There are. Guardian modules are equal to G4 upgrade.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
- Start date
Well ... I agree in that part, that once I got what I need, I keep getting materials with storage limit without real use of it.
I wish it had more "grind" to spend mats
I.e. it is not enough of the grind for the my taste.
What's the hypothesis, since FDev have said variations in the blue mean nothing but a reflection of the underlying terrain?
My own observations have been the shade of blue isn't due to terrain. Overlapping zones for different species' in the same area are often different shades of blue. My hopothesis is it's the cyan tone with the best probability, but other species in the same area can sometimes "overwrite" the first species lowering the probability of finding it.
For example:
If it were just a reflection of the terrain the shade would be the same for every species.
As we cycle through we can see overlapping species with different shades for the same location, this indicates that the shade refers to the species and not the terrain directly.
where they don't overlap there tends to be a solid tuquoise colour. Where the niches do overlap one species shows a predominantly dark blue, whilst the competing species will show a light blue which appears to indicate which species has the advantage on that terrain. This seems to work on worlds with competing Tussock and Frutexa. Bacteria seem to work differently.
I don't give a crap if other players don't consider crystal shard sites to be "natural gameplay".
- They were obviously placed in the game intentionally.
- There lots of them.
- Using them is not a game exploit. No relogging. No weird tricks.
- Using them is not a grind. Its an activity. You go to a site, collect, then leave.
- For an established player it is a very quick activity. A couple jumps in a fleet carrier while making dinner. Then collect and return. If the cmdr already knows the desired destinations.. verging on trivial task. Super easy.
- For a newish player... a descent jump range AspX or DBX and voila... enough raw mats for several G5 ship builds.
- Several systems have more than 1 type of shard crystal (giving different mats), so only need to visit a couple systems.
Is it easy for a new player. No. They gotta learn a bunch of stuff and progress in the game to make it easy. A new player generally doesn't have the ability to purchase and G5 engineer a Federal Corvette combat murder boat.
Are you seriously doubting that a reasonably experienced and established player can't purchase and equip a combat Corvette, G5 engineer, and recover resources in a normal gameplay week? With access to knowledge, skills, and equipment this really is not a big chore.
In the case of a building a PvE massive overkill murder boat corvette, a single trip to crystal shards recovers raw mats (best done after building several ships). And then blowing up ships for the rest of the week easily recovers mfg mats. A bunch of data mats magically get collected when scanning ships to destroy, and from mission rewards. As said earlier.I don't pay attn to data mats... somehow they take care of themselves.
I spend +80% of my gameplay time in deep space. When I return to the bubble I don't spend the next two months collecting mats and credits to build a new ship! That's crazy!
I don't expect a new player can do what an established player can do. and I don't expect a new player to obtain and engineer a top tier ship with only a week's effort. That's ridiculous. I was responding to someone that is not a new player. After playing the game for +100 actual ingame hours a reasonable player should know how to play the game. And should be reasonably established. And know how to collect materials.
It is still one trip to crystal shard sites to recover used-up mats. Whether your bins are 80% full or 40% full it really doesn't matter. When surrounded in a forest of mats, you just collect them.
I generally use whatever raw mats i need for whatever purposes and then just before returning to deep space for another 6 months I fill up my bins. As said above, its an almost trivial task for an established and experienced player.
For new players... they have the learning and progression curve. Like any other game I have played they gotta gain skills, knowledge, and ingame equipment (specialized ships, engineered modules, fleet carrier, etc.). This progression makes the game worth playing beyond 25 hours.
It's definitely possible with HGE relogging and efficient farming of other resources, but doing it efficiently means it becomes just a game-knowledge based activity with no surprises. That type of thing can be fun if it's a quick trick you employ to do something faster, but not for a sustained activity.
The issue isn't just that it takes too long, it's that it's also not fun and even doing everything the quick way takes excruciatingly long when the moment to moment gameplay isn't there.
I have multiple times and still haven't gotten the mentioned materials - which proves our point that the current system is broken.
I cannot see how the materials gathering aspect of engineering is broken, as it seems pretty simple to me (and I struggle to find solutions to puzzles or assess gameplay to understand it, I rely on others).
Effectively stuff is scattered around just waiting to be gathered, often in various ways. Some stuff is harder to find than others. And it can be traded.
