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AndroidHub posted:As far as the actual game content goes, the most frustrating part is that they refuse to go back and do balance passes or any kind of polishing, powerplay is the best example of this, they put in this half finished "thing" about political intrigue and cool factions with unique goals then just left it as basically a framework with every faction having the same basic objectives and only a couple granting bonuses or modules worth fighting for unless you're a roleplaying maniac. It's things like the fact that all of the weapons only come in fixed with one class, and that rank 3 has no bonus over rank 4 besides some extra credits at the end of the week. I mean, they even showed off that they had already made the faction emblems and had at least put them in their dev client to take screenshots for the powerplay promo material, but we still don't have them in the actual game 4+ months later? really? But even with all of those problems it could be fixed to a large degree by just spending an afternoon looking at the numbers they weighted everything in powerplay with, giving the powerplay npcs bounties or cargo where appropriate, and maybe giving us the options there should be on the faction modules. This is honestly the Big Thing that makes E:D merely OK (and totally lacking in long term appeal unless you like poopsocking for bigger numbers) instead of great, your outfitting choices should be hugely impactful and give a large variety of different playstyles even within each role, unfortunately most choices are just objectively poo poo. Pulse lasers and SCBs for everyone! It's also extremely annoying that they apparently are well aware that ship and module balance is hosed but rather than fixing it now they're rolling it all up into the loot / crafting update which is going to come some time after Horizons is released so... at an absolute minimum, more than a year after the game's original release. I'm bitter enough now that I assume that they're not actually going to make it better, but a bit more variety would be interesting at least. The Powerplay stuff actually made it worse in some ways because there are a few more different outfitting choices but they're gated behind a different stupid grind for each one. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Sep 14, 2015 |
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Sep 14, 2015 21:35
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Adult Sword Owner posted:Viper feels fragile when an Anaconda comes up Wanted so I wouldn't say it's the easiest ship I think every weapon size upgrade does about 50% more damage than the previous level or something like that. There's also the hull damage modifier against larger ships to take into account as well - so even though 3 smalls and 2 mediums have the same raw damage per shot, the smalls' effective damage will be lower vs. larger ships.
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Sep 15, 2015 20:46
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The most recent dev update has named 2 more new ships coming with 1.5 - the Asp Scout and Viper mk. IV, because obviously Frontier realised that people are OK with variant ships and it lets them weasel out of properly filling their 30 ships quota that they guaranteed  I'm going to assume that the Viper Mk. IV is going to take the basic Viper structure and 'upgrade' it similar to how the Imperial Eagle is basically just a better eagle, but with one obvious flaw; the viper feels a little outclassed in its niche right now with some of the other ships that have been added. They could go with a lot of options for the Asp Scout, if it's a rebirth of the original super thin Asp that probably everyone who played F:E2 or FFE loved then I'll 100% fly one for a while just for nostalgia. It might also / otherwise be the 'military variant' mentioned in the lore. I hope it isn't just an Asp version of the DBS because that would be loving lazy and pointless since that niche is already filled; if the Asp Scout fills a similar niche to the DBS (good but not full fledged explorer jump range with good combat performance) but bigger with more guns, internals etc. it would be perfect. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 21:52
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DatonKallandor posted:The new Cobra has an extra hardpoint?! They introduced it as 3M2S, IIRC. I'm wondering if they're going to just make it straight up better than the original or if it's going to have some kind of huge downside.
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Sep 24, 2015 00:05
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RearmingStrafbomber posted:Heavy implication here that the MkIV is tied to the loyalty discount conditions. It's not, they've clarified this a rediculous number of times.
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Sep 26, 2015 08:35
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Literally Kermit posted:Not stupid; initially it was a bug that 10% wasn't being taken off per module individually sold off. When they attempted to fix it, players as a whole told them to go gently caress themselves, just give them just one headache free "feature" so they could actually try and experiment with loadouts without paying for the privilege. In typical  style apparently they didn't realise that people would actually want to sell modules frequently because everyone at Frontier would just buy a new ship for every role and keep a load of different ships scattered around instead of just having one ship that you upgrade a lot.
