01-16-2015, 09:55 PM
01-16-2015, 11:54 PM
Watched some videos of E : D, looks damn good, that's gonna be epic. Especially what I'd love there would be only one server, that's make sense with such amount of star systems. Though did wrong when bought Star Citizen. Gotta try this game after little upgrade of my PC.
01-17-2015, 02:22 AM
Ok, figure this deserves a longer post...
I bought the game when it was still standard beta and so far, I'm about 70% convinced the money wasn't wasted.
The game's creators focused on a frame that would essentially remain valid for years - audiovisuals, flight mechanics, economic engine, physics and most spectacularly - the galaxy. Unlike Fl, no new systems will be added because... There's nothing to add unless of course astronomic discoveries happen and they game will need to update something. This happened quite recently btw, some exoplanets got found and the game designers reacted accodingly. The billions of systems are legit, each is scaled, the planets are pretty, the suns, everything is realistic and... kinda mundane. There's nowhere NEAR the colors FL's systems have for instance, but the most mindblowin thing is - every bright dot out the window is a legit object, not just a texture. Out of these bilienz, some 13 thousand systems are human-inhabited right now. Three sides - Federation, which is a combo of Liberty's demo-crazy, kusari's zaibatsu and Rhineland's butthurt. Empire - Which is a combo of Maltese slave labor, Bret aristocracy and Kusari's dynastic bs. Finally, the Alliance - which is essentially what would have happened if the IMG and friends got REALLY ANGRY. The rest atm are independent systems, ranging in terms of government from fascist dictatorships (yeees) to theocracies. No aliens, though one race is planned, the same one as in the earlier games. Not as complex as our belowed nomnoms. Really though, as far as a permanent, baseline game skeleton is concerned, Eddy's all set and peerless.
The problems start when you get down to playing. Not unlike after FL's Sp campaign, you undock from wherever with hardly a dime and a lot (Actually, not all that many atm) of options. There's no guidelines or tutorials about actually functioning in the game on a strategic level and a great many of the game's jobs leave more to the player's imagination than I'd personally like at this point. As far as I know, the only feasible way of progressing towards the economic maximum (equivalent of a train or whale) is doable in a matter of days - if you find a profitable trade route or... months - if you try and make money in any other way.
There's 3 game modes - all of them online. Open - normal MMO, you meet people as the vagaries of instancing permit. Solo - you're a ghost, you see nobody and nobody sees you, buy you still make the same impression on the world (prices, politix) as though in open. Private group - you can build a group in the game menu (username search function) and play without a chance of seeing anyone else. Oh, by the way... Only private chat exists, can't make a chatroom for friends, no open-broadcasting either. It's supposed to be remedied in a few weeks.
You can only have ONE charcter, but there's no limit to how many ships you can own. I kinda like it because it'll prevent people from instantly switching between the most exotic of places and allegiances. When you get shot down, fluff says you warp away in a magic escape pod to the last base you visited. You can either start over in their equivalent of a starflea (in fact, the starter ship is a LOT more potent in relation to potential combat opponents than a starflea) or... if you have enough ingame cash on hand, you can pay a portion (some 5%)of the lost ship's value to it. Now... so far this is the absolute, most deadly bit of game mechanics, as it's entirely possible to irretrievably lose an expensive ship, after getting blown up without having enough cash to cover the respawn fee. The game atm, sadly revolves around credits. All the credits. To make more, get big and STAY big. Several jobs can make kretidz...
Mining exists and requires 2 specialized (and sometimes expensive) pieces of equipment, a mineral field and lots and lots of patience. Zapping a big asteroid with a speshul laz0r yields up to 10 shards, each with various percentiles of valuables inside. Every such bit needs to be scooped up by approaching it at an appropriate angle and speed, until it gets caught into a small opening leading to the cargo hold/refinery module. Not much of a problem for smallish ships - depending on a field's richness, you'll need to scoop and refine several shards to manufacture one legit ton of stuff you can sell. For bigger ships though... I can't imagine myself trying to scoop hundreds of bitz. problem: no way of surveying a mineral field, marking depleted rocks or picking up multiple shards. It's just bare bones of a feature atm.
Bounty hunting works, as each encountered NPC has a chance of being clean, wanted in the current system or appearing clean here, but upon closer inspection (a potentially expensive scanner requiring a 10s lock-on) - wanted someplace else. Bounties are scaled depending on the NPC's skill rating and ship type. People make a decent living and don't really need extremely exensive equipment to do that.
