I feel like I’ve just been grinding and grinding at Odyssey with very little progress.
I’ve done countless missions to get together materials for engineering personal equipment. While I’ve made some gains in building up a stock, I’ve still got a long way to go. A lot of the crucial, hard to find items are SUPER hard to find. I’ve taken to just looking for material rewards from missions to accumulate what I can and then, while I’m out there, looting the ever loving shit out of everything I see. If there was some sort of trade system for goods and data, I’d be set. But that’s not the case. At least, not yet. I’ve managed to boost the levels of my suits and weapons to allow for the modifications already, but I’m running into a bigger problem than not being able to afford them: Not even being able to access them. Finding the material offering to known engineers for introductions to new engineers… and then the material costs of getting an invite to them to get an introduction to the next one… well, it’s proving to be extremely frustrating.
What I need, to progress, I can’t find no matter where I look and the luck some folx have had online doesn’t seem to spread to me when I try their methods. I’ll keep plugging away at it though. My vigor was renewed yesterday when I found a station selling a kinetic SMG with the stowed reload mod already installed. That is a combat game changer, especially for settlement assaults. If I could get that same mod on a thermal weapon, it would be ridiculous. On foot combat and space combat share the same characteristics in shields vs hull/people. Kinetic weapons (bullets) don’t do a lot of damage if your target has their shield up. To drop shields fast, you need beams/lasers (thermal). So you shoot them with thermal to drop their shields and switch weapons to kinetic to drop the rest of them quickly. Using only one over the combination takes over twice as long and makes fighting a lot harder. So the utility that reloads the weapon you just switched from so it will have a full clip when you pull it back out for the next target is extremely useful.
All in all, I’m still having a lot of fun. And I’m getting pretty efficient in completing mission work and looting settlements. Soon I’ll need to start branching more into the espionage and sabotage missions.
Just like my time playing Elite is like an accordion where I contract and take some time off sometimes (granted I’ve been pretty consistent in my hours lately), my participation in Elite communities are the same. Sometimes I leave because of negativity. I just don’t have time for that in my life and it’s extremely unlikely anyone will find a legitimate reason for me to join in on the hate. But most of the time, it’s because I have just too many damn Discord servers to read. But I seem to be in a time of expansion as that list is growing again. It helps that I’ve found a group of twitch communities that predominately play Elite and are incredibly active and nice to boot. And through those communities, I was offered a respite from my grind and a reason to buy a new ship!
Manheim’s Hammer is an Alliance Chieftain that’s build for Thargoid combat. I’ve tried Thargoid combat before… I got my ass handed to me by anything bigger than a scout. She’s named after my D&D character in d20monkey‘s Gauntlet Campaign that just wrapped season one. Gauntlet is basically weekly arena combat and it’s been the most amazing experience. After each match you’re awarded gold/items and you level up. Granted, Brian did a whole bunch of extra stuff for us because he’s an amazing DM, but even if you just roll with the base premise, Gauntlet is simply amazing. I took Manheim Delorean, a Warforged Artificer, to level 20. Maheim wielded a Hammer of Thunderbolts by the end of the campaign so, naturally, Manheim’s Hammer. That season ended a couple of weeks ago and I’m still buzzing from it. I’m excited for season two.
That was the Let Me Tell You About My Character portion of this post… moving on…
They call it Finance Friday. A group of twitch streamers take shifts bringing players together at a Thargoid spawn in open play and, together, take down whatever shows up. It’s built as a way to offer new Commanders a chance to make some money and meet new friends. My friends list doubled that day.
The idea is the green pilots get in, get a hit tag, on the target and the experienced pilots finish off the target. Everyone that has a hit on the target when it pops gets the full combat bond. And as you can see, a lot of people are getting hits on that target. I think at one point we had 20-25 people in one instance and so many were participating, we started another one.
Now, I don’t really need the money… but it was good. In about 3-4 hours of play during DeepBlueBeard‘s shift, I earned almost half a billion credits. That more than paid for Manheim’s Hammer and helped replenish some coffers I’ve left empty for a little too long. I’m more interested in getting the experience of taking down the larger Thargoids and was hoping to give my combat rating a boost, though the latter didn’t seem to happen. I have a suspicion that it was because SO MANY other commanders had a hit on the target, but I’m not 100% sure.
Regardless, it was still a ton of fun and I’m 100% going to keep doing it. Not just for the cash, but to also get better and actually be one of the pilots that contributes to to the take down.
And finally, I’ve kept Javelin from being armed ever since I commissioned the Krait Phantom as my science, material collection ship. Not out of some altruistic reason… I just knew I wasn’t likely to get into a fight if I was flying it. And if I did get caught and couldn’t escape, I doubt weapons would have made the difference. But there are times when you’re running collection missions from crash-sites where scavengers beat you to the location. Usually I land and shoot them from afar in my SRV, wait to see if there are any reinforcements, and repeat the process. But I recently realized there’s a much easier way.
Dumb-fire missiles are extremely effective against ground units. Lasers will miss easily and you can’t target people. But those missiles have a large, indiscriminate, blast radius that takes care of all your trouble pretty quick. And it’s fun. I’m not sure why I didn’t do this sooner.
What have you been doing most in Odyssey? Are you enjoying it? DO YOU KNOW WHERE I CAN FIND OPINION POLLS?!?!? TELL MEEEEE!!!
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