because you have seen the AI fight don't you?
Why does my 34th century spaceship have no autopilot OR how do you accept the hyperjump grind?
- Thread starter sc_neo
- Start date
Is that in Solo, Open or PG?
AI might deem it better not to fight at all thereby AI could be considered to be more intelligent that human beings.
Less fun though.
Why don't you question whether we are still playing games in the 34th century at all? I could imagine that games aren't played anymore in a way we are used to but injected with a highly compressed time signature. Imagine: the whole experience of 50 hours game time compressed in 30 milliseconds! No more grind, never wasting any more time. Wouldn't that be awesome? And productive?
Oh I don't know, all of that depends on two things:
(1) How big is the needle; and
(2) Where does the injection occur?
After 4 years of playing I ponder about lack of autopilot every time I log in, does not make much sense to me but hey, its FD design decision and since we cant mod the game we just have to live with it.
*if ED goes offline and open for modding I promise you Elite AP mod.
If you want to play a game that isn't Elite, play a game that isn't Elite.
The argument that 500 cycles of jump-turn-jump-turn... to get somewhere far away is tedious is the WHOLE point, it gives the galaxy a sense of size - also long distance travel is dull. The argument that "if you don't want to do it don't" is valid, because you don't have to travel long distances to play elite - you can do everything within a small cluster of systems single jumps apart. Plus what are you going to do while the autopilot is flying your ship? You'd miss pressing J and turning after a while...
Sure it could be made more interesting - random events for you to deal with (& not just ending up frying between binary pairs), but I don't think an autopilot is the way to go...
Sure it could be made more interesting - random events for you to deal with (& not just ending up frying between binary pairs), but I don't think an autopilot is the way to go...
What the hell would you know, you haven't played the game since 2.1 dropped, you are totally irrelevant to any discussions on the current status of the game
Pls don't remind me of the mosntrosity that was 2.1. It always generates a bad thought about ED and we don't want that if we wanted to improve on our Horizon.Ever explored or traveled to a distinct stellar formation in ED? Like a nebula? Or a stellar constellation? Did you notice the change of perspectives when closing? The you drop into the next system, your target out of sight again. You do the busywork and then continue your observation as you close in or pass by?
Ever heard of that guy trying to go planetside to space station in a SRV? Of the people traveling by supercuise to the next star, then having to do the loading screen?
ED's potential of seamlessness doesn't fully get used. I suspect technical issues rather than gameplay ones. But that glimpse of how the whole thing might come together in a seamlesser mode of travel between the stars is a potential strong point of the engine and I'd rather see that improved on than expecting my journeys chopped into a thousand repetitive bits should I ever try the game again.
Ever explored or traveled to a distinct stellar formation in ED? Like a nebula? Or a stellar constellation? Did you notice the change of perspectives when closing? The you drop into the next system, your target out of sight again. You do the busywork and then continue your observation as you close in or pass by?
Ever heard of that guy trying to go planetside to space station in a SRV? Of the people traveling by supercuise to the next star, then having to do the loading screen?
ED's potential of seamlessness doesn't fully get used. I suspect technical issues rather than gameplay ones. But that glimpse of how the whole thing might come together in a seamlesser mode of travel between the stars is a potential strong point of the engine and I'd rather see that improved on than expecting my journeys chopped into a thousand repetitive bits should I ever try the game again.
Anything you say is still totally irrelevant. And going by the tone of your posts, whatever FD do to improve the game, whatever new features they release won't bring you back into the game as all you do is look for faults. Goodbye!
wrong.
Right.
Left
You take the corridor to the left, the constant groaning noise gets louder and you can smell the sharp tang of salt.
As usually, you have absolutely no clue of what you are saying.
Wrong.
Right.
That way is blocked by a discarded teddy.
The salt is strong with you but I don't mind for I carry my own salinity, brother. That's why I keep bleesing these threads with my exalted presence - we are made from the same earth. You the Natrium - I the Chloride. We are the spice to the dish, without me your salt is bitter - only I can make it whole, because they who do not look for faults shall never improve.
Exactly; ED isn't Elite.
Dementedly nudging a whacking great HOTAS up-a-bit, left-a-bit for hours on end is the inverse of leet = lame.
Best you can do in ED is maybe roll 180° and try mix it up with some down-a-bit, right-a-bit. Bit of variety.
Or else just accept ED for what it is - flawed, but not-elite - and go play FFED3D instead if you're ready to get real.
Interplanetary travel's much more engaging in the previous two games. You can simply fall back on autopilot to take the wookie work out of flying the ship, but equally, you can use it in more interactive ways..
For example:
- ships in the previous games have 'momentum' (their mass, times their velocity), which means the faster they go, the more time and effort is required to change headings.
Hence you can 'spoof' a course by simply flying towards some other target - building up tangential momentum to your actual intended target - before selecting your real target, and thus following a spiralling trajectory into your destination.
You don't need autopilot to do this, but it takes all the effort away, allowing you to make a creative, intelligent piloting decision on the fly and immediately execute that strategy.
Because NPC's in the previous games are persistent (spawned with the system itself when you hyperspaced, not injected later), interdictions are not random encounters - any ship that's going to try to intercept you has to actually fly through space to get to you...
Hence spoofing your destination like this ends up throwing potentially-large numbers of would-be attackers into a spiralling trajectory - it's very fuel-intensive, and there's no way of knowing what your actual destination is until you're much closer to it. You end up flinging your tail of attackers into an ever-tightening curve, in which only the smaller, faster ships have a chance of maintaining pursuit, provided they have the fuel range..
- another creative use i was playing with the other night: if you can disable your thrusters / empty your tanks, then you can select an AP target whilst in orbit; this causes the ship to hold a given direction, slowly rotating the ship in sync with the planet / star's rotation like a gear wheel, instead of just pointing in whatever aimless direction. This in turn allows you to play with different persectives from the various internal / external cam views, to watch novel tracking / panning shots you wouldn't ordinarily get to see.
Arguably, this is one thing Pioneer actually improves upon, with its 'hold retrograde / prograde' AP functions - a most-basic AP feature than any real ship would have as standard. Logically, attitude / azimut would be maintained by precessional torques applied to tilting gyros, rather than using gas thrusts, so costs no extra energy. Yet ED has almost no AP controls at all, aside from
And this is the point - flight in ED is a chore because it's constrained to one particular singular player function with precious little room for creativity, spontaneity, tactics, skill or inspiration.
Travel in ED forces the player through a narrowing cone of gaming options, where the previous games opened up emergent possibilities. There's just no getting away from it - 'spaceflight' (the axial premise of the whole game) in ED devolves to that interminable, intractable 'up a bit, left a bit' thumbscrew of a task. Mandatory. Because space is big?
Space was always big, but flight in FE2 and FFE is creative, fun and engaging. That's the standard for Elite.