pips should only effect the rate at which the capacitor charges and nothing else. The fact that sys and eng boost the associated module's performance makes absolutely no sense and isn't reflected in the weapon pips. Just another example of not being internally consistent. It could be simple, elegant, but instead it's muddied with this arbitrary nonsensical behavior.
4 Pips to Shields - Why?
- Thread starter jpjeffrey
- Start date
Agreed. Something simple like the outer shield ring brightening or thickening in response to the number of pips would give players some clue that SYS level is doing more than controlling the capacitor charge.
The thing is, once you've heard about SYS pips its very easy to test: allow an NPC to do a jousting pass with four SYS pips and watch how much damage he does. Then do the same with no pips and wonder where your shields went. It seems obvious when pre-armed with that little bit of knowledge. But to players who aren't aware of the effect of SYS pips it will just look as though the NPC landed more hits on the second pass. Or, if dealing with multiple NPCs, it will look as though the second NPC had "uber OP unfair weapons."
In short: the in-game experience backs up the knowledge, but doesn't intuitively lead to it if you don't already have it.
Having said that, the information is actually there in the manual...
...but the link to the manual itself isn't exactly in the most intuitive of places, nor will many players bother reading it even if they find it. That's not necessarily the players' faults either; the last several generations of game have trained players not to have to read anything other than what's on the screen.
ED is very old-school in that regard, and personally I rather like that, but I do wonder how many potential players this has cost. How many have tried, found much of it too difficult or opaque, not bothered with the forums or Reddit (not even for an "I quit" flounce) but instead silently requested a Steam refund and gone elsewhere? We will never know.
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You should be managing your pips in battle. 4 pips to sys when you are taking fire and find yourself on the defensive. 4 pips to weapons when you are behind the enemy and doing damage. 4 pips to engines when you need to out manuever your enemy or run away.
Or you could avoid all that and not do things that dont make any sense. power distributor controls the priority of power to various subsystems. That's all it is. it's not a magic booster of particular subsystems that it has no way of being related to. All it should control is the rate at which the capacitor for each subsystem can charge. Simple, complete, done. Any confusion due to these completely unrelated bonuses/negatives is the fault of FD for introducing unrelated module effects to a mechanic that logically has nothing to do with it's function.
Agreed, and I never denied that. Although one should adjust their efforts to the enemy in question. No need to overexert. And not all know how to use pip macros.
Just watch this video from Kornelius Briedis!!
[video=youtube;RrSXvCEergY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrSXvCEergY[/video]
[video=youtube;RrSXvCEergY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrSXvCEergY[/video]
Exactly. Every single thread like that starts with "the AI is too tough!" with no introspection on the individuals tactics, or demonstration of actually knowing how to fly in a vaguely competent way. I'm almost certain that most people who complain about the AI are failing on a few simple points but just jump the gun and go straight to "The AI is broken and cheats".
Try to explain that though and you get accused of spouting "git gud" nonsense....
I would also like to chime in and ask a question thats always bother me, if increasing pip to sys and engines increase the strength of shields and speed of the engine why does not putting pips to weapons not increase damage?
It does indirectly. When you use all hardpoints, you will always eat more energy than you can refill even with MCs (as they eat energy per shot and are only mildly cheaper in energy). Thus having 4 pips allows for a half constant mass stream of damage... having 2 pips doesn't.
In contrast to that, more shield pips are capped for recharge by its max rate. Draw x recharge max is the most you would need in pips otherwise, making management useless there.
Same for engines... you would just calculate once, distribute and let them rot.
How do you know? Have you seen Faulcon DeLacy's wiring diagrams?
Seriously, there's absolutely no reason why doing some Technical Thing shouldn't have more than one effect. If I plug a charger into my dead laptop it allows me to use the machine and charge the battery. Pips having a direct impact on shield strength and thruster power adds a level of tactics to combat that just wouldn't be there without them. All that's missing is an obvious on-screen clue to the player that this is what's happening. A paragraph in a PDF manual doesn't cut it in 2016.
I agree with everyone who mentioned the better resistant but it's getting more interesting with the engineers mods. You gain a good resistance with them (multipliers with rules and remapping as statet here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/266235-Kinetic-Resistance-Calculation ) and the resistance of pips acts as final multiplier. This is still mighty but if you already got a good resistance it is worth to acitvely change your pip distribution even on larger vessels from time to time and not ALWAYS use 4 pips in the shields. Espeacially with reverbering cascade it's sometimes more useful to be mobile and able to boost imo.
What are pip macros......?
There was already an explanation prior to his post.
![[VR] Enexemander](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/119/119036.jpg?1621636716){kind=avatar}
Pre-determined pip setting that you activate with a press of a button (or using voice software). I prefer manual control so I couldn't tell you how to set it up.
