After achieving my original-flavour Elite goal the other day, I've now turned my attention back to its sequel. My current game started last year after being inspired by Isinona's FE2 videos to try Engines Off flight - like many others when I first played FE2 back in '93 I was doing combat all wrong 
So for a few months I tweaked my play style and ship until I was fairly happy - I'd stick to a Cobra III like the original, and eventually settled on a 1MW beam laser as being the closest to the original game "Military Laser" - 5MW pulse lasers just made unshielded things pop in one shot but were not quick enough to take down the shields on ships like the Imp Courier - higher power beam lasers again made things too point'n'click, so the 1MW beam became the happy medium. Using the "controls mod" to add lateral thrusters gave me almost FAoff style control, so actual flying and dogfighting became much more fun.
Though I was enjoying it much more, there was still some je ne sais quoi missing from the combat - and it suddenly clicked when rewatching one of Isinona's vids a couple of months ago: they don't use the mouse when flying. I was still whipping my ships around quicksharp like I had Level 8 Engineered Thrusters with inertialess experimental effect. Thankfully, I'd recently purchased a Bluetooth gamepad to use with my iPad games, so I was able to use the key-mapper function in DOSbox to put the keyboard flight controls onto it, along with a few other most-used keys:
...and although combat takes a bit longer now, it feels much more like original Elite and more importantly, I'm enjoying it
Source: https://youtu.be/SO1VsTNGKcA
So for a few months I tweaked my play style and ship until I was fairly happy - I'd stick to a Cobra III like the original, and eventually settled on a 1MW beam laser as being the closest to the original game "Military Laser" - 5MW pulse lasers just made unshielded things pop in one shot but were not quick enough to take down the shields on ships like the Imp Courier - higher power beam lasers again made things too point'n'click, so the 1MW beam became the happy medium. Using the "controls mod" to add lateral thrusters gave me almost FAoff style control, so actual flying and dogfighting became much more fun.
Though I was enjoying it much more, there was still some je ne sais quoi missing from the combat - and it suddenly clicked when rewatching one of Isinona's vids a couple of months ago: they don't use the mouse when flying. I was still whipping my ships around quicksharp like I had Level 8 Engineered Thrusters with inertialess experimental effect. Thankfully, I'd recently purchased a Bluetooth gamepad to use with my iPad games, so I was able to use the key-mapper function in DOSbox to put the keyboard flight controls onto it, along with a few other most-used keys:
...and although combat takes a bit longer now, it feels much more like original Elite and more importantly, I'm enjoying it
) though recently I’ve been doing Fed Mil missions with the aim of eventually accessing the photo & bombing stuff which I never did back in the day. I reached “Dangerous” a couple of weeks ago and have just been promoted “Sergeant” - I’ve quite a bit further to go!
