Elite Dangerous Catch-All

deftly wrote:

The trade CG will be done soon. I'm trying to get into the 5%, but I don't think I'll make it. There's like a constant stream of players in Type-9s, and I got blowed up once with a full load of palladium.

Edit: Of course, with the very next trip, I crack it. Although I estimate I'll need to have 12,000 tons delivered to be there when it completes.

Wow, only ~12k tons needed for 5%?

Double-wow, I just looked at my screen. I've sold a mere 312 tons and am already in the top 70% bracket. There must be a crapload of people who sell like 1 ton just to get the discount, and they're dragging the average WAY down.

Edit: I made it into the 40% bracket with about 1350 tons.

Edit 2: The CG has been modified. There are now 11 (!) tiers.

Profitability has really taken a hit. All of the sources of metal near Nu are just about tapped out. I've been going to Facece just because not as many people can get in, and even that system is clean out of Gold and almost out of Palladium. Best thing to run now is silver for 480 credits a ton. The finishing bonus definitely makes up for it though.

Also, a crazy number of people haven't signed up for the event yet, I guess they don't know how? over 15000 ships passed through Nu in the last 24 hours. Over 5000 of those are freighters, and yet the last time I checked the number of participating players was only 2200.

merphle wrote:

Edit 2: The CG has been modified. There are now 11 (!) tiers.

I waved off trying to get there for it with how quickly it was going through tiers, but with each tier (typically) being exponentially larger than the previous tier, I might give it a shot tonight.

Maybe this is like the exploration CG, and people don't realize you need to accept the mission BEFORE you turn anything in, in order to count towards the mission?

McIrishJihad wrote:

Maybe this is like the exploration CG, and people don't realize you need to accept the mission BEFORE you turn anything in, in order to count towards the mission?

It's entirely possible that 13000 players have never done a CG before and don't even know you had to sign up first. I mean I didn't even know about CGs until Lugh and even then it took some trial and error to figure out that I had to go to the mission board on one specific station. There are/probably will be a lot of pissed off people because of it. If everyone had signed up from the start this event would have been over yesterday.

EDIT:

Dropped some big bucks and got myself a Type-9 Heavy! I would have preferred to get an Anaconda instead, but that would involve selling my Python which I'm not ready to do just yet. The Type-9 is also half as expensive as the Anaconda, which gives me more leeway to equip it.

I still had to pull off and sell the A class gear from my Python to raise enough funds. This thing is big and SLOW, it reminds me a lot of flying a B-17 in Warthunder. With afterburners mine reaches a cruising speed of 200. The most painful thing was jumping it around station to station trying to find a A6 jump drive. Your best bet for equipment seems to be high tech stations with >20 million population.

The ship is the biggest currently in the game and has a cockpit to match. From outside the cockpit looks tiny because it gets dwarfed by the rest of the ship. But up close you can see that it actually has 3 seats for crew and the entire bridge is almost big enough that you could fit a sidewinder into it. The view from the pilot's seat is quite good, better than the Asp even, which is important because its very hard to dock this thing.

The trading turnaround times are worse compared to the Python and Type-7, but makes up for it by carrying almost twice the cargo. Because the ship is so large it's not as affected by mass-lock compared to smaller ships, so jumping out of stations takes about the same amount of time. However docking to stations takes much longer because of the slow speed, especially if you jump in on the wrong side of the station.

The agility of the ship is also terrible, small ships and the Asp in particular are very agile in supercruise. The Type-9 turns like a lead walrus in and outside of supercruise. It's bad to the point where if you come out of hyperspace at the wrong angle you may have to cut throttle to avoid crashing into the star.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/535142516159693086/C6DC1262A0A2D114ADD2FE8A4365152CF3455F3D/)

merphle wrote:

Edit 2: The CG has been modified. There are now 11 (!) tiers.

Yeah, the tier graph was messed up before too. I think someone at Frontier put some wrong numbers in somewhere. Now that it has gone past the stated 5 million tons, I have no idea what the final total will be. Makes it difficult to guess where I need to end up to stay in the 5%.

Tamren wrote:

Profitability has really taken a hit. All of the sources of metal near Nu are just about tapped out. I've been going to Facece just because not as many people can get in, and even that system is clean out of Gold and almost out of Palladium. Best thing to run now is silver for 480 credits a ton. The finishing bonus definitely makes up for it though.

