My position on UX is "if the user ever has to tab out to use an external resource, your UX has failed". Elite tanks this one a bunch of times. Even finding a good res, trade route, or where to buy a particular ship flunks this test.
Also I have 90% of a rank to go and I'm bored now and I don't know whether to break the promise I made to myself to stop if I got bored.
BH: 1I Lightweight Alloy
RB: 8D Power Plant
TM: 8D Thrusters
FH: 7A Frame Shift Drive
EC: 7D Life Support
PC: 7D Power Distributor
SS: 7D Sensors
FS: 6C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 64)
8: 8E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 256)
8: 8E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 256)
6: 6A Shield Generator
6: 6E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 64)
6: 6E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 64)
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
4: 4E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 16)
3: 1E Standard Docking Computer
---
Shield: 881.97 MJ
Power : 21.05 MW retracted (78%)
26.77 MW deployed (99%)
27.00 MW available
Cargo : 720 T
Fuel : 64 T
Mass : 1,509.5 T empty
2,293.5 T full
Range : 21.66 LY unladen
14.86 LY laden
Price : 299,463,460 CR
Re-Buy: 14,973,173 CR @ 95% insurance
I'm particularly interested to know: is that shield big enough? It's the second biggest I can fit. It's not a combat vessel, but I'd like to be able to hold off or destroy as much stuff as possible, perhaps anything smaller than a Python. If that isn't plausible, it's probably better for me to cut out all the guns, put that power into shield boosters and just book it. I lose a lot of cargo space by going up to the size 8 shield, and my aim is to keep that above 700. I'm also interested to know if D class thrusters are going to be painful to fly. This is replacing a Type 9 in my fleet.
Assuming your remaining utility slots are heatsinks, my cutter is basically exactly the same as your build, except I use mine launchers with one c4 multicannon and prismatics. I don't have that much experience fighting with it because in most cases, I find it to be a waste of time.
Generally speaking, the game tends to throw FDLs and anacondas at me when I'm hauling in the cutter so I wouldn't feel comfortable staying in a fight with 900ish MJ but if you invest a bit of engineering on this ship, you can easily double your shield capacity (even triple it if you're lucky with rolls) and cap your resistances to diminishing returns on the same exact footprint. Also, the cutter always has the option of just saying "you know what? I can't win or it's taking too long so I'm out!" and then you simply boost faster than everyone else and nothing can masslock you.
Why MCs on a trader? Drop weapons completely - or fill up with mines and leave a trail of them behind you - you can often collect a bounty as you run away. 880 MJ shields is plenty for running away.
Staying and fighting anything in an unmodded Cutter is going to feel like an episode in frustration worthy of stabbing yourself in the giblets. And that's with A stock thrusters. If you are going to fight anyway, use turrets.
I like to be able to fight sometimes, it's as simple as that. Plus, chain interdictions are a thing now. If I'm going to be repeatedly pulled out of supercruise by a cobra, I'd rather be able to splat it. It's not supposed to necessarily be optimal, but as long as I'm able to do it fairly cheaply and without pushing myself out of that crucial class D power plant range I don't see the harm. I like the mines idea though, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe macross missile spam would be fun/effective too, since running out of ammo isn't a huge deal.
The class A thrusters are 162 million, so I'm unlikely to be installing them for a while yet.
Just be aware that killing anything won't be a speedy process is all I flew my Cutter as combat ship for awhile, but I flew backwards and just tanked fire while I smoked ships. It wasn't really fun, but it worked :twisted:
When I'm making PP/trade/sothis runs in the Cutter though I'm trying to get it done as quickly as possible so just running is my choice, but that doesn't mean it's the only choice.
Why MCs on a trader? Drop weapons completely - or fill up with mines and leave a trail of them behind you - you can often collect a bounty as you run away. 880 MJ shields is plenty for running away.
Staying and fighting anything in an unmodded Cutter is going to feel like an episode in frustration worthy of stabbing yourself in the giblets. And that's with A stock thrusters. If you are going to fight anyway, use turrets.
I don't like to fight in a cutter either but for that one occasional sadsack NPC who's been harassing me with instant interdictions every 15Ls, 7 times in a row, I will make an exception.
