pantyfire wrote:

You get inter systems conflicts or civil wars in a system.  You also get flagged as you are flying about and asked to follow people and drop out of warp and have a chat etc... It definitely feels alive. There's loads of things buzzing about and 'unknown' radio sources to go and have look at.

Hmm yeah that sounds more like it. Did I miss it being £30? It's £35.99 now, do you think it will be on sale again soon?

Yeh sussed docking.

Bought it but no idea what to do now. I'll have a proper bash tomorrow.

What are the consequences for blowing up?

You lose your cargo but the ship is free. So not much.

How are you finding it?

I upgraded my starter ship with a scanner, and some new lasers and it cost 4000. I had the option of of taking the original without upgrades for free.

Why did you nearly delete it? Were you flummoxed?

You watch the video, you look at the control layout, you play the tutorial. It's not rocket science, no, wait..

I think I've enjoyed this so much because it's so bewildering when you first load it up. 
I've fumbled along and worked everything out mostly for myself and it feels like I've achieved something rather than being lead by the noise for a hour by the normal tutorials. 

But that's because i really wanted to figure it out. Most will just go WTF and put it down. Frantic is nearly most.

Frantic will love it when it clicks. I had trouble even lining my ship up with my destination until I clocked the little display on the dash. Then I had trouble even though I was looking at the little display on the dash as it wasn't pointing me towards my destination. It was pointing me in the complete opposite direction, which is indicated by the circle being hollow instead of full.

Loads to learn but once you do it's a great feeling, zipping about in no time when before you'd have squandered 20 mins overshooting the station you're aiming for and coming out of hyperdrive in the arse end of space.

The combat is rewarding too, only shot down two ships but the satisfaction gained is on a par with beating a Souls boss, real fist pumping stuff.

I remember spending a looong time trying to get the pad controls into something coherent. Even finding a simple online pic of exactly what the various control schemes looked like was basically impossible. Diggin about on forum posts gave some help but perhaps it's simpler now. 

Got it to the point where I was cleanly flying, docking, supercruising and whatnot but thought the starting ship would just get blown away in bounty missions. Seems that may not be the case so I'll try a restart and see if I can go hunting. 
I liked just pootling off into the unknown and investigating unknowns/finding starmaps to sell.

Firing your lasers while attempting to dock, when you ment to apply reverse thrust.

No amount of "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it!" is going to help you now.

I'm going smuggler. I've kitted myself out with double heat sinks, and I'm going to practice silent running so I can sneak into docks unscanned

So had a quick crack again. Same nonsense. 

Trying to find the controls managed to shoot off ma useless starter hardpoints inside Armstrong Station so that cost me 100 quid. Never mind. 

Managed to find a bounty in the nearby Freng System. Bonza, 90k, ne skill pre-reqs. I'l av it!

managed to get over there sharply enough but then found that the Freng system consists of about 3 station, 4/5 resource collection area and godknows what else. Non idea where this dude is, no clear indication of how to find him. Went to a resource point just to see what they're like and pretty quickly got attacked by some eejit called Andy. He was gubbins as was I so we did the silly target chasing thing for a while (he got my shields down and disabled me a couple of times but I managed to get away before he could finish me off.. my pokey starting lasers didn't seem to cause him too much trouble) I eventually  gave up and just frameshifted to the nearest port. The bounty didn't seem to be there either and there was no clues to where he was... 

I might try to give it another crack in a bit but it is a bit impenetrable in most everything it does. I also seem to have a permanent drift thing going on with the left stick. Tried increasing the deadzone but that hasn't fixed it quite yet. Doesn't seem to appear on any other games mind... Might just try resetting the controls to default again and starting from scratch.

Bounty Hunting is the easy way to begin as long as you go for missions with relatively low bounties, the higher ones are too difficult. You'll get the reward for the mission and the individual bounties. A lot of wanted ships don't even have shields. Just scan them first and if they look too hard, run away.

Most of the early bounties don't ask for specific targets, only pirates in general. The named ones are generally pretty tough and if you accept them and go to the recommended system you'll usually find them. You don't want to do that on your own though.