Thursday 2 June 2016

New AI in Elite Dangerous 2.1 - Stick your head between your legs and kiss your ar*e goodbye

Greetings, Commanders,

So 2.1 landed, and we tippy-toed out of our space stations to be royally rogered by the new AI. No flowers, no chocolates, and no dinner, just straight up g*ngbanged.

I haven't openly sworn at my computer for a while, having small children means, thankfully, that the headset goes on after they've got their heads down for the night. The other night I downloaded the new update, keen to work on my ship, upgrading merrily as I went. I realised I would be needing some bits and pieces from (a) the surface of the planets and (b) mining. To this end I bought an Eagle (Best thing in the shipyard) and gave it an SRV hangar, and an Asp Explorer for mining.

I loved my Asp Explorer, nice, capable ship, not TOO big, quite tough, and not such a huge outlay if I dented it a bit. How wrong I was.... but more about that in a moment. I bought collector limpets (Which are just brilliant, BTW) to get oore fragments AND they pick up scrap from ships, I later learned, a memont of sheer joy, those little guys make me happy. I headed out to a lowRES to test mining, tried it once last year and it did NOT float my boat. HOWEVER, once I'd mined enough ore to have a ton of anything, the NPC's got nasty, and this was in a LowRES! Suddenly, there's teams of 3 well kitted Vipers and Asps drilling your hull. It goes south SO quickly.

I actually combat-logged. Twice! It was just to keep my hard earned mining payload. Not proud of it, but I'm a relatively experienced combat pilot, and I got bullied like a posh kid in Lewisham.

Anyway, looking forward to a minor nerf, because if that's a LowRES, then HighRES will be like going to warp in Event Horizon.

Fly safe, commanders.