Though supposedly the higher ranks are/will be mutually exclusive
random fyi, gimballed beam weapons are very wonky and I don’t recommend them. Fixed Beam work fine, gimballed most other things are fine.
Also dumbfire missiles are amazing
I like a mix of fixed lasers and gimballed multi-cannons. It’s pretty easy to keep your crosshairs on target from laser range, much harder at cannon range (assuming normal combat manoeuvering). It also means that if they chaff, you can still hit them.
I used: Top gimballed medium multicannon
Bottom: 2 small gimballed pulse laser
I don’t like beams since i can’t sustain fire more than a few secs at most and pulses take down shields faster in short bursts, the medium multicannon will tear hull apart.
I ground out enough credits to put some teeth on me tub. Four, count 'em, 4 gimballed burst lasers beneath the cockpit and two big honking gimballed autocannons on either side of the cockpit. You wanna interdict me mr pirate? allright, throttle to zero, do your worst motherfucker. muahahah get some! get some!
Have I linked that post from the official forum where two english lads did some serious science on shields? Turns out having four pips to your shields does a LOT for their strength. Like 2.5 times as long to melt as with no pips. Another thing they found is that fitting oversized shields does not improve things and that having a good power regulator is very important for your shield strength. This thread should be linked in our OP.
Question on the standard scanner you start off with. I mapped it to weapon group 2, but nothing seems to happen when I press the rt. mouse button. Should something be happening, or is this the scanner that just automatically gives basic information that you access from the com screen?
Need to be in supercruise and you have to hold to button until it fully charges to scan, also it should be somewhere that is unexplored otherwise nothing new will show up.
You should see and hear the scanner charge as you hold it down. Did you assign it to your second weapon group or your secondary weapon?
Are you sure you mapped it to weapon group 2? The screen can be confusing. Each column is a separate distinct fire group - in each fire group (that is, reading down each colum), weapons are marked ‘1’ and ‘2’ for primary and secondary fire. While the current group is deployed, you use whatever keys are mapped for primary/secondary weapon fire (for me it’s left/right mouse).
If you mapped your scanner to a secondary fire group, that means you have a second column in the fire groups screen. In that column, you need to map weapons to primary/secondary fire controls (i.e., marking them with 1s or 2s). So it’d probably be marked with a ‘1’ if you want to turn it on with a left mouse click, and ‘2’ if it is activated with a right mouse click.
If it’s really in a second fire group you need to switch fire groups (I think the ‘X’ key rotates through fire groups) and THEN deploy the fire group (‘U’ I think), and THEN press left mouse button. You’ll see a small progress bar of sorts in the lower left-ish of your screen. When that fills up, you get the INCEPTION HORN which lets you know you scanned, or something!
I may have assigned it as secondary weapon.
Thanks for the tip.
I did click around on that but found the sorting and how it worked really counter-productive so I went to excel instead.
Was thinking that maybe a external app that hooked into the game memory to read the values as you visited stations, and then wrote a overlay on the screen would be best but that isn’t something I want to spend time on, even if it would be interesting exercise :)
Did two missions today and got around 8k in total from them. Now I have 20k credits, and I see the adder is around 87.000, so I am far off yet.
A bit annoying that I get offered missions to destroy lots of ships; considering I’ll probably die in the process with my ghetto Sidewinder; and that there are hardly any missions on offer on the stations I’ve visited. Seems like I need 8 cargo slots to be offered some of the missions, but not sure the 10k reward on the one I saw would be worth it, considering how far you needed to travel.
Maybe, but don’t chase the numbers/money as much as you chase the fun/experience, the money will come along with it and you’ll have a much better time.
Real-life lessons from space.
How mouse-keyboard friendly is this? Joystick required?
From what I’ve seen, lots of pilots are having fun with the keyboard and mouse.
So true, this game really rewards roleplay lite - you carve your own little adventure out of the path you take, and the way your memory starts linking the stars from use creates a lived-in backdrop. Time is compressed where necessary, more verging on 1:1 where necessary, the net result is you feel like you’re a spaceship commander from moment to moment, and your triumphs and tragedies versus the emergent gameplay are the story you make up as you go along.
One really cool thing is that the names for stars are often cool and interesting, much more cool and interesting than the made-up names-for-stars in many an s-f novel or game.
