General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
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Who needs a house when you can have a Legatus pack?I guess Reggit should thank his stars he's not playing SC, imagine if one felt the need to own all ships...
I only heard about those a few minutes ago and already they have increased in price tenfold.
During the lead up to the release of Engineers, pure inflation didn't seem to be the focus, customization was. Most of the teasers and livestreams emphasized new capabilities, not increased stats. Aside from ever present complaints of excessive travel times that may or may not have been perceived as a call for greater jump ranges, I don't recall anyone asking for better weapons, shields, or hull...quite possibly because inflating these things tend to negate each other. What we did get was a lopsided level of inflation that increased defense significantly more than offense, increasing TTKs across the board...unless someone didn't keep up with Engineering, then they pop faster vs. those that did (including Master and higher rank NPCs).
We have the game the publisher wanted, within the constraints of effort vs. profitability.
It's perfectly possible to have customization systems where one has to weigh tradeoffs beyond the upfront cost of an item and I think this is what most people are talking about when they mention tradeoffs. When the supply of money (in whatever form that takes) is properly controlled, cost is a meaningful point of balance, but it should not be the only factor and is no factor at all once those costs are satisfied. Not that Frontier never really controlled credit or material supply well enough to make upfront costs a real hurdle for long, and maintenance costs are even more irrelevant.
When it comes to post-acquisition balance, most of the trade-offs we have in Engineering are token ones, utterly dwarfed by the advantages of the blueprints. Take dirty drives, for example. These have a lower optimal mass than standard drives and most other blueprints yet there are nearly no ship configurations, no matter how heavy, where dirty drives do not outperform every other option for actually moving a ship around. The other downsides are equally irrelevant: integrity doesn't matter because the extra maneuverability trumps the ability to absorb module damage, especially when the module can only be attacked from a certain facing; power doesn't matter because most ships can run huge surpluses even with an armored power plant and those few that cannot are still better off with dirty drives than with any other option; thermal load hasn't mattered for years and even when it did, it wasn't enough to consider any other kind of drive.
Around the time of the 2.1 beta, I expressed the same concerns and compared Engineering to overclocking. There are modest margins that can be safely taken advantage of, at a large upfront cost (testing and sorting), and larger, but situational, improvements that can be made with significant tradeoffs. I can take any given RTX 4090, for example, and squeeze ~5-8% more performance out of it, with no cost to power, no reduction in stability, and no cost to longevity...if I spend a week exhaustively testing and tuning it. If I want more, I need to make sacrifices, not just of time, but to the final capabilities of the part. If I want 20% more performance, well I might be able to do that....with a best of five sample, at a 50% increase to power, with custom cooling, and the risk of the card breaking outright, or demonstrating stability anomalies in certain task, anyway. You can extend that metaphor to almost anything that can be subject to aftermarket tuning (which is almost everything)...there is only so far you can bore out a cylinder, lighten a crankshaft, or increase turbo pressure, before your engine runs a serious risk of catastrophic failure. If Elite: Dangerous ship Engineering had any shred of verisimilitude all these G5 dirty drag drives (a 45.6% performance boost over the best stock part sold) would last three or four fights/races before sending the pilot home in an escape pod and needing to be rebuilt from scratch, as insurance couldn't replace the modification.
When engineering was first brought out it was a lottery what you got . Then engineering was changed to a stock result . So all they did was change the numbers around from standard "stock " to standard engineered "stock" . Engineering just introduced a game loop . It didn't make the game better it gave you something else to do . It made all ships a much of a muchness which for me was a shame and made the game easy
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And it could be cool, and would introduce some interesting choices.
Tanky bullet sponge, which cannot turn.
Giant shields which overheat you so much, that you have to control how fast you fly and how long you shoot.
Dirty thrusters, which can damage you
Big resists, but low raw hp.
And much more.
Instead it we have boring straight boosts, which lead to "you can tank 10 baddies at once", "your ship has no disadvantages" or "2 wings of anti gankers cannot kill single ganker before he take down few haulers".
For me unengineered vulture is very good example of requiring tradeoffs. His plant cannot handle bunch of boosters, weapons, the best shields and cores. Simply cannot. Player have to decide, what to take.
Delta V: Rings of saturn is a game that did this with the high end engines/RCS being unreliable and some lower end stuff being very reliable and requiring less maintenance (in addition to many other factors that differentiated engines like gimbals and fuel efficiency/thrust). It also had interesting part malfunctions and required a trained crew mechanic to repair a part past a certain point.
I think in that game almost ends up not really mattering that much in game because the game is mostly about mining so you don't need high performance on anything to make big bucks.
In Elite it could matter more if your engines break during dogfights or it could just feel like being screwed over by RNG too because unlike the spire xeno flak the malfunctions wouldn't be avoidable by skill.
The issue here is that a fast ship with absolute damage will counter most of those builds, but changing that is iffy because plasma/rails have a pretty high skill cap compared to most others and the latest engineering nerf actually involved nerfing the TC stuff slightly.
They're also the most fun/rewarding to fly imo while just being tanky or having stuff overheat/break on you all the time isn't fun on it's own if you can't actively do anything with it.
Changing up the engineering meta would require a lot of experimentation and tweaks to the numbers until it stumbles on something good/fun to fly.
