Ok, so I've progressed reasonably well with my oldschool (keyboard+mouse) setup ... Broker and Trailblazer and just managed to tick over to combat Elite - HURRAH!
However, I've never engaged in PvP so feel like I've only really been playing half a game. NPCs melt like butter once you have a Vulture or better and there isn't really any challenge in PvE combat - it just becomes another grind (especially the part where we generate a good RES spawn).
So, I've decided to buy a HOTAS... just a cheapy Thrustmaster T Flight X, but something which should do the job and has only set me back about £35 (reboxed jobby from Amazon). Thinking is that this will cause me to relearn the whole flight model from scratch since the muscle memory I've built up will be useless. Obviously, the experience I have in general gameplay will be useful (in particular in PvE combat) but the mechanics of getting a ship in my sights will be restarted from newbie level again
I see this as a great opportunity to effectively reboot my game, albeit I want to keep my progress so far, so don't have any particular appetite to clear save. Instead, I'm thinking I'll dock my current ships (a mediocre Anaconda, a fairly well-equipped Vulture and a freshly acquired and empty Python hull with 16% discount) and buy either an Eagle or a Viper and start learning again. Obviously money will be less of an issue in terms of fitting these out: a single trade run in the Annie nets over 1mn credits on a good route, so it's really about learning how to use the HOTAS.
Any further thoughts on this - has anyone else done it? I think it should be quite a lot of fun going back to those early combat ships which I never really flew properly: I traded my way to my first million credits pretty much exclusively (bar I think one or two missions) so my first proper combat experience was actually in an Asp, quickly followed by a Vulture.
However, I've never engaged in PvP so feel like I've only really been playing half a game. NPCs melt like butter once you have a Vulture or better and there isn't really any challenge in PvE combat - it just becomes another grind (especially the part where we generate a good RES spawn).
So, I've decided to buy a HOTAS... just a cheapy Thrustmaster T Flight X, but something which should do the job and has only set me back about £35 (reboxed jobby from Amazon). Thinking is that this will cause me to relearn the whole flight model from scratch since the muscle memory I've built up will be useless. Obviously, the experience I have in general gameplay will be useful (in particular in PvE combat) but the mechanics of getting a ship in my sights will be restarted from newbie level again
I see this as a great opportunity to effectively reboot my game, albeit I want to keep my progress so far, so don't have any particular appetite to clear save. Instead, I'm thinking I'll dock my current ships (a mediocre Anaconda, a fairly well-equipped Vulture and a freshly acquired and empty Python hull with 16% discount) and buy either an Eagle or a Viper and start learning again. Obviously money will be less of an issue in terms of fitting these out: a single trade run in the Annie nets over 1mn credits on a good route, so it's really about learning how to use the HOTAS.
Any further thoughts on this - has anyone else done it? I think it should be quite a lot of fun going back to those early combat ships which I never really flew properly: I traded my way to my first million credits pretty much exclusively (bar I think one or two missions) so my first proper combat experience was actually in an Asp, quickly followed by a Vulture.