Reverberation cascade mines are also hillarious in that they damage the shield module's health directly so those elite anacondas chasing you in a straight line tend to go from 99% to 0% shields after the right number of hits perma-breaks their module. You can get torpedoes in the same flavor but two shots per pylon is really limited...
Ok guys, a question about resistance. If you want to maximize your resistance to rail-guns, what would be the best shield/shield booster combination? Is the damage from rails evenly split between thermic and kinetic damage? Reason I ask is because since I like to fly smaller ships, the game has an annoying habit of sending those aim-botting smaller rail-equipped NPC ships against me. My present project is modding my Cobra so that I can take on practically anything (well, as long as the ammo and hull lasts anyway!), but I'm finding that the one thing that I really take damage from is the stupid auto-hitting rail-cheaters. I'm having way more problems soloing Asp Scouts and Cobras than Condas now at equivalent pilot levels...
Since I'm spending a lot of time just cruising around looking for materials now (missions and USS-hunting), I have time to actually look at the things in the game more than usual. Elite can really be a very beautiful game, sometimes with an almost cinematic feel to it. I saw some clips from the small worlds expedition on reddit, and at those times that there are many commanders in one instance the game looks like something straight out of a sci-fi film:
Just got my first engineers' mods: two helpings of multicannons with a shorter range but more damage/second. Can't wait to try them out... except I have to wait until Friday, when it'll be killin' time.
Now, if only I'd remembered to bookmark that system with the great ring planet, high-risk RES and conveniently close station. I think it was LP something-something, and the station had an Indian-sounding name. Rahendrajan? Rajendrahan?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Just got my first engineers' mods: two helpings of multicannons with a shorter range but more damage/second. Can't wait to try them out... except I have to wait until Friday, when it'll be killin' time.
Now, if only I'd remembered to bookmark that system with the great ring planet, high-risk RES and conveniently close station. I think it was LP something-something, and the station had an Indian-sounding name. Rahendrajan? Rajendrahan?
Just got my first engineers' mods: two helpings of multicannons with a shorter range but more damage/second. Can't wait to try them out... except I have to wait until Friday, when it'll be killin' time.
Now, if only I'd remembered to bookmark that system with the great ring planet, high-risk RES and conveniently close station. I think it was LP something-something, and the station had an Indian-sounding name. Rahendrajan? Rajendrahan?
It should totally be it - the name's definitely what I remember - but the station I remember is a proper one, with a mailbox slit entrance. Chances are I'm mixing up things, rendering the riddle insolvable. Thanks for the suggestion, though!
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Will do. I know it's somewhere between Asellus Primus and Shinrarta Dezhra, and it's got several RESes, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find. (Would be nice to have a history tab on the galaxy map...)
Since people were talking about elements so well hidden in the game that you need to go to external resources: how difficult is it to find Meta-alloys? Since I've got a hankering to see this Felicity Farseer person...
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Meta alloys are easy enough, not sure if there's still a station that just sells them but there are fixed locations. Modular terminals are the ones that fuck everyone up.
Will do. I know it's somewhere between Asellus Primus and Shinrarta Dezhra, and it's got several RESes, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find. (Would be nice to have a history tab on the galaxy map...)
Since people were talking about elements so well hidden in the game that you need to go to external resources: how difficult is it to find Meta-alloys? Since I've got a hankering to see this Felicity Farseer person...
Ok guys, a question about resistance. If you want to maximize your resistance to rail-guns, what would be the best shield/shield booster combination? Is the damage from rails evenly split between thermic and kinetic damage? Reason I ask is because since I like to fly smaller ships, the game has an annoying habit of sending those aim-botting smaller rail-equipped NPC ships against me. My present project is modding my Cobra so that I can take on practically anything (well, as long as the ammo and hull lasts anyway!), but I'm finding that the one thing that I really take damage from is the stupid auto-hitting rail-cheaters. I'm having way more problems soloing Asp Scouts and Cobras than Condas now at equivalent pilot levels...
The currently most accepted way of modding shields and shield boosters is to get all 3 resistances between 50-75% (where diminishing returns make it impossible to get much higher) and then increase capacity as much as possible. You can accomplish that pretty easily with a rank 5 thermal resistance mod on your shield generator, then add 1 or 2 resistance augmented mods on your shield boosters then use heavy duty mods on the rest (for smaller ships, you'll probably want 1 resist, 2 heavy duty).
