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Elite Dangerous: Horizons |OT| Just scratching the surface

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
The character creator is a lot more fun than I expected

8DC3A83113DEBF49933A081F5A7CC719481AD26E

Same with the new camera options (though finding bindings for them was a pain)

 
So as I continue my extremely slow push through unlocking engineers, what is a good PvE build for the FDL at this point after all the balance stuff? Has the shield balance hurt the FDL?
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
So as I continue my extremely slow push through unlocking engineers, what is a good PvE build for the FDL at this point after all the balance stuff? Has the shield balance hurt the FDL?

They didn't go through with the shield balance :p

FdL is still beefy, if you really wanna tear it up with the FdL in pve and be able to hold your own if some one tries to gank you try this out.

https://coriolis.edcd.io/outfit/fer...e040404040400B22b2b2o66.Iw18aQ==.IwBj4yuYg===.

You're gonna have to get used to firing the PAs since they're fixed weapons after all but this is incredibly fun to fly, you're fast, pretty tanky and you don't need to rely on shield cell banks since even if they manage to chew through your bi-weave (which you should mod for thermal resist and half your booster should be resist all and the other half should be heavy duty) which is basically resistant to all damage types, you've got your hull which should be more than enough to hold for your shields to come back up.

You really need the PA efficiency engineer available though for this to really shine, other wise you're gonna get a bit spicy in combat.

The main weakness of the build is that it's got low ammo count so you're not gonna be staying in RES and CZs for terribly long periods of time.
 
I used to run with the huge Plasma Accelerator. I've always used fixed weapons for everything except multi-cannons. That build does look like it would be a lot fun. I also used to love the huge fixed cannon. That cannon did such massive damage to components. Just 2 hits and a few fixed medium pulse laser shots disabled a Anaconda power plant.
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
Yeah it's a very up close and personal build, so you really just orbit around your target within 500m and just deal massive damage quickly.

I've taken out NPC federal assault ships in ~30 seconds before, soooo satisfying.
 

DrBo42

Member
So I leave the computer all damn day to update, and it doesn't start downloading the update until I hit the play elite button.



war not a thing anymore? gaf faction done for? apam napat a thing of the past?

The factions just don't matter since you can't actually sign up with them or have any meaningful changes. We've attempted to raise influence before but people always give up.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I just think of Sean Bean raising that copy of Yeats to his face and getting unloaded on.
 
Ffffuuuuuck at these multicrew payout nerfs: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/64v4ta/combat_bondbounty_payouts_for_crew_members/

Helm got 179k
Gunner got almost 9k

First screenshot is MY payout as the Helm, second screenshot is my friend's payout as Gunner at Novice combat rank.

He made less than FIVE PERCENT of what I did, and he could have made 10x as much money from ONE combat bond kill if he were in his own ship.

I know the payouts were nerfed but this is seriously fucking ridiculously low. There is NO incentive for anyone to join another ship if they don't have a high combat rank. This is dumb.
 

Mengy

wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Well, spent more time than I should have messing about in the commander creator. For now I'm just gonna stick with this guy, he looks a bit like a more rugged version of me, lol:


Then I spent some time playing and configuring the new camera. It's pretty nice, gonna take a lot of getting used to though, but yeah it's nice. Damn fun to fly the ship from a 3rd person exterior view!

And speaking of ships, here is my new and improved DBX all modded out. The mod rolls aren't perfect, but they aren't too bad either.



My DBX makes 58.78 lys on a full 16T tank, and 60.86 lys on fumes!!! And there's room for improvement on that yet too!!!!!

Yeah, my Asp X will be taking a rest for a bit....
 

SmartBase

Member
Now limited to a stack of three iirc, in order to prevent players from making money too quickly.

Frontier Game Design.

I just stacked four massacre missions, maybe it only counts kills for three of them? At least they didn't go through with nerfing shields so I can sit in a conflict zone for an hour and still make some credits.
 

Burny

Member
Is that for real? LOL.

Making sure again, so I'm not telling bs, but I remembered correctly:

2.3 changelog said:
  • Massacre conflict and massacre skimmer missions limited to 3 per player at a time.

