My immersion breaks every damn planet i land on. Squares and squares everywhere. Terrain generation seems broken.
Elite Dangerous plans for 2024
- Thread starter Arubeto
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That was one of the things I liked about the old system: it was fairly cheap when it came to material costs, if you were smart about it. I always engineered new modules, rather than existing ones, until I ran out of room on my then-growing ship collection. A good G3 was better than an average G4, and an excellent G3 was better than an average G5, and you got a lot more rolls from the same amount of minimal effort. And when it came to FSDs specifically, I had numerous ships at that time which used the 5A. I’m sure Felicity Farseer celebrated the day I was able to transfer all those modules back home.
I still have numerous legacy modules that would be a net downgrade IMO unless I put several G5 rolls into them.
There isn't any necessary equipment for studying NSPs that isn't built in to every ship, as you only need the Composition Scanner.
If you want to obtain research samples from some(!) of the NSP fauna (only the large ones can be extracted from), then you need a Research limpet controller. However, the only use for said samples is to sell them for a tiny amount of credits. (There were one or two CGs where they were used, and that was about it. No special BGS effect or anything.)
Otherwise, everything else are things that you already use for exploration, such as fuel scoops. (Technically not necessary, but anyway.) In other words, any ship that can travel to an NSP can study its contents.
I would recommend anyone interested in exploring to go look up NSPs though (at the very least the larger fauna around nebulae), as although their galactic distribution is terribly designed, their dynamic content is actually pretty good. Significantly better than the entirely static Odyssey flora. But well, Frontier messed up with their sloppy design and rushed implementation, and most explorers (to say nothing about the entire player base) were uninterested about them. Although on the GEC, entries in that category tend to be rather popular, so I guess one of the main reasons for this is that people simply don't learn about them. (Through no fault of their own, mind you. I could go into the reasons why, but I mentioned the biggest one above anyway, and why go into the rest here?)
Moving on, some game history then:
Unfortunately, you're incorrect. The Hauler was significantly worse than either the Asp Explorer or the Anaconda, as its reduced jump range meant that plenty of the galaxy was simply out of its reach. A cardboard fit of a Hauler could barely reach 30 ly, and that meant leaving the DSS at home, which produced less information and halved the data sale value. Meanwhile, the Anaconda on a cardboard fit would reach 40 ly (just about, however), but it could comfortably reach the upper thirties. Same for the Asp, just around the middle thirties instead. (See here, by the way.) This difference in jump range also meant that the Asp / Anaconda could navigate through some areas with relative ease where a Hauler would be difficult to get through. Due to the way the Forge structured the galaxy, there isn't a big practical difference between, say, 50 ly and 55 ly, but there's a lot more between 30 ly and 35 ly. Especially without boosts of any kind.
So no, the Hauler wasn't better for general exploration. Maybe if one just went coreward or stayed in areas with star density relatively similar to our local area, it was a contender at least, but otherwise, the benefits of being able to reach more areas and also reaching the same areas much faster outweighed the relatively small advantages that the Hauler had. (As it stands, the Hauler's supercruise handling isn't much better than the Asp Explorer's, so if one found the Anaconda too slow there, they'd still pick the Asp.)
Operational costs were never a significant concern with exploration, you were (usually) away from the bubble for a long time and could stay out there practically indefinitely. The most expensive operational cost would have been repairing the accumulated wear and tear, except there was little point to that: hull integrity reaching zero meant that your total hull armour was reduced by 30%, which wasn't significant when exploring, although it was for combat. (I remember not bothering with that myself when I was exploring, which was most of the time: after all, why spend credits on it, especially when it's going to go down again the next time I head out?) The only significant effect was the flaking off of your paintjob, which is purely cosmetic... and plenty of people preferred the "rugged explorer ship" look on their screenshots anyway.
Otherwise, fuel was free (unless you forgot to fit a scoop!), and AFM ammo lasted a long time, unless you regularly faceplanted stars and/or overheated your ship.
Meanwhile, the purchase costs of either an Asp Explorer or especially an Anaconda were far larger. If you could afford buying (and outfitting!) one, you could easily afford the operational costs.