How far out are you going? I was doing a 3-hop route, and its margin finally nosedived last night. I switched to 4+ hop routes and went back to making 1400-1600cr/ton on palladium, gold, and beryllium. If you're not trying to get into the 5% and just want a profitable route, there are also a bunch of routes that involve taking land enrichment systems to agriculture worlds, then tobacco to refineries. Those can earn 1000-1200cr/ton per leg, but the first two legs are 3-4 hops, and the return is longer.

My Viper is now fully geared out from farming Anacondas at Resource Extraction Points, and I have about 2 million banked credit. It seems like from what I'm hearing that the only real lucrative way forward is trading if I ever want to get into one of the bigger badder ships. Is that fair?

Nomad wrote:

My Viper is now fully geared out from farming Anacondas at Resource Extraction Points, and I have about 2 million banked credit. It seems like from what I'm hearing that the only real lucrative way forward is trading if I ever want to get into one of the bigger badder ships. Is that fair?

I think rares trading is still a really good boost early on, but aside from that, combat community goals have made it about as profitable as trading in the mid-game. Mining and exploration still don't scale up well, but it looks like 1.3 will have some mining updates.

deftly wrote:
Nomad wrote:

My Viper is now fully geared out from farming Anacondas at Resource Extraction Points, and I have about 2 million banked credit. It seems like from what I'm hearing that the only real lucrative way forward is trading if I ever want to get into one of the bigger badder ships. Is that fair?

I think rares trading is still a really good boost early on, but aside from that, combat community goals have made it about as profitable as trading in the mid-game. Mining and exploration still don't scale up well, but it looks like 1.3 will have some mining updates.

Yeah, to expand on this a bit more:

Once you can afford anything larger an Asp, you're probably going to be able to make more consistent and predictable money via trading (once you learn how to find and exploit good routes, at least). With the Asp, it's harder to say — with the recent boosts to bounty hunting rewards, you probably could make roughly equivalent money farming a good RES in a well equipped Viper or a Vulture. BUT, as Deftly points out, when there are community goals related to combat their reward payouts tend to be much more generous than trade related goals, creating situations where from time to time you're going to see huge spikes in profit from running a good combat ship.

As I was saying in game chat last night, right now people at your stage in the game have a very tough decision to make. If you are absolutely certain you have no interest in doing anything other than combat related gameplay, well, just work towards getting set up with a Vulture for now. But otherwise it's a bit murky. Maybe a Vulture could be more profitable than an Asp? Certainly, if we get another combat community goal bonanza like the war in Lugh, it would be. But also, maybe not.

I think personally, I would go with the Asp first, because profitability aside, I would be itching to expand the types of gameplay I could participate in — particularly since 1.3 will be including a major overhaul to the mission system. I absolutely love the Vulture, but it's the most one trick pony in the game right now (okay, the Type 6, 7, and 9 are pretty one trick pony as well, but still), and I'm not sure I'd want that to be my only option to play with.

Also, it's worth noting that we will be seeing at least two new ships in 1.3:

The Imperial Courier
IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201503_13/peek_o_the_week.jpg)
IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201503_06/peek_of_the_week.jpg)

and the Diamondback

IMAGE(https://gallery.mailchimp.com/dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e/images/dadc3d5c-314f-4325-9778-10ad884f71ba.jpg)

No concrete details have been given about either, but from their appearance I'd say they are more ships that will sit in the price range between the Cobra/Viper and the Asp/Vulture. Also from the looks, neither is likely to be a new trade focused ship, but more than that is tough to say. In previous Elite games, the Imperial Courier (despite the implications of its name) was a heavy fighter, filling a niche similar to where the Vulture currently sits. The Diamondback is new to the series (I think?), but its very aggressive looks also suggest a combat focus, so perhaps it will be the Federation's answer to the Courier?

In any case, the point is in a few more weeks you very likely might actually have more than one option in the high-end fighter space, which to me seems like another decent reason to go for an Asp rather than a Vulture right now. But, that's all purely speculative at this point, so who can really say?

