and landing :)
I managed to locate an unexplored star and two of its planets in a binary system today simply by figuring out where it was most likely to be given the orbit line coming out of the first star. It was pretty far away (over 300k LS). You can tell you’re on the right track when you start to slow down.
Also spent some more quality time mining. Just before I quit earlier, I upgraded my refinery to a 3 bin model.
I’m inexpressibly pleased with myself from just pootling about following my nose trading things from one system to another and making a bit of money. Got nearly 5k credits now! I keep checking Bulletin boards, but I’m not seeing much in the way of straighforward courier runs (that would be more lucrative than the wee chunks of steady profit I’m making) - there are all sorts of things there though, and they change quite frequently, so I’m sure something will come up.
The best thing about this game for me is the sense of possibilities “out there”. It really feels like I’m somewhere, very virtual worldey.
One thing that’s confused me though - I got from one system to another, and there were routes from this system to other systems, but there were no routes back to the system I’d just come from. Do the routes change over time or something?
It’s the quirkiness of the in-game galaxy map. I bet the route back to the system you came from is there, you just can’t see it. Note that you just zoom the map out using the mouse-wheel, and it’ll show you different star systems and different routes. Rotate the map, and it will show different star systems and different routes sometimes. Shift the map plane up or down, and it will show different systems and different routes. I haven’t figured out why it shows certain routes and not others, it seems to be fairly … random at times. The galaxy map is a thing of mystery and beauty. One must worship it, and hope it bestows good tidings upon us.
One thing you can do is to type in the name of the system you want to go to in the next tab over, and it will bring that system into focus, then select “plot route”, and it should let you go back to the old system in one jump.
I couldn’t resist commencing my mining operation tonight. It took me an hour and a half, but I managed to mine 3 Palladiums, and I found 1 Silver pretty quick, so I stopped looking for more Palladium. Not bad, the 3 Tons of Palladium netted me 42k, and the Silver 5k. 47k total, not a bad haul for the evening. I wonder if that’s enough mining, or is one more evening full of mining called for here. There’s just something very industrious about it. It reminds me of the jobs you did in Fable 2.
I for one thank you for mining the materials we need to fly around the space lanes. :)
Finally upgraded from my sidewinder tonight. I turned it in for about 70k Cr, and had about another 70k Cr and bought myself a Viper!
…I kind of jumped the gun. I probably should have made some more money before buying so I could have at least upgraded the frame shift drive. My jump distance is a little more than half of what it was with my Sidewinder.
The routes are calculated by the game when you open the map depending on your current jump range, so if its a far away system or you picked up some cargo on the way then you have more mass and cant jump as far as before.
That’s also the reason why you can’t plot some long way trips unless you leave the computer calculating the optimal path for some minutes.
I’m going to be upgrading from my A-rated sidey to a Viper very soon, but I’ve been building up a war chest so I can keep the sidey around (it’s my original ship, still haven’t been killed!) and also upgrade the Viper out of the gate. The sidey itself is worth well over 1 million credits and I have about 600k in cash, all from bounties.
My situational awareness in this game is lower than in any other space Sim I’ve ever played. It’s because of a combination of a couple if different things. First, unlike other space sims, the list of contacts in your immediate area is not available to you on the main HUD. Instead, you have to physically look away from what you’re doing, to your left panel, to see the list. Secondly, in games like Free space and Iwar and Wing Commander I was always cycling through all my targets so I knew where everyone and everything was in relation to me. I was also looking side to side and behind me with the cameras for those views. E:D doesn’t have those cameras, and when you do target something on your contacts list, your target knows they are being scanned. I am probably being paranoid, but I would think that is a bit of an act of aggression, scanning someone. So I usually don’t do it.
It’s just interesting, I’m changing my behavior from other games of this kind because of design decisions that have an interesting impact. I like it. I especially love the act of having to turn to one panel or another to interact with it. Yesterday, as I was entering the rotating space station to turn in my ore, the station was shooting constantly at a ship right inside, near the entrance to my left. But I didn’t dare look over there by turning my ship, or even to look at my left panel to look at my contact list to see who they were shooting at. Was it a human player? An NPC? Can NPCs also forget to ask for docking permission? Is that what happened? I was dying of curiosity, but I didnt dare stray from my forward view, going between all the shooting lasers straight to my assigned docking port.
I have a hat bound to cycle targets (left/right) and target front (up) and usually cycle through that quickly to see what’s around. Basic scanning should not really be considered a hostile action, it just tells you who they are, what their profile is, etc. A cargo scanner, however, is a different kettle of fish. If you are scanning with one of those, your target certainly will think you are up to no good.
gurugeorge posted this a few pages back about how he bound the right button to be mouse-look, similar to how your typical MMO might operate.
I use a TrackIR and can tell you my awareness of my surroundings is significantly better for it, compared to not bothering to set it up pre-launch. It also makes glancing at the left/right panels amazing - quick and natural. Combined with the HOTAS it does an exceptional job of making you feel like you are actually in the pilot’s chair.