To be fair, those stacking schemes made everything else in terms of effort/payout pretty much obsolete, so it's in theory reasonable to reduce effectiveness. But there's balancing and then there's butchering things. Idk if they're the only stackable mission types, but now there's an arbitrary limit on two mission types. Utterly counter intuitive. But probably the cheapest way in terms of dev effort to put a hard limit on the schemes' effectiveness.

Everything else, like for example tackling the actual root of the issue, being that taking up separately RNGenerated missions is an insult to player time for advanced players, would've probably overtaxed Frontier's resources for fixing the issue.

Commander Haulsalot and their 400t cargo ship have come to help a faction transport things. 'Great!' , says the faction representative. 'Here's a mission to haul twelve tons of cargo. Come back in ten minutes, we might just give you another one then. Or log out and back in in our parallel universes called "Open", "Group" and "Solo", they might have more of this type of mission for you there.'


This shit needs to be fixed. Not by doubling down on fucking up player effectiveness, but by giving players things that are worth a damn. One approach is building mission board refreshing into the game, which is really overdue. Make it cost credits if you must. An approach for stackable missions, which are just a design crutch, is to limit these missions revolving around one specific target type/ware at the same destination to one mission per faction and per player. But allow a player to scale them according to their rank and standing with the faction, e.g. by means of a slider. They feel they can massacre ten ships? Let them. They feel they can take up 400? Let them. Scale mission payout and time limit accordingly. That'd utterly do away with multiplying payouts by means of stacking missions and give Frontier far tighter control over how effective this is, while also not continuing to insult players by requiring them to do the mode-locking game to even fill their mission capacity.
 

danowat

Banned
Few things I've noticed from the XBO version.

It now runs (and looks?) much better, a lot smoother framerate in more areas.

I keep getting a verbal message that "your FSD drive is running over capacity" or something like that, I've never heard that before, and not sure what it denotes.

In nearly 300hrs, I've never seen this, poor civilians.......

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Danowat32/video/29532055
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
I don't know if I am getting really awful luck or if the patch did something to the power play ships AI but my god they keep running away as soon as I interdict them!

If I can't kill the fed logistic ships within 30 seconds they fly away really fast and then jump out 5 seconds later.
 
Well, spent more time than I should have messing about in the commander creator. For now I'm just gonna stick with this guy, he looks a bit like a more rugged version of me, lol:

.

I can see a bit of Willem Dafoe in there too, the idea of Willem Dafoe being a space trucker pleases me greatly.
 

SmartBase

Member
I love me some more voice lines but this is getting a bit silly.

"This is a highly ranked target Commander. We need to fight smart here" x10000

Well no shit, I'm in a high intensity conflict zone. Shut yer gob!
 

Bru

Member
The NeoGAF faction in Apam Napat is at war! Hop to it.

My Cobra MKIII and I were doing our tiny bit for the cause through to the wee hours of the morning. The fun finally ended when I fell asleep at the helm with my docking computer activated.

Xbox performance has definately improved with the latest 2.3 update. Framerate is significantly smoother, transitions are quicker and planetary textures seem clearer. Whatever optimisations the team at Frontier have made, they have worked wonders.
 
Few things I've noticed from the XBO version.

It now runs (and looks?) much better, a lot smoother framerate in more areas.

I keep getting a verbal message that "your FSD drive is running over capacity" or something like that, I've never heard that before, and not sure what it denotes.

In nearly 300hrs, I've never seen this, poor civilians.......

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Danowat32/video/29532055

^ LOL

It definitely is running better with this update.
 

Mengy

wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
I can see a bit of Willem Dafoe in there too, the idea of Willem Dafoe being a space trucker pleases me greatly.

Hah, yeah he kind of does! After showing my commander to my girlfriend she said it looked nothing like me, so lol. I like him though so I’m keeping him for now. I’ll play around with it some more later, it’s nice how you can change your look pretty easily, that was a good decision.

As for performance, yeah the game seems to run better overall, but there are some pretty bad bugs too:

- Star texture pop in on system jump in is horrible, it’s far more laggy now than it used to be. That has to be fixed, the stars look like ass for the first 8 seconds or so.
- The galaxy map is broken for most people who run high resolutions or downsample. I had to switch down to 1X SS just to get my galaxy map working, that needs fixing too.

However, FSD jumps seem faster for me now, and both the galaxy map and system map open faster too.
 
