Elite a lifetime of work :)

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Hedge1970
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Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Hedge1970 »

Thought I would post these posts... Been playing this hard for the past month or so and think I should get Elite soon.... I hope :lol:


#### Past History ####

DEC 2010
Never did play Elite when it first came out. Been playing it a lot recently got some bits now, larger cargo bay, better lasers and a fuel scoop. It's such a cool game - ok I've read it's the marmite of 8bit games.

I think i will be playing this for sometime yet, not easy to get into but once the basics are learned it comes alive. Such a strong back story to this game that your imagination runs wild.


DEC 2010
Made my way to the top of the Galaxy. My fiting status has moved up to competent.Not sure of all the steps but its something like - harmless, quite harmless, poor, below average, average, above average and now competent. My ship has the extended cargo hold, a fuel scoop, pulse and beam lasers mounted up front and a mining laser mounted out back. I have no need for a docking computer as I find docking very easy - not one crash or incident in all docking so far. Most of my trading is innocent, the only time I do illegal trading is when I use the fuel scoop to salvage the cargo and aliens - slaves - from pirates I blast away. The planets I visit are all well goverened. My status fluctuates from offender to fugitive, it seems to me keeping this to clean is one of the hardest parts of the game, the main reason being that even the police shoot you up when your clean and not being able to out run them all you can do is shoot back.

I am saving for a military laser and a galactic hyper drive, probably in that order, once I get the military laser I will start visiting anarchic planets, swarming with Pirates.

Liking this game a lot, although spending far too much time playing it


FEB 2011
Just been playing and got seriously bullied

I am on Galaxy Chart 2 and found a couple of planets that would prove to be very prosperous each having different cheap and expensive goods, I was on to a winner.

Well I did the trip twice, on the third trip it all went pear shaped. First up a few pirates, dealt with them and Thargoid Invasion ship turned up. However it did not really fight at all, just flew away from me... I followed and followed and followed but unable to shoot it and with it not shooting back I gave up.

I turned around and the planet whos solar system I had just Hyperspaced into was not visible! I set course using the flight grid scanner and compass, using the Torus Jump drive I edged a bit closer until finally the planet came back into view. However I was still further away than when I had originally hyperspaced in. It was a long long way off and each time I used the jump drive Pirates driving Kraits, Ferdelance or Cobras would turn up. I felt that they where being extra aggressive against me, not the usual "soft targets". Anyway as the planet edged closer - still a long long way off - another Thargoid Invasion Ship appeared. This time I fought it hard and it fought back, it threw out many smaller versions of itself all of which I quickly shot down. Eventually I got it 50 Credits... I turned around and again the planet was miles away - sh**e. Jump drive just resulted in more Pirates. Kraits etc... Then another Thargoid.. .This was getting silly, I was tired and so I used my energy Bomb and blew everything in sight up. Getting pretty tired I once again set out for the planet not more than two short jumps and I had another Thargoid on my case, this time it was accompanied by Cobras and Kraits. Everyone of the ships firing on me hit. For the first time in about 2 months of playing this game I could see my sheilds where not going to hold out I was in a bad way. I flipped up the Local Chart, found a safe planet and hyper spaced out of there. I arrived at my new destination with my warning lights flashing and energy low displayed -I had literally made it with enough shield to deflect 1 more shot.

I waited around for my sheilds to repair and then started jumping towards the planet. Half expecting a Thargoid to turn up. I was now well into 2 hours of this lifes game play I needed to save. With my extended cargo bay bulging from the spoils of fights in the last solar system (collected with my fuel scoop) all I wanted to do was dock and save (get some rest).

There where a few short fights to be had but the pirates where back to normal none of them being as aggressive or accurate as in the last solar system. Finally I made it to the planet and the compass started to direct me to the space station. Now I've played this game long enough to know that sometimes space stations don't exists, can't be entered or are over run by Pirates. Finally I got a visual on the space station and it was accessible, and spinning (generally means its free of Pirates.). As I manouvered to enter the landing dock a sense of "Glad to be Home" washed over me.

I docked, sold up, bought a new energy bomb and saved.

What a great game.

JUNE 2011
Elite - been on and off this for almost a year now, made it to "Dangerous" last night. :evil:


FEB 2018
Back on Elite going to do it this time I hope


MAR 2018
So I have been playing this a lot since my post, I had one week off but apart from that this has burned through a few days of my life.