Think about it this way: Elite in exploration was 155 million Cr data sale required, and used to take more than ten times longer than it does now. That would just about cover buying an Anaconda, but not outfitting it. Even Asps were often purchased via trading instead, not by exploring nor combat. (The latter also used to pay terribly: for a long time, getting any significant amount of credits meant trading, or some variation of it.)
After the Diamondback Explorer[1] was added in the Powerplay update, there was even less point for flying the Hauler for exploration anymore, as the DBX was a cost-effective ship that didn't take long to afford. People were already complaining about income inflation by that patch, if memory serves. (Such as with Painite.) Well, even before them, people sticking with the Hauler was fairly rare, as for most everyone, it was just a stepping stone, often to the Adder first. (And hey, it's in the name as well: would you rather explore in a Hauler, or would you do it in an Asp Explorer?) But after the DBX was added, the Adder was mostly forgotten too - as I mentioned, it didn't take long to progress to the DBX instead.
However, one crucial thing to bear in mind is that all of these happened within half a year after launch. So on a time scale, we are talking about a relatively short era... even more so if we remember that Horizons came out just one year after launch. By two years, not only did Engineering increase the differences between ships a lot, but even exploration income was inflated by enough so that a DBX was rather quick to get, and anything cheaper than it was trivial.
Compared to that, here we are now in 2024, wondering what plans for development might even be. Well, the game was young back then, with its company heading up, and it's old now, with its company in a crisis.
[1]: Some fun history about the DBX, by the way: originally, there was just the Diamondback Scout, and it was named simply the Diamondback. However, the ship's reception by players was quite poor, as people expected the combat-exploration hybrid ship to be decent at exploration, which the Diamondback wasn't. So, Frontier quickly made a new variant called the Diamondback Explorer to do just that, and renamed the original Diamondback to the Diamondback Scout instead. Which was part of the PvP meta for a while, used as a stealth ship there, but basically never as an explorer.
2D FSD + 1C fuel tank is for wingfighting builds (organized PvP). The question is not whether or not 5 to 8 m/s is negligible (actually it's not only a gain in boost speed, but also in agility). The question is why would I want to be 5 m/s slower if I don't get anything of value in exchange? (these ringfighting builds are not supposed to jump anywhere after all).
People don't use such builds in organic PvP though (not that the 13 Ly jump range a shielded FSD is capable of is a very convenient way of jumping around).
Some of them you might also find a laser helpful (still possible to fit to any ship, but often omitted from "recommended loadouts")
I don't know, the sounds some of them made when shot didn't make me want to continue doing that
I disagree. You only need long jump ranges if you intend to do ”Because it was there” exploration, which is only one of the myriad styles of exploration out there. Which is all I’ll say on the matter, because I don’t want to get into yet another “who is a real explorer” debate with you.
Any ship is a good explorer. I don't do the huge jump ships . My first is the cockpit , get one I like ( hence my dislike of the Annie) then I put decent engines then good shields ( maybe with a oe heavy duty super cap G5 booster only 2 ton) then I add the other stuff and then go engineer for the best I can get . Bear in mind I got to the blue snowball in a dolphin ( something like 246 jump ) ok I was stuck with very low fuel til I got to my FC.
My pref is the dolphin. But engineering really messed up the builds so you can take what you want and be happy .
My pref is the dolphin. But engineering really messed up the builds so you can take what you want and be happy .
That's alright. People who know me know quite well that I dislike people calling others "not real / true / pure / etc explorers", and tend to make fun of that, so there's no danger of me bringing that in.
We were talking about ships anyway. (Well, and NSPs, but you didn't reply to any of that. Oh, minor note I forgot to mention: you do get Codex vouchers to turn in, but as with the samples, they don't pay well. Although if you find something not previously discovered in that region by anyone, your name goes into the global Codex, which is a reward too.) Perhaps I misunderstood what you wrote, and what you meant there was that the Hauler was much better than the Anaconda for you at that time. If so, then my bad.
In the end, one could explore significantly more of the galaxy in an Anaconda, or an Asp / Diamondback Explorer, than a Hauler. That was the fact - but come to think of it, whether or not that actually mattered to someone was (and is) a matter of personal preference. Personally, I think that being able to reach significantly more of the galaxy made a ship better at space exploration overall at that time, you disagree and think otherwise, and that's all there is to it then. (Past tense for "made", as jump ranges have inflated well past the originals now, and any ship can reach 40 ly full tank jump range.)
