Elite: Dangerous

Myranda

thumpingrug said:

@Myranda  You do need a Hands on Throttle and Stick arrangement to make the most of it and with time and a bit of luck you can make money and upgrade the ship to something much better equipped and much more manoeuvrable.   Have to say its a bit of a slog though and you need to be willing to invest a bit of time in it.    Some people seem to get very quickly to  a stage where they are making loads of cash each trip they make, but Im certainly not there yet and as a consequence keep being distracted by xbox games.  Ill come back to it though.  

I have a saitek HOTAS setup... 

What I'm on about is the turning speed of the ships.

Having played Star Citizen (where someone mentioned to the games dev's that it's set in space, so why would you need the main forward thrust going to turn) the ship in the tutorial seemed to have a turning circle measured in light years ... if that's indicative of the flight model in E:D then I'm not interested...

thumpingrug

Myranda said:

thumpingrug said:

@Myranda  You do need a Hands on Throttle and Stick arrangement to make the most of it and with time and a bit of luck you can make money and upgrade the ship to something much better equipped and much more manoeuvrable.   Have to say its a bit of a slog though and you need to be willing to invest a bit of time in it.    Some people seem to get very quickly to  a stage where they are making loads of cash each trip they make, but Im certainly not there yet and as a consequence keep being distracted by xbox games.  Ill come back to it though.  

I have a saitek HOTAS setup... 

What I'm on about is the turning speed of the ships.

Having played Star Citizen (where someone mentioned to the games dev's that it's set in space, so why would you need the main forward thrust going to turn) the ship in the tutorial seemed to have a turning circle measured in light years ... if that's indicative of the flight model in E:D then I'm not interested...

The flight dynamics do have a realistic mode which which allows you to spin the ship using thrusters while still moving in the same direction.  This can be toggled on and off.  I agree that the normal flight assisted mode does feel bit like a supertanker in the initial default sidewinder.  You may be better getting info from @digitalscream as he has progressed much further than me.  

Myranda

Just tried with flight assist off... it's worse - the turning speed isn't much better and the handling turns into that of a jelly-on-a-pogostick ... just a pogostick that can't turn well.

Refund request sent to steam.

digitalscream

Myranda said:

Just tried with flight assist off... it's worse - the turning speed isn't much better and the handling turns into that of a jelly-on-a-pogostick ... just a pogostick that can't turn well.

Refund request sent to steam.

Wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your problem - without wishing to sound nasty - is that you just don't know how to fly your ship. This is all about skill, and it's not the sort of thing that you can just pick up instantly; there's a lot of learning to do. It genuinely starts with reading the manual...if you don't do that, you're in for an interesting-but-long learning curve.

The turning speed depends on which ship you have, obviously. If it's combat you want, then you need to get enough money together to upgrade to a Viper, and later the Vulture (my favourite, which is the most agile ship in the game).

Anyway, turning speed can be improved massively in these ways:

1 - You should only use yaw for small movements - it's not worth shit for turning in this game, which is a mechanic from the original game. Roll and pitch are your friends for turning.

2 - Get your throttle in the blue zone, as marked on the right-hand side of the scanner. I guarantee you're flying too fast.

3 - When you need to turn fast, use FA-off (usually best to have this as a toggle on the hat of your stick).

4 - Power management - when you need to turn really fast, push 4 pips into ENG. It takes some real skill to get the hang of doing this quickly and then flicking it back to 4 pips in WEP (which will let you fire for longer without running out of energy or overheating), or 4 in SYS (which will strengthen your shields).

5 - Use your vertical thrusters. This one depends heavily on which ship you have - on the bigger ships (eg ASP, Clipper, FDL, Anaconda) you can enhance the turn rate a fair bit by using upward (or downward) thrust at the same time as all the above methods. This doesn't do anywhere near as much on smaller ships.

6 - For the first second or so after boosting, your pitch rate is hugely increased, but after that it's decreased.

When you get the hang of all the above, you can do things like the boost-flip - put 4 pips into ENG, turn FA off, pull the joystick back and boost while using your downward thrusters. That'll give you a 180 in less than a second.