I have been using a micro drive for game play saves and then when the day is up I also save to tape as a back up to the MD saves. About four days ago the system just went nuts on me, multiple inbound attacks from 3, 4, and 5 ship groupings. as anyone who plays knows, its hard for you to shoot them, but they are accurate and under certain circumstances all you can do is Energy bomb and or escape capsule. As part of this (sudden) increase in aggressive attacks I also had Asp Mk II ships that would disappear from screen, now the ASP MK II is iMHO the second hardest ship to kill (Fer De Lance is always a little harder to get), however with them disappearing from view - but still shooting with deadly accuracy - I was toast. I tried a few things, no cargo, different routes, galactic hyperspace and numerous energy bombs and escape pods but no luck the aggressiveness and hidden ships where a permanent feature.

I thought that maybe the MD saves where corrupted and the screen was breaking up when more than 4 ships where fighting so I tried old saves on tape, new loads of Elite from ROM and yet it always came back. I googled "disappearing ships" and found references to cloaking but most where ref to Frontier (Elite II) and only a very small mention of this Elite - The first.

However finally today I had a group of 4 ships, one disappearing, two Kraits and a Sidewinder scout, I decided (even though it was killing me ) to ignore the disappearing ship and concentrated on the Kraits, two down, last energy bar barely full and i swung around to the Scout - at this point the ASP had also swung away and my energy was climbing, also from behind I could actually see it (the scout) clearly, no dissapearing - so I killed it... now I don't always scoop up the detritus that pirate ships leave, but in my reading I had noted that there was a cloak device. sure enough after some narcs, Food and Luxuries the last jettisoned swag I got was the Cloaking Device.

Since getting this everything has calmed down again, but wow what a few days, thought I had lost my best game to some horrid bug only to find its some really quite cool feature Onwards to Elite once more.

Some Photos

ImageElite
by RC Paul, on Flickr

ImageElite
by RC Paul, on Flickr

ImageElite
by RC Paul, on Flickr
Firefox

Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Firefox »

You've actually completed the cloaked Asp mission by accident! :D

It's been many years since I played Elite, but I think before the Asp mission was the mission where Thargoids had invaded a system, so that might be the cause of all the hassle you had with Thargoids in one system. (I'll have to go and look that up...)
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Hedge1970
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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Not sure the order but yes the Thargoid mission is the red screen above. I missed photographing the mission to save the people in the exploding space station where you get jewels and I am sure there was another mission but like you I would need to go look it up :-)

Can’t believe the time gap from when I started lol
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Ersh
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Ersh »

Right on, Commander! :D I've only made it to Deadly on the Spectrum version (a couple of years ago), but I've managed to reach Elite on the NES version.

Mission 1 (Sun going super nova) is triggered after you've made 32 hyperspace jumps in any galaxy but the first.

Mission 2 (The cloaked Asp) is triggered after you've made 128 jumps in any galaxy but the first.

Mission 3 (Thargoid attack) is triggered after you've made 254 jumps in any galaxy but the first.

The mechanics of the "Ship boarded by pirates" event can be read here.

Good luck!
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Hedge1970
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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Ersh wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:13 pm ...The mechanics of the "Ship boarded by pirates" event can be read here.

Good luck!
That’s a good read thanks for posting. It’s says it’s a rare event I think I am getting hit around once every “Right on Commander” which is 256 kills. I’ve had it happen two or three times in a row and it’s a pain. I stopped collecting booty in the vain hope it would stop but still got hit, I even got hit once when I used the escape pod!!

I will try the no hyperspace idea from now on and see if that works. I really hope I am just a couple of hours away from elite, I can’t believe how long it was since i first started this game.
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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I had been playing Elite for weeks, almost every day. It was my life. I had a kick-ass ship, all the upgrades and masses of cash. I hyperspaced into a new system, very low on fuel with a full cargo hold. The screen was red, the sun was huge... I docked at the Coriolis - couldn't hyperspace out (no fuel) but when I got there there was no fuel to be bought and I couldn't sell any of my cargo. They wanted me to take on refugees from a Nova but I had no room and no way to make room.

I had no way to get out of the system. I rage quit and never played it again :)
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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ZXDunny wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 9:13 pm I had been playing Elite for weeks, almost every day. It was my life. I had a kick-ass ship, all the upgrades and masses of cash. I hyperspaced into a new system, very low on fuel with a full cargo hold. The screen was red, the sun was huge... I docked at the Coriolis - couldn't hyperspace out (no fuel) but when I got there there was no fuel to be bought and I couldn't sell any of my cargo. They wanted me to take on refugees from a Nova but I had no room and no way to make room.