Names for stations are interesting too. And I’m starting to appreciate the level of detail wrt factions and mini-factions - there could be more, much more, but it’s a solid start.
It’s interesting that I’ve often been tempted by the lucrative rewards of slave runs, but after toying with the idea, hovering over the button, as it were, I decided not to get involved in all that. I’m going to stick to my character’s guns.
Ordered some new cables and rearranged my desk. Now I have three monitors, TrackIR, Voice Attack and Saitek X52Pro. I spent some time this weekend going through all the tutorials and starting my commander career! Loving the immersion this game gives, I told myself I have to finish Dragon Age first before I focus on this game, and I am enjoying DAI, but man is this thing the most immersive I have felt in a game since I first started playing Wing Commander.
Oh, and what is with the setup of nvidia surround for multi monitor gaming? I got it to work, but really want to find a way to create a profile back and forth between it. My secondary monitors also host my server PC and my MacBook Air when not being used for gaming.
If anyone is interested in trying out exploration in the game, here are some things I’ve learned:
[ul]
[li]The intermediate discovery scanner is worth grabbing at the earliest opportunity. While its range is only double that of the basic version, this translates to 8x the volume scanned. Ping it, ping it often, ping it when you’re bored, ping it when you’re scanning something else–sometimes you’ll get lucky.
[/li][li]The detailed surface scanner will net you a lot more income in the long run, once you pony up the necessary CR for it. It’s a good investment for if you’ve decided that you enjoy exploring, but otherwise skip it. It gets used automatically when you point your ship at something marked “unexplored” and get close enough to figure out what it is. If all you plan on doing is jumping into a system, pulsing your discovery scanner to mark everything within 500-1000 Ls, and then selling that for some quick, easy CR once you dock somewhere over 20 Ly away, this won’t help with that.
[/li][li]When you’re flying towards something marked “unexplored” trying to get into range to scan it, and you notice something else moving across the background starscape, change direction pronto to fly towards it and don’t stop pinging your discovery scanner until you mark it. You may think you’ll remember roughly where it was, and you may at that, but other times you’ll spend 5-10 minutes trying to find it again, whereas once something is on your contact list, it’s trivial to get back to it again even if you have to turn around and fly all the way back.
[/li][li]Periodically check your system map. Sometimes you’ll find gaps in planetary lists indicating you’ve missed something and more or less how far out you can expect them to be.
[/li][li]Most planets are found within an orbital plane, but not always.
[/li][li]Binary stars can be a total pain. When you jump into a system and scan the star (not just ping it), the system page will indicate its orbital period. If that number is less than about 100,000 days, you can usually get to it in a few (2-5) minutes worth of supercruise. If that number is in the millions of days, you’ll be traveling for a while. Also, when you target the original star, you’ll also get its orbital path. Usually the binary partner will be the brightest object on that path, and should be the same color as on the system map. With trinaries and more, well sometimes you’ll get lucky and have a close-orbiting pair, but if not I just skip 'em. Maybe once I get an advanced discovery scanner…
[/li][li]If you’ve been flying towards what you suspect is the binary partner for a while and start slowing down, then you’re on the right track. Once your speed drops down to 30c, you should be in range of a pulse from the intermediate discovery scanner.
[/li][li]A good fuel scoop is a must. Scoop when the scooping is good, as you might just run into a string of systems that won’t easily give up their hydrogen.
[/li][li]A good shield is helpful. In addition to the obvious reason, it will let you take more excess heat while scooping before a crash-stop.
[/li][li]I’ve posted this upthread, but this is a good video that will teach you how to use parallax to find planets and stars out of range of your scanner. Watch the HD version if you can.
[/li][/ul]
Excellent post conVurt.
Mr. Rubin, keeper of the OP, could I humbly suggest you add this and krazykrok’s Screenshot Enhanced Landing Guide to the list of links. This is paste-able to the Qt3 section:
krazykrok’s guide to landing: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?71093-Elite-Dangerous-Kickstarter-Launched&p=3691461&viewfull=1#post3691461
conVurt’s guide to exploring: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?71093-Elite-Dangerous-Kickstarter-Launched&p=3691969&viewfull=1#post3691969
Thanks!
EDIT: You’re fast Brian. Now get back to killing pirates.
Speaking of cool names, I just ran into Richard Feynmann flying a hauler. Even though he had a clean record, I was tempted to blast him out of the sky just to be the monster who killed Feynmann.