AndroidHub posted:

-Powerplay and You-

"What is Powerplay and why should I care?"
Powerplay was added as the main feature of version 1.3 and is basically meant to give the galaxy "super factions" which players could support and receive boons from in return. What it ended up being was a grindfest to keep people busy and give the illusion that there's a lot more going on than there actually is, but it does have its uses. This guide will cover the ways a player can take personal advantage of the bonuses a power grants, and little on how powers operate in terms of gaining and losing territory, command capital, etc (because frankly it doesn't matter and you shouldn't care.)

Basically each power has a different bit of flavor text about why they want to control the galaxy, their methods, etc. None of that really matters, currently all powers operate in the same manner, and the only difference is the way that systems under their control change, and the bonuses they give you for holding a rank with them.

Ranks within powerplay are updated weekly (at 7am GMT on Thursdays) and ranks are granted based on the number of merits a player has when the week is finished. Merits are a metacurrency that only exists within powerplay, when the week is over three things happen, you are granted a rank based on your number of merits, you get the salary for whatever rank you had been for that week, and your merits decay by 50%.

"How do I get these wonderful merits that I can hold and cherish forever?"
There are a number of ways, but they boil down to Kill enemy powerplay npcs, or haul powerplay gubbins from point A to point B.

Hauling gubbins is not really something you should do, but it basically involves going to your faction HQ and collecting garrison supplies to take to nearby control systems, you get one merit per ton and have to pay to get more after a small amount of freebies. You can also collect other gubbins from control systems and take them elsewhere, but it's not worth doing in any case. These actions fortify control systems which makes them less vulnerable to actions taken by enemy factions (really though don't haul things in powerplay).

The real way to get your merits is some good old fashion space murder which comes in two varieties. The best way is to go to an enemy control system, interdict npcs from other factions out of supercruise and kill them, each kill grants 30 merits, and you can interdict wings of up to three enemies at once (under regular circumstances). This is also one of the few activities that is practical to do in a wing of your own, as having more players in a supercruise instance increases the spawn rate of wings, and all players that do damage to an enemy in the minute or so before they die get the full 30 merits from the kill. You can kill enemies belonging to any un-allied faction while doing this (for whatever reason), but the faction the system belongs to will have two type of npcs that spawn, Defense forces, and supply ships. Generally speaking supply ships will be much less powerful, but there are some instances where they can be things like clippers, pythons or fdrops.

You want to look carefully at the system you will use for doing this-

• The system must be controlled by an enemy powerplay faction in order for you to get credit for the kills, Superpower aligned PP factions all have peace treaties between them, which means if you attack and kill npcs from their faction, you lose merits (30 per kill). So if your faction is Imperial, you can't kill other Imperials, if you're Fed you can't kill other Feds

• In any system that isn't anarchy you will get bounties on you for killing enemy PP npcs, which is only a big deal in that it can reduce your standing with the three Superpowers if done in a system with a controlling faction aligned with one of them (all the way to hostile if you aren't careful), so look for anarchy or independent governments when doing this.

• Systems produce worse spawns when heavily undermined (which you can see when looking at the galaxy map in powerplay view), which basically means players were already in that system during this cycle and did what you're looking to do, you can still get your merits there, but the spawns will be much worse.

• Whatever system you are getting your merits in should be relatively close to a control system belonging to your faction, because you have to turn in vouchers at a control system to receive your actual merits. If you die or the cycle happens while holding vouchers they are all lost to the void with no way to get them back or receive credit for them.

The other way to get merits from killing is to go to expansion combat zones belonging to enemy factions, these are like the combat zones you would find anywhere else, but one side is the expansion forces of the power and the other is the system authority trying to repel them from the system. They can only be found in system where expansion is being carried out by a faction during that cycle, each faction has a different name for its brand of combat zone, but the names are always different from those you will find elsewhere. Kills here are worth 10 merits each, while the enemies are much better equipped than those you would find to interdict in supercruise, which is why most people prefer supercruise assassinations to farming in combat zones.

"OK, so what do these merits actually do for me?"
As stated above, you get a rank based on your merit count at the end of a powerplay cycle, there are 5 ranks in all and have a number of shared effects regardless of faction, as well has three pertaining to each faction specifically.

All factions get these bonuses (omitting nominations and commodity allocation, because you shouldn't care about them)-

Rank 1 (0 Merits)
• Salary of 1000 credits

Rank 2 (100 Merits)
• Salary of 50,000 credits
• Power specific bonus with additional effect when the power in in the top three in galactic standing

Rank 3 (750 Merits)
• Salary of 500,000 credits
• Power specific module or weapon after being pledged for 28 consecutive days

Rank 4 (1,500 Merits)
• Salary of 5,000,000 credits
• NOTHING

Rank 5 (10,000 Merits)
• Salary of 50,000,000 credits
• Power specific bonus

Faction Bonuses


The Nitty Gritty

So as the game is right now there are three ways to utilize powerplay best

• Buy in Li Yong Rui's territory for 15% off all ships and modules/weapons, this decreases the insurance cost as well, so it's worth going out and rebuying all of your ships there since you'll even make a bit back after the resale hit (don't forget to sell your modules first!). Also note that you don't need to be pledged to Li Yong for this since the discount is a system bonus.

