Elite Dangerous Catch-All

Half the point of the update is to better show how BGS works and allow you to work toward expansion. But they have a contest eligible to those who have expanded before the patch... way to not get it, Frontier.

Stele wrote:

Half the point of the update is to better show how BGS works and allow you to work toward expansion. But they have a contest eligible to those who have expanded before the patch... way to not get it, Frontier. :lol:

Yep

Worth noting that even for those of us who've been studying the BGS, there can be weeks when no matter what you do the numbers just don't update, leading to the suspicion that the BGS is actually a man called Fred with an excel spreadsheet who manually enters the changes

I went to Oort in Orcus (Patrons Principles) and the faction influence tab looked the same as Tombaugh. Is there another tab somewhere that shows station influence? Everything reads "System Influence".

So this was great to read today.

I'm starting to dive back in. The last thing I did was sell most of my ships and buy a Python, with enough for 1 rebuy. This is about as big as I want to go until I get into a Fed Corvette.

Just need to work on that Fed rep.

Carlbear95 wrote:

I went to Oort in Orcus (Patrons Principles) and the faction influence tab looked the same as Tombaugh. Is there another tab somewhere that shows station influence? Everything reads "System Influence".

No, all the station ones read the same. The numbers in a station are more accurate than the ones on the system map tab though.

That's the reason people in the BGS thread recommend docking at a station, not just popping into a system or pulling up the galaxy map.

Finally jumped back in and managed to make some money! I'm making way more money off the jerks that interdict me while I'm running a mission than the missions themselves, though. I guess that will come with time. Seeing you guys talk casually about multi-million credit cargo runs is depressing, though!

This week's livestream just wrapped up. Not a crazy amount of new information (and most of the new stuff was things you might have inferred) but they did show video of a lot things that have been discussed or shown in screenshots so far.

The videos will be up on youtube shortly (as will the full stream archive as usual, if you want the commentary to go with it), so everyone will be able to see them soon, but:

1. The animations on the huge multicannons and beam lasers are really, really cool.

2. The modification for cannons that was teased in the newsletter last week is f*cking priceless to see in action. I've always leaned towards multicannons for my choice in kinetic weapons, but that might change now that every shot from a cannon landed on a smaller ship will be inducing gleeful giggling.

EDIT:

And, here that is:

And the rest of these aren't bad either.

zeroKFE wrote:

2. The modification for cannons that was teased in the newsletter last week is f*cking priceless to see in action. I've always leaned towards multicannons for my choice in kinetic weapons, but that might change now that every shot from a cannon landed on a smaller ship will be inducing gleeful giggling.

I absolutely must have that force cannon ASAP.

It will look real nice with my Python.

IMAGE(http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g20/Kelly-Hrdina/Elite/Screenshot_0158.png)

Its one of those slightly insane things I love about the Frontier team, the amount of detail in the ship exteriors and the detailed firing animations are amazing and yet 99% of the time as a player, you'll never see them

Hrdina wrote:

I absolutely must have that force cannon ASAP.

It will look real nice with my Python.

Yeah -- up until yesterday I knew on an intellectual level that this patch was basically going to change a LOT about how we think about ships and how to outfit them. But now, I feel it in my gut.

ShynDarkly wrote:

Its one of those slightly insane things I love about the Frontier team, the amount of detail in the ship exteriors and the detailed firing animations are amazing and yet 99% of the time as a player, you'll never see them ;)

Right?

On the Distant Worlds expedition I actually spent a LOT of time admiring the exteriors of ships, and it was easy to forget that mostly you just see shields flashing or hulls exploding, but either way I love that the details are there.

Newsletter day.

There's a lot in this one!

Some of the highlights:

- The new mission board (text also repeats earlier information about reflecting and being more influenced by the background sim):

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/1d2500140a45b3e22f7bba29fbfb27bb02f5e3c9.jpg)

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/596050cbe89b2d7ec892d927e948fcfa39309a57.jpg)

- Missiles and torpedoes are getting stronger and better differentiated.

- New commodities as well as materials used by engineers can now be found by mining ice rings.

- Traffic control!

- More peeks at weapon modifications available via engineers

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/6ed320306920733c430b8a57293f9d08f4245a9e.jpg)

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/ffb907b531932cfd08d75af1a0c30b55567218b3.jpg)

- And some peeks at what some engineer bases will look like

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/2d2d65e5e8f56badec82d628a1107d8f90e48808.jpg)

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/d85bbfa282b25de5be56e972945db79078f1f077.jpg)

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/150f6497f9a79dd21cb9e871f710b12f1325e76b.jpg)

IMAGE(http://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/newsletters/newsletter_201604_22/e8a2b4d1052faf6faca5dec64e3e67000f8abee9.jpg)

That all looks so sexy.

