was the same in EII Frontier...always avoid stations around secondary stars in binary/trinary systems.
Supercruise is effectively comparable to 3x orders time acceleration in FE2, wherein to get anything done you'd normally be using the full 5x orders acceleration.
Go fire up an old FE2 copy now, or Pioneer - it's at least two orders faster over the same distances.
This translates to a massive time penalty when playing ED. If FE2 had been half the waiting game ED is, i'd've given up on it in no time...
This weekend i spent my first full-on attempt to play ED - about 7-8 hours in all. Trading, i netted about 700 credits in that time. Made another 15 grand doing a fraught special mineral delivery in which i had to search half a dozen systems just to find the stuff, then strip my freagle of all weapons and shields in order to buy it.
This is much,
much slower going than previous games.. for the greater part of that 7-8 hours play, i was completely inactive and literally unengaged by the game.
The only way i managed to make such marathon bouts of inactivity bearable was to wire a line-in from my telly to my sound card, so i could watch TV and movies while waiting for the oportunity to actually do anything in-game.
Not only were FE2 and FFE orders of magnitude faster to play, but there was more to do during the long slogs - first of all you had autopilot to take the reigns for you, then you could switch to external view and watch the system slip by in nice rotating panning shots as the lighting model played out the colours of the starlight across your hull. You could switch to a 3D system map and look around for other ship activities, check for pirate clusters and whether they were closing on you, check out the view of the station you were heading towards, see what you were going to find when you got there - what transports or bulk carriers were parked outside... you could even see other ships coming and going from the station entrance - perhaps ones you were interested in like contract targets, or police vipers alighting... In FFE you also had the latest edition of any subscribed journals or news headlines to catch up on.
So in summary you had a lot more to do, during much reduced flight times, in previous versions of the game.
Binary, ternary, quaternary, quintuple and sextuple systems could all be traversed within 5 minutes or so. Nothing like the sometimes 15-20 minutes or more required for mere unary systems in ED.
It's MUCH too slow, and there's MUCH too little 'game' to engage the player during these slogs. 20 minutes of "left a bit, up a bit" is no job for the likes of an Elite pilot. You'd stick a monkey on it - an autopilot, or hired hand. Minimum wage stuff. Some low-aspirations farm hand from the frontier systems. Even Han Solo had a Wookie - you think he'd sit there staring catatonically transfixed at a small dot while making tiny incremental adjustments to the yoke? No, he be battling hostile boarders, stowing fugitives, plotting a scenic route around the busier flightlanes, or playing that hologram battle-chess console down in the galley.
Speaking of which: grab yourself a stop watch, egg-timer or chess clock, and log how much of your 'play' time is actually spent doing ABSOLUTELY SWEET FUDGE-ALL while glued helplessly to that little wavering dot on the horizon. Tot that up over a few days.. and then ask yourself;
is this really how you envisaged yourself heroically battling out the forces of good and evil in an epic swashbuckling renaissance of lost teenage valour? Where's the sense of achievement? This is worse than watching paint dry - at least with modern paints you could be applying a second coat after 15 minutes.
Final word - for 90% of your flight time that pricey HOTAS isn't doing anything a mouse can't handle.
This isn't what we signed up for!