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Oct 3, 2015 10:50
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Yeah it's funny that as soon as someone explained that to me it made perfect sense - after all, almost all of those sorts of fights in Frontier were initiated by enemy ships, and if the enemy is able to intercept you in any meaningful way then they have to be moving at least at a similar velocity, otherwise they wouldn't really be able to interact with you at all, so by turning off your engines and just using thrusters you're essentially setting your initial velocity as a new inertial frame which means you can have a perfectly good spaceship fight without jousting even though you're all moving at thousands of kilometers per second in a single direction (of course this is always true in some sense in space which kind of makes my point)
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Oct 5, 2015 23:35
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timn posted:This was pretty clearly an unintended edge case. Less nerf and more bug fix. For new players I cant imagine that instantly blowing past the entire progression curve that does exist in the game is very fun. It was certainly a breath of fresh air for those who already hit the wall past vulture/clipper, though. The reason that people want to be able to blow through content is that their lack of balance passing has made the game extremely stagnant, they haven't even touched modules or weapons or ship stats (other than a few heavy nerfs relatively shortly after release) even though there's obvious room for improvement. They have added new stuff and espcially the 1.4 additions are very welcome but they seem weirdly dedicated to never changing anything except to nerf it into the ground.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:38
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So hull reinforcements got buffed quite a lot but the scaling on them is totally different now. Before the strength of each (D Grade) hull reinforcement was 7.5 (2^class) so going up a grade doubled its effectiveness. Now it's just a weird progression where each increase in class is +60 or +70 but the baseline strength is much higher at 110 for a 1D hull reinforcement. So class 1 got buffed from 15 to 110 but class 5 only went from 240 to 390. Still a big buff for all classes (and bigger in terms of raw numbers rather than as a percentage of its previous strength) but the biggest change is that low grade hull reinforcements are actually meaningful now which puts them more on par with SCBs.
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Nov 14, 2015 11:49
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TorakFade posted:That's really good for the otherwise pretty useless size 1 internals on the vulture, since it can't fit a decent SCB without lots of fiddling, especially with the new mechanics. More hull gives some leeway if you get dumb and let your shields go down. Another thing I didn't mention earlier is that base hull strength is now even less important since it's hugely overshadowed by hull reinforcements. For example an Eagle filled up with hull reinforcements has more armour than a stock FAS. So in some aspects this makes the naturally 'hull tanky' ships worse as there's no way to compensate for having poo poo shields. It's probably not even worth fitting shields to some ships now, in terms of pure survivability, though repair costs are obviously a factor.
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Nov 14, 2015 12:17
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I like that there's now loads of sidegrade ships but why are they almost all 2S2M hardpoints. If you want something with more firepower you're still choosing between a handful of ships ranging from the size of the Vulture to the Cutter, it's crazy. They really should have mixed things up a bit more with the Viper MK4 and Asp Scout.
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Nov 14, 2015 13:58
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Xae posted:It's all theory at this point but even if the Cobra Mk4 doesn't deliver the Viper Mk4 is looking good for Multi-Role and Mission running. The agility rating for the Viper Mk4 has me extremely concerned that it will actually suck balls though, if someone with beta access could confirm that it's good then that would be nice. And it still only has a C3 power distributor.
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Nov 15, 2015 09:46
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Bear in mind that the current worst cases take like 20+ minutes to recharge so we're still talking a long rear end time. AndroidHub posted:The question does still stand as to what happens if your ship meets an unfortunate end while it's still in your instance but you're not inside it. Yeah this is huge purely because it's the first time they've changed ship stats on Live since the Python nerf, and the FDL is probably going to be terrifying now but I guess that's what you get for 0 jump range. I am honestly more interested to see how effective hull tanking might be with the damage reduction.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:35
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Obviously the jump range on the FDL and Corvette are too low but Frontier have made it pretty clear that they think that it's totally fine for fully geared dedicated fighters to have jump ranges in the 12-14 LY range. I'm still waiting for a ship with the holy trinity combination of decent jump range, weapons (+ power distributor) and flight model, I was hoping that the Asp Scout would deliver but it's incredibly loving slow for some reason and is also fairly light on armaments for its price. The FAS is probably your best bet though it doesn't exactly have great jump range, ~15LY is a hell of a lot more than 12.5.
