Be Excellent To Each Other

You can pick up X3 on 2 for £15 in Game - I think it's bundled with a mission expansion, too.

We have an awesome triple-thread EVE-X3-Frontier conversation going on here.

If you just want the one game, it's £7.99 at Play (disclaimer: I've no idea if this is exactly the game being dexcribed here, but I'm tempted to give it a whirl at that price, even though my machine might not take it (cap'n))

That includes the mission expansions I referenced, too.

If I may put my geek slippers on for a moment...

Of course, since hyperspace jumps can spit you out randomly anywhere in a solar system that's a decent distance from any large objects (stars or planets), the chances of you meeting any other vessel until you're relatively close to a space station are remote, unless you're either intercepting another ship or another ship is intercepting you. That's why you see so many pirates. As for the police, the original Elite established that space stations have a certain scanning range which the police monitor. Commit an offence within that range and you get attacked by a swarm of police vipers. Commit an offence outside of that range, no problems. That's why all pirates attack you in deep space - once you're fairly near to a space station, the attacks stop.

In theory at least.

While that is all true and reasonable, it also means that a huge number of space stations and planets wiv bases on are constantly living with the barbarians at the gate. Was Braben trying to make you feel like an 18th century tea ship, having to outrun pirates to reach London from India? If so, he fucking overdid it.

Privateer, at least, gave you militia and military patrols away from the planets and space stations. Heck, sometimes you'd even come across them FIGHTING THE PIRATES. Or you'd find another merchant ship under attack by pirates. Granted, these were all more or less randomly generated (the game looked at the system you were in, and then randomly decided what of the ships allowed by that system it would or wouldn't plonk in at each waypoint)...

...but at least you didn't feel it was you vs the entire fucking universe, while the rest of the non-pirate world sat smugly in their space brothels being serviced by space whores, looking out the window and laughing as you got swarmed by pirates who had no chance of killing you (me in a Lion Transport with loads of shields, them in a Hawk Airfighter with a laser pointer for a weapon) and no hope of gaining anything worthwhile if they did kill you (so, tractor beam and a cargo hold on that airfighter for my 20 tons of robots?).

I think Mr Angle is forgetting that Frontier came on one floppy disk. ONE. AN ENTIRE GALAXY!

http://dimrill.com/index.asp?pic=68&sec=pics

I disagree. You would almost never be attacked by pirates in a "safe" system with a strong police presence, so if you wanted to avoid being attacked you were obviously a sissy coward and needed to stick to the safe trade routes (Barnard's Star to Sol and back for example).

Boring, but then life is when you've no death threats... I should know

How can you disagree? The vast majority of systems aren't safe, are they? That's fact, not opinion - the core systems of the Federation and the Empire aside, the vast majority of systems are crawling with pirates.

It made sense to play it safe - both because of the risk of random death (being slammed into by a pirate, or worse, one who's spent his life savings on one missile and the missile gets very lucky) and because of the tedium of having slingshot combat with half a dozen ships EVERY TIME you come into the system. And then, you've reached your destination, and half your profits are gone repairing the damage to your ship.

They see you as a big pinata.

But on the flip side, many of those dangerous systems had trade possibilities that gave far better reward than "safe" trading. There has to be a risk otherwise people amass huge quantities of cash and it just gets boring.

I guess it all comes down to your thoughts on it all, really. I certainly never felt that the frequency of being attacked was overdone, I quite enjoyed it.

There were only a couple of systems that were notorious for pirates as far as I'm aware anyway, Riedquat in the Empire sectors and Lalande 21185 in the Federation. You were guaranteed to be hassled all the way to your docking port in those systems, every time you jumped in.

I dunno, it matches up with what my impression of space in the far future would be. It's so big, we can't police it all. Hell, we probably wouldn't even be able to police the core systems effectively - look how well we police Earth?

Well, true, until you got the Barnyard's Star pass, at least.

All I'm trying to say is that, given how irritating the combat was (until you were within 3 inches of your target, they were a tiny little speck which you hit only with luck rather than skill with your laser, regardless of whether it was pulse or BEEEEEEM!) it got really tedious really quickly having to fight your way through every sodding time. The game just spawned in a new pirate every few days anyway - I landed on a planet in a system like this once and let the stardreamer run at full acceleration for several months. A new pirate ship appeared on my scanner until the system was choked with them.