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Well, remember, that Darkfyre talked about " credit reward inflation reached absurd levels"
If we will talk about times, when credits were difficult to gather...hauler offered 24/27 range for price of less than 2 millions. Slighty less than dolphin, but dolphin is few times more expensive.
On another hand conda (just hull) require nearly 200 millions, and outfitted for exploration had range below 40.
much bigger range, but for much bigger price, so reaching this point required MUCH bigger effort. Exploration in any ship which you will use is one thing. But years ago road to this ship could be very long, so I understand advantage of using ship requiring just few millions.
"better or worse" is difficult in exploration, where pure range ISNT everything (if is- then the best vessel is carrier with his 500 range,much better than jumpconda, and still better than jumpconda with neutron boost), even if it means bigger possibilities. Personally I prefer good cockpit, agility, and shields which allow me for some bonks, but hauler can be surprisingly good, early ship.
We just play in times, when economy is so broken, that you can outfit conda after scanning just 2 certain plants, if you will receive first log bonus, so price point is no longer valid.
If we will talk about times, when credits were difficult to gather...hauler offered 24/27 range for price of less than 2 millions. Slighty less than dolphin, but dolphin is few times more expensive.
On another hand conda (just hull) require nearly 200 millions, and outfitted for exploration had range below 40.
much bigger range, but for much bigger price, so reaching this point required MUCH bigger effort. Exploration in any ship which you will use is one thing. But years ago road to this ship could be very long, so I understand advantage of using ship requiring just few millions.
"better or worse" is difficult in exploration, where pure range ISNT everything (if is- then the best vessel is carrier with his 500 range,much better than jumpconda, and still better than jumpconda with neutron boost), even if it means bigger possibilities. Personally I prefer good cockpit, agility, and shields which allow me for some bonks, but hauler can be surprisingly good, early ship.
We just play in times, when economy is so broken, that you can outfit conda after scanning just 2 certain plants, if you will receive first log bonus, so price point is no longer valid.
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Solution: introduce the Anaconda Mk II, which has a class 7 FSD, has a spoiler built in, and costs 20 billion Cr! (Yeah, I know, the spoiler is a bit too much.)
This is only partially a joke, as there are a fair number of MMOs out there (last time I checked) that "balance" income inflation exactly this way. ED just hasn't regularly introduced new tiers of ships, weapons and so on.
(Insert Panther Clipper comment here)
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Whilst this is true some of this could be mitigated by properly specced missions...... it was actually far better at launch imo where you couldnt take on an elite mission unless you were suitably ranked.
new players dont (or shouldnt) expect to be doing missions which pay in the millions of credits and so a mission requiring only a harmless commander may not pay much, but it is not going to spawn in really tough ships.
however this would mean far more missions would need to be on the mission board , though this wouldnt necessarily be an issue as by default the mission board could filter to your rank and then standing within that sector so as not to bombard the player with 100s of missions they cant do.
yes there would still be the matter of normal space, but then that could just sort of work as it does now.... if you are harmless in a sidewinder then high end pirates are not going to bother you .
i would also put far more stock in the system security levels. maybe new players would need to stay near hi sec space, and then there would be a gradient of risk, with more profitable systems being incredibly high risk for the un prepared.
all of this would have taken some thought balancing out at the start,............. probably too late now this far down the road but it would have allowed engaging content for new players but also giving the hook to want to work to get to the next "level" and given challenging content for old pros.
I guess the thargoid content is sort of like that. my only issue there is it does not come naturally to the player, they have to make a concerted effort to unlock that content.
a player could be triple elite and the most talented pilot in the game but they are not going to hurt a thargoid unless they have collected the correct runes to put on their ship, which again, seems more dungeons and dragons fantasy game to me than it does sci fi.
(imagine a scenario in real life where we have our best combat pilot, lets call him maverick and we are suddenly attacked by a massively superior force......... but no we are not going to give our best weapons against that enemy to him because he hasnt been to peru to collect that rare jewel and he hasnt been to india to get that new optical cable....
but little jimmy over there........ he has. he is a crap pilot but he did all that AND he knew the secret salute so lets give him all the cool weapons instead.
