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[digitCruncher]

What a game with such... potential. And yet... it fails so miserably.

If you go anywhere with even a smidgen of unstability (Corporate Police, IMO, is the second most stable system in the galaxy, second only to Federation Rule)... and you WILL be attacked at LEAST 20 times... often with entire fleets. As a result you are limited to 5 (Count them... 5. I did...) systems that you can go in with a mediocre combat ship without getting swamped with 6 or 9 combat ships in a WAVE... I can do 1 on 1 (and OCCASIONALLY 1 on 2), but try taking on 6 ships when you are in a worse ship than all 6 other ships -.-

Cargo scoops are impossible. Literally... it takes about 20 minutes to pick up a resource. 1 thing that should be in any game where things 'drop' things... the things that should be dropped should NOT require you to be within 10 meters of the ship... especially if it takes 5 minutes just to get within 100 meters -.- Traction Beam Cargo Scoops are marginally better (Read: The Automatic pilot can get them in about 4 runs, after about 8 minutes) 10 meters, is literally impossible to get to. In comparison, you only need to be within 1km to get pulled into an orbital station -.-

So... considering that you can only go through 4 systems, you are grinding away, doing trades for over 10 hours, from Sol -> Bernards Star and back (and later, you can go to that farming place, if you are willing to take out 10 waves of lone pirates, for some variety).

After getting bored, I decided to do some military quests. First quest: Blank Disks to Bernard Star. No problem. I deliver, and get $300... which is worth the profit of 0.7 robots -.-

Next mission, $500 for another delivery quest. No problem. I dive into the system... get swamped by 7 elite ships. No problem... reload... and try again.

After 30 minutes, I give up. Black mark #1 for me... So I try and get another quest. Delivery quest to Proxima Centauri. GREAT!! A simple quest, that should take no distance, as I am at Sol anyway...

Warp into Proxima... and look for Eden (the base). I look some more. Use the navigation computer, and ...

1000 freaking AU away is Eden. I have 10 days, to travel over 10 times the distance that I have ever travelled. I use no less than *4tonnes* of Hydrogen fuel, and it takes me *2 months* to get there. (From March 1st, to April 22nd). I get a second black mark, and decide to quit the game, as slow trading (and I mean SLOW) doesn't interest me.

My question is this: Why do systems in Federation control have piracy problems in all but 5 systems, and how do regular ships survive and trade in such situations? The other two groups are even WORSE (There ARE no safe systems -.-). There is no difficulty settings, and some worlds, especially Binary Systems, have insane layouts. Why warp to the largest star, if the smaller star is where all the other planets are?? Why must I travel 120 AU to the nearest colony (or 1000 -.-), when it is orbiting another star...

This game is FULL of balance, gameplay, and design issues, which otherwise could be a great game. I am surprised this game didn't kill the entire "Explore and Trade and Fight in Space" theme, with its endless grinding, poor balanced combat, and negligable leveling system (I think that if I got a decent craft, I could go anywhere, and fight anything... up from 5 systems -.-)

[dosraider]

Soooooooo .... you didn't like the game, did you?

[Robsie]

I entirely agree on the combat, Frontier First Encounters is an incredible game but is ruined by several annoyances :

In the majority of system if you dare to press the maximum acceleration time for the stardreamer just once you are attacked.
Now if you press the acceleration that is before you are attacked a -very- lot less during a travel.
Problem, if you don't use the maximum acceleration time a travel from a system jump to a station/planet can easily take forever especially in some systems huge.

So if you want t have a reasonable amount of attacks on you, you can't use the max acceleration in most of the systems, or be prepared to be ambushed hundred of time before reaching a station.

Ingame you can see your rader is able to detect ships at long range in the ingame radar, but when the game decide to make you attacked, the computer is unable to warn you before the enemy is extremely close.

So when you are attacked, your computer warn you when the enemy is actually in position to open fire and is very close to you.

But coming from that is the major problem : according to where the enemy is spawned, you can die without being able to do nothing about it :

With tons of hours playing in the peacefull sol -> barnard star usual cargo runs to make lot of money with food vs robots, i bought a big ship to test battles.
For this big ship i bought an insane amount of shields.

