4941

Might want to lead with that sentiment next time. :)

4942

If those landings come with exploration data to find then this would be the biggest content expansion ever for me. Thats like… and exponential of things to discover, assuming the surface stuff is all procedurally generated as well then I am in hogs heaven :)

4943

I must admit that does sound pretty darn cool!

4944

Exciting Mass Effect Mako-style gameplay!

4945

That is pretty much what this puts me in mind of. Luckily, I’m one of those weirdos who really enjoyed tooling around in the Mako, so it should be perfect.

4946

I don’t know that I’ve ever intentionally bothered to track those guys down, what happens if you do is they give you an alternate mission along the lines of “Those rocks that Pickafaction asked you to mine for them, well those guys suck, you should bring those rocks back to Someotherfaction instead”, with some other, usually smaller, reward. That said, if you do want see firsthand what that is all about, make a note of the name of the ship sending the message, and then target all the nearby contacts and point your ship at them long enough for a ship name to resolve in the lower left, until you find the one you want. And when they drop down and turn into a little grey blip on your radar, you can lock onto the blip and approach it like you might approach an outpost or station until you get the safe-to-disengage-supercruise blue light, although I’ve read that doing so can be fiddly.

Alternatively you could just take fifteen or so missions, fly out and when you inevitably get interdicted by someone and submit, you’ll probably find that about half a dozen of those guys have also dropped down with you trying to shill their revised mission contracts while you shoot up some pirates!

4947

Man, I will have to get this…

So, once the expansion hits the expansion gets you the base game also?

Is the expansion out already?

4948

Yes.

Is the expansion out already?

You can preorder but it’s aiming to be out for the holidays, and an exact date has not yet been released.

4949

…and if it is still possible think about getting the all future expansions offer, as that is really going to make ED the complete game over time.

4950

I still can’t believe you guys that actually bought the lifetime pass back when this was in development. Back when I was an active member of the space sim community first with Wing Commander and then A Talent For War, we kept hearing over and over in the late 90s how David Braben was making a new Elite. But year after year, there was no other progress reports. And this kept up throughout the 2000s too, even as the space sim genre overall kind of died (or went into hibernation, being represented by mediocrity like the X Series). So when this Kickstarter was announced, there was just no way for me to think this was anything except literally throwing your money down a bottomless pit.

But how wrong I was! I still can’t believe that this game, this endless vaporware of a game that’s been mentioned since the mid 90s, is the one that carries the space sim torch the best (in my opinion) in its current form. It actually came out, and it was actually great because of getting the fundamental gameplay right. Shakes head. It boggles the mind.

4951

Looks like exploration is green light again now.

4952

I think a big part of it was the game (Elite in the 80’s) and it’s two rather brilliant creators (Sir David Braben and Ian Bell) and how it came about. If you like the DNA of Elite was incredibly strong, and even if in the rather top-publisher-heavy video game industry of the late 90’s into the 2000’s, that meant for David it was still a contender.

I mean what is not to love about being a free wheel that inherits a space ship in an actual galaxy sized game ‘world’, set in a reasonably recognizable human future?

So yeah, while the publishers pretty much killed it off for a good decade or so (and in the case of Elite, with both Frontier and FFE, it could be argued the publishers nearly killed those games too, releasing them as buggy as they were, FFE in particular!), Elite was (is) such a great seed idea, with pretty damn awesome delivery for the various era’s it had it’s three previous parts released in.

Wing Commander, like the X-wings games, that were also the cream of the crop for ages and awesome games (and obviously you have likes of Freelancer and Independence War in this timeline), nothing was such a large a scope in terms of having an actual galaxy to play around in. Elite was serious brain candy for many uk youths for oh so long.

Now obviously i’ve been a bit of a critic of Elite: Dangerous since it’s release, but that is mostly born out of my love of the game, knowing where it has been and where it could go…

So yeah, i’m a hopeless Elite romantic with my fingers dirty from hex editing the reverse engineered third game (FFE), because i’ve always loved it since 1984 when i first played it on my friends BBC Micro. And even if i currently find Elite: Dangerous lacking, i know that strong game DNA it comes from will eventually get it’s time to shine, so it was a no brainer for me personally to back the kickstarter for the long haul and get the all expansion pass.