Veloxi wrote:

That all looks so sexy.

Yeah, perfectly timed for inspiring me to get back home too.

Maybe too well timed, actually. I still have about 46kly to go, and I was planning on doing some fairly heavy neutron star farming on my way back to pad out my earnings. With each extra bit of info they drop, though, I'm feeling more compelled to just buckyball the whole way back.

Nice updates, looking forward to getting back into this.

I can't wait to get my office all set up in my new apartment and finally get back to this!!

- New commodities as well as materials used by engineers can now be found by mining ice rings.

How the heck is that going to work? Will we need to have a mining outfit for these mats, or will they be sold somewhere?

cube wrote:
- New commodities as well as materials used by engineers can now be found by mining ice rings.

How the heck is that going to work? Will we need to have a mining outfit for these mats, or will they be sold somewhere?

A good question.

Currently, materials only come from shooting rocks on planetary surfaces.

I'm guessing they're trying to add a few more options for obtaining them, though -- I think I remember them saying something about salvaging them from wrecks somewhere? (Or, maybe that was someone's wishlist I was reading. )

I like the idea of making ice rings more than just a screenshot destination. And also giving miners another way to get credits and missions is also a plus. More gameplay options to break up the monotony is always a good thing.

But if we're going to need a dedicated mining setup to get those things(since there isn't any player trading), that's... not great.

Is there any setup thats dedicated? Its not hard to switch a build to be a miner. I was actually going to try my hand at mining this weekend.

You need to swap out 1 or 2 medium/small gun mounts, get a prospecting limpet controllers, refinery, and(if you have the slots) gathering limpet controllers.

If you're in a high tech sector, have a decent bank account, and are flying a multipurpose/trade ship above a Cobra, it's not too bad. But if you're poorly outfitted or in a combat ship... it'll be pretty annoying.

Since limpets became so useful mining is one of those sit back and mine while doing something else activities, although with the cutter you can strip mine large tracts of a system pretty quickly.

I assume the new mats will just appear in the same way as the other mining fragments; might even be harvestable without having refineries onboard, which might promote people running dual use lasers a little more.

I don't think most people here have a cutter, but a n Asp Explorer can make for a perfectly capable mining ship.

I did get a few more hours back in this weekend after a long break. Avoiding powerplay I went to the CG in Mudjiga (sp?) to bring tantalum, gallium, indium. Got myself into the top 25% with around 2400 tons, and will probably run a few more trips to stay there.

Playing in open, I did get interdicted by someone in a Corvette. I think I'm better armed than what most PVP'ers are looking for when they interdict haulers but I wasn't going to press my luck so I high waked it out of there. He was only able to take one ring off my shields despite ramming me on interdiction.

SDC also made an appearance while I was playing which made for a tense run to the station but didn't have any issues.

Of course after getting into the top 25% and wanting a change of pace what did I do? Run fortification Power Play mcguffins... sucks when you are back at 0 because you can only load 10t at a time so even though I'm willing to spend the credits to speed up the timer, it still takes way too long to load up the ship.

Speaking of the current CG's, Mudjiga sells titanium and is close to Phiagre, so it's really easy to contribute to both trade CGs.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Is there any setup thats dedicated? Its not hard to switch a build to be a miner. I was actually going to try my hand at mining this weekend.

cube wrote:

You need to swap out 1 or 2 medium/small gun mounts, get a prospecting limpet controllers, refinery, and(if you have the slots) gathering limpet controllers.

If you're in a high tech sector, have a decent bank account, and are flying a multipurpose/trade ship above a Cobra, it's not too bad. But if you're poorly outfitted or in a combat ship... it'll be pretty annoying.

Carlbear wrote:

I don't think most people here have a cutter, but a n Asp Explorer can make for a perfectly capable mining ship.

After you've been playing for a while and have a decent bankroll, pretty much any level of refitting seems pretty routine and manageable -- you jump back to your personal favorite discounted outfitting location, you swap the parts, maybe swap ships too, and then you go off on your way, no sweat. But, it is easy to forget (particularly once you've progressed to the point of owning an Anaconda) that the galaxy is not early as open and easy going for newer/more casual players of the game.