That said, nothing you can do will let you tank aimbot-railgun fire in CZs all by yourself in a small ship. You could have a 1.2 billion credit imperial cutter with perfect unicorn-tier secondary rolls on all your mods and size 8 shield cell banks and you'd be tanking for 10 minutes instead of 2 before running into the same problem.
If you want to stay in a high intensity CZ for a while, get a wingman with healing lasers and preferably a couple more with big guns to kill the railgun spammers in concert.
Ship fighters are going to help large ships deal with small ships I think. The big problem is bringing your guns to bear, and the fighter can either bring their guns to bear or distract them and stop them from actively evading you.
One thing that I'm trying to get used to in the current game: you should not jump in against three small ships. You will probably get ganked. Things have changed, and small ships are still a thread. For me it's actually medium sized ships that I do well against, because if the worst comes to the worst I can just brute force them. Big ships and multiple small ships are no bueno unless I can control the field of engagement.
Thanks jin, that sounds like a good setup. I'll have to try that with my FDL when I eventually get around to modding it fully. Hm, I wonder what setup is optimal for the Cobra... only 2 utility mounts kinda limits the options, especially since how I fly it makes a point-defense pretty useful.
So after being chain interdicted and getting nearly blown up, and hovering around this damn planet for over half an hour waiting for a mission objective to spawn so I can go to sleep, I think I'm done with this game for a while.
Ahaha mission objective spawned but no items were inside it. Fun times.
Edit: aaand another objective spawned but I'm interdicted before I reach it. This fuckin' game.
Yup, some of the gameplay mechanisms of E:D are mind-bogglingly strange. I think I've said it before, but I wonder how much the developers actually play their own game rather than theory-crafting the whole thing and let the player-base figure out what is fun and not. Some of the things that bothers me would be very simply fixes (like the mission updates that goes to 0 minutes), just changing some numbers in a function, and yet they persist for months and months. Same thing with the chain-interdictions (and NPCs playing by different rules than players), those are just stupid.
Hope you find your way back to E:D if you decide to take a break, Syngyne. I know I have had periods where the game frustrated me enough that I preferred playing other things, but in the end I have always came back as the E:D experience is pretty unique
@Tube, what is your opinion on the different fighters? Which one do you prefer? Since they changed them from CQC, I'm getting the feeling from watching videos that the imperial fighter (as usual, no imperial bias here, oh no!) is the best one followed by the taipan. Makes me sad as the Condor was my favourite...
Edit: To balance the negativity of this post, here is a random picture of my mining-Cobra MK4. After doing some mid-level mods in this ship, it is actually quite nice even though still painfully slow. Took down a python in it yesterday that was after my painite!
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
The mission update for zero minutes is annoying as crap. Obviously not hurting my game or anything, they're just so damn stupid when they happen. Gotta be such an easy fix too, just a chunk of logic that sets the minimum time to two minutes or something when it generates the update.
Actual combat now scares me. I don't think I've taken anything nastier than a Viper in a dogfight since I got the Python. Too scared to lose it. For interdictions, I submit, boost, and then poop out mines until the other ship explodes. Really not looking forward to whenever that bit of AI stupidity gets fixed.
Do cannon shells now explode? I was running from an FDL and these shots kept flying over my cockpit and exploding in front of me. It was pretty damn cool.
What's the chain-interdiction thing?
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
@Tube, what is your opinion on the different fighters? Which one do you prefer? Since they changed them from CQC, I'm getting the feeling from watching videos that the imperial fighter (as usual, no imperial bias here, oh no!) is the best one followed by the taipan. Makes me sad as the Condor was my favourite...
Haven't tried the taipan yet, but for the other two there's not much between them. It's more about which loadout you get. The imperial fighter is faster and more agile, but by a tiny degree. Whichever model you prefer, you'll get good performance with it. I prefer the fighter because I think it's the coolest and I tend to fly Imperial.
Speaking of which, I hit Duke! The last rank is a real pisser, it slows down a lot for that one. Thankfully I had a long hangout with a friend and I just idly chipped away without really thinking about it.