To test them i attacked for fun some ground bases and fought with the police, the shields were indeed good to help survival and allowed me to wipe out lot of police.

Then i reloaded after those tests, i then jumped in a non peacefull system, pressed the max acceleration as i knew it triggered automatically an attack .. and exploded cut in half by a beam as soon as the warning appeared.

Yes a big ship with 60 active shields destroyed in a second without having the time to press any key (at least for the JFFFE reactors to "strafe" to left or right and give me some more seconds to move)

Reloading , then jumping again in same system, this time instead of spawning behind me, the enemy was to my left.

This time the shield took damage but it allowed me time to actually move out from there and use my own beam to destroy the target.

At this point you can see what is the big problem to your fun : pure luck is involved as soon as combat start as shields do not protect you behind.

Because if the enemy is spawned behind you and open fire with good accuracy, you are destroyed without even having the time to press any kind of key whatever super ship you have is irrelevant.

Sometime you are attacked by one ship, but sometime you can have 3 or 4 (and even 5 in one of my games).
Then you may see the problem with the spawning location, the more ships will come to you, the more chance one will be spawned behind you and then can destroy you in a single hit before you can move.

Now it is interesting to see that while Frontier Elite 2 is featured the same amount of attacks when pressing the damn max acceleration, the enemy ships are never as near to you when it is spawned as in FFE.

So in FE2 you are never destroyed in a second without being able to move and then you can actually fight.

That's certainly why despite Frontier First Encounter is newer, most people prefer the older Frontier Elite 2.
It's been a long time i have not played FFE, but i always play FE2.

[gregor]

Well according to the manual you are supposed to start closer to the star with smaller ship and further out with bigger ones. But hat doesn't seem to be the case. I bet that would provide some balance as you could not get attacked so much if the path you need to get to the base would be short.
Another hting there is no was to get some good shield for small crafts. so you must have a big one if you plan to survive under fire. i have a huge (and slow) transport ship that has most of the space filled with shileds. i still have cargo space (more than enough of it to get good profit). i use turrets to defend my self. on them i have 100MW laser. i also have all upgrades (lasercooling, autorepair...).

it's funn as most enemies smash into me like a bug, causing only slight damage that is quickly repaired or the shield go up to 100%. ohers get killed fast when they attemt to buzz arround. the only danger are big ships with plasma accelerator. but if i see them comming soon enough i rip them in half as they usually have poor shields.

but i too am dissapointed in the abilities of smaller ships. i belive the problem is the way shields are done and the entering point into the system.

and no, i think there are more than 5 systems where you do not get attacked.

[Johnstein]

i wanted to know wich file i should run on DosBox

Thanks

[_r.u.s.s.]

well, the excutable

[The Fifth Horseman]

There are two types of executables used in DOS: EXE and COM. Some games need to be ran through batch files (BAT) in order for certain settings to work properly.

[mattep74]

I had this game when it first came out on a 486 with 50 Mhz and then i could fight on even terms as the game didnt move as fast.

When i play it now on a wery faster computer i have this little problem with pirates. They can attack me and fire without me having the time to respond since the game moves to fast on newer computers.

One time i jumped a bit to far hand ended up in a unexplored sector 100s of jumps from a friendly base and i didnt have fuel scope

[Mighty Midget]

If you run it in DOSBox, you can adjust the speed to your likings by adjusting the cycles in DOSBox. As for combat, I always found it annoyingly difficult, especially since it doesn't really matter if you have 1 shield unit or 10, or 50. My Panther Clipper with 40 SU was destroyed by a couple of ships that had only 1 MW beam lasers...

[bikerkermit]

Well I can't for the life of me figure out how to get this to run...Vista & DOSBox 0.72 before anyone asks.

I've tried loadfix, and that doesn't work either - what happens is that I can watch the intro. If I press anything the intro starts again, then if I press anything else at all I get a black screen with a load of what looks like an error message in large white letters

Any thoughts please?