It has been said that there is a lack of information in the game. The way I see it, is that the in game info (tutorials, codex etc) is like learning a job at a college, which gives you the basic grounding. It is not until the work place (game and forum) is entered, and you get exposed to the actual job and work with others who provide lots of additional info (such how the easiest way to achieve x is by doing y, or this place here is where z can be found). When entering that place we do not have all the skills/tools at our disposal. They will come with time and effort.
Steve
Effectively stuff is scattered around just waiting to be gathered, often in various ways. Some stuff is harder to find than others. And it can be traded.
It has been said that there is a lack of information in the game. The way I see it, is that the in game info (tutorials, codex etc) is like learning a job at a college, which gives you the basic grounding. It is not until the work place (game and forum) is entered, and you get exposed to the actual job and work with others who provide lots of additional info (such how the easiest way to achieve x is by doing y, or this place here is where z can be found). When entering that place we do not have all the skills/tools at our disposal. They will come with time and effort.
Steve
No, it's not. Download Odyssey Material Helper—it gives you very specific hints where to find what you need. Eg, for Core Dynamics Composites it has to be a Federal system with high population and in the state of "None"; Biotech Conductors are mission rewards etc. It's no different from eg searching for materials you need for crafting in Skyrim—you don't just find ebony in any old mine.
You know how in better games you raid dungeons or kill bosses to get loot or high end crafting materials instead of killing the same mobs over and over again or on the non-combat side find and memorize the locations of resource nodes and plot an efficient route to check all of them quickly turning it into a traversal challenge or in some games you set up bases with logistic chains to do the boring stuff for you...
In Elite it's all a fetch quest that takes no skill and can't be performed better with skill. Or as people suggest killing and looting hundreds or thousands of ships and looting the dropped materials which is not a grind for them.
It boils down to traveling from place to place in an immersive way to pick up the stuff (if you know where the stuff is which new players don't really). The travel by itself isn't that challenging and if there are distractions along they way they just prolong the already very long process of getting materials. That is the game.
Better games? That is opinion and not fact. And, no, I do not know, as I do not play games that involve raiding dungeons and/or killing bosses. My type of game is strategy, like Hearts of Iron 3, or the Total War series.
Bearing in mind that I have little knowledge of such "better" games, but I have vague recollections of characters having to preform repetitive actions like fishing or hitting a rock to gain mats or to improve. Seems like grind, time consuming and could be made much easier and simpler ......
Steve
The high-level 'Condas and Pythons that come after you during missions drop grade 4 and 5 materials. As do high level assassination targets and high level ships in Haz RES-s. I estimate that about 90% of my manufactured materials are collected from the wreckages of my enemies, and I have a large surplus from simply doing what I've become to like the most in the game.
But the game also having non-combat avenues for collecting materials is a good thing. Not everyone wants to do combat and them having options to upgrade their ships is a good thing, even if strictly speaking you don't need grade 5 dirty drag drives on your hauling or exploration ship.
I do like flying my ships around in supercruise. Makes me feel as an actual pilot flying an actual spaceship. I wouldn't have it any other way.
As for the knowledge part, as a new player in Skyrim I had no freaking idea where to find various ores or what the bazillion different alchemical ingrediences do. And the only help in-game were occasional alchemy recipes you could find laying around. Most of it was trial-and-error, and later UESP as an out-of-game community knowledge source. Same goes for other open-world RPG(-ish) games I have played. Elite is hardly unique in this respect; figuring it all out is part of the game. (Let's not talk about the devilish puzzles in Myst or figuring out how targeting and weapons systems work in DCS).
Most mission stuff the majority of the time is probably still spent traveling and the mission-stalker condas have like a 10-25% chance to spawn per mission for me. It's highly random, sometimes I get up to 3-4 per a set of ~10 missions, sometimes it's nothing and they require special triggers to activate which you might not hit unless you know about them.
The combat itself isn't too different from other combat here and in addition to being a bit random with the spawns for new players without engineering it won't be viable to do these (or they might spawn smaller ships without having high enough elite rank). In addition the rewards aren't worth the effort or if this was your only way of getting those materials then the rate at which you gain the materials would be awfully slow (which is the subject of the thread).
Elite actually has parts of that in Odyssey content with memorizing settlement layouts and knowing where the data ports can spawn and where they spawn on specific bases if you visit them multiple times.