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Nov 17, 2015 09:46
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Vahalla posted:I'm looking to upgrade from my Vulture into something larger. FDLs and Pythons are similarly priced, and I mostly intend to do bounties. Is there a glaringly right choice? Seems like the FDL is the shootier option to the Python's more multi-faceted capabilities. The FAS is cheaper and a lot more agile than the FDL / Python, it fells down in shields and firepower but it's the closest to a straight upgrade from the Vulture than anything else is. With the coming buffs the FDL is going to be objectively better though, other than the terrible jump range.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:48
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People were asking for shields to regenerate faster so that you could stay in CZs and RES for longer, SCBs were the solution they introduced. It wasn't great.
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Nov 18, 2015 09:42
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Kavros posted:Imagine if some hardpoints can only fit certain weapons or classes of weapons, some hardpoints can only fit turrets or fixed weapons, etc, but each came with their own inherent capacitor supply. I was thinking a while back that this would be the best possible way of making weapon loadouts and ship selection more interesting. Then we would be able to have a wide range of weapon strengths balanced by the fact that you can't just fill your ship up with a ton of the same weapon. Combat-focused ships would have more flexible hardpoints or generally allow more powerful weapons such as beams and PACs. Then the relative strength of each weapon no longer needs to be balanced against every other weapon and suddenly missiles can be powerful again etc.
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Nov 18, 2015 15:22
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IrvingWashington posted:Sorry, everyone At first I was wondering why you were apologising but it's ok I forgive you, you're good people.
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Nov 21, 2015 00:36
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Mercurius posted:Horizons is scheduled to start Beta in the next couple of days and the E:D betas usually run for 2-3 weeks so I'd expect a release just before Christmas at this rate. It's obviously something their bizarro world marketing team came up with, any normal company would have just sold Horizons at a normal expansion amount and made a package with Horizons + the core game for an extra £10. It's basically exactly the same deal but the way they have presented it makes existing players feel like they're getting hosed over horribly.
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Nov 22, 2015 22:09
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There's going to be some kind of crafting system coming in the not too distant future which will probably be a huge money and/or time sink so that's a thing you can invest in.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:45
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Drake_263 posted:Note that one of the big things about Elite is how the various ships are, theoretically, all good and useful in their own niches. A ship that costs 10 of 100 times more than yours isn't necessarily 10-100 times more effective than yours - each hull has its own niche, strengths and weaknesses. If your goal in the game is to get into the biggest trade ship to make shitlots of money (that'd be the Lakon T9) that's entirely valid. It is, however, equally valid to find a cheap simple ship you enjoy flying and stick with it. Whatever floats your boat! This isn't exactly true but what is true is that 500k (which you should be able to make in a couple of hours) will get you a ship which isn't half bad at something and 5M will get you a ship that's pretty decent at at least one thing. I'd strongly recommend getting a Cobra Mk III as your first main goal since it's one of the most versatile ships, extremely iconic and fun to fly and is excellent for giving you an idea of what role in the game you're going to enjoy most. You can do combat, trading, mining, smuggling, or exploration in it without feeling like the ship is holding you back.
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Nov 23, 2015 20:20
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about them)
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You at least convinced me to start following the PGS thread again
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Nov 24, 2015 23:37
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Those paints are a pretty nice deal even though the paint jobs are hardly super exciting. I'm still sitting on the fence on Horizons pretty hard but I might preorder after all just for the novelty of having at least one non-default colour scheme for each ship.
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Nov 25, 2015 22:30
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TorakFade posted:I tried the DBE a while ago and it was kind of meh, the 1 large / 2 medium hardpoints aren't that good with the smallish PP / distributor and even with A thrusters it's not what I'd call agile (but the Vulture has forever spoiled me in this regard). Having 30 LY range is good but 20LY would be quite good enough for general farting around. The only niche I can see for the Cobra MKIV is as a shorter jump range more combat-focused Asp but I can't really see that happening; either it's going to have lovely speed and agility or lovely shields. All the new ships have been bad so I'm setting the bar really low.