Myranda

That seems an awful lot of work...

In Star Citizen, I just turn the stick in the direct I want to go and it goes there...

digitalscream

Myranda said:

That seems an awful lot of work...

In Star Citizen, I just turn the stick in the direct I want to go and it goes there...

This isn't a simple game - in fact, it's fucking complicated...no instant gratification here. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's great.

I can help you, if you want; first we'd need to get you a decent ship. You need to spend about 2.5 million (plus another 500k in the bank for the inevitable insurance claims) on an A-spec Viper if you want to get into combat at the beginner level, really. For that, you either need a lot of trade grinding, or somebody incredibly nice who's willing to give it to you in the form of cargo. I can do that, if you want to meet up in-game; I can also teach you how to fight.

EDIT: If you want to stick with it, tell me where you are (system and station), and I'll come to you. We'd probably need a couple of hours to get you enough money to get started and go through the basics of combat manoeuvring.

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

That seems an awful lot of work...

In Star Citizen, I just turn the stick in the direct I want to go and it goes there...

This isn't a simple game - in fact, it's fucking complicated...no instant gratification here. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's great.

I can help you, if you want; first we'd need to get you a decent ship. You need to spend about 2.5 million (plus another 500k in the bank for the inevitable insurance claims) on an A-spec Viper if you want to get into combat at the beginner level, really. For that, you either need a lot of trade grinding, or somebody incredibly nice who's willing to give it to you in the form of cargo. I can do that, if you want to meet up in-game; I can also teach you how to fight.

EDIT: If you want to stick with it, tell me where you are (system and station), and I'll come to you. We'd probably need a couple of hours to get you enough money to get started and go through the basics of combat manoeuvring.

Hmm...

It's sort of already refunded... 

digitalscream

Myranda said:

Hmm...

It's sort of already refunded... 

Pffft. You young 'uns, no staying power...

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

Hmm...

It's sort of already refunded... 

Pffft. You young 'uns, no staying power...

With Steam you get 3 hours or so to decide if a game will be refunded or not... and I lost an hour to leaving the loading splat screen open (hadn't noticed it was behind Steam) while I tried to find video of dogfighting in E:D ... and what I did find didn't leave me with goosebumps (only watched three videos).

And to be honest I had over-spent at the beginning of the month, so £27 was a punt and as it seemed so not-fun to start with it made sense to claw my pennies back... perhaps you can post - or point to a video more representative of good dogfighting and then I can re-consider

digitalscream

Well, I just had a quick look around and I can't see any decent videos...most of them don't seem to know how to turn either

I'll record something when I go bounty hunting later.

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Well, I just had a quick look around and I can't see any decent videos...most of them don't seem to know how to turn either

I'll record something when I go bounty hunting later.

Well, it's on offer till midnight sunday so there's no rush

digitalscream

Here's a short one - my Vulture vs a wing (Anaconda and Diamondback):

You can see the difference between turning with and without FA-off, as well as a little bit of a boost flip. I was also deliberately bad with the power management, so you see what happens when you don't have enough pips in WEP - your weapons run out of energy and overheat really quickly. It's also relatively bad tactics to go for the bigger ship in a wing first, because the little ones will take your shields down pretty fast while you spend a long time on the big one; against a wing of two, my Vulture's shields are pretty strong so I can absorb a battering without being too concerned. In lesser ships - and even some of the big ones - you have to be a lot more careful.

Got a much longer bounty hunting one uploading at the moment (probably be another half hour or so).

