I was going to get a rift anyway but now I'm impatient for the release. I fired up ED yesterday, planning on playing all day then got called into work for a 14 hour shift. It's the most annoyed I've been in a long time.

Voice Attack is a must for playing with rift. Any buttons or switches that aren't on the main body of your joystick or throttle are pretty hard to use when you can't see them, so mapping all of your secondary functions to voice command is a huge boost in playability. Also, you can code in the NATO phonetic alphabet to type (very slowly) without a keyboard. Useful for searching in the galaxy map. Also also, you can program it so you can say "Engage!" and jump into supercruise, which is pretty sick.

I got Voice Attack (and a voice from Ivona) but found that I could map pretty much anything I needed to my hotas (X-55) and since I prefer playing without a headset, I haven't really used it since.

Might try it again once I get a Rift though - some of the switches on the throttle base are probably going to be hard to get by feel alone.

I set up VA for Star Citizen and it's awesome. I'll definitely be using it. I spent about an hour training my text-to-speech program.

Official forums for this game are a massive train wreck.

Aren't official forums always complete cesspools?

Reddit's Elite sub seems alright, but I haven't read enough to really say.

Official E: D forums have seemed way better than what you usually get from game-forums when I've visited them, but haven't been there much since release so it might've changed lately.

How do people go about finding reasonable trades to run? I find it pretty mystifying.

When you're at a station, write down whatever is in high demand. Once you build up a small catalog, you should be able to put together some lucrative runs.

Or use trading tools online like:



to find good routes and/or rare goods. From my reading its also possible to find intra-system routes where you make thousands per ton.

Yep. Use that tool. Click on the rares tab, find some close by, jump around till your hold's full then find somewhere 130-160Ly away to sell them, repeat.

Pretty sure you can find lucrative routes without jumping that far. I've just been bounty hunting and doing missions though and only have about 500k and a stock cobra.

I got a cobra but the jump drives maxed out around 5Ly until class A where it shoots to 21. I couldn't afford 1.6 for the drive yet so downgraded back to a hauler. I see a route I want to try in reddit but I need more cargo space.

Trading seems a bit easy.

I have found several systems where there is an extraction economy next to an industrial/ high tech economy where gold is always well above galactic average.

Dont understand using a tool at all, breaks one of the central satisfactions of gameplay, which is the I found this element/exploration.

In essence tool = spoilers.

I personally would prefer to work a bit harder to find good trades, or at least have to make more than one jump between my trade stations.

Just work out how all the various economies inter relate. Each economy will make a good and need inputs to produce. Look at the supply/demand.

Its really straightforward.

hah, we're very different people! I'm happy to let other people map the game. I want fleets of ships.

I agree with that - I'd never use anything like that. Might consider using a tool that only kept track of prices the last time I personally visited a system, but probably wouldn't even bother with that.

Don't care if others do, but for me it would be a huge immersion breaker and something that doesn't fit the Elite universe at all.

You don't think that we'll know the price of goods outside of the single station we are sitting in in the year 3300? I've always wondered why we didn't just have access to this info in game. It seems silly to me to think that ~1300 years from now, people are going to be guessing where the best place is to go to sell their spaceship full of valuables.

If there was perfect information then there would hardly be any trade possibilities for someone tootling around with a less than 10 million tons of trade capacity.

Which I could actually buy into, trade for the odd jobbing freebooter should be much more about ad hoc od jobs/smuggling/highly dangerous trade routes etc than just actual vanilla logistics for production.

Hai guys, we can make the robotics today coz cmndr OAFK just happened arrived with his 8 tons of gold strikes me as a bit off. Rekon the robot factory would have that **** nailed down without my input.

However much mental gymnastics I have to do to accept the presentation of reality offered by the game, using an out of game tool is just to much pressure on the third wall for me and breaks one of the central satisfactions of the gameplay itself, e.g. I found this.

Do you think we'll be manually docking our space ships with less aids than what pilots have on airplanes today? Do you think people will spend hours manually mining asteroids instead of having bots do it? Do you think anyone will actually fly around like it's done in Elite, pirates all around?

It's not about what'll probably actually exist in the year 3300 - it won't look anything like what Elite (or SW for that matter) does. They're not 'future technology' simulators.

You can't accept some totally unrealistic futuristic parts of it and then justify going totally out of character for the setting with another part just because "we'll have that in 1300 years". It's about staying true to the reality presented by the game - not by the reality we'll probably actually have. Information is key in the Elite universe - and it does not travel lightly.

Somehow I spawned in some random corner of the galaxy that's a zillion miles away anywhere that's listed in these trading tools. I am currently in the process of wending my way back to civilization.

You really dont need those tools to trade, its really straightforward. If you are able to refuel you are able to trade.

I just bought my first Cobra and it came off the shelf with 9Ly range and for 50K I can upgrade it to 11Ly.

You got sold a dud.

That's annoyingly realistic.

I'm starting to sour on this game a bit. It's more like a collection of minigames of uneven quality than a real game. I think I spend more time playing the "decelerate towards a target in supercruise" minigame than I spend on any other game activity. And that is not a very fun minigame.