Frontier - First Encounters(Elite3)

[Barinthus]

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.

[J Bytheway]

My strategy in my longest-running game of Frontier (I think I'm up to 12-15 years in now) was to make a fortune (about 8MCr) on the Sol - Barnards Star run where I didn't need to worry about weapons, shields or any other extraneous silliness that wasted mass so I could pack the cargo in that much tighter! Then, with my future assured, I switched to having fun - pursuing a Federation military carrer in a Viper. I lost a couple of million credits (mostly in paying for repairs) whilst doing assasination missions, but now I've finally got enough rank to perform other missions, and I'm actually making a profit!

There's no way you could do assasination missions in a pure "iron man" way because some of the time your target won't appear even if you do everything right - you can improve matters by avoiding certain systems, ship types, etc., but the problem never goes away. I've had to reload from about 80 saves beforehand on some occasions... If you failed as many missions as you inevitably would, then people would stop hiring you (especially the military).

[DrSpike]

Yeah, lots of silly bugs did ruin Frontier.

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Yeah, lots of silly bugs did ruin Frontier.

I disagree - they didn't ruin it, they just made it more characterful . So long as you play carefully, with the right attitude and save as if your life depends on it (which, in a sense, it does) then it's quite possible not to be frustrated by the bugs.

Of course, it would be better if the bugs were fixed, but we can't have everything .

[DrSpike]

You should work for Firaxis.

[J Bytheway]

Originally posted by DrSpike
You should work for Firaxis.

Alas, (from what little I know), I think their bugs are just annoying, not characterful.

[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

Thus relying purely on your auto-pilot wasn't the norm for most pilots.......something like that.
So the game bugs became apart of the folklore of space fareing for me(how else do you put up with being driven into a planet?).
And even with these bugs in Frontier(and FFE), it didn't stop me sinking untold happy hours into my amiga over the course of a couple of years.

Now does anyone know where that smugglers shipyard is that allows you to build your own spaceship?


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'

[J Bytheway]

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...)

Now does anyone know where that smugglers shipyard is that allows you to build your own spaceship?

Now now, stop spreading urban legends .

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 .

[J Bytheway]

OK, something really wierd is going on in that post (the one above this one) - I can't seem to remove the duplication . Bizarre...

Edit: And now it appears to have fixed itself . Some things were not meant for mere mortals to comprehend...

[child of Thor]

......well we are talking about Frontier+FFE? maybe your auto-pilot is playing up? when did you last service it?

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...)

well....that sounds about right. Get some lower ranking/undesirable to take the flak - never blame the system

But yeah - overall it could have been so much better. Still they are apparantly hireing for Elite4 at the momment, so maybe that is a good prospect for all our elite dreams(not much info about it is forthcoming, but maybe that will be for the best)

if not then i'm a very happy recent inductee to FFE - its being very absorbing, and as usual im finding the the freedom to pursue whatever type of lifestyle i prefer the main draw of this game.

[child of Thor]

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

[Snotty]

I remember those missions I love the fact that you actually have to fly your ship for once instead of the autopilot doing the grunt work, and combat being point and click. Its worth getting a high standing in the military just so they can give you missions like this all the time

[child of Thor]

aha! maybe you can help me then

when i took the contract it said 'a few well aimed missiles should do the trick'.
I'm flying an Asp and can only carry one missile(i've made sure its the best one i can get). Will that be enough? or will i have to use my 1MW laser to finish the job? I'm just a bit concerned i might not make it if i have to do a few passes - maybe another ship with more missiles would be better?

I really want to get these lawyers [not that i got anything against them in general - just that this bunch are pretty underhand]

[Snotty]

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

[Snotty]

damn dp