I was in a Conflict Zone in my Annie last night and took a few hits from an accelerator. Every time I got hit, the computer would announce that I had increased shield regeneration and my shields would jump back up to full like I was getting hit with healing beams from a wingmate (I was in solo). So I just kept jumping in front of PA rounds and was unstoppable lol.
 

SmartBase

Member
Well, spent more time than I should have messing about in the commander creator. For now I'm just gonna stick with this guy, he looks a bit like a more rugged version of me, lol:



Then I spent some time playing and configuring the new camera. It's pretty nice, gonna take a lot of getting used to though, but yeah it's nice. Damn fun to fly the ship from a 3rd person exterior view!

And speaking of ships, here is my new and improved DBX all modded out. The mod rolls aren't perfect, but they aren't too bad either.




My DBX makes 58.78 lys on a full 16T tank, and 60.86 lys on fumes!!! And there's room for improvement on that yet too!!!!!

Yeah, my Asp X will be taking a rest for a bit....

How do you deal with the slow fuel scoop speed on the DBX? I just engineered one and I'm already thinking of getting rid of it since it takes forever to scoop.
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
I was in a Conflict Zone in my Annie last night and took a few hits from an accelerator. Every time I got hit, the computer would announce that I had increased shield regeneration and my shields would jump back up to full like I was getting hit with healing beams from a wingmate (I was in solo). So I just kept jumping in front of PA rounds and was unstoppable lol.

I was getting this too but from a random vulture.
 
Hah, yeah he kind of does! After showing my commander to my girlfriend she said it looked nothing like me, so lol. I like him though so I’m keeping him for now. I’ll play around with it some more later, it’s nice how you can change your look pretty easily, that was a good decision.

As for performance, yeah the game seems to run better overall, but there are some pretty bad bugs too:

- Star texture pop in on system jump in is horrible, it’s far more laggy now than it used to be. That has to be fixed, the stars look like ass for the first 8 seconds or so.
- The galaxy map is broken for most people who run high resolutions or downsample. I had to switch down to 1X SS just to get my galaxy map working, that needs fixing too.


However, FSD jumps seem faster for me now, and both the galaxy map and system map open faster too.

I was just about to post about these. Thank you. Using the mouse in a lot of the UX is broken at the moment. I didn't realize it was associated with resolution. I'm at 1440p with 1.5 SS.

Also, I opened the Galaxy Map from the Engineers menu to go straight to their system and I plotted a course. It plotted a single 154 ly jump that I obviously could not make.
 

Mengy

wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
How do you deal with the slow fuel scoop speed on the DBX? I just engineered one and I'm already thinking of getting rid of it since it takes forever to scoop.

Yeah the 4A scoop is very slow, however, I did some time trials and in reality the difference in traveling speed between the Asp X and the 2.3 DBX is not that great, as long as you take advantage of the DBX’s longer jump range and better heat management by charging the FSD while fuel scooping. See my thread on it here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/340119-The-DBX-vs-Asp-X-A-tale-of-two-fuel-scoops…

So while scooping in the DBX is slow, and it feels so very slow, it’s longer jump range can actually make up a lot of that lost speed as long as you overlap FSD charging and fuel scooping. This is only really important when in “traveling mode” of course, when actually taking the time to explore the slower scoop doesn’t matter much, but man that greater jump range certainly does matter! Especially out on the fringe or high/low on the galactic plane.
 
Man, jumping to a new system and having the star suddenly dominate your entire field of view is one of the iconic and most impressive moments in the game and to have a partially loaded star texture completely ruins that.
 

SmartBase

Member
Yeah the 4A scoop is very slow, however, I did some time trials and in reality the difference in traveling speed between the Asp X and the 2.3 DBX is not that great, as long as you take advantage of the DBX's longer jump range and better heat management by charging the FSD while fuel scooping. See my thread on it here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/340119-The-DBX-vs-Asp-X-A-tale-of-two-fuel-scoops…

So while scooping in the DBX is slow, and it feels so very slow, it's longer jump range can actually make up a lot of that lost speed as long as you overlap FSD charging and fuel scooping. This is only really important when in ”traveling mode" of course, when actually taking the time to explore the slower scoop doesn't matter much, but man that greater jump range certainly does matter! Especially out on the fringe or high/low on the galactic plane.

Looks like you're going with a smaller fuel tank, hadn't thought of that. I'll definitely be giving it another go tomorrow, thanks.
 
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