I haven’t played since the early VO mining days, but I used to hunt griefers almost exclusively. Tricked out the Mur-der-Lance and cloaked her in the Black Friday paintjob to run deadly dark. It was great fun for a while and even made Elite during that stint (never got the trio, though). Thing is, their numbers just seemed to grow and admins ultimately did fuck all about it. C’est la guerre, I guess.
Well, for one, griefers tend to be stupid easy to bait, and pretty shit at keeping up with new techniques (at the time) for ships they’re not interested in. Generally, they gravitate toward simple min/max and seem to lack the attention span to delve into various overclocking/tuning of modules that advanced (and vastly superior) builds require.
I had been running the ol’ girl in dogfights here and there, but I’d not yet had a compelling reason to train to use the Plasma Cannon as her Huge hardpoint until that moment I decided to answer the call on the Silverback forums and others for griefer/ganker/camper killers. Now, the Fer-de-Lance has always been known for her slippery handling, and her fans adapted their piloting to compensate if not outright benefit from it. Add to this an overclocked engine, bleeding edge cooling system, and a boost with such unbridled power that it could handily outpace any other ship in the ‘verse and warp out before they could regain lock.
Thing is, that was just the bait.
She also, during this eyelid-peeling boost, could yaw like butter and with just the right touch, face fully backwards at that blinding speed. Now, as I’d said before, the average noob-hasslin’ assclown is only interested in quick bullying and even quicker satisfaction, so they’re not the sort to let an easy target go un-exploded and that goes double if you bruise their pride in the process. So. With this in mind, I’d rattle their cage a bit, take some hits and make it look then like I was running scared. Jackrabbit ahead and they’d boost right in behind me, lining up a shot to take me out… when, without warning, the engine tails’d disappear (I’d cut power, drifting on boost momentum) and the all-black ship was silently, invisibly staring right down their barrels as they sped at top-speed after me. In that frozen second, the only way to see my ship was by the stars it occluded behind it, so I was functionally invisible, and previous few of these chucklefucks could fly by instrumentation only. To them, I just blinked out.
That’s when I’d fire a single plasma ball the size of a small bus, fiery purple white and racing toward them faster than thought. Outside of this maneuver, the weapon was known to be extremely inefficient and slow, but that only made its appearance here all the more surprising — and perfect. They didn’t have any idea how to dodge it, or even what it was. Before they could button spam, their ships were absolutely obliterated (a direct hit, nose to tail did some of the highest damage in the game at the time, and could nearly one-shot any similarly-sized ship, and even cripple a Conda), or if they’d planned a little better and kitted or with some armor, etc., then their ships’ systems were at least offline from the blast and I’d mop up as they spun lifeless in the void right in front of me.
Not sure about why all the dwarfs, hopefully it’s realistic. But you can filter star types and only use scoopable ones for your routes. You want KGB FOAM types. That’s a handy acronym.
If I manually plot a route, I can do that. Can I filter them out when using the automatic route plotting? My destination is almost 2000ly away. It would take ages to manually plot!
Edit: NVM I see now. There’s an “apply filter to route” option way at the bottom I didn’t see at first. 🤣 This is a big help.
Oh yeah. But now I am looking into this “Neutron Highway” a friend on Discord mentioned. I have a trip of just under 1400 jumps ahead of me, and since I know the game doesn’t have wormholes I am willing to do anything to get there faster. I should have checked the destination before I agreed to the fare, but the dude was paying so much I just accepted it lol
I haven’t played ED since the first person expack dropped. Really enjoyed it back then. Worth checking it out again? Has there been content releases? Heard the first person expack was pretty mixed.
Gameplay hasn’t changed at all, except for the Odyssey on-foot stuff, which is optional (and costs extra). I love the on-foot stuff and don’t mind the grind, but it’s not for everyone. If you liked the game before, there’s no reason you wouldn’t like it now. If you want to try the on-foot stuff, wait for a sale. It’s grindy but definitely adds a new dimension to the game.
The star forge and galaxy sized flight sim are amazing. Most of everything else feels tacked on. FDev as a company just doesn’t have the inspiration or whatever it took to make ED great, and they have been chasing the dragon for years.
It’s been a while since I’ve played but I have this spreadsheet bookmarked as my go-to for engi mats. In my experience I had a lot more fun by farming tons of all the mats and then ignoring them. Trying to accrue them naturally takes forever.
The raw material notes in that sheet apply only to legacy. For live, it’s the same planets, but you either drop in the blue and look yourself, or you navigate to some known coordinates. …frontier.co.uk/…/live-4-0-materials-farming.6107…
Something I realized while on that trip is that if you enjoy the exploration part of this game, you essentially enjoy roleplaying a field researcher with a dash of survival on the side. It’s tedious, boring work and you have to be really into the details of all the stuff you find to keep going.
I keep IRL notes on a lot of my finds. I stay more engaged and I can easily find the location of some interesting thing I passed.
Koli Discii C 6 is your best bet to farm engineering resources imo. Right in the bubble, easy to get to, and a variety of mats to pickup. You’ll need to relog though to keep up the farm but you can get a decent amount of crap in an hour or two. You wanna find the crashed python on the planet.
Can’t speak for synthesis mats though, never bothered with it myself.
It’s been too long since I’ve played. I haven’t played since they announced they were abandoning console players. Maybe I’ll return, but I’m never spending another cent on an Fdev product, so I guess I play on Xbox until they let the server collapse.
I'm not an AX combat enthusiast, but I've been enjoying the thargoid war lately. There's more to it than just combat, too—the reworked EVAC missions are great, the Scythe really puts C into CSAR and the barnacle matrix sites have interesting implications. I also like Glaives and the way they stir up the meta. Fun to fight them, too.
I think the game is moving into the right direction overall. The thargoid war story is very well done, going beyond simplistic "humans good, aliens bad and attack for no reason because they're alien" we normally see in games, movies etc.
If there's one thing to complain about, it's the fact that thargs haven't ramped up their war effort enough and it's too easy to counter them now that we've figured out what works best. We should be losing more systems to them and they should be sending vanguard forces deeper into the bubble.
elitedangerous
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