The issue with gathering space materials being so heavily knowledge based is that that's all there is to it. Figuring it out isn't satisfying and it doesn't change much in what you actually do just where you do it.
It's like a puzzle where you instantly figure out the solution and the steps to get there are obvious but actually solving it includes minutes of walking from one end of the room to the other and riding an elevator to press the correct switch to move/rotate the puzzle pieces to the correct place. Making the puzzle itself harder or easier won't fix it, reducing the number of steps might make it too simple, increasing the walk speed would just draw attention to the convoluted setup/UI the puzzle uses and if the game has only one puzzle you might not want players to finish it too quickly.
Engineering is broken in multiple places in similar ways, but since it's not an abstract example there's concrete things that can be done to fix things here unless the issue is that players fully engineer their ship to G5 and promptly realize they completed the game and there's nothing to do now so it's time to quit.
Morrowind had very limited fast travel options—you had to walk/run between POI-s, often having only vague clues as to where to go due to lack of quest markers (I never did find that witch some Nord directed me to go and find giving very limited directions...). It took a lot of time travelling between dungeons to find the "good stuff" while only having dumb cliff racer mobs with their worthless drops on the way. Yet the game is praised for being "hardcore" like this, while Skyrim was derided back in the day for being too dumbed down with its quest markers and fast travel.
Myst also had puzzles that forced you to run around back and forth on the map doing pretty much brute force trial-and-error, yet is praised as the pinnacle of puzzle games.
Pre engineered gear was surely the right step. Why did they have to make it a random fomo first come first serve limited offer though? A deep hate for players accessing game content?
Elite has the worst of both worlds here and more - you have markers to the USS you need with uneventful, sometimes long travel times and the stuff you need might even randomly or semi-randomly not spawn there.
Pre-FSS it was maybe a bit more involved with having to resolve every signal manually by turning your ship instead of just scanning the nav beacon or using FSS. I like the new system better because it removes another boring step from the process, but it doesn't add good gameplay to replace it (due to the FSS being too simple and more like a bubblewrap clicking minigama for tons of signals than an useful tool for finding what you want).
Elite also (almost) had it down the good way here with SRV planetary exploration in horizons with the wave scanner and POIs, but it was held back by lack of variety in the stuff you could find and has since further degraded with odyssey changing things
Using a SRV to gather raw materials off of horizons geo/bio stuff in odyssey is the closest it comes to interesting gathering (if you like the SRV and exploring), but that's held back by various technical issues (FPS/graphics/pop-in/terrain generation/materials getting stuck/turret jank/eventual infinite black screen if you disembark often to avoid turret jank) and neglected design issues (no clear difference between which plants can have materials for new players). It's also limited to o one type of material.
I haven't gotten around to playing myst yet, but my bad example was inspired by a video I saw on Obduction. I think for the older Myst games it might be a case of novelty (in other aspects than puzzles like lore and graphics) and only having to do it once with each failed step potentially providing new information during the trials and errors that lets it get away with such things. Even if it's a god damn non-euclidian maze in one of those games you can make solid eventual progress by mapping it out and most bad oldschool adventure/FMV games only have 1-3 of those per game In Elite it's just floating to the nav marker.
Once you get away from the main gravity wells the travel times are very short, a minute or two (unless you have to cross the whole system, in which case it's a few minutes more), if you do it manually and aim for the barely-5-seconds ETA. I don't find it tedious or uneventful, but much like driving in racing games—trying to get to the "finish line" against the clock as fast as possible. Takes a bit of skill of setting your throttle just right, keeping the ship on target and finding the optimal path away from the gravity wells that is not too long. Quite zen, if you ask me. Only way to make it better would be diversifying FSD-s and ships to have varying supercruise speeds and accelerations.
The loot in Morrowind was semi-random, too, leading to repeated save reloading before opening a container if you wanted to get the "best stuffz". Skyrim had random loot, too, but rolled the dice at the entry to a dungeon, making reloading pointless—but attacking a merchant, then reloading to reset their inventory is a common exploit to get the rare enchanted item you're after. And in Oblivion repeated reloading if you didn't get the Sigil Stone you wanted when closing Oblivion Gates was the best way to get the "good stuffz" for enchanting weapons or armor.
Every game has boring, repetitious ways for getting "stuffz" that players have figured out to be the most "efficient". That's the way it is.