Hedging one's bets against the odds of an inopportune failure is a skill, as is knowing the limits of a component and not pushing them when one doesn't need to. Maybe you leave a bit of safety margin when Engineering and only fly at 80% throttle, only boost in combat, only run FA On when absolutely needed (as it automatically trichords at maximum thrust for all negative acceleration)...or only jump 75% of max distance when not trying access fringe systems. Even an engine with paper thin cylinder walls and a crankshaft with 1% strength margins at redline will run forever at normal highway speeds. A Mig-31 has the thrust to reach mach 3.2, but normally stays below mach 2.9 to prevent damage. These considerations are tradeoffs and every tradeoff is an opportunity to apply skill, even if the absolute limits are vague/unknown enough to only be able to be described in probabilistic terms (or have been abstracted that way for the sake of simplicity).
It's not like the game is devoid of RNG abstractions in combat either. Module penetration and malfunction chances are prime examples of wholly intentional mechanisms that have strong RNG components.
But is it fun? Almost no mainstream FPS games feature weapon malfunctions/gun jamming because it's not fun and gets in the way of the action. Taking away movement controls is a more harsh version of that.
Elite does have weapon malfunctions/jamming, but only as a result of damage and I think that's the main reason seekers are banned in competitive PvP - they do massive module/hardpoint damage (with little skill required) and it ends up in a situation where the other player is still alive but can't shoot back and that's no fun.
Letting players build a ship that randomly breaks by default is bade design and while experienced players might be able to and might want to deal with it, for new players it'd be a worse trap choice than any of the currently existing choices that are just worse than the better choices but usually not worse than stock (stuff like lightweight hull reinforcements being the exception).
I can picture the conversation:
New Player: "What do you mean I spent 50 hours engineering my ship and now I died because it's worse because stuff randomly breaks"
Veteran: "lol nice self-own, noob"
The FSD wears out on the neutron highway and needs repairing. Can't say that I think this is bad game design.. Up to the player to equip an AFMU and keep an eye on it.
I'd have to think about Morbad's suggestion, but it would indeed make the gameplay somewhat deeper and add some more balancing to player choises..
I'd have to think about Morbad's suggestion, but it would indeed make the gameplay somewhat deeper and add some more balancing to player choises..
Ships used to take damage from jumping in between twin stars as well sometimes, there were ways that ships could get damaged once while traveling long distances, and I recall having to travel 5kly with 7% hull once on my way back from Colonia, but that was my fault, planet didn't get out of the way fast enough!
To me it seems like the game is too safe and predictable, you mostly have to mess up badly to be in any danger. To be honest I'm not sure I like that..
I still fly all my ships without an AFMU, it's so safe out there it's not needed for exploration unless you are neutron boosting, which I never do.
Also is it fun to be hit with a grom bomb (containment missile) when ganked?
Remember trying to jump my T-9 and repeatably getting the FSD shut down.. Maybe I messed up and I could have gotten away, but at least it made me reconsider my build and make some changes.. Not sure they were effective as I haven't been grommed since then.
Remember trying to jump my T-9 and repeatably getting the FSD shut down.. Maybe I messed up and I could have gotten away, but at least it made me reconsider my build and make some changes.. Not sure they were effective as I haven't been grommed since then.
That works out because FSD damage from (neutron boosting) wear is more of a low stress situation where you have plenty of time to troubleshoot the problem even if you get caught off-guard. It's an entirely different mode of play from combat.
Indeed having more of that and turning exploration more into a deep space survival experience with some danger could be fun - currently the danger is too low to really keep you on your toes so when it does strike it's so unexpected and usually because of zoning out due to boredom (which is admittedly how a lot of real accidents related to machine operation happen too).
This can't be really fixed by engineering (or improve engineering) because the main choice presented isn't interesting - a better ship I have to maintain all the time or a durable ship that's worse. The maintaining part isn't interesting and a durable ship doesn't open up new gameplay due to being able to visit more dangerous locations. Even if many don't consider it exploration the maelstrom/titan gameplay is almost great in this regard, but it ultimately fails by only having one solution for almost every problem it presents.
FWIW, I think the Titans and the spire sites are probably the most exciting exploration targets available in the game right now.
Nope, but there's a difference between being stunlocked by other players active abilities and having your character randomly pass out because you didn't put enough points into constitution in character creation. Technically those abilities have counterplays in Elite (dodge the rocket, use PD), but in practice that's really not possible for slow haulers.
I did add more PDs and a preengineered FSD to it.
You're moving the goalposts. "Possible" and "advisable" are completely different things. Doing what that guy is doing with a suboptimal build is not new-player friendly, period.
As usual you're playing the contrarian and playing ignorant of the point of my questions. These are all factual observations:
Most time spent in supercruise is largely spent doing literally nothing besides watching numbers tick down. See: Hutton run. (It's really ironic that spending hours doing absolutely nothing is seen as a rite of passage and "content" in this game.)
Most players do in fact need a guide & third party tools for most activities in the game, whether it be combat, trading, mining, exobiology, even exploring (which is by far the easiest and least barrier to entry).
Most players that have bounced off this game have done so because the barriers to entry to many of these activities involve too much of doing things said players do not want to do.
These are all problems that deserve solutions.