I've got to say the the Courier looks like a really, really pretty ship. My kudos to whoever designed her. The Diamondback? not so much, although the lines aren't bad for a bad mutha-trucka heavy bomber-style ship. Maybe we'll finally have something that makes missiles worthwhile?

I've got almost enough for an Asp saved up from RES dogfighting, a quick loop of rares trading, and some exploration. I think I'll pop back up to Tsu to collect my CG Asp, then maybe run one more rares loop. The only question then is how to outfit my Asp, since I've got my combat Cobra, and an exploration-equipped Adder.

Latest on Steam keys, from the new dev update:

For those of you who already own Elite: Dangerous from our store and asked about getting the game in your Steam collection: we hear you and we’re looking into it. We can’t speak for other cases where the same question has come up, but turning EliteDangerous.com customers into Steam customers unfortunately isn't 100 percent our decision and isn’t free for us in the context of the game’s ongoing growth and development. It could take a few weeks to work through, but we hear your feedback and addressing it is a priority for all of us.

Stops short of saying "this is definitely happening", but at the same time, it doesn't take "a few weeks" to do nothing.

I despise how you can lose 3 hours of work in 1 second by hitting a single impossible to see dark asteroid at 20% ship speed. Almost makes me want to delete the game. If it would have been in a fire fight, or at full speed that's one thing but losing almost 3 million on my way back to cash in is nausea inducing. That's almost more than everything I've made up to this point.

Nomad wrote:

I despise how you can lose 3 hours of work in 1 second by hitting a single impossible to see dark asteroid at 20% ship speed. Almost makes me want to delete the game. If it would have been in a fire fight, or at full speed that's one thing but losing almost 3 million on my way back to cash in is nausea inducing. That's almost more than everything I've made up to this point.

Yeah, the game has no problem kicking you in the teeth without much provocation. My worst encounter with an asteroid was boost turning a combat specced Clipper into an asteroid chasing after one last kill before leaving to turn in maybe a million in bounties, but when you add in the 2 million or so in insurance costs, the final price tag was similar. That was the point where I established the rule for myself that I mentioned to the other day in game:

When hunting in an RES, job number 1 is not flying into an asteroid. Job number 2 is not shooting anything that hasn't scanned as wanted yet, since a good RNG seed is hard to come by sometimes. Job 3, well, that's not hitting asteroids again. Then somewhere down around 7 or 8 is shooting targets.

(Flippancy aside, I have found it very helpful to always fly above or below the main plain of the rings, unless it's absolutely necessary to get in amongst them to shoot a target. Then, when I do that, no touching boost.)

Of course that wasn't even my worst accident, or my dumbest. I was flying the same Clipper (but trader specced, so only 1.1 or 1.2 million in insurance), but loaded up with 240 tons of palladium, at 15k or so a ton, so about 3.6 million in cargo. Part of the trading game is optimizing every second of your route, including (hell, especially) your docking and undocking procedures, and I was starting to get quite confident about undocking and immediately boosting my way out of the mail slot. And truth be told, I was getting very good at it, barely even scraping anymore. But, all the accuracy aiming through the slot in the world won't save you if the broad side of a Type 9 floats up and blocks the exit entirely just after you hit boost.

So yeah, that one spawned a new rule too: no boosting out of the slot when over a million is on the line. (I still reserve the right to boost out in my Vulture. Hell, that thing is so agile, I might have been able to avoid a fatal collision in the same situation.)

Squeegee_Joe wrote:

I've got almost enough for an Asp saved up from RES dogfighting, a quick loop of rares trading, and some exploration. I think I'll pop back up to Tsu to collect my CG Asp, then maybe run one more rares loop. The only question then is how to outfit my Asp, since I've got my combat Cobra, and an exploration-equipped Adder.

Just keep in mind that Tsu, while the heart of the CG, is not the best place to find upgrades for an Asp. I had to make 2 or 3 jumps to find a system with some High Tech stations with outfitting, and even then the best I could do was a 5C FSD.

Nomad wrote:

I despise how you can lose 3 hours of work in 1 second by hitting a single impossible to see dark asteroid at 20% ship speed. Almost makes me want to delete the game. If it would have been in a fire fight, or at full speed that's one thing but losing almost 3 million on my way back to cash in is nausea inducing. That's almost more than everything I've made up to this point.