Trading is basically divided into two categories - normals and rares. Normals are a lot like FL trading albeit without the luxury of FLcompanion. As things stand, the only way of noting prices and seeking out profitable routes is by pen and paper. People try crowdsourcing something like a live Fl companion, but its data depends on manual input anyway. Now... Rares on the other hand are location-specific goods of VERY limited supply, but unlike normals - their price increases as you carry them further away from the point of origin. More predictable and preferrable for small, long-range ships but again, the bigger the ship, the less point there is to doing it.
Piracy... sorda works. Now, unlike FL, destroying a ship makes all its cargo go boom as well. This leaves three options - shooting the targeted ship's cargo hatch (possible, though challenging), using a limpet missile, which hacks the said doors or... if you encounter a human and make an angry face - get the guy to voluntarily drop his cargo. 2milrdai is impossible simply because right now the game lacks any way of wiring credits.
Smuggling hardly qualifies as such because instead of being MORE valuable due to increased risk (yes, authorities can scan and fine you, but they won't outright start blasting just yet) - goods you manage to silent-run or crash-land onto a base that might or might not have a black market outlet are worth HALF their usual price.
Exploration is something mildly fun, but incomplete. you buy VERY expensive bits of equipment, plot a route (no more than 70ish lightyears) and off you go. Lonely, away from anything human and once in a blue moon finding something as valuable as a terrestrial planet. It comes down to staring at discovered celestial bodies until the game tells you they're "scanned in detail" and moving on to the next one of the hundreds of systems along your path. And once you come back to sell the data (having grown a respectable beard and becoming a hygenic disaster), you'll need to click two buttons for every system you want to sell. Every. Single. One. I once spent... an hour just clicking away, selling eploration data. And realizing, that in the meantime, I'd have made thousands (not an exaggeration) of times more cash by trading.
The game's overall fun and an extreme pleasure to look at. It's hard to explain why something as mundane as an Euro trukk simulator IN SPESS can be so satisfying, but there it is. The game got some surprisingly good reviews, so at least for the time being there's just about no risk of a business failure. Again though... It'll be at least another few months before it's a match (even) for Disco in terms of a functional multiplayer game in space.
I bought the game when it was still standard beta and so far, I'm about 70% convinced the money wasn't wasted.
The game's creators focused on a frame that would essentially remain valid for years - audiovisuals, flight mechanics, economic engine, physics and most spectacularly - the galaxy. Unlike Fl, no new systems will be added because... There's nothing to add unless of course astronomic discoveries happen and they game will need to update something. This happened quite recently btw, some exoplanets got found and the game designers reacted accodingly. The billions of systems are legit, each is scaled, the planets are pretty, the suns, everything is realistic and... kinda mundane. There's nowhere NEAR the colors FL's systems have for instance, but the most mindblowin thing is - every bright dot out the window is a legit object, not just a texture. Out of these bilienz, some 13 thousand systems are human-inhabited right now. Three sides - Federation, which is a combo of Liberty's demo-crazy, kusari's zaibatsu and Rhineland's butthurt. Empire - Which is a combo of Maltese slave labor, Bret aristocracy and Kusari's dynastic bs. Finally, the Alliance - which is essentially what would have happened if the IMG and friends got REALLY ANGRY. The rest atm are independent systems, ranging in terms of government from fascist dictatorships (yeees) to theocracies. No aliens, though one race is planned, the same one as in the earlier games. Not as complex as our belowed nomnoms. Really though, as far as a permanent, baseline game skeleton is concerned, Eddy's all set and peerless.
The problems start when you get down to playing. Not unlike after FL's Sp campaign, you undock from wherever with hardly a dime and a lot (Actually, not all that many atm) of options. There's no guidelines or tutorials about actually functioning in the game on a strategic level and a great many of the game's jobs leave more to the player's imagination than I'd personally like at this point. As far as I know, the only feasible way of progressing towards the economic maximum (equivalent of a train or whale) is doable in a matter of days - if you find a profitable trade route or... months - if you try and make money in any other way.
There's 3 game modes - all of them online. Open - normal MMO, you meet people as the vagaries of instancing permit. Solo - you're a ghost, you see nobody and nobody sees you, buy you still make the same impression on the world (prices, politix) as though in open. Private group - you can build a group in the game menu (username search function) and play without a chance of seeing anyone else. Oh, by the way... Only private chat exists, can't make a chatroom for friends, no open-broadcasting either. It's supposed to be remedied in a few weeks.