It took maybe a week where I played a little every day (except yesterday) and was pretty fun until that last slog. I made a net profit of about 15 million, which is insanely low. But what can you do? That's not what I was in it for. I'm liquidating my Type 9, Python, Asp and Courier to pay for a Cutter. My Vulture I'm keeping around for now. I might try a Sothis run or two, or take a break for a while since I don't want to burn out before the update.
"I tend to fly Imperial"... what, I though you were a Faulcon deLacey-man! Keeping the Conda then or selling that as well? Don't know how much modding you've done, but I wouldn't have the heart to sell some of the ships I've spent a long time flying and so much effort on modding, at least not until module storage is in. That grind sounds terrible, I'm glad I'm not interested in the Corvette or Cutter, although I need one more rank in the Federation to get a Gunship for playing around with fighters.
Have you guys seen this? Someone reconstructed the crashed alien ship:
Looks kinda thargoidy... maybe? 8 sides at least! Also here is a new picture from the weekends Elite-met in Birmingham:
Mysterious structures!
Finally, here is a video of a SRV driving into a geyser and getting some air:
I'm keeping the Conda! I could actually pay for a Cutter just by scrapping the powerplant on it if I wanted to. It was a discount purchase, so there's a heavy insurance incentive to keep it around. The cutter is going to be a trading vessel, the conda will stay as my workhorse and combat ship.
Outside of my main ship though, I like the imperial stuff. The Clipper was my favourite stage of my trading journey, the Courier flies great and the Fighter is awesome fun. It's mainly the look, and the feeling that you're flying a sports car in space. I have a feeling (from limited flight experience with it) that the Cutter would be too much of a pain to use as a general purpose vessel, but it's very sexy for a cargo ship
So, I'm flying a Cobra MkIII set up to be an allrounder; my weapons are beam lasers and multicannons. I'm only just getting into the engineer upgrades. What upgrades do you recommend? With the weapons, I'm tending towards making them deal more damage while decreasing their range, but I'm curious as to what the experts here suggest.
Also, on a different note: what are the practical advantages/disadvantages of playing in a non-PvP community (say, Mobius) vs. playing solo? I know what they are in theory, but have people found that they're pretty much the same experience, or do they change things in noticeable ways?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
@Tube: That's funny, I think if I was in your situation I would have kept the Python over the Conda as an allrounder since you already have a bulk-hauler with the Cutter. Maybe it's just me, but I really like the capability of landing at outposts, and in my opinion the Python is much nicer to fly as well... the largest small ship if you know what I mean?
@daveNYC, on the topic of fighting with Pythons, from what I've read the development over time has made the Python go from the no.1 über-ship, to a good if somewhat slow combat ship, to the present day of a hard to fly ship at the mercy of even NPCs, singularly hard hit by the whims of the developers. However, some of my friends who are very experienced combat pilots (PvP included), claim that with the right loadout, Pythons can still be lethal even if flying them now takes good pip-management, FA-Off and specific loadouts that are in line with what the ship excels at. Personally, my Python is set up as a freighter with teeth. It only has 600 MJ something shields, but even then I don't really have any fear of npc interdictions. Thankfully there are no npc pirate Cutters in the game yet!
@Thirith. Ah, the Cobra Mk2! No wait... that was the catastrophe that sunk the original manufacturer of the Cobra line. The Cobra Mk3 I mean of course, the one ship that is the poster child of the Elite series! When I don't have anything specific I'm up to, my Cobra is still the ship I take out from the shipyard. The main attraction of the Cobra, at least for me, is the speed it is capable of, and all modifications I've done so far have the ultimate goal of making a good allrounder exploiting the high speed the Cobra is capable of, but let me get back to my build later.
Your suggested build with multis and beams are what I flew a lot a long time ago. After some trial and error, I found that I got the best result with one medium beam and the rest multis, the distributor simply can't keep up with anything more than that. If you wish to stay with that specific load-out, you should probably aim for weapons-focus on the distributor mod. However, I found that I had more luck with a large-small pulse and large-small multi setup so that you have a pulse and multi on both top and bottom. Since the cobra has a small overlapping field of fire for all four hardpoints, this means you will always have both a laser and a multi firing at your target as long as your nose is in the vaguely right direction.
Short range blaster is a good mod for multis from what I've read, and as a general rule multis aren't long weapons anyway so you are not losing much by going with this mod. Other possibilities are light weight mount, which will help you with the all-important speed, or overcharged as the jitter is not that important for multis (?).
