Engineers Single player against land bases impossible?

So I am trying to do a mission for blue mafia (so I can get access to the engineer, so I can grind for materials, so I can grind the gamble for random upgrades). I need to get into a base and scan a data point. The problem is the air support above the base. First time around I decided to try to kill them with my anaconda before landing. I killed 3 ships but more kept warping in....ok....so I went back up to orbit and came back down. Infiltrated the base twice and scanned the data point...the alarm goes off and I can't get back to my ship before getting creamed by enemy ships.

Am I doing something terribly wrong? Is it now a requirement to go find wing mates to do a mission that pays 1 million?

Super fun.
 
What was the security reading of the base? Several people have found +++ bases too tough for single players in beta. Vindicator Jones site a good article on it here.
 
What was the security reading of the base? Several people have found +++ bases too tough for single players in beta. Vindicator Jones site a good article on it here.

It was a ++. I barely did a +++ last night by myself but the base wasn't infinite spawning ships. To be honest...unless there is some trick I don't know about, I'm not sure how a wingmate could have distracted the Anaconda, Eagle, and Federal Assault ship guarding the base for a long enough time for me to get in and out.
 
Same issue. Abandoned an assassination mission that required me to scan a comm array in a ++ base. I figured that I could do some surface air combat in my ship but had to run because the defenders where two Elite Vipers and 1 Elite Corvette. Seriously my shields were apparently paper made for them. Came back couple times, inside the base, my SRV was being creamed by Viper's rail guns and missiles. I couldn't even work my way towards the comm array because it was on a terrace and you had to do a lot of cornering and jumping to get there all that while being railed, missiled and turreted by the base defenses. The worst part was when I say f.u.ck it and ran with my SRV back to my ship and the Vipers stopped attacking the buggy and went towards my Anaconda, I think I actually got pale and started shivering when the shields went down and I was struggling to board and lift off just to have my power plant damaged and do micro management before being blown to pieces, got away with 8% hull. Oh, and the repairs exceeded the 1 million credits, and the mission reward was about 700k credits. I do not think those missions rewards are worth the hassle it takes to do them, if its even possible to do them actually.

After that I think I just turned the game off and did something else, was fun and frustrating at the same time, but heavily leaning to the frustrating area. Yes, it is Elite Dangerous, but it is a game, it should give me a chance to accomplish the things it says I can do.
 
Same issue. Abandoned an assassination mission that required me to scan a comm array in a ++ base. I figured that I could do some surface air combat in my ship but had to run because the defenders where two Elite Vipers and 1 Elite Corvette. Seriously my shields were apparently paper made for them. Came back couple times, inside the base, my SRV was being creamed by Viper's rail guns and missiles. I couldn't even work my way towards the comm array because it was on a terrace and you had to do a lot of cornering and jumping to get there all that while being railed, missiled and turreted by the base defenses. The worst part was when I say f.u.ck it and ran with my SRV back to my ship and the Vipers stopped attacking the buggy and went towards my Anaconda, I think I actually got pale and started shivering when the shields went down and I was struggling to board and lift off just to have my power plant damaged and do micro management before being blown to pieces, got away with 8% hull. Oh, and the repairs exceeded the 1 million credits, and the mission reward was about 700k credits. I do not think those missions rewards are worth the hassle it takes to do them, if its even possible to do them actually.

After that I think I just turned the game off and did something else, was fun and frustrating at the same time, but heavily leaning to the frustrating area. Yes, it is Elite Dangerous, but it is a game, it should give me a chance to accomplish the things it says I can do.

I feel your pain. I wasted so much time accomplishing nothing. Got irritated and logged off.
 
After that I think I just turned the game off and did something else, was fun and frustrating at the same time, but heavily leaning to the frustrating area. Yes, it is Elite Dangerous, but it is a game, it should give me a chance to accomplish the things it says I can do.

It was already difficult in 2.0, but now...

Perhaps I'm missing something though.
Or perhaps I just should accept that those missions are not for a lone CMDr, but that would make me feel a bit locked out from certain content as I can not have NPC wingmen.
Or perhaps when FPA gets implemented we get a chance to sneak in on foot :). But FPA will take a while to arrive.

ED should perhaps make a tutorial vid about those.

A PROPOSAL:
I would love it if FD added some additional tricks, mechanisms for soloists like me to solve the heavily guarded bases.
Personally I would love it if there was some remote hacking module in the game that enabled me to shut down some defense mechanisms, or even turn them against the owner.
I think that would be so cool.
It could be an expensive module. It might even be a module forbidden for private use.
 
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What I think will happen is that FD will smooth the challenge curve quite a bit and easy several activities.
As a game it needs to be accessible to a wide kind of players, not just the hardcore or competitive ones.

So wait and see I suppose.
 
the simplest possible way would be just to communicate it to the players - "cmdr, to accomplish this mission you'll probably need a fellow cmdr." easy as that. i love E:D but it struggles to communicate things properly (maybe because it's so huge and its hard to design good user experience which works well on pc and console). call me an idiot, but at first I asked myself what those "+++" actually mean (didn't bother with base attacks before 2.1) and needed to google it.
 
I think OP, you need to drive faster, and don't forget, you can heal the SRV at any moment if you have the right materials, even while driving full throttle away from the base.
 
I think OP, you need to drive faster, and don't forget, you can heal the SRV at any moment if you have the right materials, even while driving full throttle away from the base.

Drive faster? The ships stay right on you and pummel you.

Heal? Ok...good luck navigating the menus to do so while 3 ships are ruining you as you "drive faster"

Thanks for the killer advice though good sir.
 
I tried one of these in the Beta and got my ass handed to me. What makes it even harder is that you can't really use your ship to assault the base anymore, since FD in their wisdom have made ground targets virtually impervious to ship weapons. And for Gods sake don't even think of colliding with a Skimmer in your ship....its almost fatal. And even if they weren't so OP you can't target them with your ships sensors anyway. Its probably the worst change in the whole update TBH. Its flawed thinking on FD's part though. They believe that by making your ship basically useless against ground targets that it will force you to use the SRV. In reality all it does is stop people from ever doing these missions unless they have 3 or 4 wingmen. The rewards are just not worth the risk.
 
I did this one in Beta but it was hard even then.

There was an Eagle on the landing pad which made a tough fight for my Explorer Class 3 shielded Asp. Once that died of old age I parked just outside the perimeter of the base in a straight line from the central "avenue". I managed to use the SRV to take out all the ground turrets slowly and with a repair, then had to try and figure out how to get close enough to the Ops generator to turn it off, eventually doing a leap of faith off the top of the landing pad as there was a power shield over the driveway.

As soon as the scan finished all hell broke loose and it was skimmer city. Pegged it back to the Asp which acted as a handy shield, managed to do a 17 point reverse into a parking space to get on board and then blasted out of there with skimmers raking my shields.
If there had been more aerial support I would've been toast!
 
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