You can only have ONE charcter, but there's no limit to how many ships you can own. I kinda like it because it'll prevent people from instantly switching between the most exotic of places and allegiances. When you get shot down, fluff says you warp away in a magic escape pod to the last base you visited. You can either start over in their equivalent of a starflea (in fact, the starter ship is a LOT more potent in relation to potential combat opponents than a starflea) or... if you have enough ingame cash on hand, you can pay a portion (some 5%)of the lost ship's value to it. Now... so far this is the absolute, most deadly bit of game mechanics, as it's entirely possible to irretrievably lose an expensive ship, after getting blown up without having enough cash to cover the respawn fee. The game atm, sadly revolves around credits. All the credits. To make more, get big and STAY big. Several jobs can make kretidz...
Mining exists and requires 2 specialized (and sometimes expensive) pieces of equipment, a mineral field and lots and lots of patience. Zapping a big asteroid with a speshul laz0r yields up to 10 shards, each with various percentiles of valuables inside. Every such bit needs to be scooped up by approaching it at an appropriate angle and speed, until it gets caught into a small opening leading to the cargo hold/refinery module. Not much of a problem for smallish ships - depending on a field's richness, you'll need to scoop and refine several shards to manufacture one legit ton of stuff you can sell. For bigger ships though... I can't imagine myself trying to scoop hundreds of bitz. problem: no way of surveying a mineral field, marking depleted rocks or picking up multiple shards. It's just bare bones of a feature atm.
Bounty hunting works, as each encountered NPC has a chance of being clean, wanted in the current system or appearing clean here, but upon closer inspection (a potentially expensive scanner requiring a 10s lock-on) - wanted someplace else. Bounties are scaled depending on the NPC's skill rating and ship type. People make a decent living and don't really need extremely exensive equipment to do that.
Trading is basically divided into two categories - normals and rares. Normals are a lot like FL trading albeit without the luxury of FLcompanion. As things stand, the only way of noting prices and seeking out profitable routes is by pen and paper. People try crowdsourcing something like a live Fl companion, but its data depends on manual input anyway. Now... Rares on the other hand are location-specific goods of VERY limited supply, but unlike normals - their price increases as you carry them further away from the point of origin. More predictable and preferrable for small, long-range ships but again, the bigger the ship, the less point there is to doing it.
Piracy... sorda works. Now, unlike FL, destroying a ship makes all its cargo go boom as well. This leaves three options - shooting the targeted ship's cargo hatch (possible, though challenging), using a limpet missile, which hacks the said doors or... if you encounter a human and make an angry face - get the guy to voluntarily drop his cargo. 2milrdai is impossible simply because right now the game lacks any way of wiring credits.
Smuggling hardly qualifies as such because instead of being MORE valuable due to increased risk (yes, authorities can scan and fine you, but they won't outright start blasting just yet) - goods you manage to silent-run or crash-land onto a base that might or might not have a black market outlet are worth HALF their usual price.
Exploration is something mildly fun, but incomplete. you buy VERY expensive bits of equipment, plot a route (no more than 70ish lightyears) and off you go. Lonely, away from anything human and once in a blue moon finding something as valuable as a terrestrial planet. It comes down to staring at discovered celestial bodies until the game tells you they're "scanned in detail" and moving on to the next one of the hundreds of systems along your path. And once you come back to sell the data (having grown a respectable beard and becoming a hygenic disaster), you'll need to click two buttons for every system you want to sell. Every. Single. One. I once spent... an hour just clicking away, selling eploration data. And realizing, that in the meantime, I'd have made thousands (not an exaggeration) of times more cash by trading.
The game's overall fun and an extreme pleasure to look at. It's hard to explain why something as mundane as an Euro trukk simulator IN SPESS can be so satisfying, but there it is. The game got some surprisingly good reviews, so at least for the time being there's just about no risk of a business failure. Again though... It'll be at least another few months before it's a match (even) for Disco in terms of a functional multiplayer game in space.
01-17-2015, 06:52 AM
What Panzer has said is pretty much what one of the guys at work has said about it.
The main thing I'm getting is that E
is FL, with the graphics on steroids.
I've read a review elsewhere that basically says it looks wonderful, but that the learning curve is almost vertical and you have to learn how to dock manually with virtually no pointers.
The only gripe I really have about the game is the same one I have with Star Citizen...... both need Win 7 or 8 to play and I'm still on XP, which I'm quite happy with, thank you very much.
Essentially, if I want to play either of them, it's going to cost the price of the game in question, plus the price of a copy of Win 7 and add on top of that installation time and general sorting of the new OS....., well I can't really see it happening until there are a LOT of people out there who say things like 'must get/play this game'.
