Elite Dangerous Catch-All

I've been doing a lot of trading, but that's what I signed up for.

My impression of the combat missions was that they were a little scarce at the start of gamma; I was mostly seeing some high-payout missions that I wasn't about to take on in my sidewinder. I think there's a better spread available now that the developers have been steadily adding mission content and USS stuff.

I have a whole cargo hold full of Rebel Transmissions I found at a USS and I can't find a black market to sell them on. Or, you know, two friendly droids to send them with. I'd hate to eject it all into space. Many Bothans died to get that info.

I saw a list of black market places floating around but I can't find it at the moment.

Black market outposts are one of those things where it helps to know where some are ahead of time.

It's good to have contacts before traipsing around the galaxy with a cargo hold full of stolen merch, approaching random people, "Hey buddy, I got some speakers that 'fell off the back of a truck'. Know what I mean? You interested?"

PSA:

Don't mess with the decals, it could lock you out of the game:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showth...

Buying the Mercenary edition yesterday gave me access to the combat simulator. When the game releases, I will have to spent a lot of time configuring my joystick (an old Logitech Wingman). There is a sh*t-ton to keep track of though playing X-Wing recently with my son has helped.

Are there preset joystick configs available out there?

I saw that via Reddit and flew to Lugh with my marginally upgraded sidewinder. My biggest problem is that I can't seem to find any missions for the Crimson boys that I can take. I have resorted to bounty hunting but making sure I don't kill any Crimson faction ships, no matter what bounty. Have yet to see another human player in the system, but then again, I've not played more than 3 hours this week.

I like the idea though and when I last checked, the influence had shifted somewhat, which is the point of the experiment.

Goo wrote:

Independence for Lugh

This might be interesting. Be cool if a civil war broke out or something as a result.

Nevin73 wrote:

Are there preset joystick configs available out there?

What stick do you have? There's a basic dropdown in-game that gives some rudimentary setup on the popular sticks but it still needs tweaking.

All the preorder people doing combat training are going to blow me out of the water in fights, given I've spent most of my time hauling cargo...

Gremlin wrote:

All the preorder people doing combat training are going to blow me out of the water in fights, given I've spent most of my time hauling cargo... :D

Well come hang out near me then at least you'll know the guy blowing you up =)

Got to love the reddits...

Wanna change your HUD color?...

http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangero...

Dig it!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/NKXxl5D.jpg)

Shoal07 wrote:

About guilds/corps - the Devs have strongly said NO to any such thing. They haven't elaborated why, they've just said absolutely not. With that said, a planned post-release update is to allow "wings" that can at least jump from place to place together. However, outside of protecting a trader or hauler from pirates, there's little reason to do so because you can't split bounties or share in trade/mining profits... unless that is also a part of the wing mechanic.

Goo wrote:

Independence for Lugh

This might be interesting. Be cool if a civil war broke out or something as a result.

[snark]Boy, it sure is a good thing that they omitted any kind of guild/corp system. The players will never be able to organize now![/snark]

omni wrote:

I guess I've never played in a Corp/Guild environment to accurately discuss whether or not they would be a good thing in ED, I've just heard some bad things about factions overpowering the remaining playerbase.

Large-scale groups are going to form outside the game. Leaving out in-game guild/corporations isn't going to keep Goonswarm away; it's just going to make it harder for other people to organize in-game to deal with them.

This reminds me of the early days of Ultima Online... they purposely left out chat channels and restricted communication to players on your screen. Everybody just installed ICQ and instant messenger...

For the record, I can absolutely see the reason behind not including an Eve-style corporation with taxes and fees and pyramid schemes, but some kind of community function should be included.

That screenshot has a particularly horrid shade of blue. Still, I know that some people were wanting some customization.

Gamma 2.03 is out, looks like mostly bugfixes. Though those of you interested in combat may appreciate this:

Upped AI bounties to make bounty hunting more viable as a career

Edit:

Vargen wrote:

For the record, I can absolutely see the reason behind not including an Eve-style corporation with taxes and fees and pyramid schemes, but some kind of community function should be included.

Yeah, online games tend to follow a trajectory as they discover why certain past design decisions were made. Still, I suspect that the devs are less hardline about guilds and whatnot than some of the people in the forums seem to assume. Frontier's pronouncements have been much less absolute than they are sometimes interpreted as. (cf. all the stuff that people swore would never be added until it showed up in the next patch.)

Yay better bounties!

Damn, I hope that was just bad luck Zach. 2.01 - I lucked out and found a really nice Metallic cluster and found a rock that was producing 20-30% platinum chunks. I was able to spend 2, maybe 3 hours (over 3 sessions) mining palladium/gold/platinum to afford a Cobra.

I haven't seen anything about mining being nerfed, though I haven't been mining so I haven't been looking. I know a log in/log out exploit related to mining was fixed earlier, so maybe it's due for another balance pass?

Previously I was mining a major reserve and regularly brought in 20 - 30 percent palladium/ platinum/ gold. Maybe it's bad luck. I'll try a bit more when I get home.

