Let’s talk about the mobile version of E.L.I.T.E.
Space Unlimited is an Android app created by Craig Hart under the moniker Funqai. Existing since at least 2014, this E.L.I.T.E. based game has a special place in my heart. You play as a space pilot owning a small ship, with a small cluster of planets to explore and exploit. According to the description there are 110+ locations to visit. The world is presented as a 2D graph, a sort of star system map. The nodes are either planets, asteroid fields or deep space. The 110+ locations are probably including the pretty useless asteroid fields and deep space nodes. The pilot can only travel from the current node to an adjacent one that is connected via a space route. These take an x amount of days to travel and deduce x amount of fuel from the ships tank. Refueling can be done anywhere, but is relatively pricey in the midst of deep space.
Besides traveling the player can buy goods and store them in the limited space aboard the ship, sell goods, gamble, attack or extort other ships or just fight other ships. Other ships are randomly encountered and chances are based on the location and colour of the route. On green routes between wealthy planets you will mainly see freighter ships. On red paths in deep space you will find unwelcome guests not up for negotiation. Only one encounter can take place per travel (usually it seems like an 80% chance for an encounter to take place). Every encounter has choices the pilot can make. The outcomes then depend on the other party as well.
Being a role-playing game there is no real goal in the game. You can just explore everything, buy the most expensive ship or be a bad criminal with a huge bounty on your head.
The other mechanic is being able to take on missions at planets. This is almost always flying some person or package to planet X and getting XP as a reward along with some credits. The final mechanic of note, the pilot can level up and invest in four stats: attack, defence, flying and comms. Comms is basically an all-round communication stat, but it does not seem influence market prices, only persuading. Flying is important too as it increases evasion in fights… but to even hit an enemy you’ll need flying that is about equal or higher than your opponent.
If you came looking for a review, you won’t find it here. The game is free, so you can always just try it out for yourself. I will just talk about my experiences a bit and posit some things the game lacks.
The story of Quark
Quark already made a mistake when registering himself as a pilot, stating ‘Qaurk’ on his license. He starts his journey in Xeden, the de-facto capital of the Space Unlimited starting area.
To add some spice to the game we decide to not invest in stats with skill points at all. Quark is too dumb to do that basically. With only a few credits to spare and a basic ship, there is little to do. Quark takes on a mission to deliver a mysterious package and he buys some fruit to sell to another planet. This quickly turns out to be a dud, as he bought it at a high price. Quark starts flying around, making himself familiar with the safe central space around Xeden. We pick up a few passengers and bring them to the desired planets.
It turns out all manner of people want to hitch a ride. Protesters and lonely women who want to visit their boyfriends.
The package that needs to be delivered is headed for Telera.
Telera is part of the chain of more ‘criminal’ worlds. Quark slowly finds out that the safe central space is surrounded by a sort of ‘U’ shap that is formed by less orderly worlds.
The package is delivered without a problem.
After misguidedly buying a load of oil and again failing to sell it at a higher price, Quark goes back to the drawing board. Passengers net a nice sum, but are unstable income. Having passed a few freighters by now this seems to be a good goal: Buying in large quantities of products and selling even for a margin higher is still a lot of profit. At this point, Quark only passed by these freighter, not attacking them or trying to extort them. He is not very smart, but not so dumb to randomly attack friendly crafts.
Quark studies the prices between planets and starts dealing in medicine. Buying in around 70 credits and selling for about 100 per piece. After making some credits this way, the get-rich method is discovered [I simply remembered this from my earlier playthrough]: scientific Equipment is expensive, but can be gotten for 350 credits or cheaper and then sold for 500 or more. With the low storage space of 10 items, but any planet having only about 15 equipment, this works out perfectly. Quark gets to work trading in science machines and quickly amasses lots of credits. Enough to slowly upgrade the ship. First improving cargo space, then shields and then fuel. The route is simple, fly between Enxeribe and Onorte, both in the northwest part of the central safe space. Many protests happen on Onorte and the world seems to be very unstable, despite its bureaucratic government. Quark ponders on this shortly, but pays it no mind for the rest and continues trading. His disinterest for the background of planets will be a mainstay. Slowly he dares to go to the seedy underbelly of the safe space. Discovering that selling weapons can make huge profits, he is talked into buying a smugglers hold and fits it to the ship. The constant passengers are none the wiser.