As for non-weapon mods, Farseer is a good engineer to unlock. She has fsd level 5 (always nice no matter what you do as travelling is such a large part of the game), and more importantly thrusters level 3. The only engineer with higher level for thrusters is Prof. Palin, and the road to his base at Maia is a long one. Farseer can also upgrade your powerplant a little bit, also useful.
Ok, let me get back to my own Cobra build for some inspiration. This ship is my "do-everything-reasonably-well", with the option of running away from anything I don't like the looks of:
The rails are modded with feedback cascade and super penetrator, the multis with corrosive munitions and incendiary. The rails are mainly for any PvP encounters, the multis for additional punch and when I am feeling lazy and just want to blast some NPCs. Everything else in the ship is modded for high speed, while still keeping a good amount of damage-soak capability when silent running. In a cobra, your shields WILL go down (the one main drawback of the ship, and something that really made the heat-nerfs hit the Cobra and DBS hard), and you need strategies to cope with this. Going silent is something that used to work really well, but lately it is much harder, especially if you still want to have offensive capability. I'm hoping that 2.2 will be beneficial to silent running builds, we will see how that turns out.
Anyway, that is just my preferred build, optimised for what I do in game. If you post your own build, we can probably come up with better suggestions and input!
Wow, the Cutter flies like shit. I'm trying to find a Class A FSD to whack in it, then take it to... maybe Sothis? What do you guys think? I wouldn't mind making some paper.
I'm not up to date, but I've heard anecdotes suggesting that the Cutter can make serious dosh pirating.
It can, but so can any ship really. I pirate NPCs (and players) in my Corvette. Cutter is faster though and isn't as horrible getting there in the first place hah.
Wow, the Cutter flies like shit. I'm trying to find a Class A FSD to whack in it, then take it to... maybe Sothis? What do you guys think? I wouldn't mind making some paper.
I take mine there all the time. Nothing like coming back to the bubble with 100mil in missions to deliver.
There is literally no way 0h 0m mission updates are not pants-on-head stupid.
Fortunately they're pretty rare. I'd argue the 0h 7m (or in that area) updates are also kind of dumb if they're not given to you literally in the area of the receiving platform. They should be a random bonus for doing a job, not a stress builder.
Wow, the Cutter flies like shit. I'm trying to find a Class A FSD to whack in it, then take it to... maybe Sothis? What do you guys think? I wouldn't mind making some paper.
I take mine there all the time. Nothing like coming back to the bubble with 100mil in missions to deliver.
That's some good shit, literally.
Yep, get yourself to ceos/sothis and your cutter will print money. The only thing I'd do first would be to get your FSD mods on it since it will drastically cut down the time you waste jumping.
That said, I dont think I've ever managed to get 100mil in one single run. The most was slightly less than 70mil and I honestly never tried to stack high profit to tonnage ratio missions again because having to deliver to 30 different station ended up feeling more tedious than just doing another ~50mil run where I only had to deliver to 5 different ones and hopping back in 14 jumps.
The best profit per hour still remains if you get allied with the smuggling factions and they start giving you 4x7mil missions to sneak illegal stuff to sothis from ceos and vice versa. Those dont seem to spawn consistently but when they do, it's the fastest cash in the universe since robigo's sellback glitch got fixed.
In other news, mine launchers got nerfed in the newest beta. NPCs, even low rank ones, are now unable to ever hit one.
Posts
Also I have 90% of a rank to go and I'm bored now and I don't know whether to break the promise I made to myself to stop if I got bored.