I had no way to get out of the system. I rage quit and never played it again :)
Lol that’s a mission, save them from the exploding star by ditching your cargo and then you get loads of gems from a happy refuge :-)
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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I made it to harmless.
That's good right?
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Morkin
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Morkin »

RWAC wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 9:25 pm I made it to harmless.
That's good right?
Better than me, I didn't make it past the Lenslok...
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Hedge1970
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Hedge1970 »

Morkin wrote: Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:28 am
RWAC wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2020 9:25 pm I made it to harmless.
That's good right?
Better than me, I didn't make it past the Lenslok...
LOL I bought the cassette version of the game for the literature and keyboard layout - but never loaded the tape. The box was very complete but no LonsLock, so I thought hey one lenslock is much the same as another (Wrong of course) and so bought a game with a Lenslock to complete my Elite version... I then realised that the version I have is the 128k version which runs on the 48k as well and that there is no lenslock for it :lol:
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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The epic journey is complete. I have been counting down the kills, checking off each 256 when Elite prints "Right On Commander" to the screen. To go from Dangerous rating to Elite you need to get 15x "Right On Commander". I started playing this game with real Microdrives and my Multiface One, I always backed up milestones - rating promotions to 2 microdrives and also a Tape save. Around a couple of years ago I moved to VdrivesZXs for a more secure SSD storage. However A few weeks ago I hit the multiface red button and over wrote a corrupted save to my only copy of SSD Elite saves, thankfully I still had microdrives and Tapes and was able to load an old copy - which turns out to be the promotion to from Deadly to Dangerous. Since then my Multiface has given up on me and so the last 100 odd saves where to good old fashioned FE tape.

I had expected the last 256 kills to end with a "Nice One Commander" as this is the normal promotion message, however it just flashed up "Right On Commander", my heart sank a little as its been a long journey. To put that in context for each 256 kills it takes around 6 game plays of between 25-40 mins each - which is enough to fill the 35T cargo bay with pilfered loot. Add to these 6 game plays, the times you get killed, the intermittent and very annoying "Ship Boarded By Pirates and they Showed No mercy" plus a sprinkling of game freeze crashes with the multiface and your racking up the hours playing this game... My first thought on seeing what I expected to be "Nice One Commander" was that I had some how overwritten my game and was playing from an unknown amount of kills and thus would never finish!!! But it turns out that it was ELITE :) My final ship was not some paralysing attack by hordes of Kraits and Sidewinders, no Thargoid revenge or Annoyingly accurate and punishing Police Viper, no it was a big fat lumbering Python scared half to death and turning to run from my unrelenting Ingram Model M1928A2 military lasers.

Now I am off to get on with the rest of my life, having finally put to bed the young 15yr olds yearning to be Elite back in the 80s.

ImageElite
by RC Paul, on Flickr

ImageKills
by RC Paul, on Flickr
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Ersh
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Ersh »

Congratulations mate! :D Remember to send for your badge.

I thought you would be grinding Thargoids in witchspace, iirc it was 45-60 minutes between ROC's doing it that way.
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

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Never thought of that route would imagine it’s tough though, been in and out if witch space and multiple thargoids soon gets the FPS dropping to like 2 :-)
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Ersh
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Ersh »

Yeah, the FPS drops quickly in witch-space (though it can be advantageous). There are several ways to handle the Thargoids there, I think my best strategy was to use the cloak (which neatly disables their E.C.M's), take out two with missiles then uncloak and hit the other two with a front mining laser (good to have one at the back as well when shields get low) as that does more damage than the military laser. I think it took around 3-4 minutes per skirmish and you got 50cr and 4 kill-points a pop.
Firefox

Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Firefox »

"Nice one, Commander"? I don't remember that... :?

Anyway, well done! :D
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Morkin »

Congrats on an impressive feat, especially loading it up on original hardware.

I never quite realised the effort you had to make to get to Elite. I knew it took a while but didn't twig you had to shoot quite that many ships.
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Hedge1970
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Re: Elite a lifetime of work :)

Post by Hedge1970 »

Morkin wrote: Tue Feb 18, 2020 1:15 pm Congrats on an impressive feat, especially loading it up on original hardware.

I never quite realised the effort you had to make to get to Elite. I knew it took a while but didn't twig you had to shoot quite that many ships.
Yeah initially I miscalculated how many kills and once I realised I thought heck I am half way there, but even then it was still a bit of a grind.

Should add it was also quite enjoyable with different atta k styles and flying formats appearing and keeping me on my toes.
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