At this point Quark is doing really well. He travels all over the central space, dangerous routes included. His passengers have to wait longer and longer to get to their destination, as Quark is mainly heading to the next market to exploit. They complain, but he stubbornly keeps trading.
He thinks back on the freighters. Taking a look in a shipyard on Teliti — basically the only corporate state within the chain — he sees it requires at least 80.000 credits to buy a Beluga mega freighter. He wont settle for less. So in his quest to get a100.000 credits he does three things:
1: tries mining in Soarrabi. This is extremely unprofitable, but at least he saw the planet and dropped a few passengers. He also encounters his first pirate here, though gets away safely.
2: Make runs between the Democratic Zaistor of the southeast and Onorte with Scientific Equipment. Aside from a few close pirate encounters he earns lots of credits here.
3: Commits his first crimes between Larebeti and Xeatge on the west side of the center. He tries to extort some lonetraders and tries fighting pirates as well, all while smuggling dangerous weapons and drugs.
Finally he buys the Beluga. By now he knows that to the north a whole region of wild space is left unexplored. Beyond Lequce and Usreuson an astroid field lays, with hidden in it the criminal haven named Bilaquve. A lot of his passengers want to go there… but at least they can wait in style in the huge beluga. But no, Quark fears he needs some upgrades and being prepared to go there. Trying the Beluga against some pirates was futile. They cant get a dent in on the thick shields of Quarks ship, but its also so slow, the pirates dodge all returning fire.
So quark simply makes runs between Zaistor and Onorte again. Buying huge amounts of Science equipment for prices as low as 250 credits, selling them for 588. This along with medicine, firearms and crops he finds on the way.
Getting a shield-regen unit in the shipyard of Teliti is the last step before going North. The passenger deck is starting to get crowded, with at least 50 missions on Quarks name. He heads to Lequce, inspects the ship and then leaves for the dangerous North…
Having some experience with pirates already, he actually easily manages to reach Bilaquve. He gets dragged into a mission for which he has to hunt down aliens in the route between Bilaquve and Cegeat — another planet many passengers want to go to. Hearing this Quark gets doubts about it all.
Heading back to safe central space he thinks about what to do. The life of a trader is pretty boring after all. The Beluga is great, but just not cut out for deep space exploration.
He earns some credits with more fringe trading and makes a decision. He leaves for Cegeat. On the way his ship is attacked by aliens, not getting through the shields luckily.
He then makes another decision. To trade guns between Bilaquve and Cegeat. His ship can hold attacks, nothing to worry about he thinks. After making some credits and heading back to Lequce, disaster strikes: he is assaulted by aliens and pirates, completely getting his ship blasted to pieces. Waiting for days on remote repair services he swears to never visit the north again in this ship. Many lost credits later, he starts trading safely again.
He takes his savings to the Teliti shipyard. Lonetrader class of ships just don’t cut it for him and becoming a pirate himself seems to be a lost cause. Then he sees this bizarre ship: the UC13. It would cost him a lot, but it would be able to fight evenly with aliens. He buys it, immediately buying and fitting upgrades as well. Quark is still skeptical of his abilities and decides to prepare even more, which means, earning credits first. In this period he notices freighters are scared of him… so he extorts them. In turn, Quark bribes the police at criminal planets, to not get hunted down by bounty hunters. Quark takes odd jobs, blasting some pirate to space dust and trading on the side. All while occasionally taking money from honest traders. This all takes a while and almost brings Quark to bankruptcy again: He got carried away when trying to fight pirates. He takes up a good loan to pay off the ridiculously expensive ship repairs. Having uninvested skill points doesn’t help either. So, we start to invest, on a whim. It’s time to dominate the space. But it’s got to be interesting. So, Quark now has 100 Comms. Around level 40, owning a great ship and being able to extort level 50 megafreighters, things are looking good for Quark again. He has all forgotten about the short depression from loaning and living on a few spare credits, barely enough to cover fuel expenses. Just to be sure, he trains himself at Xeatge, hunting pirates. This goes well and he heads north again.