M: 2F/G Multi-cannon
M: 2F/G Multi-cannon
M: 2F/G Multi-cannon
M: 2F/G Multi-cannon
L: 3C/G Multi-cannon
L: 3C/G Multi-cannon
H: 4A/G Multi-cannon
U: 0A Shield Booster
U: 0A Shield Booster
U: 0A Shield Booster
U: 0A Shield Booster
U: 0A Shield Booster
BH: 1I Lightweight Alloy
RB: 8D Power Plant
TM: 8D Thrusters
FH: 7A Frame Shift Drive
EC: 7D Life Support
PC: 7D Power Distributor
SS: 7D Sensors
FS: 6C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 64)
8: 8E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 256)
8: 8E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 256)
6: 6A Shield Generator
6: 6E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 64)
6: 6E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 64)
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
4: 4E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 16)
3: 1E Standard Docking Computer
---
Shield: 881.97 MJ
Power : 21.05 MW retracted (78%)
26.77 MW deployed (99%)
27.00 MW available
Cargo : 720 T
Fuel : 64 T
Mass : 1,509.5 T empty
2,293.5 T full
Range : 21.66 LY unladen
14.86 LY laden
Price : 299,463,460 CR
Re-Buy: 14,973,173 CR @ 95% insurance
I'm particularly interested to know: is that shield big enough? It's the second biggest I can fit. It's not a combat vessel, but I'd like to be able to hold off or destroy as much stuff as possible, perhaps anything smaller than a Python. If that isn't plausible, it's probably better for me to cut out all the guns, put that power into shield boosters and just book it. I lose a lot of cargo space by going up to the size 8 shield, and my aim is to keep that above 700. I'm also interested to know if D class thrusters are going to be painful to fly. This is replacing a Type 9 in my fleet.
Generally speaking, the game tends to throw FDLs and anacondas at me when I'm hauling in the cutter so I wouldn't feel comfortable staying in a fight with 900ish MJ but if you invest a bit of engineering on this ship, you can easily double your shield capacity (even triple it if you're lucky with rolls) and cap your resistances to diminishing returns on the same exact footprint. Also, the cutter always has the option of just saying "you know what? I can't win or it's taking too long so I'm out!" and then you simply boost faster than everyone else and nothing can masslock you.
Staying and fighting anything in an unmodded Cutter is going to feel like an episode in frustration worthy of stabbing yourself in the giblets. And that's with A stock thrusters. If you are going to fight anyway, use turrets.
The class A thrusters are 162 million, so I'm unlikely to be installing them for a while yet.
When I'm making PP/trade/sothis runs in the Cutter though I'm trying to get it done as quickly as possible so just running is my choice, but that doesn't mean it's the only choice.
I don't like to fight in a cutter either but for that one occasional sadsack NPC who's been harassing me with instant interdictions every 15Ls, 7 times in a row, I will make an exception.
Reverberation cascade mines are also hillarious in that they damage the shield module's health directly so those elite anacondas chasing you in a straight line tend to go from 99% to 0% shields after the right number of hits perma-breaks their module. You can get torpedoes in the same flavor but two shots per pylon is really limited...
Since I'm spending a lot of time just cruising around looking for materials now (missions and USS-hunting), I have time to actually look at the things in the game more than usual. Elite can really be a very beautiful game, sometimes with an almost cinematic feel to it. I saw some clips from the small worlds expedition on reddit, and at those times that there are many commanders in one instance the game looks like something straight out of a sci-fi film:
https://gfycat.com/AffectionateRingedDingo
https://gfycat.com/MatureFailingAsiaticgreaterfreshwaterclam
https://gfycat.com/MixedVengefulBat
In that last one I especially like the Cobra that is like: "Nope, I'm not going that way".
65% of my last rank!
Now, if only I'd remembered to bookmark that system with the great ring planet, high-risk RES and conveniently close station. I think it was LP something-something, and the station had an Indian-sounding name. Rahendrajan? Rajendrahan?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Was it this?
Space cookies for you, sir.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Since people were talking about elements so well hidden in the game that you need to go to external resources: how difficult is it to find Meta-alloys? Since I've got a hankering to see this Felicity Farseer person...
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Darnielle's Progress in Maia sells them.
The currently most accepted way of modding shields and shield boosters is to get all 3 resistances between 50-75% (where diminishing returns make it impossible to get much higher) and then increase capacity as much as possible. You can accomplish that pretty easily with a rank 5 thermal resistance mod on your shield generator, then add 1 or 2 resistance augmented mods on your shield boosters then use heavy duty mods on the rest (for smaller ships, you'll probably want 1 resist, 2 heavy duty).
That said, nothing you can do will let you tank aimbot-railgun fire in CZs all by yourself in a small ship. You could have a 1.2 billion credit imperial cutter with perfect unicorn-tier secondary rolls on all your mods and size 8 shield cell banks and you'd be tanking for 10 minutes instead of 2 before running into the same problem.