Yesterday was also an exercise in frustration trying to turn in materials for quests and constantly getting sever connection errors.

With release being a few days out I hope they can these issues fixed that wern't there in previous builds.

I'm having trouble wading through the official forums for an answer but has mining been nerfed?

I spent a bit time with the galaxy map to find a metallic pristine reserve. When I got there and started mining I was only bringing in 5 & 6 percent palladium / platinum.

Should I ditch my refinery and laser for straight hauling? Dog fighting isn't really my cup of tea as I completely suck at it.

Any other kb/mouse pilots here? I'm curious to know if you bind y-axis to yaw or roll. I find yaw to be more controllable combined with A and D for roll controls.

I have Y as my roll and find that easier myself, but I also use a different KB scheme that WASD for all games too so I wouldn't take my advice

Got a new Adder tonight. Lost it ten minutes later when I got interdicted, got my canopy shattered, killed the bad guy, but didn't make it to a station in time to dock since the ship wouldn't align properly to go into frameshift until it was too late.

I love this game.

Tamren wrote:

Any other kb/mouse pilots here? I'm curious to know if you bind y-axis to yaw or roll. I find yaw to be more controllable combined with A and D for roll controls.

Pitch and yaw on the mouse. A and D for yaw. Q,E,W,S for lateral thrust.

Oh man, found some ancient artefacts (heh, artefacts, silly Brits), now I gotta find a black market to sell 'em to. Wheeeee!

How do you identify the quality of a mining field? Do you go to unexplored systems or rings around planets?

Basically, can someone give me a quick tutorial?

I finally pulled my CH FighterStick and Throttle out of the basement. For now, I just stole a map file from the CH forum as a base, so a lot of things aren't quite right (throttle!). Still, having a stick rather than mouse is such a vast improvement. I could hardly hit a planet when flying M&K, but with the stick I goth through the first 4 combat trainer tutorials fairly easily.

Is the control setup in the combat trainer similar enough to gamma (and presumably the release version) to make it worthwhile for me to spend time on programming, or should I wait for release?

Does anyone flying with CH FighterStick & Pro Throttle have a map file they can share?

Your control setup is for the game, not for the part of the game you're in, so any changes will carry over. Feel free to get it tuned just like you want it. There have occasionally been updates that reset key bindings but I wouldn't expect that after launch.

Senkrad wrote:

I have Y as my roll and find that easier myself, but I also use a different KB scheme that WASD for all games too so I wouldn't take my advice ;-)

Maq wrote:

Pitch and yaw on the mouse. A and D for yaw. Q,E,W,S for lateral thrust.

I tried to use roll on Y at first but I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I'm used to war thunder where you move a cursor and your plane uses the controls to align itself in that direction. This is effectively an autopilot but I also use the manual controls a lot too. In Elite things work differently. With roll on Y I have to target things in arc motions. Vertical up/down targeting is easy enough. Targeting something up and to the left requires pitch and roll input at the same time because yaw controls are relatively weak.

I use yaw on Y now because my brain can deal with it a little better. With mouse yaw you can target a roughly rectangular strip down the middle of the screen with mouse movements alone. Targeting up and to the left simply means moving the mouse up and to the left. When stuff isn't aligned with this rectangle that when I use A and D as roll controls to spin until my course matches up. This isn't fully ideal because KB roll controls have no fine adjustment, it's 0 or 100% power and ends up being a little chunky. But M&KB controls are not ideal to begin with anyway, this is really a joystick game.

I've made it up to wave 9 of the combat practice demo. Wave 10 is a freaking Anaconda, so I'm happy with that performance. I've found a couple things that I just despise.

1. People pre-ordering now and trying to figure out the game using the demo are kinda screwed. I had to watch youtube videos to figure everything out because the handy control map popup that beta players see isn't in the demo! The game doesn't tell you anything at all on how to play it, the only instruction it gives is stuff like "hit U to deploy guns". I had no idea that I had to keep throttle towards the middle in order to turn faster and was ripping my hair out through the first couple tutorials because it took me 20 seconds or more just to get my guns back onto target.

2. When pitching up rapidly, which you will be doing 90% of the time in dogfighting combat. The camera pitches UP and this cuts off half of the UI! This hides stuff like the enemy HP and the all important throttle blue zone. It's extremely aggravating.

Well the point of using mouse for roll is that, since pitch is much faster than yaw, high speed manoeuvres should mostly be banking/radial turns. I shift the mouse left or right to roll into the turn then "pull back on the stick" with the mouse to execute the turn, using yaw controls for finer control. It's exactly how I do it with the stick so it doesn't feel "wrong" to me. Also having lateral thrust and rudder all under my left hand makes sideslips easy and intuitive: A+E to sideslip right and Q+D to sideslip left. I find that more intuitive than the twist rudder + rocker on my hotas, which is handy since every station approach or nose to nose combat pass I make is going to use that manoeuvre.

Also I have FAoff bound to the thumb button on the mouse which makes it very easy to toggle it on and off quickly mid-turn in a turning dogfight to mess with the geometry a little.

Just put in for the pre-order. I'm in for the duration!