By now he has more than 60 missions on his name and when he finally reached the first outer rim section of Adixe, Esvedi, Ditexe, Lesorari, Atile, Agetiar and Orquusan… he and his passengers are relieved. The UC13 was cramped and not made for so many people. He simply trades some guns in that sector and avoids the strong pirates. He gets bored again…
There are two more inhabited sectors on the space chart. The sector of the Xeoned dictatorship seems closeby. He decides to go there. What else is there to do anyway? The UC13 is nearly fully upgraded. He has to travel through the R5XX, R7XX, R8XX, and R10XX fields of asteroids before getting to the first planet. Knowing there will be pirates he comes up with a strategy. We first invest the remaining skill points when Quark reaches level 50, giving Quark a reasonable balanced 50 attack, 40 defence, 50 flying and 100 comms (not the exact numbers). Because he is so rich now, he can just pay off any pirates. Off he goes, and negotiates with the first pirate, a level 60 in a medium tier ship. It goes so well, Quark haggled the price down from about 50.000 credits to just 5 credits. He feels great and confident, repeating the motion a few times. Unbeknownst to him, the pirates get stronger closer to Xeoned. The highest levels are 170, with unparalleled fighter ships. Thusly, he fails to haggle and has to quickly dodge enemy fire. He takes a few hits and escapes the scene to the next asteroid field. Paying close attention to the pirates now, he manages to still haggle enough to be better off, but not too much to anger the pirates. At least 10.000 credits later — peanuts to the treasurey of 200.000 Quark has — he arrives in the Xeoned sector. Aside from some missions and uncharted planet discovery, it is extremely boring. The pirates appear on any route, too strong to even attempt to fight. The market sucks as well, so Quark goes back to think. The R7XX asteroid field has another route, up north. There are planets that way, but also deep space and probably aliens. Quark, thrilled by this dangerous idea, goes ahead. Its a tough track and indeed he gets attacked by alien ships. Narrowly escaping and paying off a lone pirate he does make it. His hands still tensely gripping the controls, he flies off to the first planet.
Teesge is the first planet of this two-pronged sector. We dub it the Rateisa Dictatorship sector: just after the biggest planet in the center, just like the other dictatorship sector. Quark helps a few passengers reach their destination after almost a year. His mood, despite the interest for this unknown space, stays low, with many pirates attacking his ship and the planets all being piss-poor. Had he still owned a Beluga he could have set up a dangerous but very profitable trading route. Quark however, never thought about this. He traded some guns and trinkets without enthusiasm. There was something else on his mind.
The aliens he encountered, they use stronger ships. He never had never seen those before in any shipyard… [I as a player realized this earlier, but I was surprised that they did not sell it in these outer regions]. Hoping to find a shipyard that does, he leaves the decrepit Rateisa Dictatorship sector.
He leaves for deep space exploration. Particularly, deep space above Bilaquve. He heard rumours of it containing planets and seeing the map it seemed highly likely there are at least some planets there. Taking tough routes, getting into many fights, he finds two desolate planets. Both poor unlawful places. Quark is dissapointed. He can’t seem to find that super ship anywhere. At his current heights there is little to do for him.
Then he thinks of something: maybe if I help out some of those planets with pirates and aliens bothering them we can negotiate about those special ships [I was really wondering as a player where and how, even figured it might have to do with level or credits.]
Returning safely to Bilaquve, Quark starts hunting pirates and aliens. The aliens seem shy. Pirates don’t often even see Quarks UC13 and they often get blasted without even getting a hit in on Quark. Quark discovers he is quite fond of dogfights in this ship. Pirates below level 50 will never spot the stealthy craft. Quark returns to the safe center space after not seeing many aliens. There he dumps some angry passengers. He extorts some traders again and reaches a milestone million credits. 1.000.000 credits! Quark thinks this will make buying such a special craft easy.
Returning to Bilaquve — Cegeat route, the aliens start noticing Quark again. Quark reaches level 60. He chases after aliens, giving it his all to destroy their craft, but lands one hit at most. What’s worse, they completely get his ships shield down and Quark limps to Bilaquve for repairs. After two more fights he notices all aliens use the super craft. If I encounter an alien using a UC13, I might just have a shot, are his thoughts. In the back of his mind, this hope is dimmed by seeing just how skilled these aliens are. Their stats are the inverse of Quark: no comms at all, maximal flying skills. And this dark thought is proven true: Quark engages an alien UC13, completely losing, and again fleeing with severe hull damage.
Quark makes up his mind: he must buy the super ship. He doesnt even take missions anymore and barely trades. He scours every shipyard of the outer regions. Simply blasting low level pirates that are in the way, fleeing for the few that are too strong. Back in Rateisa Dictatorship he tries mining. For the first time ever he finds gems. It’s worth so little to him that he quickly sells them and gives up mining. The super ship is sold nowhere in outer rim, only a single shipyard even sells UC13, on order only. Quark goes back to central safe space. Perhaps destroying some low level pirates will improve his mood.
