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J Bytheway
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England
Jul 2001
time: 05:21
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If the autopilot is giving you trouble then go to maximum time acceleration (even for the last little bit after you get landing clearance) - it behaves much better then.
Last edited by J Bytheway on 08-01-2005 at 20:55
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child of Thor
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Hi J Bytheway, and welcome 
I'm finding those new missiles(MB something or others) quite interesting. I'm not usualy a missile guy(who can be in an Asp?) - but i did use one to take out my first contract.
[I should just let Snotty know that i didnt commit the act he thinks i did, but ended up doing the same job he is doing for 50,000 - that of getting the scoundrel that did]
wow - i'm actualy planning my weekend around playing FFE 
And after eating and spitting out Halo2 over a day or two, and Just starting to get into Fable - this is quite something. Especially when i'm not even playing my long time(6months so far?) staple of LMA manager.
(looks towards FFE)
Impresive......most impresive.
And now for something completely(well not quite) different.
Hard War.
Been playing it a fair bit over the last month. I like it its a cool game, and doesnt look bad even by todays standards. Again its another game i'm new to, coming out in that period where i wasn't gameing much.
Anyway, in FFE whenever i fly to the space station orbiting Titan(or Io?) in the Sol system(sometimes its the closet dock) - i give a nod to the guys down on Titan, scurrying around in their Moths, fighting for scavenger rights 
And it got me thinking - wouldn't it be kinda dreamy if you could also own fixed property in FFE, like in Hard War? You could then not only have your 'batmobile' but also your 'batcave' 
Its also that feature i liked in daggerfall(i can do it in Fable too) - the ability to own property.
Anyway i'm going to scour a few websites and see if i can find the 'Stories/Gazeteer' that came with FFE - as i've just got the game manual(complete with typos in the ship descriptions, commonly mixing the numbers for 'crew' and 'missiles' up). The one that came with Frontier is a bit out of date and many planets names have changed(especially in the 'new' Alliance part of sapce).
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child of Thor
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Yes it is tricky trying to find the right balance of space-craft. Too big and your an easy target for someone with a big enough weapon(even if you pack in the shields).
Too small and its just a matter of luck if you survive a multiple craft attack.
And yes i've noticed that the fastest 'time' setting is more prone to getting you attacked.
I've started to slow things down much more now - the upside is that i get less attacks/crashes. And i only use the top speed untill i'm about 7.AU out(taking a few attacks), then i go down a speed setting untill i'm about 2.AU out(still maybe getting a few attacks).
After that its a progressive slowdown on the 'time-speed' settings untill the autopilot starts its final run.
The nice thing about this is that i get to actualy watch the planet approach, which adds(for me) quite alot to the impression of being in space. In max speed auto-pilot mode it all goes by in a blur 
And Qudos to Snotty trying to play it 'iron-man' style
I cant even imagine anyone succeding at that!
I am trying to cut down on the reloads, and like you considering an escape capsule when i get a big enough space ship.
At the momment i just carry that extra fuel into any new system, and set my escape hyperjump system as soon as i arrive.
I've currently picked up an interesting mission from the bulitin boards - to 're-decorate' a firm of lawyers in the Ackweyda(sp?) system. I took it because its mentioned in the Journals and sounded fun, and i've never tried a ground attack mission before.
On the otherhand i'm also taking a high paying passenger to the same system. She needs to be there a day before i'm due to 're-decorate' - i hope she isnt a lawer? 
Escape Velocity looks very nice indeed - i'll have to read more about it, is it as free-form as Elite?
@Barinthus, when decideing which planet(system) to fly to next, in the bottom left of the navigation map screen(the one with all the planets on and your purple/pink range circle) you will see as you highlight from one planet to another, that you get a range readout - this will tell you how many tonnes of fuel you need(in your cargo hold) to get to that system.
With the internal fuel readout(the one on the flight console), i make it a habit of nver letting it get less than half full, and for this you use the 'refuel' button that Snotty mentioned - each press on this will take one tonne of fuel from your cargo hold and refill the internal fuel tank.
Nothing worse than flying helplessly off into space cause you run out of fuel, eventualy you'll get swallowed by a star!
Last edited by child of Thor on 10-01-2005 at 18:27
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Barinthus
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A Magical Moment...
Jan 2004
time: 21:21
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child of Thor - from what I've read here, it seems that FFE is more 'freeforming' than EV. However EV's pretty good. You could be a trader, a smuggler, a rebel, a pro-Federation, a pro-whatever, a pirate, a reckless marauder, or whatever. I do enjoy EV although, it seems more fast paced than FFE and plots can get interesting. For instance I got myself enslaved by some telepathic race that has inflirated the Federation government and I have no choice but do their bidding. Right now they're using me to inflirate the Rebellion and I was recently summoned to return to Earth so I'm wondering what's next.
This, I can say, is that the trading system in FFE is probably better than EV. FFE makes it easier for you, you could do some research and determine your own trade routes while in EV if you wanted to do the trading thing you would have to document everything which can be tedious.
However with small crafts you'd be better off checking mission BBS for requests to transport cargos of so and so, more money that way. And you can determine which are safe ports and so on. I suppose if you had a huge ship, buying goods directly from the market and selling those yourself could be profitable but by then I do not want to do some trading, I want to do some serious backside-kicking  . I'm also sure that it'd be still more profitable to take transporting goods missions off BBS anyway.