If you want to stay in a high intensity CZ for a while, get a wingman with healing lasers and preferably a couple more with big guns to kill the railgun spammers in concert.
One thing that I'm trying to get used to in the current game: you should not jump in against three small ships. You will probably get ganked. Things have changed, and small ships are still a thread. For me it's actually medium sized ships that I do well against, because if the worst comes to the worst I can just brute force them. Big ships and multiple small ships are no bueno unless I can control the field of engagement.
Ahaha mission objective spawned but no items were inside it. Fun times.
Edit: aaand another objective spawned but I'm interdicted before I reach it. This fuckin' game.
Hope you find your way back to E:D if you decide to take a break, Syngyne. I know I have had periods where the game frustrated me enough that I preferred playing other things, but in the end I have always came back as the E:D experience is pretty unique
@Tube, what is your opinion on the different fighters? Which one do you prefer? Since they changed them from CQC, I'm getting the feeling from watching videos that the imperial fighter (as usual, no imperial bias here, oh no!) is the best one followed by the taipan. Makes me sad as the Condor was my favourite...
Edit: To balance the negativity of this post, here is a random picture of my mining-Cobra MK4. After doing some mid-level mods in this ship, it is actually quite nice even though still painfully slow. Took down a python in it yesterday that was after my painite!
Actual combat now scares me. I don't think I've taken anything nastier than a Viper in a dogfight since I got the Python. Too scared to lose it. For interdictions, I submit, boost, and then poop out mines until the other ship explodes. Really not looking forward to whenever that bit of AI stupidity gets fixed.
Do cannon shells now explode? I was running from an FDL and these shots kept flying over my cockpit and exploding in front of me. It was pretty damn cool.
What's the chain-interdiction thing?
Get interdicted, submit, boost like a bat out of hell and jump out.
Then they follow you and this repeats until one of you gets bored or messes up.
Haven't tried the taipan yet, but for the other two there's not much between them. It's more about which loadout you get. The imperial fighter is faster and more agile, but by a tiny degree. Whichever model you prefer, you'll get good performance with it. I prefer the fighter because I think it's the coolest and I tend to fly Imperial.
Speaking of which, I hit Duke! The last rank is a real pisser, it slows down a lot for that one. Thankfully I had a long hangout with a friend and I just idly chipped away without really thinking about it.
It took maybe a week where I played a little every day (except yesterday) and was pretty fun until that last slog. I made a net profit of about 15 million, which is insanely low. But what can you do? That's not what I was in it for. I'm liquidating my Type 9, Python, Asp and Courier to pay for a Cutter. My Vulture I'm keeping around for now. I might try a Sothis run or two, or take a break for a while since I don't want to burn out before the update.
Have you guys seen this? Someone reconstructed the crashed alien ship:
Looks kinda thargoidy... maybe? 8 sides at least! Also here is a new picture from the weekends Elite-met in Birmingham:
Mysterious structures!
Finally, here is a video of a SRV driving into a geyser and getting some air:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFcKBMQp8t4&feature=youtu.be
Edit: Haha, this one is even better, geyser-induced orbital velocity!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f4j4rRaBTQs&feature=youtu.be
Outside of my main ship though, I like the imperial stuff. The Clipper was my favourite stage of my trading journey, the Courier flies great and the Fighter is awesome fun. It's mainly the look, and the feeling that you're flying a sports car in space. I have a feeling (from limited flight experience with it) that the Cutter would be too much of a pain to use as a general purpose vessel, but it's very sexy for a cargo ship
Also, on a different note: what are the practical advantages/disadvantages of playing in a non-PvP community (say, Mobius) vs. playing solo? I know what they are in theory, but have people found that they're pretty much the same experience, or do they change things in noticeable ways?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
@daveNYC, on the topic of fighting with Pythons, from what I've read the development over time has made the Python go from the no.1 über-ship, to a good if somewhat slow combat ship, to the present day of a hard to fly ship at the mercy of even NPCs, singularly hard hit by the whims of the developers. However, some of my friends who are very experienced combat pilots (PvP included), claim that with the right loadout, Pythons can still be lethal even if flying them now takes good pip-management, FA-Off and specific loadouts that are in line with what the ship excels at. Personally, my Python is set up as a freighter with teeth. It only has 600 MJ something shields, but even then I don't really have any fear of npc interdictions. Thankfully there are no npc pirate Cutters in the game yet!
