Shilka
Hardcore
The learning curve is not too bad, for a good impression, check out the user manual or the video tutorial series. Also, the game comes with some short tutorial missions where you can fool around a bit, and which are good for setting up your controls.
I played the first months with keyboard and mouse, and it's very much doable, especially if you set the controls to return to neutral when you stop moving the mouse, and I actually find it more precise then joystick, so I still find that landing for example is easier with mouse/keyboard.
However, I'm primarily a trader, if you want to concentrate more on the pew pew side of things, I'd advise a joystick, which is much more suitable for prolongued turning and twisting. The €50 hotas I bought more then suffices to play the game, so really a joystick doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg would you want one. It's either that, or learn to fly with mouse in a different way, where you need to move your mouse back to where you started to stop movement in a certain direction, which I found to be quite difficult.
The loss at death isn't too big, basicly you have insurance on your ship, so you only need to make sure you have 5% of the value of your ship in the bank to pay the own risk part of the insurance. The larger the ships the more that 5% will cost of course, also, repaircost on the larger/largest ships will rise significantly. Usually dying as a trader will be the most costly, as the value of your cargo in medium ships onwards can easily surpass the 1,000,000 credits. On the other hand trading is the easiest way of moneymaking atm, so most traders with medium ships can afford to lose amounts of credits like that.
Hope that explains a bit
I played the first months with keyboard and mouse, and it's very much doable, especially if you set the controls to return to neutral when you stop moving the mouse, and I actually find it more precise then joystick, so I still find that landing for example is easier with mouse/keyboard.
However, I'm primarily a trader, if you want to concentrate more on the pew pew side of things, I'd advise a joystick, which is much more suitable for prolongued turning and twisting. The €50 hotas I bought more then suffices to play the game, so really a joystick doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg would you want one. It's either that, or learn to fly with mouse in a different way, where you need to move your mouse back to where you started to stop movement in a certain direction, which I found to be quite difficult.
The loss at death isn't too big, basicly you have insurance on your ship, so you only need to make sure you have 5% of the value of your ship in the bank to pay the own risk part of the insurance. The larger the ships the more that 5% will cost of course, also, repaircost on the larger/largest ships will rise significantly. Usually dying as a trader will be the most costly, as the value of your cargo in medium ships onwards can easily surpass the 1,000,000 credits. On the other hand trading is the easiest way of moneymaking atm, so most traders with medium ships can afford to lose amounts of credits like that.
Hope that explains a bit