This is one aspect where I reckon Privateer was superior. You didn't encounter pirates constantly, even in pirate controlled systems. You could outrun the pirates if you had a fast ship. There was a more visible law enforcement presence stopping them. And the pirates actually seemed to want to do something other than just randomly attack you for no reason.

In my experience, it was the carebears that swore the most. All of the pirates I knew/know were pretty standupish people.

Including the less popular ones (Malka Bad'ia for example).

Carebears in space? This EVE game sounds awesomes.

Sorry, 'carebear' is a (semi) derogatory term for a person that wants all of the reward with none of the risk, and when something happens (them getting blown up somwhere where they think they should be 'safe') whines about it a lot.

Yes, but EVE takes place in a world where the internet is king, so it's natural that everyone shouts 'SHITCOCK' while randomly killing other people.

Frontier took place in an altogether more civilized universe. Or perhaps the internet was made illegal? And how come the cops still will UK-style hats but appear to often be otherwise naked?

Privateer was indeed lovely (and the Privateer remake is, while not totally faithful, an excellent little thing), and the military and obunty hunter patrols did seem to work rather well. It felt a bi tmore like a generally safe universe with a bunch of nasty buggers hanging around in it, instead of a universe that hates and despises you. And as Angel said, the pirates would generally have a goal in mind - if you ditched your cargo they'd often leave you alone. Same goes for Hardwar, where pirates would utterly ignore you if your cargo wasn't up to much.

X2 was shite. I tried to like that, I tried harder than you would believe, because it was pretty and promising and full of interesting possibilities. But it was fucking horrible to play - cane it on ultra-micromanaged cargo runs for a bajillion hours and maybe you'd be able to afford one non-shit weapon, maybe. And yes, I did try building factories - I saved up for fucking forever and found that turning a profit involved even more bloody micromanagement, and I eventually gave in and admitted that going out and starting a real space merchant business would be luss frustrating and pay off more quickly.

X3 can have some of the similar frustrations, but there are lots of (frankly essential) player-made mods that streamline a lot of the tedious stuff.

I'm enjoying this thread.

I first discovered Frontier when my dad bought it on the way home for work one evening. A work colleague told him was good and showed him the CU Amiga review, apparently. Seemed complicated and very juddery, but loved the idea behind it, the idea of simulating the galaxy in the none-too-distant future. Did agree with the criticisms in Amiga Power review I read a couple of weeks later, but still played a bit more Frontier now and then. Last time I played that game was during the end of my PC-owning days, more than five years ago. Through the Elite Club website, I think. Enjoyed the game far better than, thanks to the faster processor = smooth gameplay, and the readily available savegames with beefier ships... Really got into the sandbox aspect of Frontier for a while. Have to say, having the real galaxy (in terms of star names at least) added a lot of the appeal to me, as someone who was into astronomy as a teenager. A sandbox galactic exploration game with modern visuals? I quite like the idea of that...

There was some game or other in PC Gamer ages ago which was promising to be another attempt at remaking Frontier.

Most of the preview was spent discussing how amazing it was that you could start on the ground and, with no loading screens, fly up into orbit and then between the parts of a giant space station.

Which would be REVOLUTIONARY had Frontier not done it 15 years previously.

So, without wishing to reread everything, is Frontier available now in updated form of some kind?

I loved travelling to stars that I already knew by name. Travelling around fictional galaxies just doesn't seem to do it for me.

Yes. There's Oolite or GL Frontier. If I remember correctly the latter is the Atari ST version poked with to use openGL.

Oolite looks very nice - GLFrontier seems a bit pointless (no offense to the creator) given all you're getting is sharper rendering of low poly ships - why not just run the Amig0r version in UAE?

Indeed! Because then the "cabin space" money bug and the jettisoning of invisible cargo bug would work.

Because I've never managed to get the Mac verison of UAE to run on my iBook you insensitive clod!

(If any one has, and could just cut out the middle man, and give me their .app I would kiss them forever).

I shall see if I can do just this tonight or tomorrow morning, Mr Lave, as I think I've managed it.

Or, if it's a large file, just the settings.

Please note that I *think* I managed it... I quickly edited that in as I'm in work now so can't check to be sure.

The hope, the hope is enough.