Now it might blow up in my face, there are certainly many things we have seen from Frontier (the dev) and Elite: Dangerous so far that could kind of hint that might have diluted that DNA down the passage of years, we shall see.

As long as i get to land on Earth at some point, and gaze up at Mars low on the horizon after dusk, and seamlessly jump in my ship and fly there to buy Liquor to sell on the planet New California in Epsilon Eridani, while enjoying a small holiday with my crew on it’s azure beaches, then i’ll be happy, and fully on board with Elite: Dangerous :)

4953

I finally downloaded the latest update and took my Cobra for a brief spin last night. Holy crap, I’ve completely forgotten how to fly this thing! I just about managed to take it away from the platform, request docking permission, and land it, but it wasn’t pretty. Thankfully nobody was watching. I certainly won’t be going near BBQ until I can get back into the swing of it. I may even have to… ulp… do the tutorial again to remind myself how it all works. Embarrassing.

4954

If anyone enjoys flying a Vulture, you might want to give its big brother the Federal Assault Ship a try. It goes from a small to a medium ship, but somehow keeps the maneuverability. The two large hardpoints are paired with two more medium, there’s one more internal and they’re sized larger. The large hardpoints are weirdly placed, in that there’s one directly above and one below the cockpit. But they are very nicely placed for fixed beams, as you can very easily just keep pitching up to keep the beams on a ship that’s trying to run. The medium hardpoint placements are annoying for gimbles, since they’re below the ship they won’t target anything above the mid-line, and a good portion of your screen is taken up by the cockpit, but if you know your target is down there, you may still be able to hit them. As well, the FAS has better speed, a similar jump range, and it doesn’t nearly have the same power limitations as its little sibling (although you may still need to monkey with priority settings.)

The main drawback, and it’s a doozy, is the FAS has about half the shields of a Vulture. You can not tank this ship with shields, and indeed the first time I took it out for a spin not thinking, it didn’t take long for me to look down and go Hull damage! WTF where are my frakking shields?!? So it may need a bit of a rethink of how you play. So throw on some mil-spec armor, chaff and a shield cell booster, maybe even some hull reinforcement packages, and don’t panic when the shields go down, because the FAS can take a beating and still finish the job.

If you’re bored of the Vulture, give it a try. You may be pleasantly surprised.

(Note, I haven’t done any PvP, so the lack of shields may truly suck there, but it was fine the two hours I spent in a HiRES just now fending off clippers, pythons and anacondas.)

4955

I’m having trouble power-wise in my Viper. Do people generally get good at quick-switching modules off and on or do I need to save a shitload for a new distributor?

4956

I don’t think the distributor helps for that, a better one just refreshes your SYS, ENG and WEP pools faster.

If you’ve already gotten the best power plant you can, here are some things you can try: If you generally don’t scoop up stuff in space you can disable your cargo hatch without any problems. Otherwise, you might leave a shield cell booster off, or if you have two, swap between them. In general, though, folks mostly set the power priority of modules that are only active in supercruise to a higher number. So your FSD, a fuel scoop if you have one, the aforementioned cargo hatch, an FSD interdictor, that kind of thing. Those will get turned off when you deploy your hardpoints. If you’re still having problems having done all that, then you probably need to rethink what’s on your hardpoints. Instead of having all laser weapons, mix it up with some cannon, or drop down to a D-rated kill-warrant scanner from a C-rated one for example. Typically all my ships have D-rated life support and sensors, as it saves on energy and weight. Gone are the days when I would A-rate everything just 'cuz.

Hope this helps.

4957

Thanks for the info.

Should I sell my cartographic data? I have a couple hundred thousand’s worth of it.

4958

Why would you not sell it?

4959

conVurt gave good advice about setting power priorities, but a better-than-the-base power distributor is a very good thing to have. It’s the first thing I’ve upgraded after getting a new ship, since it lets your power recharge faster, especially when diverting power from weapons to shields to thrusters.

4960

Anyone else having problems getting into the game right now? I can’t even get to the main menu.