Frontier Elite II - combat

[Lardo Boffin]

I was very excited when I saw a copy of Frontier Elite II in a games shop back in the 90s and immediately bought it. It ran superbly on my 486 DX4 100 on maximum detail etc.
I remember marvelling at the scenery as I flew away from Merlin and up into the sky and then space. And with music too!

Having read the manual (honest) I flew off to Barnards star to do some trading. All good. I sold some stuff and bought some stuff. I then tried to fly back and sell it. On the way back I got mugged by a pirate. Easy I thought. There is only one of them after all. I got destroyed. By the time it was close enough to see, it had flown past and nearly destroyed me. On the second pass it did.

Not to worry I thought. Must be a tough one. I tried again. Different ship but same result. Argh. I managed a run without being attacked and did some more trading.

I did another run back and died to pirates. Next time I used missiles and survived! But only two missiles per run. A third pirate appeared and that was that. Still, I persevered for a while but eventually gave up as the combat was too difficult and there were too many other things to do.

I recently watched Colin’s excellent videos on best Beeb games and (spoiler alert) one was about Elite. After watching that one YouTube did its suggesting videos thing and one came up about Frontier Elite being one of the best space games ever. Somewhat incredulous I watched and saw that the reviewer made some good points and wondered about the combat and maybe it was my lack of patience. DOSBox and a download later (my copy being lost in the mists of time) it turns out no, the combat is still awful.

So I searched for videos about combat and found this one:

https://youtu.be/9UMIbdN0UFE?si=ZE47FL31WMh4YYnv

And I tried what was suggested. And, only 30 or so years later I actually killed some pirates without using missiles or deliberately crashing into them! I have since done several reading runs and am really enjoying it!

[trixster]

As a teenager in late 1993 who had loved Elite on the beeb the problems with Frontier were: the combat was absolutely zero fun (whereas the combat in Elite was superb), and the framerate on a somewhat decently souped-up Amiga was absolutely dreadful (which made the woeful combat even worse).

I remember putting many hours into Frontier, getting moderately far along, but never really having any fun with it because it felt like a total chore.

[Lardo Boffin]

Agreed. I got great frame rate on my PC but could not do the combat.

I tried it on my unexpanded Atari ST a couple of years ago. It was seconds per frame rather than frames per second.

With the new combat tricks it is a lot less annoying. Will see if I can anywhere with it now.

[Ramtop]

I'm one of those apparently rare people who thoroughly enjoyed the combat in Frontier!

I didn't ever get on with the artificially limited ability to manoeuvre in Elite and found the Newtonian physics of Frontier much more intuitive. Though I've no idea how anyone managed combat on a standard Amiga or ST with the awful frame rate, I was fortunate enough to have an A1200 with a 40MHz 68030 accelerator to run it on at launch, and not long afterward upgraded to a 32MHz 68040 which made the game fly.

[Lardo Boffin]

Apparently a lot of people liked the combat, I guess it was a little Marmite like.

Regardless I’m up to Mostly Harmless now! Progress!