Returning player, suggestions

Felix DiCestria

Felix DiCestria
Ian Doncaster said:
Though, it is only relatively recently that Frontier have added meaningful possibilities for something to happen to you at the intermediate systems of a multi-hop trip you have fuel for. Previously if you were just charging the next jump on your route as soon as you arrived, the chances of anything being able to interfere with you or be spotted by you was pretty remote; it's only with the Thargoid War that mid-way events have become more common (and then only in certain circumstances)
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That's not entirely accurate.
Pre-carrier hauling station repair commodities in the aftermath of an incursion would likely attract NPC interdiction on the run out to the nebulae.
 

PogaZeus

PogaZeus
I am a returning player myself, luckily I had made quite a few credits in game in the past, I had done mining when Low temp diamonds were making over 1mil per diamond in 2020.

I have tried to have a go at all aspects of the game, in a small amount of time without the requirement of a fleet carrier or higher ranked imperial/federation ships like the cutter/corvette or whatever. At the time of writing this my steam says I have 400 hours of in game time (and some of that was by mistake, I left the launcher open, most of it was on Horizons a long time ago).

My tips to speed things up are simple though

1. Get a ship with a large jump range (Hauler, ASP Explorer etc) engineer the FSD as much as you can. That will help you get around quickly. Transfer required ships when you get far away and log off, come back on when your required ship is where you need it.

2. Don't keep all your ships in 1 place, use a ship to jump around^ keep the ship you need in the systems you need them in (bounty hunting ships for instance, leave it in a station in a system which offers missions where you find res sites).

3. Unlock and use Jameson Memorial - use it to buy ships and modules (it has most in the game at 10% discount).

4. Use websites as tools to help you find what you need quicker, don't waste time. You can make loads of money at the moment in exobiology, and you can set route planners where the distance to the planet is short (reducing the time to get to the planet, scan, land and find life). When you land in a system (stop) and look at the distances (or system map) to find the correct planet without having to fly around pointlessly.

I made an AX (anti xeno) ship and I left it in a system next to another system in Thargoid conflict, and I used my explorer to get to it, then I'd jump into a conflict system (that I found on a 3rd party website) and I used the DSS (discovery scanner full scanner thing when I get into the system) to quickly tune non-human signals or ax combat signatures. I would pickup an escape pod on purpose so that hunters hyperdicted me every 2 minutes and then I'd kill the hunters by giving them hell :) before returning to repair and finish for the day. It speeds things up a lot.
 

MVBanks

MVBanks
Navigare Necesse Est said:
Not happening, player time is a measure of success for the company and all the little time eaters are there deliberately: To inflate the time players spend in the MP.
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But as we know, they once introduced Fleet Carriers into the game, which brought us a significant acceleration of the game and relief in some activities.
So maybe something similar can happen again.
I don't believe they will install something that requires a lot of time and effort (and money), although I have to say that I like the ideas Ian presented above. (activities in SC).
Fdev have other solutions available, faster and cheaper, eg to give us something like a Thargoid SC booster/stabilizer, similar to how there is a Guardian FSD booster.
With such a module, we would have a chance to avoid thargoid Hyper/Interdictions (but not with every ship), but it could also give a significant speedup/slowdown in SC.
Obviously the Thargoids are very advanced in space travel technologies, so it would be time to learn or steal from them.
 

aRJay

aRJay
Greasetrap42 said:
Possibly the OP's actual criticism is the quantities of time the player must sit idle while waiting.

I do not agree with simply eliminating travel time. Or fast travel. I am an advocate of changing the game so the player can be doing something engaging during travel rather than watching TV or task swapping to something else.

When entering/exiting supercruise, snapping menus & maps closed is awful, making doing anything ingame while waiting for the jump sequence frustrating. And locking players out of any game activity while onbaord a fleet carrier during the jump sequence is terrible.

The game should be capable of loading the next instance while letting the player do something. And give players something to do during supercruise.
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Yes but…

I suspect the trouble with implementing this is the fact that we are running this games on everything from potatoes to Commander Thrusts third generation quantum desktop machine.

Ian Doncaster said:
Agreed. All it needs, I think - and I say "all", it's not going to be a small thing to code - is the ability to access some station services remotely.
- view market prices before you dock, maybe change course to another station if those look better (all previous Elite games had this ability once you'd got in-system)
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Those would be the standalone single player games with no internet connection and the ability to speed up time. It was probably much simpler back then.

Ian Doncaster said:
- hand-in missions which don't require physical presence (most of the combat ones, some of the exploration ones, quite a few of the on-foot ones)
- take missions which don't require physical presence (the above, some more of the on-foot ones, plus any trade mission with a depot feature)
- browse the other missions on offer but not take them
- view local station news (not that there's usually a lot there, but still, it's something to read)
- browse but not use outfitting and shipyard
- set up ship and module transfers to a station
- potentially more controversial but you can already do these without any in-system risk by using Apex shutles: hand in bounty vouchers, combat bonds, exploration data ... or pay fines or use IF services to clear bounties

Some of these could require a particular reputation level with the station controller or the mission giver, all should of course be unavailable at Hostile.
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They all seem reasonable but I feel they are very close to the top of a slippery slope.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
aRJay said:
Those would be the standalone single player games with no internet connection and the ability to speed up time. It was probably much simpler back then.
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We can already view some remote market prices - not even from the same system - via the galaxy map or the market screens at other stations. You can use your carrier admin tools in flight to view and configure the market on your carrier wherever it is. There are certainly lots of limitations introduced by the multiplayer environment but "it's not possible to receive price data from a station you're not docked at" is not one of them.

Now, certainly, I'll accept "given the amount of effort it takes Frontier to get the game to do anything compared with doing it in singleplayer" the chances of a nice-to-have feature like this which would require substantial interface work ever getting close to the top of the pile is nil. But the same is true of them fixing the Colonia Bridge local news articles to actually include the whole bridge.

aRJay said:
They all seem reasonable but I feel they are very close to the top of a slippery slope.
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That's fine - between Fleet Carriers and Apex and so on the game is several miles down that slope and accelerating. Climbing back up to the top to add a few more things that were missed on the way down shouldn't cause any further problems.
 

Hellrider

H
PogaZeus said:
3. Unlock and use Jameson Memorial - use it to buy ships and modules (it has most in the game at 10% discount).
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Before it- use brestla.
Maybe it has more expensive modules, but it isn't high price for all ships and modules without jameson permit

PogaZeus said:
4. Use websites as tools to help you find what you need quicker, don't waste time. You can make loads of money at the moment in exobiology, and you can set route planners where the distance to the planet is short (reducing the time to get to the planet, scan, land and find life). When you land in a system (stop) and look at the distances (or system map) to find the correct planet without having to fly around pointlessly.
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Depends what is more important, grind or fun. Personally I noticed something interesting in last days.
If I don't look at inara for whole time even trade is much more interesting with finding personal spots, looking at market info, galaxy mapy or even checking avaliable commodities through system map (there is no better thing, that completing stack of 20 trade missions, for 13 different commodities with using this one planetary extraction port which you found with this trick, with inara probably I would end with doing it with 5 different markets in space).
With inara it is just brainkilling A-B routes with ocassionally "commodity X, max stock, close distance".
 
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