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Titican was recommended by the manual as a safe place for initial trading. Are there any other systems that would make for a good starting route to and from Gateway?

[Eva02Soul]

Yes, for the first few months of game-time, a medicine run from gateway -> Soholia is very profitable when you have enough credits to fill your entire hold.

Wow, last night I destroyed a 20MW armed imperial courier with my default Saker 3. I was pleased.

Elite II and older has been freeware for quite a while. FFE was just made freeware a year or 2 ago. Jades.org has a link to the site of the company that made them, and they are listed as freeware now. As far as I know, all PC versions of Elite, Elite II, and FFE are now freeware, NOT abandonware. They are still owned buy the company that made them. (actually, the origional PC port of Elite may still be in legal limbo, but Elite Plus is a much better version than Elite port)

Frontier: First Encounters (aka Elite III) came out in 1995, just before windows 95, and was made entirely in assembler, which is why it requires special conditions to run. It must be installed on a FAT16 file system, not NTFS, (so you would have to install it from inside dosbox, instead of the "easy" way through win 2K or XP) and it must be installed to C:\firstenc\ not to any other location. It also requires EMS memory, and possibly XMS, (I would have to turn them off to be sure about XMS) and over 500K base memory.

Good first route lasts for 2 or three months and is a mission route. Since the Wiccan Ware Race takes at least 2 jumps in your starting ship. Sell everthing you can from your ship, except the autopilot, atmospheric sheilding (so you can land on planets) and engine. buy medicines stop off at the system that starts with an "s" (cant remember the name, and go to the bbs to sell medicines.

[whatshisface]

gah! I dont know what to do! I try to make trips from old blackwell or somthing like that (the place you start at) and fortress saskoon. But it always says "missile incoming" and two seconds later im burning debree floating around

So how do people manage to play this game? It's almost impossible to arrive at a spacedock without being shot down. What cheats do everyone use to make the first complete trade run? I'm sure if the game was easy enough to let me get to Argent and back to Hope, I could probably have enough money to buy shields and continue the game at the current difficulty.

[Abi79]

Argent is in Titican ? If it is, DO NOT go there. There are safer places around the galaxy, trust me

[gregor]

yes there have to be safer systems arround there. search on the map and see political info. you will find some safer systems where there are no pirates.

[gregor]

ah yes how to dodge a pirate....
personally i never really tried it but there are a few things you can do.

1. first travel only in very safe systems, untill you can afford a larger ship or at least a fast ship. that way you can outrun them. larger ship will provide oyu more shields.
2. to dodge the rocket ECM should do the trick, but don't count on it too much...

3. most importantly save often. sometimes if you save&load or travel at certain time compression you actually wont see any pirates. i once had a problem when i already had a larger ship and was attacked by imperial destroyer who was armed with plasma accelerator. i couldnt' avoid it and it destroyed me the second i dropped out of time compression. the solution was to be in system and travel with low time compression. he was getting close to me on couple of occasions but i always fired at him the right time (backside cannons) and managed to damage him enough so he stopped pursuing me.

4. you can use planets sometimes as hiding spots or use to to slingshot arround them (some physics knowledge should do the trick).

More on how to equip the ship what to selects etc. see Tricks and tips: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~kelpi/kelpie/

on bottom part of that website.

I did manage to get to Argent and back to Hope in one piece, until my autopilot forced me to reenact "A Journey to the Center of the Earth." Oh the humanity.

Ah... what's a good political system? Titicani is Democratic/Capitalist, and I get raided every time I go. I know feudal and anarchy aren't good...