So...I bought the game, underwhelmed by mining, initial difficulty piloting the ship with mouse and keyboard, like the idea of exploration, seemed like an interesting concept although found it tough with the starting scanner. I found it really hard to use the 'spot the moving star like object' technique, although I did find one star doing this - and found out it pays pretty poorly. Iv'e just made my first 100k bounty hunting (hanging around an belt of asteroids where two enforcement ships kindly identified a never ending stream of AI dudes that I could 'help' kill), and thats where I am. All SOLO, although will prolly move to open now I can at least use the basic controls.
I was late to this thread and you'd already bought the game by the time I caught up, but what I was going to say is that where
ED really shines is in the way the player interacts with his ship. In that regard it's more like a flight simulator than a traditional space game. Unfortunately making the most of this means investing in extra peripherals, all of which push up the cost. I would normally recommend people at least try a HOTAS joystick and throttle, followed by some sort of head tracker. The difference it makes is unbelievable, but of course even the cheapest joysticks and DIY head trackers add some cost to the game. Given that cost seemed to be a priority I would have advised waiting until you could afford peripherals that would really make the game shine, but now you have it...
If you're going to stick with mouse and keyboard, take a look at some of the tutorial videos on YouTube and consider learning to fly with Flight Assist off. It's bloody difficult (I gave up and went back to the comfort of HOTAS/FAON) but if you can get the hang of it as some of the top pilots have, it'll definitely give you the edge in manoeuvring and combat.
The basic discovery scanner is, as you've found out, not a great way to make credits. It's more about filling in the gaps in your own galactic map than exploring for profit. If you can afford to upgrade to the intermediate scanner or beyond then the ROI starts to increase but it's still a bit of a grind and really only practical if you're going to explore the fringe and/or do long trade runs through unexplored systems whose data you can sell when you get to where you're going. If you're going to spend a lot of time in unexplored systems, and if you have credits to spare, it's also worth fitting a surface scanner. They are madly expensive but they do add a lot of value to the data you collect, and since there doesn't appear to be any depreciation in the
ED universe you can sell it again once you get somewhere where exploration isn't going to be a priority any more. I rather enjoyed my stint as an explorer (got to the rank of Scout simply by scanning everything I could while flying long routes between the Empire and Federation, or while trading rare goods) but I wouldn't want to make a permanent career out of it.
As many other posts will testify, the real money is to be made in trading but only once you have a large enough ship and enough money for seed capital and insurance. Once you have those three sorted the money will start to roll in. The most
fun is, IMO, in bounty hunting and mission running for the various factions. You can have multiple hunter-killer and collection missions on the go at the same time, scoop any spare goodies that are left lying around at Unidentified Signal Sources and sell them at black markets. You won't make as much money as a trader but you should make enough to cover ammo costs and the occasional upgrade, and have fun doing it.
If you get really good at combat, there are always the war zones. And given the way the galaxy is coming apart at its political seams it looks as though there will be more and more of those to choose from.