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Nov 27, 2015 21:58
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Libluini posted:Even if not, reinforcement-mods, especially the smaller ones, get a massive buff so going armor over shields will become easier. As an example, class 3 RPs will go from 60 to 260. Additionally, Frontier has promised the new RPs will add damage reduction to make it harder to lose modules. Put a class 3 RP on a Cobra and it's suddenly harder to kill than an Asp. The Asp might regain some of its previous appeal as a mid range multi role combat ship because it becomes tanky as gently caress when you cram it full of the new hull reinforcements and it's got good enough shields to be worth combining with SCBs. I mean the FAS is straight up better but that's a much more expensive ship with fewer multi role refitting possibilities.
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Nov 27, 2015 22:42
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The FAS is basically a straight upgrade from the Vulture with the exception of the shield being rear end but otoh it has tons of spare power for shield boosters and SCBs. More importantly it's also hella fun to fly.
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Nov 28, 2015 20:28
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Terminally Bored posted:I played Frontier a lot during my Amiga days and now got this during the steam sale. Looks and plays great, I see they picked up a lot of stuff from I-War 2 this time. Got some questions: Not as far as we know They're coming but not for at least a year Yup, uh, assuming you mean "cool poo poo to take screenshots of" and aren't talking about those sweet recon missions where you had to fly over a military base and take photos of it Nope
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Nov 29, 2015 12:41
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quote:- Starter package Sidewinders (and bought) now come with low powered gimballed pulse lasers quote:- Increased the hopper ammo amount for the fragmentation cannons from 30 to 90
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Nov 30, 2015 20:02
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Threadkiller Dog posted:Wow, the Cobra MKIV was a disappointment. No internals upgrades to speak of, essentially a heavier MKIII with shorter legs and an extra small laser. Well I was expecting it but it still feels bad, it probably has more shields and armour but that still sucks  For some reason they aren't allowed to make any new multi role ships that are actually better than the Cobra => Asp => Clipper => Python progression.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:51
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Literally Kermit posted:as far as I am concerned the Cobra Mk IV IS better. I don't care about speed, I wanted internals. Which apparently it has EIGHT. If it has a lovely jump range I will probably sing a different tune but I really was looking for a good ship to cram a little of everything and a buggy, and go have adventures. Ursine Catastrophe posted:4/4/3/3/2/2
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Dec 1, 2015 00:00
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Duo posted:So I picked this game up during the sale and have been having some fun with it. I have a question though, why are they releasing a full priced expansion for an unfinished game? People will pay money for it 
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Dec 3, 2015 09:08
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Nah let's have like 10 ships with the same guns that cost ~500k or less, that seems fun and cool somehow
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Dec 9, 2015 20:12
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I'm not going to say "don't add any lower-cost ships ever again", but with the addition of the Asp Scout and Keelback, we currently have: I don't think it's super useful to group ships in price like this because it takes way the gently caress longer to get into the 100s of millions than it does to scrape together a few million for a specced out Cobra or whatever, also bigger ships have a higher cost to get them fully kitted out. If you mapped out a graph of number of ships that can viably be used against time they would be massively collected around the first few hours of gameplay. It doesn't help that the new ships are also mostly obsolete by design or extremely niche picks anyway, reducing the chance that people are actually going to fly them. Of the small ships the only 3 worth flying are the DBS, Cobra Mk III and Courier, with the Viper Mk III and Imp Eagle being notable as cheaper combat options but straight up worse than the others once you have more credits. In particular, the Viper Mk IV is almost straight up a worse Cobra Mk III (gaining a little shield and hull strength in exchange for a signficant drop in boost speed and turn rate) and the Asp Scout is a weird sidegrade to the DBS (gaining a little shield and hull strength and larger internals, and a better power distributor, which is great, but losing a ton of speed and being restricted with only 2 utility slots while being roughly twice as expensive to A spec). The Keelback is supposed to be justified by being the smallest ship that carries a fighter but at least until then it's 100% worse than the T6 for trading and worse than the Cobra for multirole. It's not just that the new ships fit into an already heavily populated part of the lineup but they're just not very good or interesting. And then all of these ships become 100% obsolete for combat once you can D-spec a Vulture which you can afford well before A-speccing anything larger than a Viper anyway, which says more about the Vulture probably being cheaper than its effectiveness would suggest than anything else, but it's also a major reason why adding any low end ships is going to be futile since I can't see anything ever beating out the Cobra for a cheap multi role ship. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 00:27