• Prismatic shields from Aisling Duval are the best faction-specific module in the game, they give you a 20% boost over regular A-rank shields and are very good on a lot of ships. They are the only faction module worth pledging specifically for.

• Arissa Lavigny Duval(or Avril Lavigne for short) offers a significant bounty bonus which is absolutely worth going for to grind out a lot of cash fast. She gets up to a 50% boost on turn-in from maintaining rank 2 while bounty hunting in her territory, and a 100% from rank 5, which is a lot of work, but many feel is worth it for the massive earning potential. While Hudson and Pranav also offer bounty bonuses up to 100% they do not have the same system bonus which gives and additional 20% boost which is compounded by the rank bonus. In 1.3 her system bonus is bugged to give you much higher bounties than it should, so even just hunting in her territory is a good idea for the time being (this may or may not be fixed in 1.4, if anyone has evidence that it's been changed please present it.)

You need to get 334 assassination kills in a given week to attain rank 5 and utilize a given bonus (and recieve the 50m salary), if you do this in a group it can take as little as 8 hours, then on following weeks you will need roughly 170 (which can change as your merits decay) which can take as little as 4 hours. These times are a sort of "best case scenario" so be prepared to take much longer while you learn how to most efficiently murder your way to fame and riches.

If you are going after rank 5 and plan to keep it for a long time, keep in mind that merit decay is not entirely straightforward. Merits decay 50% every week upon the powerplay cycle (7AM GMT), but each week of merits is stored as its own instance and merits simply vanish after decaying for 4 week, so if you earn 10,000 meirts one week then upkeep rank 5 for at least 4 weeks the amounts you need to earn will look something like this (bold is how many you need each week to maintain rank 5)-

10000

5000+5000

2500+2500+5000

1250+1250+2500+5000

625+1250+2500+5625

and so-on.

And it bears reapeating that if powerplay cycles or you die while holding merit vouchers you lose all of them, so be sure to turn them in at a control system regularly.

An important thing to come into powerplay knowing is that inherently it doesn't make you wanted in systems under the control of a different faction, what it does is makes you "hostile" when in those territories (unless they belong to a power from the same major faction, Fed or Imperial), and what that means is that players and npcs pledged to the power in control of that system can attack and kill you without becoming wanted (though currently players get no benefit from doing so). Stations and law enforcement don't care what power you're in, only if you've broken the law.

That should cover about all of the bases, if there's something left that you need to know ask in the thread and I'll try and give you an answer then update the guide.

orange juche posted:

Love can bloom even when two ships are caught on the edge of the largest gravitational singularity in the galaxy.

Bloody Wanker posted:

Previous Elite Games:


ELITE (1984)





Elite was the first open world space simulator released originally on the BBC Micro in 1984, written by David Braben and Ian Bell. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of "Elite". The player takes control of "Commander Jameson" and it's up to the player to decide what kind of career to pursue, such as piracy, trade, military missions, bounty hunting and asteroid mining. The money made from these missions can buy weapons and upgrades for your ship.

Elite was a very big game for it's time and a lot of never seen before techical innovations. The Elite universe contains eight galaxies, each galaxy containing 256 planets to explore. Because of the limited memory budget at the time, these worlds had to be precurally generated and the entire game is programmed in assembly. Elite was a huge hit and has been ported to several other platforms such as Apple II, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, NES and the kids favorite - the Tatung Einstein.

A pretty comprehensive list of all the ports can be found here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/AFE_FAQ3


Frontier: ELITE II (1993)



Frontier:Elite II is the first sequal to Elite. The game plays very much like its prequal but has realistic physics and a accurately modelled galaxy. Just like in Elite, the game doesn't have a plot or a storyline, but the player is free to do what he feels like. The player can also get a better ship by making money in a number of legal or illegal ways. The game replaces the Elite's arcade flying style for a model based on newtonian physics, but a autopilot can be used for docking and navigation. Stars and planets also had realistic gravity, which can be used to do slingshot maneuvers around them. The players could also now land on planets and dock in space stations to the tones of the classical piece 'The Blue Danube'.

The graphics was very advanced for it's time, and the PC version was using curved polygons and texture mapping. The game was huge, containing millions of stars and planets made possible by procedural generation. And the original version for Amiga was entirely written in Assembly and was published on a single floppy disk.

The game was generally well recieved even though it was launched with a few bugs. Since the games development had been running over its deadline Gametek insisted on publishing it before it was finished. It has been released on Amiga, Amiga CD32, Atari ST and PC.

illectro posted:

The 'Previous Elite Games' manages to conflate Frotier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters.

The first frontier game wasn't rushed out by the publisher and was available on Amiga/Atari/PC, but it had no real story.
Frontier: First Encounters had a story on top of the usual open universe and was a huge pile of bugs on original release.

Groggy nard posted:

Erection Sustained. If they ever add in Huge sized Fixed Beams I won't ever leave.

Chrysophylax posted:

tooterfish posted:

Elite is currently 40% off on Steam.
They said they'd be released at the same time, not that they're the same release. 1.5 is still part of "Season One", you won't need Horizons to get the new ships.

I think all these slaps to the face are starting to blur your vision.

Dante80 posted:

some pretty good control in FA OFF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d3zfPoB0oM

tooterfish posted:

They very rarely miss a release date, so Horizons is six weeks away tops.