My petty gripe aside, why should I buy a FL like game, when I already have a (mostly) bug free FL game to play?
The main thing I'm getting is that E
is FL, with the graphics on steroids.I've read a review elsewhere that basically says it looks wonderful, but that the learning curve is almost vertical and you have to learn how to dock manually with virtually no pointers.
The only gripe I really have about the game is the same one I have with Star Citizen...... both need Win 7 or 8 to play and I'm still on XP, which I'm quite happy with, thank you very much.
Essentially, if I want to play either of them, it's going to cost the price of the game in question, plus the price of a copy of Win 7 and add on top of that installation time and general sorting of the new OS....., well I can't really see it happening until there are a LOT of people out there who say things like 'must get/play this game'.
My petty gripe aside, why should I buy a FL like game, when I already have a (mostly) bug free FL game to play?
01-17-2015, 03:02 PM
Are you playing online, panz? And is it a pvp-fest or is it possible to get around without too much hassle from other players?
Also I got 3 million credits all in all, they're tied up in a Viper I use for hunting bounties (using the killwarrant scanner to boost income). What's the "best" way to earn credits enough for a Python for instance, keeping in mind that I've only got 3 mil to invest at this point?
Also I got 3 million credits all in all, they're tied up in a Viper I use for hunting bounties (using the killwarrant scanner to boost income). What's the "best" way to earn credits enough for a Python for instance, keeping in mind that I've only got 3 mil to invest at this point?
01-17-2015, 03:24 PM
Trading is the fastest way to make money, by far.
With less than 3 million, I'd get a Cobra with an A-rated FSD and start trading rare goods.
A Cobra with 40 cargo space (+ shield and fuel scoop) makes 1-1.2 million per hour. Should be more without a shield or fuel scoop.
Type-6 is also usable for that, but you're going to wait a lot until you can fill your hold.
After that, you may want to upgrade to a Type-7, but that one is only useful for normal trading.
Normal trading is utterly boring, IMO, but it's the only somewhat fast way to get to the bigger ships.
It can be compared to hauling the same stuff back and forth between Norfolk and Houston, for hours.
With less than 3 million, I'd get a Cobra with an A-rated FSD and start trading rare goods.
A Cobra with 40 cargo space (+ shield and fuel scoop) makes 1-1.2 million per hour. Should be more without a shield or fuel scoop.
Type-6 is also usable for that, but you're going to wait a lot until you can fill your hold.
After that, you may want to upgrade to a Type-7, but that one is only useful for normal trading.
Normal trading is utterly boring, IMO, but it's the only somewhat fast way to get to the bigger ships.
It can be compared to hauling the same stuff back and forth between Norfolk and Houston, for hours.
01-17-2015, 04:27 PM
Mimi, it depends on the region. Much like in FL, activity hubs form around places where there's relatively good trading to be done or some war, that's been announced on the ingame news board.
If you want a python (which is the objectively best bit of equipment in the game) - you'll need to at least get yourself a t7 trader of the imp clipper first. Since you're at 3 milliens, a t6 is an option, possible to decently outfit and still keep enough cash for insurance and trade goods of any price.
After that - it's trading like a hampster until you reach something over 100 millienz. Only then will you have enough for a decently-armed hunter-python. And by decently I mean large beams, over a millien each. I once had a python and believe me - it's very expensive to equip, repair and refuel. it's also the ship that can murder anything and dock everywhere.
Personally I managed to build an anaconda from 3 millien in... 10 days. I only play open and stay well away from places with rare goods and wars. Right now I'm still powertrading to equip the anaconda with ever better equipment and once that's done... I'll continue to do so, albeit with some killing sprees in planetary rings nearby to maintain insanity.
If you want a python (which is the objectively best bit of equipment in the game) - you'll need to at least get yourself a t7 trader of the imp clipper first. Since you're at 3 milliens, a t6 is an option, possible to decently outfit and still keep enough cash for insurance and trade goods of any price.
After that - it's trading like a hampster until you reach something over 100 millienz. Only then will you have enough for a decently-armed hunter-python. And by decently I mean large beams, over a millien each. I once had a python and believe me - it's very expensive to equip, repair and refuel. it's also the ship that can murder anything and dock everywhere.
Personally I managed to build an anaconda from 3 millien in... 10 days. I only play open and stay well away from places with rare goods and wars. Right now I'm still powertrading to equip the anaconda with ever better equipment and once that's done... I'll continue to do so, albeit with some killing sprees in planetary rings nearby to maintain insanity.