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Panzer,
Is this game playable as a group? How would that work? Is there such a thing as hosting a server?

Elite Dangerous is fully server based- but the servers are hosted by Frontier. No private servers, but Private Groups make a little sandbox for only a group. It has 3 modes:

OPEN where you are in it with lots of other humans (and PvP is possible...and Gankers abound)

SOLO where you are all by yourself

PRIVATE GROUP where everyone in the group sees each other and you can PvE to your heart's content and you won't see a human outside your group.

We have a group that has played Elite for thousands of hours, but we sort of drifted away. Recently we started getting back into it a bit.

Note though that it is pretty much an Open World (GALAXY). There aren't discrete missions to do, though there are available missions that can be done as a group. We mostly did Bounty Hunting, Winging up and killing AI Pirates. Note also the WING size is limited to 4, though you can have as many as you want in a Private Group, and create multiple Wings, though things like kills and credits earned are on a Wing by Wing basis.

Thx Recluse!

Any more details that anyone can share might be helpful.

For coop, it sounds like Private Group is the way to go, this is very similar to how we (well, you all) have been playing DCS and other sims.

Can we do PvP within our own Private Group if we wish? Does it have the concept of "teams"?

That is one thing that SC does have - missions.

Yes.. if you want to do PvP in your group, you can certainly do that. Note however that when your ship gets destroyed, it costs you an "insurance" fee to replace it. For big ships that can be significant, but, it is now fairly easy to become a billionaire in Elite, so not really too bad. You can, of course, stop short of outright destruction. There is no real mechanism for giving money to someone else to help them along, but by Winging up (see below) you can share profits. In our early days, Winged up Bounty hunting was how we made enough to afford new ships and bring along newer players. If you mine, or buy precious metals, you can dump them and let someone else pick them up to sell for their own profit. . TEAMS are WINGS of 4. The mechanics of Wings in Combat are:

- Anyone in the wing that lands a shot on a target gets a full share of the bounty. Outside a Wing, only the person who lands a killing shot gets the reward

- If you Mine in Wings, you get more materials
-If you buy and sell commodities as a WING, you get Trade Dividend when members of the Wing get paid.
-There are specific WING missions (Combat/Trade) where all members of the Wing share in the profits....actually not really SHARE, EVERYONE gets the full amount.

A common and very real criticism of Elite is that it is "A mile wide and an inch deep". The galaxy is VAST, there is lots of stuff going on and around it. There are some threads running through like the current Thargoid war that players can participate in or not. There are POWERPLAYS where you align yourself with a particular Superpower and do missions in support of them (for some rewards, and status). At root, for most players, though it is a Grind to: MAKE LOTS OF CREDITS-->BUY BIGGER SHIPS-->OUTFIT/ENGINEER SHIPS-->MAKE MORE CREDITS-->BUY MORE SHIPS... rinse and repeat. Once you have a few billion and own all the "end game" ships, it is sometimes hard to find interesting things to do. For us, even mundane things were more fun as a group and the Social aspects were better than the game play itself.

Odyssey has an On Foot component which adds FPS type actions and missions in addition to Ship combat. Again, probably you can do PvP or PvE or MISSIONS. I have only recently stuck my toes into this. Elite is STUNNING in VR, but the On Foot Portion is NOT VR enabled.

Here is a nice and entertaining (if NSFW) video on the subject.



This thread on SIMHQ is where our little crew has been interacting. It goes from DEAD for years to a flurry of posts..

https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4647821/1

You might want to jump to recent posts unless you are really bored

I should also say that due to the Evolution of Elite Dangerous there are a few different games running parallel. The original Elite Dangerous was upgraded to HORIZONS... then ODYSSEY came along. I think the original Elite Dangerous is totally deprecated and you need at Least Horizons. Then there is a Horizon LEGACY mode. So the Elite Dangerous launcher allows you to specify which game type you want to play. This way, people who might not have Odyssey can still join with other players who launch into HORIZONS. I don't even have the Horizons Legacy mode installed, so I don't really know what that is. Sometimes a pain to figure out who is playing what. In general, most of the features are there, but without Odyssey for example, there is no On Foot ability and a lot of the planetary bases cannot be accessed, removing some mission types, but more or less everything else is there. There are some graphical and UI differences between the versions IIRC, but maybe those have been all harmonized.

Recluse pretty answered it all. I have nothing to add except that we should find out first who would be interested in doing ED as a group and this would not be a replacement for our DCS nights but in addition to.