Ayup. I refuse to fight in any asteroid field that isn't brightly lit. The white and pink asteroid belts are the best because they fill the entire area with dusty fog and it gives you 100% visual contrast. You can sometimes visually spot ships at ranges of 8km or more, even without laser fire.

Squeegee_Joe wrote:

I've got to say the the Courier looks like a really, really pretty ship. My kudos to whoever designed her. The Diamondback? not so much, although the lines aren't bad for a bad mutha-trucka heavy bomber-style ship. Maybe we'll finally have something that makes missiles worthwhile?

They would have to fix missiles first. The size 2 launchers still shoot backwards. Speaking of shooting backwards, I had a run in with the buggy launchers not long before I swapped my Python out for a Type-9. I got interdicted and figured I would just blow the pirate away with my torpedoes and continue on. So I lock onto the pirate, fire a pair of torpedoes and... almost die when the torpedoes hit ME and knock my health down to 30%. Really game? Really?

I've since ditched the torpedoes for multicannons, I'm not going to touch any missile weapons until they fix them. And that might take a while even though that bug has been present since Alpha according to some old archived forum posts I found.

deftly wrote:

Yeah, the tier graph was messed up before too. I think someone at Frontier put some wrong numbers in somewhere. Now that it has gone past the stated 5 million tons, I have no idea what the final total will be. Makes it difficult to guess where I need to end up to stay in the 5%.

There was a news post that specifically said the amount was extended to 8 million, it hasn't been 24 hours and it's already at 6 million so it won't be long. You said you hit 5% at 12000 tons? Well I'm at 5% now too and I didn't have to go that high, another 500 people signed up and that made the brackets bigger.

deftly wrote:

How far out are you going? I was doing a 3-hop route, and its margin finally nosedived last night. I switched to 4+ hop routes and went back to making 1400-1600cr/ton on palladium, gold, and beryllium.

3-hop routes are far too slow for me since I was going for the 5%. But even if all of the 1-hop metal sources are bone dry at this point there are still some viable 2-hops. I've been going to the system above Facece that I can't remember the name of, it has multiple large stations that are 100% refineries so the output is huge. They have millions of metal available and I was able to set up a 1500cr/ton round trip route. That can't match the other 2500-2700 2-hop regular trade routes I know about but it's acceptable in the context of the event.

Speaking of the event it just hit the third to last tier and the rewards are increasing. It's looking like tier 10 will have a 10 million payout for the top 5%. If they do the same thing as the recent exploration event then when the players hit the 8 million cap the rewards will double. If you haven't already go truck some resources to Nu, it's very easy to get into the middle brackets and you can scoop a few million for light work.

Also the discount for the Clippers has reached 23% for 2 weeks, the event isn't even over yet which means it may go as high as 25 or 30%. The clipper is a great ship and at that price it's a better Type-7 for less money. If you sell at least a single ton of metal you will have that discount available for two weeks which is more than enough time to reach Baron rank and earn the 15 million or so to buy one.

Tamren wrote:

Ayup. I refuse to fight in any asteroid field that isn't brightly lit.

Couldn't agree more. I bail if the RES is in the dark, even in the light side I turn my ship light on.

Sorry to hear the bad news Nomad, we have all been there once or twice. Plenty of dents at Chango Dock made by my ships.

10 tonnes delivered to Nu, took a small loss, but the minimum rewards are up to 90K, plus hopefully I'll be able to take advantage of the clipper discount.

Tamren wrote:

There was a news post that specifically said the amount was extended to 8 million, it hasn't been 24 hours and it's already at 6 million so it won't be long. You said you hit 5% at 12000 tons? Well I'm at 5% now too and I didn't have to go that high, another 500 people signed up and that made the brackets bigger.

Nah, I hit it between 8000 and 8500 tons. 12000 tons was an estimate of what I needed to guarantee a finish in the top 5%, assuming completion at 5 million.

I think the sudden reward surge for the exploration CG was a last second tweak by Frontier to address the complaints about exploration profits. I doubt that will happen for the trade CG, but it's possible.

deftly wrote:

I think the sudden reward surge for the exploration CG was a last second tweak by Frontier to address the complaints about exploration profits. I doubt that will happen for the trade CG, but it's possible.

