Hello, "nooby"
player here.
First off, I played
the original Elite game as a kid on my father's old commodore computer and had a blast. When I recently saw this game (time difference of about 17 years) was available, I downloaded it immediately.
Because of my past experience with Elite, I had a basic grasp of certain things all new commanders need to know: how to make a profit from trading, how to fly
the ship, how to dock, which upgrades I needed to get first (or so I thought
) etc. Imagine my surprise when I found out there were space lanes! You couldn't use
the torus drive to jump straight to
the mainstation! Heresy! (joking, joking). I was also impressed with how
the jump drive didn't launch you forward a certain distance but instead sped up your ship. So I very, very quickly adopted
the tactic of going outside
the space lanes. I knew that I could probably not take on pirates with
the original equipment that I had, but avoiding
the space lanes had a lot more to do with just making a profit as fast as I could, thus, jump driving instead of piddlying around by following
the space lanes.
That being said, I did decide to fight at least one battle with pulse lasers before upgrading to beam. It was interesting. Not too difficult, but I found that I did have to use a missile to take him down.
So, as to difficulty with new players I don't feel like I'm qualified to speak about some things (like
the lack of a tutorial; my dad taught me
the basics of
the game from elite and I never forgot; plus I was...am a reading adict and I loved going through
the manual my dad had of Elite). However, concerning
the safety of a system, I think you all are barking up
the wrong tree concerning pirates. If a new
player wants to be safe, he'll avoid combat and avoid
the space lanes as
the existence of combat,
by definition, is not safe. However, that being said, I do feel like there's no difference between a corporate state and an anarchy as it stands now. After iron assing my Cobra Mk III, I decided to do some passenger ferrying. Some of those routes required me to go through an anarchy system or two. At first I was terrified because I remembered how dangerous those systems were within Elite. So I made sure to avoid
the space lanes and hoped that I wouldn't land myself into a pirates nest along
the way. Guess what? Never once entered combat at all. In fact, I didn't even see any pirates except near
the witchpoint beacon and all I had to do was
fuel inject away from them before jump driving to
the mainstaition
So here's my thoughts about
the safety of a system:
the corporate states, democracies, and confederacies are supposed to generally be safer because of galcop activity, right? However, there's always, mind you,
always a battle going on within
the space lanes as I'm trading, and on top of that it doesn't matter what government type of planet I'm at,
the mainstation has
the exact same range of safety (nearly nonexistent for all practical purposes). Why not change
the range of
the safety "net" that galcop mainstation provides at all systems above anarchy, doubling
the range for each level up you go? This would simulate
the idea of
the safer planet's providing more protection while at
the same time leaving
the difficulty of engaging pirates where it is at now. If someone did this, I'd also recommend increasing
the activity of pirates
outside the space lanes
the more dangerous
the system gets. This would provide a double layer of emphasis to
the safety (or lack thereof) of a system without taking away
the possibility of danger within even
the most safest of systems.