@Thirith. Ah, the Cobra Mk2! No wait... that was the catastrophe that sunk the original manufacturer of the Cobra line. The Cobra Mk3 I mean of course, the one ship that is the poster child of the Elite series! When I don't have anything specific I'm up to, my Cobra is still the ship I take out from the shipyard. The main attraction of the Cobra, at least for me, is the speed it is capable of, and all modifications I've done so far have the ultimate goal of making a good allrounder exploiting the high speed the Cobra is capable of, but let me get back to my build later.
Your suggested build with multis and beams are what I flew a lot a long time ago. After some trial and error, I found that I got the best result with one medium beam and the rest multis, the distributor simply can't keep up with anything more than that. If you wish to stay with that specific load-out, you should probably aim for weapons-focus on the distributor mod. However, I found that I had more luck with a large-small pulse and large-small multi setup so that you have a pulse and multi on both top and bottom. Since the cobra has a small overlapping field of fire for all four hardpoints, this means you will always have both a laser and a multi firing at your target as long as your nose is in the vaguely right direction.
Short range blaster is a good mod for multis from what I've read, and as a general rule multis aren't long weapons anyway so you are not losing much by going with this mod. Other possibilities are light weight mount, which will help you with the all-important speed, or overcharged as the jitter is not that important for multis (?).
As for non-weapon mods, Farseer is a good engineer to unlock. She has fsd level 5 (always nice no matter what you do as travelling is such a large part of the game), and more importantly thrusters level 3. The only engineer with higher level for thrusters is Prof. Palin, and the road to his base at Maia is a long one. Farseer can also upgrade your powerplant a little bit, also useful.
Ok, let me get back to my own Cobra build for some inspiration. This ship is my "do-everything-reasonably-well", with the option of running away from anything I don't like the looks of:
https://coriolis.io/outfit/cobra_mk_iii/2pataFalddasdf4272a2429040345033201v62f.Iw1-kA==.Aw1-kA==
The rails are modded with feedback cascade and super penetrator, the multis with corrosive munitions and incendiary. The rails are mainly for any PvP encounters, the multis for additional punch and when I am feeling lazy and just want to blast some NPCs. Everything else in the ship is modded for high speed, while still keeping a good amount of damage-soak capability when silent running. In a cobra, your shields WILL go down (the one main drawback of the ship, and something that really made the heat-nerfs hit the Cobra and DBS hard), and you need strategies to cope with this. Going silent is something that used to work really well, but lately it is much harder, especially if you still want to have offensive capability. I'm hoping that 2.2 will be beneficial to silent running builds, we will see how that turns out.
Anyway, that is just my preferred build, optimised for what I do in game. If you post your own build, we can probably come up with better suggestions and input!
I run mine with the multi/pulse top and bottom, and it has treated me fairly well. Popping on railguns sounds like fun.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
It can, but so can any ship really. I pirate NPCs (and players) in my Corvette. Cutter is faster though and isn't as horrible getting there in the first place hah.
I take mine there all the time. Nothing like coming back to the bubble with 100mil in missions to deliver.
That's some good shit, literally.
Fortunately they're pretty rare. I'd argue the 0h 7m (or in that area) updates are also kind of dumb if they're not given to you literally in the area of the receiving platform. They should be a random bonus for doing a job, not a stress builder.
What's the deal with Sothis?
Yep, get yourself to ceos/sothis and your cutter will print money. The only thing I'd do first would be to get your FSD mods on it since it will drastically cut down the time you waste jumping.
That said, I dont think I've ever managed to get 100mil in one single run. The most was slightly less than 70mil and I honestly never tried to stack high profit to tonnage ratio missions again because having to deliver to 30 different station ended up feeling more tedious than just doing another ~50mil run where I only had to deliver to 5 different ones and hopping back in 14 jumps.
The best profit per hour still remains if you get allied with the smuggling factions and they start giving you 4x7mil missions to sneak illegal stuff to sothis from ceos and vice versa. Those dont seem to spawn consistently but when they do, it's the fastest cash in the universe since robigo's sellback glitch got fixed.
In other news, mine launchers got nerfed in the newest beta. NPCs, even low rank ones, are now unable to ever hit one.