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J Bytheway
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England
Jul 2001
time: 05:21
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quote:
Originally posted by child of Thor
Still - i can see where J Bytheway is coming from. The way i looked at it in Frontier(and FFE has the same problems more or less), is that with all the bashing around the computer systems on my ship take, you could expect glitches in the system that might cause a fatal systems error |
I like that perspective. Similarly for the no-show assassination targets - it's not surprising that the military has imperfect information sometimes (although it is a shame that they blame you so much for failure...)
quote:
Now does anyone know where that smugglers shipyard is that allows you to build your own spaceship? |
 Now now, stop spreading urban legends .
quote:
And J Bytheway, that Sol - Barnards Star strategy; so we can blame you for all the unhappy unemployed crew that litter the BBS in both frontier and FFE then?
'why did you quit your last job?'
'I found the repetitive cargo runs boring' |
Oh, don't remind me - by far the hardest part of upgrading to a Panther Clipper is finding enough crew to man it. In the end I bought in on the station around Titan, I think, and had to wait around for about a fortnight before enough prospective crew turned up.
Nevertheless, I paid to dollar (top credit?) and my employees certainly never quit! I felt so very bad when I sacked them all after I'd made my millions with their help, and they'd only earnt a few hundred credits in the process  .
If only the game allowed you to pay severence compensation I would have given each of them 100KCr to salve my conscience, but alas, I was forced to simply dump them (at Galileo, IIRC) and fly away in my new Viper  .
Last edited by J Bytheway on 12-01-2005 at 02:17
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child of Thor
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I'm wondering if this game is so hard due to design, or by accident
I'm being forced to trawl some fan-sites to find out how to succeed at ground attack missions after 2 hours of dieing last night.
It was kinda breathtaking though.
Flying into Akwada( i still dont know the exact name), its southwest of federation space somewhere in the vicinity of Tilia(the civil war planet of one of my previous adventures).
After messing up the mission a few times by landing on Yorkville(the planets only spaceport on land), and fast-forwarding to the date i was meant ot carry out the attack on the lawyers firm; i eventually worked out that i needed to do something else other than fly around the city trying to blow up buildings(i didnt have a big sign saying 'lawyers this way'). 
So i went back to a previous save and approached the planet again, this time noticing that there was another white blip on the planet surface. As i got closer my hud told me it was something called '*rontier' - i had no idea if this was the lawyers firm but it was the only clue i had.
I was flying quite low, about 1000 meters and going around 350kph with 600km to go. I decided to speed up the time flow.
Alarms!! dammit!
All i'll say is i thought combat in space was hard untill this point!
reload try again.
This time i entered the atmosphere much closer to my target(around 400km) and much lower at around 200meters above ground level. I decided not to speed up time
What i wasn't expecting as i got to around 250km from my target, was the ground to drop away! One momment i was at a few hundred feet, then the next i was at 10,000 meters.
FFE isn't a sexy looking game, but this was quite a breathtaking experience(and all in 640x480!)
I also noticed around half a dozen ships flying around my target!
I decided to land on the floor of the canyon - i wasn't being attacked yet and i had to wait a few hours(game time) because i'd been instructed to wait for a diversion in the evening sometime.
This time i did use the speed up setting, after getting this far i wanted to see what was going to happen, and i didn't want to wait in real time for those few hours to go by.
I was attacked a number of times as soon as i hit the speedx2 setting, but the ships blew themselves up(i guess by flying into the ground), and i only took a little damage to my shields. Sometimes bugs can be your friends
I think i missed the diversion - i noticed too late that the ships(their registration numbers) i had seen near my target were no longer there.
I had just thought it a graphic glitch for a while?
Still once i realised i should be moving i went to the attack.
Flying low around 100meters, it was a straight run in, and apparently uncontested, all those ships really had vanished.
Untill i got to about 50km from the target, then all hell let lose.
I lost count of how many registration numbers i saw riseing from what turned out to be a small star port, they started to obscure each other!
What i did notice were the three Imperial Couriers armed with 4MW lasers.
I flew like a mad-man, all within a few hudred meters of the ground, up and down - left right - all over the place, ECMing every few seconds, not that i could tell if they were using high tech misiles or not, my scanner was overloaded with blips.
I got to within 8km of my target - i could now see that it was actualy called 'Frontier', but still no sign of the lawyers firm that i could tell.
Then one of those 4MW laser did the job on me, my 10xshields neatly peeled open and it was the wonderfull spinning gravestone:
'RIP comdr. Jameson died 20th April 3251'
I just hope this is my real target, and not some secret military base i'd stumbled across - now where are those faqs 
found the one(and some answers) here http://www.alioth.net/ajn/PlanetaryAttack.html
Last edited by child of Thor on 13-01-2005 at 17:40
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Snotty
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er...buggered if i can remember. I might give it crack myself, I seem to remember the mission popping up recently. My mind throws up memorys of pictures taking mission more readily than the missile ones.
I checked out the voyager probe website the other day, they said that voyager 1 had reached 80 AU away from earth and was the furthest any object had travelled from earth! kind of puts it in perspective a bit when we jump into those binary star systems that dump us 250-300 AU out from the nearest port
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08-01-2005 18:42
The constrictor that came after me took a pasting with my 1mw pulse laser as he waved his 4mw beam wildly around the place.
. Some things were not meant for mere mortals to comprehend...
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