This is where Quarks final and crippling mistake happens.
He just entered safe space and sees a few Beluga’s with highly valuable cargo. Greed gets the better of him, immediately forgetting his past trouble and current missions/goals. Over the communication line he threatens them like an expert. Shortly after, his credit account shows a number close to 2.000.000. Quark is pleased and continues his journey. He knows he is likely to be a sought criminal for this extortion.
He flies into a bounty hunter while avoiding lawful planets, confirming his suspicions. In his stupor he tries to destroy the craft; luckily the fight ends in a stalemate. They part ways. Quark then lands on the nearest planet to replenish the ship’s shield… Setting foot on Usraqu, a communist world he brought many passengers too and from. It is a world know for punctual transportation. Precisely in time a squad of guards and police arrive. Quark stares at them dumbfounded. As they arrest him and tell him of the 20.000 credit bounty on his head he finally realizes his mistake. “I can talk my way out of this”, knowing his extreme success with the Pirates.
He prattles on, in order to lower his measily 15.000 credit fine. The police is only annoyed by this and they throw Quark 230 days in jail. This lowers all stats across the board by 19. His flying skills are now too low to take on serious pirates, let alone aliens.
When Quark is finally released, he is depressed and pointlessly flies off to complete a few missions. Little passengers remained with his ship, mostly carrying leftover presents to way overdue destinations. Then by sheer coincidence, Quark checks out a shipyard. There it is. The UC18, the super ship the aliens haressed him with for close to a year, already almost a year ago. Quark nods to himself, his goal fulfilled. He knows he will never go alien hunting with his current or future skills, yet at least he can buy the ship. After upgrading everything and making it all customized, Quark is left with 700.000 credits, not bad at all. More than enough to cross the outer rim tens of times still and extort many freighters.
Quark heads for Onente for the umpteenth time to sell some Science equipment stored in the new large shiny storage trunk. On the way asking some freighters for some pocket money.. which immediately causes a clumsy bounty hunter to catch up with him. The pilot cannot even see the Quark’s ship; on an evil whim Quark shoots him to bits. Cleaning his criminal record in the north, Quark is absent-minded. He brings himself to Bilaquve again. No aliens yet.
The UC18 is great. Quark knew it was worthy of being called a super ship. Besides the relatively large cargo space, it has a large fuel tank, great shields, great hull and is more spacious than the weird UC13.
He makes the trek between Cegeat and Bilaquve a couple of times. No refuel in the asteroids from remotes services needed for once. No weak aliens pop up and most pirates cant even see Quarks ship.
Quark is still frustrated with hislack of flying skills, so he blows up some pirates. As a worker wants to go from Cegeat to Bilaquve he just kindly takes him there. For once he pays attention to the passenger’s story. The passenger thanks him and heads to work on Bilaquve. Not everybody is scum apparently, on these criminal planets.
Quark tries his hand against level 50 pirates. Before his time in jail he could shoot them down without getting a scratch himself. That doesn't work out anymore. Quark just heads back to the safe central sector. The outer rim is still boring after all. On the way to Lequce he finds a UC13 enemy… it is still too strong and after landing only a single hit after six sweeps, Quark flees with major hull damage. Another 5500 credits for repairs and 1200 for missiles later he continues downwards to Soarrabi to polish his skills. [grinding basically]
On the way picking up science again, extorting many freighters and almost going for the juicy Belugas again. Quark reminisces that he has seldom been able to extort a lonetrader. Even in his UC18 they are unimpressed and immediately start shooting after Quark demands the credits. He flees the scene, not taking a single hit.
Finally killing time with some pirate weeding in the small mining sector of Soarrabi, Quark reaches level 70… That means we are only about 1/3 on the way to reliable taking on the most difficult enemies. The last goal Quark really had was to be able to hunt aliens and help out some planets. This however will take many years of training for him. Knowing this and the grind that would be required, we quit.