They have been increasing the rewards for this one, though. Not hugely, but both the cash and the ship discount have crept up.

I, for one, will not be upset IN THE LEAST when I never need to dock at Syromyatnikov Horizons again. Seriously, who decided the station should orbit its host planet about a mile and a half above the atmosphere? I'm pretty sure I even flew through some tall clouds while docking.

misplacedbravado wrote:
deftly wrote:

I think the sudden reward surge for the exploration CG was a last second tweak by Frontier to address the complaints about exploration profits. I doubt that will happen for the trade CG, but it's possible.

They have been increasing the rewards for this one, though. Not hugely, but both the cash and the ship discount have crept up.

That's pretty standard though. The rewards go up with each goal tier that's met. It's been a simple arithmetic progression. The Tsu reward for the last tier was a big change though. I think the only CGs with that sort of jump had been the two-tier terraforming supply CGs.

If anyone is still working on the event you have a couple hours left. I dropped out of the 5% bracket but managed to get back in at 12400 tons.

deftly wrote:

That's pretty standard though. The rewards go up with each goal tier that's met. It's been a simple arithmetic progression. The Tsu reward for the last tier was a big change though. I think the only CGs with that sort of jump had been the two-tier terraforming supply CGs.

Well in the history of CGs only a few have ever ended by early completion. The exploration event doubled the reward at the last tier which may have been an exception. Currently the ship event is on the last tier and already worth 10 million for the top slot. I'm guessing they will up the final reward by 2, 5 or 10 million.

pndragon26 wrote:
Tamren wrote:

Ayup. I refuse to fight in any asteroid field that isn't brightly lit.

Couldn't agree more. I bail if the RES is in the dark, even in the light side I turn my ship light on.

Sorry to hear the bad news Nomad, we have all been there once or twice. Plenty of dents at Chango Dock made by my ships.

I havent used them, but I know that the ships have lights, you can see the key for it in the control options, not sure what type of lights they are , but if they are headlights then it might solve that problem.

Jacknine wrote:

I havent used them, but I know that the ships have lights, you can see the key for it in the control options, not sure what type of lights they are , but if they are headlights then it might solve that problem.

They certainly would, if they actually had a range greater than 20 feet. Okay maybe not quite that short but it's definitely "long enough to see the rocks coming but not soon enough to avoid them".

Basically it's enough to say "Oh good, at least I get a glimpse of what is about to kill me"

Yeah, I won't touch an RES if it's in the dark side. Humorously enough, the last RES I was in was in the light side, but I was in there long enough, and it was close enough, that it darkened WHILE I WAS IN IT. That was creepy and awesome and yet I had to leave.

Event is over, final reward for the top tier was 11 million. Not as high as I was hoping for, but if you plan to buy a Clipper the 29% discount is the next best thing to a free 6 million credits.

However when I went by Nu to get my reward the shipyard does not have the correct price listed, it should be 15.8 million not 22 million. Hopefully that will get fixed soon, hold off on buying the Clipper until then.

Tamren wrote:

Event is over, final reward for the top tier was 11 million. Not as high as I was hoping for, but if you plan to buy a Clipper the 29% discount is the next best thing to a free 6 million credits.

However when I went by Nu to get my reward the shipyard does not have the correct price listed, it should be 15.8 million not 22 million. Hopefully that will get fixed soon, hold off on buying the Clipper until then.

So yeah, the rewards were a flat arithmetic progression all the way to the end, like I expected. I wasn't planning on getting a Clipper, but since the discount got bumped to 29%, maybe I will.

They usually fix the ship price for the reward within a few hours.

Now I just have to earn the Baron rank and make 30 million in 14 days.

Sounds like cake.

deftly wrote:

So yeah, the rewards were a flat arithmetic progression all the way to the end, like I expected.

It seems to vary depending on the event and how "difficult" the event is perceived to be. This one was clearly steaming for the finish line, so much so that they added extra on the top and it still completed in 3/7 days.

Clipper prices still not fixed. I checked one last time and they remain at 22 milllion, even if the "event completed go buy your clipper now" news post is in the feed now. You only get the discount if you actually signed up for the event right?