Elite: Dangerous

digitalscream

CMDR Digitalscream is dead.

This evening, he made his final trip into the black. He looked around at the malaise infecting the galaxy in exhaustion, made one final pilgramage to his birthplace in Sol, and flew into the sun.

May he rest in peace.

---------------------

Yep, I cleared my save. I'm about to find out what the galaxy looks like from a newbie's perspective.

digitalscream

Restarted as an Imperial Bounty Hunter (perk of being a Kickstarter backer), so I came back to life in an Imperial Eagle. That's junk, so I went to the nearest High-Intensity RES, picked a few small fights to get the security services to jump in, then flew around picking fights with Anacondas, Pythons and FDLs. Made a cool 1.5 million in about half an hour with that, then nearly got wasted by a Federal Assault Ship. Serves me right for picking on an Elite FAS with peashooters.

Limped back to the station, took an assassination mission for another half-mil, finished that (he was a Novice Vulture), and bought myself a combat-spec Viper on a budget.

Spec here

This is much better than that Eagle. Yeesh, those things are horrible...I don't know how you guys didn't just give up when you started in Sidewinders.

fretmeister

If you wanted to play with an underpowered ship and little money I would have lent you my log in for when I'm on holiday!

digitalscream

Just FYI - in the couple of weeks since I cleared my save, I've had maybe 7 hours of play (possibly 8). With a little focus and some knowledge, you can get surprisingly far on that.

I now have a high-spec Vulture (A-rated on all the core modules except D-rated sensors and thrusters, which are B-rated but Engineer-modded with clean drive tuning, bi-weave shields, beam + pulse lasers, shield boosters etc) which is mostly modded to level 1 with Engineers, and level 3 for the FSD. Having earned 4 million in bounties in the Arque CG, I netted another 16 million.

To get access to the right Engineers, I've had to do a lot of futzing around - travelling out to Maia (400Ly away) to get some meta-alloys for Felicity, which also gave me access to Elvira Martuuk (you need to travel 300Ly from your start point).

Top tip: the "Deal with 5 black markets" requirement from The Dweller is easy; just land at a port with a black market (you can find them by looking at stations in the galaxy/system map), take a goods delivery mission and abandon it. The cargo is now illegal, so you can sell it to the black market. Repeat 4 times, get the invitation.

I lost a couple of million with some poor decision-making (PvP battles I couldn't have won), so my balance now stands at a more healthy 22 million.

fretmeister

I fancy doing some proper trading.

I haven't managed to get on for a while so I've only got about 1.3 Mill and a Viper 4.

If I was going to swap the ship for something with better cargo space, what should I go for?

MrBump

Typically behind the curve, I downloaded this the other day.  It's a bit of a mindf*ck to start with, and I'm still struggling with some basic concepts (WHY WON'T THE DAMN THING DOCK?!?!), but it's definitely cool, and I'll persevere.  Conceptually, it's awesome.

TimmyO

I'd love it if there was something a bit more pick up and play in the space combat/exploration line.

Elite seems to have grown enormously (which is fantastic) - but the reason I left Eve: Online was because it was so complex and becoming a time sink.

Is Star Commander still a thing? I paid them some money some years back for a standalone combat module that didn't work so I stopped following it. 

digitalscream

TimmyO said:

I'd love it if there was something a bit more pick up and play in the space combat/exploration line.

Elite seems to have grown enormously (which is fantastic) - but the reason I left Eve: Online was because it was so complex and becoming a time sink.

Is Star Commander still a thing? I paid them some money some years back for a standalone combat module that didn't work so I stopped following it. 

If you find an Extraction economy system with a ringed gas giant, there are usually Resource Extraction Sites (RES) where it's all-you-can-eat in terms of wanted ships (take a Kill Warrant Scanner with you to get extra bounties). You've got four types of RES, in order of threat level: Low, Normal, High and Hazardous. The last one is a bit of a special case; you won't get any authority help in there, so choose your targets wisely.

Alternatively, find a system in a state of War, and you'll find Conflict Zones (CZs) - jump into one, go to the last tab in your right-hand panel, click the top option and choose a side. You'll then get half the ships turning red on your scanner, and you're away.

And...Star Commander...do you mean Star Citizen? If so, it's still not finished.

Flink_Poyd

Dare I buy this? Bought SW Battlefront for the nipper as he's mad on Stormtroopers but I need something a bit more involved. 

digitalscream

Flink_Poyd said:

Dare I buy this? Bought SW Battlefront for the nipper as he's mad on Stormtroopers but I need something a bit more involved. 

I won't lie - it's a massive learning curve at this point, but ultimately very rewarding (in my view) and these are interesting times; there appears to be two races of aliens to look at now. One is likely the Thargoids, but the Guardians are a possibly-extinct race with a whole load of new tech potentially on the horizon. 

Axe_meister

Heads up. Bounter Hunter Community goal on at the moment. Great way to earn some big bucks. If I can stay in the top 75% for the next 22 hours, I'll be getting a nice 4m bonus + bounties. Upto 1.2m in bounty all ready. with 2 days game play.

digitalscream

Axe_meister said:

Heads up. Bounter Hunter Community goal on at the moment. Great way to earn some big bucks. If I can stay in the top 75% for the next 22 hours, I'll be getting a nice 4m bonus + bounties. Upto 1.2m in bounty all ready. with 2 days game play.

