Many players rush to get to the "end" of the game (big ships, engineering, etc), not realizing the best fun is found at the beginning.
While everyone is fretting about fleet carriers, I'm ...
- Thread starter Old Duck
- Start date
I love the pants off my Corvette, but half the time I'm back in the vulture.
I build my Corvette with weight in mind.
If I dump prismatics and armor all over, it does become a tad slow.
Sticking with bi-weave, max resistance, which is just fine for pve, and the dirty drives it almost flies like a Krait and my c4 fixed beams cooks most things.
As for playing it took me about four months or so to get a conda.
And since horizons came out it's been focused on having fun.
And I spent many a session just jumping a buggy off mountains.
Or driving hundreds of km's across a surface. The sense of exploration from that is quite pleasing and a chasm becomes a real challenge when you set down a rule that you can't fly over it.
I build my Corvette with weight in mind.
If I dump prismatics and armor all over, it does become a tad slow.
Sticking with bi-weave, max resistance, which is just fine for pve, and the dirty drives it almost flies like a Krait and my c4 fixed beams cooks most things.
As for playing it took me about four months or so to get a conda.
And since horizons came out it's been focused on having fun.
And I spent many a session just jumping a buggy off mountains.
Or driving hundreds of km's across a surface. The sense of exploration from that is quite pleasing and a chasm becomes a real challenge when you set down a rule that you can't fly over it.
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Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
That is indeed possible. I can understand how immersion-wise some players that favor realism may prefer you had to be at the carrier to manage things, but the fact you do not need to (at least as of today) is great for gameplay imo.
Edit: Alas, you still need to send your FC to an admin port to resupply etc which is a bit more controversial.
As I said elsewhere, I actually don't mind this "remote control". Tim Cook doesn't need to travel to his factories in China in order to control what they do, nor does an Admiral need to be on the bridge of a carrier group in order to move those ships across the globe. We are the CEO / Admiral of a fleet carrier, which IIRC has its own captain. I'm totally cool with this.
I agree with this, though I feel like FDev is somewhat to blame here.
I play a lot of space sims; it's just my niche. Just in Egosoft's X series alone (x2, x3, x rebirth, x4, etc) I've logged more than 3,000 gameplay hours combined, and that doesn't include all the other games like ED. And if there's one thing I've realized: the small ships are just more fun.
I think a lot of us grew up watching the same shows (Star Trek, Babylon 5, BSG, etc) and imagined commanding a big star ship because it looked so enjoyable. Then we got space sims and realized that for the shows to be enjoyable, they'd have to cut out all the scenes where the crew is faffing about on the bridge dying of boredom because big ships are gigantic, slow and boring. I went from dreaming of being the captain of a big ship to realizing I'd really want to be the chief engineer, or maybe a pilot, just to have something to do on the regular lol.
Space sims are the same thing. The small ships are infinitely more fun to fly and fight in, but FDev didn't do like other games and give them a viability beyond early game. The ships in Elite are logical "steps up", a vertical progression, rather than a horizontal or diagonal progression. EVE, IMO, did this right: small ships are fast and nimble while large hulking ships are durable and strong. A small ship can pick a fight with a big ship and actually survive the encounter, even if it's weapons can't even pop the shields, because it's just so damn fast. But in ED? The big ship is barely a step or two behind the little one in speed, and pops it like it balloon.
There's no value, at all, in flying a smaller ship in this game. So for that reason, I can definitely relate to players wanting to go big or go home.
Still making friends, I see.
This is what trolling looks like
I'm not here to make friends, I'm not a particularly social person. I'm not here for abuse either though.
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I've got a billion credits and no interest in FCs, so I don't need "value" outside of enjoying the game. I earned much of that billion credits mining LTDs in a medium Krait Phantom with only 96 tons of cargo space, and I also earned a small percentage of those credits pirating other players using my small DOLPHIN, which IMO is the best ring pirate ship in the game. The only time I fly a truly large ship (the Type-7 doesn't count) is my Type-9 when moving lots of cargo achieves some bigger goal, like achieving a community goal or flipping BGS. Thankfully the T9 is the one large ship I can visualize flying solo, for reasons previously mentioned.
What do you define as "value"
i can see usefulness of small ships, a vulture with twin frag cannons is quite useful.
Also would you relate fun as a value?
Totally agree, to me ship classes should 'generally' be a bit like rock, paper, scissors, like in the game Homeworld. Fighters beat capital ships, Capital ships beat Corvette ships and corvettes beat fighters. Problem with this game that there's no capital ship classes (that are playable)
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Do not necessarily disagree with all that you said but just wanted to highlight that...
Since moving the carrier is as costly as it is, I would want to scout locations ahead of time. We are talking at least 50 mil or so for a kylie.
So yeah I'd go out, in an explorer and find a few belts with good stuff in them, then summon the carrier to me.
Still two jumps in a carrier takes three hours.
1 hour spoolup, spooldown, spoolup again.
So three jumps become 5 hours.
Even in a 30ly Corvette I can go pretty far in 5 hours.
So yeah I'd go out, in an explorer and find a few belts with good stuff in them, then summon the carrier to me.
Still two jumps in a carrier takes three hours.
1 hour spoolup, spooldown, spoolup again.
So three jumps become 5 hours.
Even in a 30ly Corvette I can go pretty far in 5 hours.
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Is there a fleet carrier arrival animation?
If we're talking combat, I've defeated players in medium and large ships using my Eagle and Dolphin. And as for PvE, the Vulture was my favorite combat ship for everything until I experienced it in VR and sold it shortly after
If we are talking G5 engineered meta ships, then it's much harder for small ships to compete, but only noobs use metas
A Cmdr after my own heart!
While everyone is fretting about fleet carriers, I'm ......
Eating rebuys! (I got bored of mining
)Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
I can agree with the general sentiment, but properly engineered small ships are next to unkillable by cutters and such. Gankers dont bother attacking a courier by a decent pilot; that thing is tiny and very fast (so annoying to hit with fixed weapons) and can use chaff and weapon specials to annoy gimbals to no end.
I don't really include FCs in my statement because I view them more as flying structures; capital ships vs the Corvette class and smaller that we otherwise fly.
But case in point: the Krait is still a pretty big ship; realistically it is much larger than I'd be trying to buy for myself if I were some dude living in space. If the T9/T10 are semi-trucks, the Krait would be an F350. Me? I'm a F150/Tundra kinda guy, and something the size of the T6 or Keelback is right up my alley. Not too big, not too small. But the reality is that they bring absolutely nothing to the table except cheapness; in fact, even the ultra small and light ships like the Imperial Courier, which by all rights should be an untouchable harasser of all things large, is still just a step or two in speed above my Krait and could easily be destroyed by it.
That's really my point; while it doesn't feel like you need value in your ships, if tomorrow you were suddenly limited to only flying a Cobra forever while everyone else flew bigger ships, I wonder what upsides you'd be able to find to the situation. The Cobra brings no benefits to the table to offset the fact that the Krait is simply better in almost every way.
Most other games don't do this, though. There is usually at least some benefit to flying a smaller ship over a larger one; something to make that gameplay style feel valuable. But in ED, the entire point of a smaller ship is to make money to get a bigger one, until you finally get the largest classes of ships. The only real time that a smaller ship makes sense is going from Python/Krait to Conda/Cutter, because of outpost landing. Anything smaller than those? Ain't worth your time.
wish i could see youtube right now, proxy blocked.