Note i definitely dont want all the stuff handed to us, but i just think FD did an awful job thinking about game progression in terms of both economy and technology... which is why in a way i would like to see a proper sequel **** where they start with a clean slate but hopefully actually think about progression more.
**** this is absolutely NOT what I used to want... indeed i backed to the level i did in the game because this was meant to be the last elite game with continual paid expansions instead, and in some ways i know i would be dissapointed because elite without VR is nothing to me.
but the game appears to me to have so many issues that maybe it needs to start from scratch again with a new codebase and the player progression fixed.
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its strange i have seen plenty of screenshots like this, and sure the LOD pop in and asset reuse can be an issue (but these are things most games suffer from) , but i cant remember ever seeing tiling issues like that in my actual game,
I could pay 50b for it.
His issue is irregular; it may be a shader/texture problem or he needs to turn off "Checkerboard rendering".
Idk ofc, but if it happens on all planets for him he should contact support as they can help.
To an extent, yes - but the balancing point is really tricky to get right in that case, even if the emergent loopholes from a game world the size it is all get closed.
If you've got the following choices through the mission system (and you're flying a medium ship with a rebuy ~5 million, say)
Easy mission: 1 million credits per hour in essentially perfect safety
Moderate mission: 5 million credits per hour if successful but 40% chance of a rebuy instead
Hard mission: 15 million credits per hour if successful but 90% chance of a rebuy instead
Then in theory that all seems pretty good - the Moderate missions pay slightly more on average, and the Hard missions will need to wait until you're more capable.
The problem is that ship capabilities vary substantially (even for the same rebuy, and even ignoring engineering), and player skill levels span an even wider range, so there's no chance to balance it that finely. The level of difficulty where a task is neither impossible nor routine for any individual player is pretty small.
In practice it's very rarely an interesting choice - do you do the easy, low-paying but reliable thing or the difficult, high-paying but risky thing - either the difficult thing is a guaranteed failure, or it's also actually pretty easy, so the choice is obvious. The game isn't really set up to make "partial success" an applicable outcome in a lot of cases, and certainly not the most likely outcome even then.
And you also of course have a set of players who want things to be predictable - there should be a mission available to do this, there should be a way to guarantee success at that, situations where the movement of the BGS make a particular mission type much harder are bugs, ambushes should be clearly labelled in advance, the full consequences of backing a particular CG side should be made clear upfront, etc. - who don't want the level of ambiguity and uncertainty and hidden information needed to stop these choices being obvious and automatic. Given the choice between a reliable 10M/hour and a risky route which would in the long term average out at 20M/hour after rebuys, they'll pick the reliable one anyway and just do it for twice as long.
And then complain about how grindy the game is!
At the time I chose ships for explorations I was happy when I made 1m / h and these were not necessarily "easy" missions. The thing was that most missions just didn't pay well and then you got the stuff like "deliver 10t of beer" you'd need to scrape off some freighter which would probably take hours to find, so I never bothered unless a team mate took pity and dropped them. But how often do you want to bother someone doing that for you?
The steadiest income streams were bounties. Mining could net you decent cash but was random (unless you map pixels from your screen which I never did, I need my eyes). From my experience it all was incredibly random, the routes that were lucrative were quickly farmed by the players telling each other via 3rd party apps, normal trade wasn't worth much and cargo spaces were not enough to do bulk trades, with bounties you got a jackpot when an Anaconda spawned, but usually you just got small fry for some couple 10K cr.
There was exact 1 worthy credit earner I stumbled across and that was at the time smuggling paid well. They all went to Robigo for some reason I never figured and I discovered a neat system by myself that spawned good paying missions. They still took some time to carry out and there was a risk. One time a pursuant Anaconda spawned right in front of my while I boosted my shieldless Cobra. Yeah they really didn't like it at FD when we earned cash.
After all that crap the game gave us I felt the smuggling was something I earned. It was "clever use of game mechanics" like the other "exploits" found by players and yielded surprisingly good gameplay instead of mindless repetitive grind.