Rambling about the design
One of the few things that bugged me since playing this game way back in 2014, is the lack of any story line. After three missions which are set about the mysterious package, everything is basically random and not very interesting. As far as I can tell, protests don’t changes prices, nor do sport matches. The hunting missions aren't very special either and particularly not rewarding at all. Perhaps you can form relations with planets that can be damaged depending on smuggling or shooting down allied ships originating from that planet. This would make pirate hunting more interesting perhaps, as traders will be allied to profitable worlds.
The game could also at least reward the player for seeing every single node in the space. It’s quite a challenge and would be interesting.
Another thing is that ‘ASAP’ mentions in missions don't do anything. Missions can be completed even years after taking up. Time in general is not used. Limiting the passenger space would be a good change perhaps? Along with making packages take up storage? In retrospect I don’t think the game is ‘too easy’. It’s fine in difficulty. You do have to think to get anywhere. However, deeper systems can be better and do not offer much challenge as is.
Aliens could have been more complex. What if they actually do have a hostile home planet? What if it actually mattered whether the player flies in a Alien ship?
Another thing that could be interesting is larger space battles, fleets and all that. Battles are alright as they are, if a bit random when stats are unequal (which they often are).
It’s a shame this game seems to be abandoned. It did receive a minor patch in 2019… But I don’t see how its any different from 2014.
The in-game economy seems rather simple and not affected much by the actions of the players nor of the NPC traders/pirates. I am not sure of this, a peek in the code would be required for that.
Fast travel is another one of my gripes. If the map would expand even more… it would be even more boring to go to one end to the other. Some portals, perhaps for a hefty fee, would be great. The end game balancing is a bit off as well. The last enemies are close to level 200. With my near optimized playstyle I only got to level 70 in about 10 hours. Experience barely scales, yet it will take a looong time to get to the real endgame, which still adds nothing. My suggestion is to make some easy experience farming tricks later on to bridge this gap. It’s one thing to roleplay and simulate, another to boringly grind for at least 10 hours.
Also I do think loaning money is interesting stuff, perhaps even optimal for speedruns or high level playing, yet they are not great overall. Perhaps I have to play around with them more. Oh well.
Lastly, jail sucks. The game should have properly explained what happens if you get into jail. Losing stats would not be bad if there is an easy place to grind. There is no such place and 19 across the board is a huge loss. Interestingly enough getting caught selling illegal goods or smuggling just nets you confiscation, no other penalties. This could have been made more interesting lets say, the punishment differs per planet. If time played a more important role (perhaps you can only spend 10 years in space?) and jail would be easier to get put into, it would have been an interesting mechanic, but as it is now, its not great at all.
Okay one more, mining just sucks. Maybe that was the point, but yeah its super slow compared to traveling between 5 planets for a trade that its not even funny. For mining you often need to travel to get to good spots. In addition you have to travel to safe planets for better prices. Even then, you can only earn about 2000, maybe more per run. Comparing a freighter run of medicine, which is also a way lower risk, you earn 8400~ credits instead. you could mine more in one go, but need to repair the drill at a planet and increase risk again. Maybe you can join a mining fleet, share profits and scare pirates off? Perhaps a few missions that relate to mining and archeology? Or some experiments in space? There is just a lot that could be done with this.
What about a mission of needing to visit an unknown planet? Really search for a person? Finding rumours and tracking them?
Another suggestion, what about a story line leading up to having to enter deep space, and construct a space station? With the requirement of supplying materials to it maybe? This would actually incentivize the player to buy the ‘shit’ products such as metals, crops or clothes.
Maybe there an be missions around spying and sabotaging, wrecking economies and requiring comms for once, which is only used for persuasion right now (still handy to enter the boring late game zone early though).
Mission accomplished
Closing off, the best I can say is that I love this game especially for it’s potential. This game can be improved so much and its fun thinking about that. This time around I actually roleplayed somewhat with it. Just the simplicity of a 2D map, and mainly economic turn-based gameplay makes it easy to imagine stuff, to the otherwise pretty lifeless and robotic world. I really did not expect coming back to this game and finding a game that genuinely captures the feeling of E.L.I.T.E. but ‘on the go’.
I hope this was fun to read. It was an experiment, writing a story around my playthrough. It was fun to write, giving me just a taste of what it would be like to condense a more expansive RPG in a nice story. As for my future writing, this is likely to be a one-off. I don’t really take the time for RPG’s that really require one to roleplay. I often find it hard to get invested. I might write about other (RPG) Android games in the future however. The game design writings are going very slow so in the meantime I might release some videogame reviews that have been sitting on my laptop for years now.