GRcade

Rex Kramer wrote:After reading this thread and a few other guides, I decided to just go with the training missions initially. First one, no bother at all. 2nd one

My first attempt resulted in me failing to drop out of supercruise at the right point to satisfy the tutorial. After about a dozen attempts and continual fly-bys I decided to give up and go to bed. Had another go this morning and then realised I'd spent the previous evening targeting the wrong place. So, I'm there nice and easy and then comes docking. Luckily this thread had pointed out the alternate flight controls so I'm feeling confident. Then I spent 10 minutes bouncing off the dock. Line up the chevrons it's says, so I do. Took me a while to realise/remember that I needed to be pointing away from the entrance.

Was it fun? Not sure but it wasn't too frustrating as reading this thread had prepared me a bit. What was a significant improvement over OG Elite was the size of the entrance to the space station. That original design decision to make the slot only as big as your ship so you had to match the strawberry floating rotation was a nightmare and also illogical given ships about 5x bigger than the one you flew came out of the same entrance.]

Haven't broken out the flight stick yet (by that I mean I haven't figured a way to use it without withering glances from my wife and comments about wasting money on peripherals again). Handled nicely with the pad (aside from the gazillion button combinations) so with a stick it should be something special.

Brerlappin wrote:You were probably just facing the wrong way. You need to be facing the right direction for docking to work. Even with the gear down and everything you cant land in just any position, i think it shows you on the mini map thing which way to face. I forget, its been a while since i played it

Tafdolphin wrote:Elite is:

- The best simulation of actually owning and flying a space-ship ever made
- Beautiful
- Calming
- Blessed with an extremely active and interesting player community
- A near constant grind.

Elite is not:

- Exciting
- Fast
- Simple
- A game, really.

I had a shedload of downtime available to me and I was quite happy to pour it into Elite Dangerous, but this is not an experience for people who desire quick rewards for little work. All in all it took me close to 100 hours to save up enough money for my Anaconda but I'll be damned if that hunk o' junk isn't one of my proudest gaming achievements. Elite is, almost literally, a job you pay to do. It's trade routes and exploration tours, it's constant Alt-Tabbing out of the game to check http://eddb.io or https://coriolis.io/, it's spending 40 minutes on one passenger run and getting blown up by security forces as you forgot to request landing permission. It's the sort of game you put on auto-pilot whilst listening to Dan Carlin podcasts. It's immersive, boring, beautiful and awful all at once. Now if they'd only fix the strawberry floating reputation grind, I might even consider going back to it one day.

Frontier's latest content drop introduces a new Beginner's Zone, where newcomers are free to take flight and familiarise themselves with Elite Dangerous' idiosyncrasies without fear of attack from PvP-frenzied pros. New players will have access to the area - alongside a selection of easy, introductory missions and reduced re-buy costs - until they earn their first Combat, Trade, or Exploration rank.

Additionally, there are two new ship modules available to all players, both designed to assist with some of Elite's trickier flight manoeuvres. The new Advanced Docking Computer, for example, not only automatically lands a player's ship at a station, it'll undock too. Gone will be the days in which you carefully navigate a station's access slot, only to be greeted by a fellow Commander ricocheting dramatically off a nearby wall.

There's also a new Supercruise Assist module which, once activated, will automatically maintain the correct speed and approach required to reach a selected destination, even dropping out of Supercruise at the optimal time - meaning the awkward loops of shame that invariably occur whenever players overshoot their target will likely become a rarer sight. Supercruise Assist will also, apparently, help players remain safely in a planet's orbit.

The Advanced Docking Computer will be fitted as standard on all newly purchased smaller ships post-update, and the Supercruise Assist module is standard on ships of all sizes. And it sounds like both modules should be available from Outfitting too.

Lagamorph wrote:There is an auto landing module you can buy as well...