Well, just fired E:DH up again.
Seems smuggling is dead. Not just nerfed, but proper dead as there's so few missions even bothering to get dished out.
It's a shame as I felt, for the risk (NPCs chasing you and the like) the income level was alright. I was making about 10m an hour but damned if I wasn't working for it and damned if I wasn't rolling a risk every. single. time. A real shame as doing it the 'regular' way through trading/mining/low ball missions/res farming is an arbitrary block to getting into some of the more fun parts such as combat and super deep space exploration.
Anyways, before I decided to terminate this game again because 1m an hour just isn't going to cut it with the costs of ships at the mid-higher tier (sorry, I play games for fun not for a second part-time job just to buy another combat ship), anyone have any worthwhile guides? Is the vulture still an ok ship for RES farming with the new cell boosting AI? Youtube is a bit divided there.
What about these passenger missions? How do I get into them? Any updated load outs (not including new fangled modifications just yet)? And what the hell are these engineer thingies about?
The engineer thingies are basically about the massive grind coupled with RNG that one must now endure to stay competitive. You bring 3 x Shrubbery and 1 x Holy Hand Grenade that has a 0.5% chance to drop on a planet somewhere, you spin the wheel, you get a randomized improvement on certain stats of a module. I didn't bother to engineer anything above level 3, but even a level 1 powerplant upgrade is really helpful on a tight fit. A good level 5 roll be utterly OP, but i'm not doing THAT, because i have a life. Sort of.
Smuggling was nerfed to the ground because the Sothis farming just won't stop, yes. Passenger missions paid good for a while, but it seems they also were nerfed lately, so
. You'll need the passenger cabins, and probably an Orca for the luxury ones. Stay away from the Beluga, it's a coffin.
Can't say anything about the Vulture, because laidback explorer and never even owned the thing. Screw being competitive.
Oh, and they're going to murder gimbals in the next update. Frontier are even worse than CCP sometimes, heh.