That said, I definitely agree that once you've got an Asp and a bit of pocket change, you have all the resources you need to make it no big deal -- you just might not be aware of some helpful tools yet -- like ones that dramatically improve your ability to plan ahead and experiment with new builds, and ones that help you find the parts you need without spending hours jumping from system to system looking.

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That said, 2.1 could change a lot in this regard. I mean, it WILL unquestionably change a lot of the conventional wisdom about the "right way" to outfit ships for different purposes. But, it could also change a lot about how we feel about refitting our ships, since the effort required to make certain customizations to parts might make us much less cavalier about switching them out at a moment's notice.

In fact, I think it's highly likely this will change. The developers have always said that their intended design was for changing ship parts to feel like a heavy choice. Some folks may recall that at one point in the early betas there was a value degradation on selling back parts just as there is with selling ships. Then, they tried to reintroduce it in the beta for patch 1.3, and players revolted (very correctly, in my opinion), saying that unless we had some way to store our more more expensive parts this was an fun killing penalty that would prevent experimentation and make it too hard to switch roles within the game for all but the most affluent/hardcore players.

So, while I do think that a resale penalty on parts will not come back unless we do get the ability to store extra parts, it seems well within the desired design to have part customizations serve as another (less onerous) route to the desired design goal of having people feel more attached to their outfitting choices, and having changes to outfitting feel like more weighty and important decisions.

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Of course, you do sort of settle into having mostly specialized ships anyway once you have a few hundred million credits in resources. When I get back to the bubble (only 31kly to go!) I'll definitely be getting set up with a dedicated Cutter trader, which will free me up to leave my Anaconda as an exploration vessel, my Asp as a smuggler, and my Python as a dedicated combat ship (and all my smaller ships were already highly specialized to begin with).

Wasn't trying to imply folks needed a monster like the Cutter to mine, more a 'even an ungainly, poor to maneuver monster like the Cutter can mine now that limpets do the legwork'

Will be interesting to see how much flexibility the engineer changes allow, and more importantly how easy it is to switch from one form of customization to another without access to some form of 'module bank'; which I know they don't want as right now it would negate the reasons many folks drift in and out of the Powerplay mechanics.

I suppose it won't be much longer before we have a much clearer picture, but I'd wager quite a bit that one of the costs of modifying our ships via engineers will be (one way or another) a much greater cost to refitting. Or to put it another way, we'll be asked to choose either this new ability to min-max and specialize or the flexibility we currently enjoy from being able to quickly and painlessly change our outfits.

And, while I think this is a perfectly fine choice to ask players to make (and MUCH better than making us lose money every time we sell our parts), I would also wager that people will be unreasonably angry about it, and call for simultaneous cake-eating and cake-saving at the same time.

zeroKFE wrote:

That said, 2.1 could change a lot in this regard. I mean, it WILL unquestionably change a lot of the conventional wisdom about the "right way" to outfit ships for different purposes. But, it could also change a lot about how we feel about refitting our ships, since the effort required to make certain customizations to parts might make us much less cavalier about switching them out at a moment's notice.

This is where I start to get concerned. IIRC, I'm around 150 million in net worth, with an Asp Explorer mostly outfitted for long range exploration, a fully kitted out Vulture, and a half A-rank Python combat/trader. I'm at the point where I have enough of a bank account to swap the Python whenever I want to whatever I want to do, which is great.

But with the module customization, as everything currently stands, I can't use the Python to mine, because I'd probably want to customize the guns I'm swapping out, or customize some of the internals. So I'm probably going to need another Asp for mining. I can afford it now, but 3 months ago? Not a chance.

I'm really hoping that Frontier's going to add some sort of module storage or some way to actually store the customizations until you can apply them to your current kit. I don't have a problem with losing them if you swap out the part, but I'm seeing major issues with getting them in the first place, especially with how difficult Frontier's made it to manage multiple ships.

cube wrote:

But with the module customization, as everything currently stands, I can't use the Python to mine, because I'd probably want to customize the guns I'm swapping out, or change some of the components. So I'm probably going to need another Asp for mining. I can afford it now, but 3 months ago? Not a chance.

This is why we grind so we can have nicer things than those that don't

#FeelTheBern

Carlbear95 wrote:
cube wrote:

But with the module customization, as everything currently stands, I can't use the Python to mine, because I'd probably want to customize the guns I'm swapping out, or change some of the components. So I'm probably going to need another Asp for mining. I can afford it now, but 3 months ago? Not a chance.

This is why we grind so we can have nicer things than those that don't

#FeelTheBern

Please keep the politics in P&C.