EDIT: It's worth bearing in mind that I tend not to use all of the turning tricks that I listed above; because the Vulture is the most agile ship in the game, I can just use FA-off and getting the throttle into the blue zone (they make more difference than any of the others). If I'm against a big ship with a high combat rating, I'll put a bit more effort in and start swapping pips into ENG to speed things up - Elite Anacondas, for example, can use all the above tricks as well as flick between power management settings instantly and very fast, with the result that they can seem like they've got 4 pips in everything (impossible for you and I). The effect is that they can perma-fire with unnaturally fast turning for such a big ship and have crazy-strong shields.

digitalscream

OK, here's another one - bounty hunting in a Resource Extraction Site. Lots of big fish here (Pythons, Dropships, Clippers, Vultures etc) with nice bounties:

I mostly went for the larger ships, but at about 9:00 you see me target another Vulture. There are a couple of Vipers in there too, and an Adder (just to show you the difference between Vulture-level ships and the starter ships). You'll note that the Adder only takes a few seconds to kill, while the Vulture takes a lot longer.

You wouldn't be able to do anywhere near as much damage that fast in a Viper, but it'd get you on your way. That half hour session netted me about 4.5 million credits (I'm pledged to Arissa, who gives about a 70% bounty bonus). Even without pledging to her Power, you'd probably be able to pull around 1.5-2.5 million for an hour's worth of carnage if you find a good-spawning RES like that one.

Unfortunately, that's not a particularly dense RES, so you didn't get to see me dodging around asteroids in a big fight. I tried to get a couple of the NPCs to follow me into the ring, but none of them seemed to want to. That can get really fun - the whole Han Solo thing.

thumpingrug

Any tips on making some money right at the very beginning.  I seem to be making some money by taking on assignments but almost nothing trading, and the bits I am making are small fry.

Axe_meister

About time I upgraded by trusty cobra. Have 7m in the bank and my ship is worth about 14m.

digitalscream

thumpingrug said:

Any tips on making some money right at the very beginning.  I seem to be making some money by taking on assignments but almost nothing trading, and the bits I am making are small fry.

I did it with rares trading - there's an 80-odd-stop rares route somewhere, which nets massive amounts of money and relieves the trading grind a bit.

I'll try to dig out the PDF if I can.

If you haven't come across rare commodities before, they're basically commodities which are only available at one station in the galaxy, and significantly increase in value the further you get from that station. The kind of gains we're talking about are buying for less than 1k, and selling for over 20k about 120Ly away. Outfit whatever ship you have with a fuel scoop and as much cargo space as you can fit in it, and get going.

The Old Worlds (Lave, Leesti, Reorte etc) all have rares - Leesti has two at George Lucas station - but that's a dangerous place to be in Open - I'd suggest Solo if you're going to try it there in a low-spec ship. They appear yellow in the commodities market.

What ship do you have, @thumpingrug?

digitalscream

Axe_meister said:

About time I upgraded by trusty cobra. Have 7m in the bank and my ship is worth about 14m.

14m in a Cobra? Are you sure?

You can get a well-kitted Vulture for about 12m; ignore the idiots who say you have to spend 20m on it - no point in things like reinforced hull and the like. Get a dual-pulse Vulture, head off to the nearest RES or Conflict Zone and start making some real money.

thumpingrug

@digitalscream  Im still in the sidewinder I started with.  Probably not put more than 15 hours in.  Life keeps getting in the way.

digitalscream

thumpingrug said:

@digitalscream  Im still in the sidewinder I started with.  Probably not put more than 15 hours in.  Life keeps getting in the way.

Yeah, you need to get some serious flight time in there, mate.

Then again, I started in a Cobra, which is a vastly better ship than a Sidey. If you're OK with a cargo scoop, I could meet up with you at a High Tech/Refinery station and drop a load of palladium to get you started?

thumpingrug

digitalscream said:

thumpingrug said:

@digitalscream  Im still in the sidewinder I started with.  Probably not put more than 15 hours in.  Life keeps getting in the way.

Yeah, you need to get some serious flight time in there, mate.

Then again, I started in a Cobra, which is a vastly better ship than a Sidey. If you're OK with a cargo scoop, I could meet up with you at a High Tech/Refinery station and drop a load of palladium to get you started?

Thanks for the offer.  Its appreciated, but Im sticking in solo mode for a while.  I lost around 4 years to the original of this game in the 80s so I'm happy to take it slow.  The tips about rare commodities is useful and Ill be on the look out.