Reflex doesn't have anything to do with whatever the physics, game loop, or even mesh update rate is and plenty of game have thoroughly decoupled all of these. Reflex is just a dynamic frame rate limiter to keep the renderer from fully saturating the GPU, thus keeping the game CPU limited and preventing any presented frames from being queued.
I'm a fan of good tutorials. I think it's pretty silly that anyone can get that Pilots Federation license while still being a complete beginner.
In a single player game, none at all.
In a multiplayer game with universal time and shared setting such consequences are hugely important balance considerations.
I've always assumed that most ships would spend most of their time in a rotating station or on the surface of some planet with some significant gravity. Most of them can't even stay in space for significant uninterrupted periods of time without shutting down most of their systems. I don't expect any of those coffee machines or cups to be used in micro gravity any more than I expect the more complex facilities on someone's motoryacht to be used while evading coast guard helicopters or weathering a typhoon...they are for the yacht parties, while anchored safely at the marina.
Don't need to be evenly matched for small variances in performance to skew the outcome significantly, just need that outcome to be decided by an appropriately narrow margin. Get in enough conflicts and the number of them decided by the skin of someone's teeth can be fairly frequent. A few examples I came across earlier while feeling nostalgic about those pre-Engineer days (not that Engineering eliminated close calls)...
This match would have ended eight minutes sooner if my FDL were ~2m/s slower:
Source: https://youtu.be/aKc1Mb53i1U?t=742
These two are fairly self explanatory:
Source: https://youtu.be/R2C_z-_3eMs?t=410
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd7hG8CTVg8&t=620s
These two are fairly self explanatory:
My CMDR has escaped, or prevailed, in fights with tiny slivers of hull, or only a few seconds of oxygen left, more times than I can count and has probably had even more close calls with fuel. He's taken more than a few escape pod rides by similarly narrow margins.
Besides, leaving anything on the table, or anything more to chance, when it's possible to go all the way, messes with my sense of immersion. I min max most anything I take even vaguely seriously in real life. I'm sure not leaving a whole 0.5% margin on my computers' CPU, GPU, or memory performance.
As for ship transfers, I never voted on the poll because I didn't want them at all. I liked the logistical gameplay enabled by having to move one's own ships and the introduction of transfers wiped out much of that. Not that I didn't adapt.
The cost per roll was the same (unless the blueprint needed cargo and many did), but for much of 2.1 materials dropped in quantities only a third of what they did later. Experimental effects were also only on ~10% of weapon rolls and there was never any guarantee of getting a good roll. On average, getting to a given grade probably took as much effort in the original system, and getting something distinctly above average was typically far more labor intensive.
The worst thing about the new system, IMO, was that they didn't forcibly convert old modules, so had to inflate bonuses to make anything created in the new system competitive with the best of the old stuff.
When long range smuggling missions first showed up, I was convinced they had to be a bug. The first (and only) stack I took doubled my CMDR's net worth and advanced him an entire trade rank and it was comically easy. If the police interdicted my Asp, I deployed weapons and shot them once so they wouldn't scan, then I waked out. I made a whole video on the thing and stuck it in a bug report thread (you should have seen the number of downvotes that video got).
I knew the game was on a downturn when it became clear this stuff was working as intended (well, except for the part about being able to abandon the missions and sell the goods back to the station without much consequence). Previously, most everything that smelled like an exploit to me was relatively quickly patched out (e.g. the more flagrant forms of seeking luxuries abuses), if not outright reversed (people buying expensive modules from Shinrarta and selling them for a profit in LFT 926). In hindsight, I was absolutely correctly and mid-2015 was when any real pretense of an economy died. By 2016, even though I had been religiously avoiding anything that looked exploity to my rather strict sensibilities, my CMDR was making more money than he could realistically spend with mundane A-B trade and bounty hunting. Then The Engineers was announced and I concluded that Frontier had abandoned the credit economy for the material one, probably because inflationary rewards kept most people happy, but they still wanted some kind of constraint on 'progression'.
You're not wrong. Then again - it was marketed to SP audience under the guise of a "solo mode". And it still is a way to avoid unwanted interaction. I've always said a game can't be both and yet here we are. Again.