Is that all? If those CGs get to the highest level, you should be getting at least 10m!

EDIT: Ah, wait, I misread it. Top 75% is 3.2m bonus - I'd hazard a guess that putting in another 1.5m in bounties should get you into the top 50 which'll double your bonus. I'm almost tempted to join in myself...my crazy-engineered Vulture should make light work of it and get into the top 10%. Not that I really need the money...I don't even play any more, because they keep making the PvP balance and meta worse with every update (they're making shields ever-more-powerful instead of the promised nerfs, which basically makes everyone immortal if they have a FDL or bigger).

digitalscream

Bit of an update...

I popped over to Gandii this morning - first time logging into Elite for well over a month - to find that it's basically PvP heaven (anarchy system, so no "Wanted" tags for attacking players. Had to abandon a fight with an Elite Cobra - he was whining about his canopy having blown and we were both around 50% hull, but I'd only just arrived in-system and was running so low on fuel that I only had about 5 minutes left at most.

Got my ass kicked by a Corvette (couldn't be bothered to go back to the station, so figured I'd face-tank a Corvette and see how long I'd last...turns out about 7 minutes is as much as I could muster).

The fun part was a Dangerous Anaconda. I interdicted him because...well, if a Conda can't take a Vulture, there's something wrong. 10 minutes later, he actually high-waked to another system to run away! I think he may have underestimated how much firepower I had, and ended up legging it after using all of his shield cells. I think my shields had just come back up for the third time at around 60% hull.

I do like my engineered-to-hell Vulture:

299m/s normal, 484 boost
507MJ shields with massive resistances
59MJ/s of damage from dual efficient-modded fixed beam lasers
Dual high-capacity chaff launchers (15 in one, 14 in the other)
Armour at around 1480
Charge-enhanced distributor
etc etc

All engineer mods are at the maximum level available for each module now. It's a scary, scary machine...the only problem is that the thrusters are so powerful that aiming fixed lasers is quite a challenge; hitting anything smaller than a FDL is almost impossible, especially if flown by a player.

I still go back and forth on the chaff - if I'm hunting players in big ships, I hang on to the dual chaff launchers because it's the only way to reliably stay alive when facing turrets, gimbals or packhounds. On the other hand, if I'm after players in smaller ships or NPCs, I stick an extra resistance-augmented shield booster on there for about 610MJ shields and better resistances.

I did flirt with SCBs again, but the heat output from them is intolerable in a small, heat-sensitive ship like the Vulture; too many malfunctions from just using one of the damn things. Better to have module or hull reinforcement in the military slot, I think.

Axe_meister

Just upgraded to a vulture.
Did have beam lasers but they over heat too quickly and you run out of juice so have just downgraded to Pulse lasers.
Lost ny ship on Gandii and a 1m re buy cost I will have to re-evaluate my strategy.
Hit a ship once then boost away hopefully he will follow.
One to one I can hold my own but after that I'm dead meat

digitalscream

Yep, for beams to be a realistic prospect on the Vulture you definitely need to get them modded for efficiency up to the maximum grade.

In fact, the Vulture flat-out requires engineering to be remotely competitive these days. Start with Felicity Farseer and get her to do your FSD (increased range), power plant (overcharged), thrusters (clean or dirty tuning) and shield boosters (resistance). Then it's off to The Dweller for lasers.

Just the power plant gets you a lot more freedom. Until you can get the efficient-modded beams, though, beam + pulse is excellent for chewing up NPCs.

Just a word of caution - don't use special effects on laser mods. You lose 10-20% damage with them, and they're invariably not worth the loss.

digitalscream

Whoa. After the update with the new lightweight sensor mods from the engineers (specifically Lori Jameson), I modded mine up to G5 so that my ship's mass dropped down below the "optimal" threshold for both thrusters and shields. In my PvE config - with an extra shield booster instead of a chaff launcher - my Vulture now has 300m/s max speed / 486m/s boost, and critically 701.9MJ shields.

That's absolutely mental. It's pretty close to the vanilla FDL shield levels with four boosters (the most common config).

I popped into a HazRES to test it out, and I comfortably took out a wing of three Deadly/Elite Anacondas without breaking into my last shield ring.

Also...even with the new and improved twisty-turny NPC AI, my dual efficient C3 beams take around 15 seconds to chew through an Anaconda's shields.

The Vulture is a terrifying ship in combat when it's modded.

d8m

Thread resurrection!

This  is out on PS4 tomorrow, worth a go?

fretmeister

Yes. 

d8m

OK, so  how does it compare to NMS? they look similar but I got bored of NSM pretty quickly.

Also should I go for the base game or the version with Horizons expansion?

I know these questions could be answered using google but i figured id ask you guys as the game seems to have quite a following on here!

digitalscream

d8m said:

OK, so  how does it compare to NMS? they look similar but I got bored of NSM pretty quickly.

Also should I go for the base game or the version with Horizons expansion?

I know these questions could be answered using google but i figured id ask you guys as the game seems to have quite a following on here!

They're not even remotely similar. I haven't played NMS, but that's the consensus amongst everyone who has.

Get the Horizons expansion, because you won't survive in Open without significantly-engineered gear.

Now's a great time to get involved, too - the alien story is finally kicking off. You'll just about have enough time to learn how to play and get your ship up to snuff before the Thargoids arrive en masse and kick the shiznit out of all of us.