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Getting from 0 to a few million only takes awhile if you've walked into the game with no real bearing or point of reference. If you deleted your save and jumped back in a sidewinder, I don't think you'd take nearly as long to get to a few million as you did the first time around, even if you discount "log in for 2 hours, participate in a CG, wait for it to end and get 7.5mil in your pocket" types of approaches. Somehow I wrote the first part of that post the exact opposite of what I meant, I meant to say that getting up to a few million only takes a short time even when you're new and loving around, but once you settle into "OK I want a sweet Python" territory you're 100% going to have to put in some dedicated farming time. Libluini posted:Actually, the Viper Mk. IV is better then the Cobra, since it not only has better armor and shields, but also higher jump range plus enough internals for an easy explorer-fit, including a landing vehicle. The DBS and the Asp Scout don't have enough internals to fit everything and the Cobra III and IV have less jump range. Yeah sorry I forget explorers exist, you guys get it even worse than everyone else what with all the stupid specialised modules you need and everything having less jump range than the Asp. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 01:09
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Xae posted:Given the new ships for Horizons I don't. The new ships are so loving bad that even the brown sea has generally rejected them, though of course there are still some people who swear blind that they think that the new ships are all great and that it's a good thing that some ships are just plain worse than others while being more expensive.
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Dec 14, 2015 17:46
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The cutter is in lore terms supposed to be an intimidating Imperial navy ship nearly on part with the Corvette in combat performance but it has atrocious agility and an undersized power distributor so it's kind of bad for combat though it sure can take a lot of beating. The Corvette is pretty bad rear end at straight up fighting though it's incredibly drat slow - I think the buffed FDL will possibly be generally considered the better ship when you consider the cost difference. If they add huge lasers then the Corvette will have an amazing amount of firepower though. I was refering more to the new smaller ships though, all of which are either straight up redundant or sidegrades in the price / performance range where there is already a good selection of ships. Also weird choices like making the successor to the Viper into a slightly different Cobra, or the new Cobra being worse at everything other than trading in spite of being presented as a more combat-capable successor.
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Dec 14, 2015 19:32
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Pro tip 17 Draconis is in civil war right now so don't go there for smuggling missions as they just want donations.
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Jan 1, 2016 17:07
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The Locator posted:Is there any way to tell where I might be able to buy stuff to upgrade my ship? I found one port that has a shipyard and a few ships for sale, but I don't see anything in the outfitting section which is I assume where I would be able to buy upgrades to various systems? There's no way in game to see exactly what is sold at each system in outfitting, http://eddb.io/ is a fantastic resource for this kind of thing if you're looking for something specific.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:16
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The Locator posted:Also, drat my pulse lasers overheat frigging fast as hell. If you're talking about them getting to the point when they stop shooting and the bar reads "thermal overload" that's actually the confusingly named way that the game is informing you that your weapons capacitor is empty. You can alleviate this by getting a better Power Distributor. Overheating is actually a totally separate mechanic where your ship gets hot from various poo poo, which can include from shooting weapons but is usually from other sources such as being too close to a sun or using a Shield Cell Bank. The Power Distributor is arguably the most important component of your ship for combat since it directly impacts your shields, weapons and engines, and conveniently it is also usually the cheapest component so you almost always want to upgrade your power distributor before thrusters, shields or power plant. My general upgrade path for getting a new combat ship goes buy weapons => D grade everything (extremely cheap and efficient upgrade, as D grade components are both lighter and perform better than E grade) => A grade power distributor => A grade thrusters => A grade shields => A grade FSD. Upgrade power plant where needed for extra power output.
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Jan 2, 2016 01:08
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The Locator posted:I have to say that I disagree somewhat with the learning curve steepness. It's nothing like as steep as the old-school Eve, I've made a lot more progress in a day than my first several weeks in the old Eve days. Yeah it's actually fine now, it was kind of hosed up in the early days though when most sources of income were literally 10-100x less profitable (the only one which hasn't changed much is trading which they actually nerfed a bit IIRC).
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Jan 2, 2016 16:58
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