Use of keyboard or voice control software to put pre-selected numbers of pips in various systems regardless of where they were before.
As an example, if you have pips balanced and you clicks four times on the SYS button this will put four pips in SYS and leave one each in ENG and WEP. But if you had four pips in ENG and two in WEP and you click four times on SYS, you'll end up with four in SYS, two in ENG and none in WEP.
Macros allow you to simulate very quick key presses, so for instance a "defensive combat" macro might be WEP WEP WEP WEP SYS SYS SYS SYS which will always give four pips in SYS and two in WEP for a quick combat joust. Or a "boom and zoom" macro might be WEP WEP WEP WEP ENG ENG ENG ENG which always gives two pips in weapons to reduce capacitor drain, four in thrusters for maximum boost manoeuvrability.
I used to use these with Voice Attack but I always found the actual voice software to be a bit temperamental, flaking out at critical moments and leaving me yelling "SHIELDS!" into a non-responsive microphone. These days I do everything manually but I'm strictly PVE. PVP players need the edge, and I'd wager a fair deal that a good number of the top PVP and Arena players are using macros of some sort.
why does not putting pips to weapons not increase damage?
The WEP capacitor is a cooling system, just how the devs wanted it.
- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -
Calm yourself man, my original text was at 5am after getting home from a night out, Just woke up, I'll edit this post and reply to Cmdr Gemai
Can you elaborate more on the above? Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, advising Cmdrs to use 2 PIPS to counter damage is a fast way to get someone killed.
This is an old curve, but still relevant
Cheers
EDIT -
Ok this part makes perfect sense, although even when fighting a weak enemy I'll keep 4 in SYS and move the rest between WEP & ENG, I'll move pips out of SYS when out of the enemy's fire arc.
There is no hard and fast rule, it is all about adapting, my general advice to anyone inexperienced, keep 4 in SYS and move the rest around, use weapons that have a low drain in the WEP capacitor. You can't fail with that method.
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The graph is particularly interesting, because it shows that having between 0.5 and 2.5 pips in shields is nearly useless. If you've got 2 pips in shields, just put that energy into weapons or engines where it might make a difference, because there's almost no difference between 0 and 2 pips in shields. (sure, if you need to recharge damaged shields, 2 pips can help, but then you're probably better off briefly using 4 pips to charge your capacitor again, then going back to spending your energy in a way that makes sense.)
It's no wonder many people have complaints about this game. Being complex is, in itself, not a big issue. There have been good games in the past (like, say, Jane's F/A-18 or Falcon 4.0) that were far more complicated. But those were based on real systems, complex machines of war that had real engineer teams working on them, trying to make those machines as effective as they could be, and as user-friendly as they could be made without compromising their capabilities. Difficult games, to be sure, but the difficulties made sense, and the manuals made a good effort to educate the user about military tactics, all the possible systems, they told you about the attack patterns the systems were optimised for,...
Elite is complex too, but too much of it seems to be arbitrary, capricious, magic complexity that makes no sense and isn't documented. Systems should make sense. Or, if some balance reason dictates that this isn't possible, at least make sure the users don't have to hunt through the forums for a month to assemble the information that should have been in the manual to begin with.
No, what's in the manual isn't enough. It just says more pips to shields strengthen the shield, but not by how much. Someone reading the manual might get the false impression that 2 pips is a good compromise setting, but in reality 2 pips is simply rubbish and almost as bad as 0. If you're going to include a thing that doesn't make sense like that, the exact numbers, or a graph like the one above, need to be in that manual.
In my opinion, if you feel including power distributor management is needed at all, the shield systems in games like X-wing, TIE fighter, and Wing Commander: Privateer made far more sense than the ones here. Power to shields simply determined the level of shields you could maintain. Full power to shields gave you fully charged shields. Drop the power, and you'd get lower shield charge. Translated to E, that would mean lower shield charge settings would only give you 2 or 1 ring of shields.
Though it would probably make more sense not to have power distributor management at all. That's such a world war 2 era thing to do, manually managing prop pitch and engine mixture settings... In modern military planes, all of that stuff gets managed by the engine computers, allowing the single pilot to keep his attention to stuff that matters more, like the tactical situation and data from the many, many sensor systems his aircraft carries.
It's no wonder many people have complaints about this game. Being complex is, in itself, not a big issue. There have been good games in the past (like, say, Jane's F/A-18 or Falcon 4.0) that were far more complicated. But those were based on real systems, complex machines of war that had real engineer teams working on them, trying to make those machines as effective as they could be, and as user-friendly as they could be made without compromising their capabilities. Difficult games, to be sure, but the difficulties made sense, and the manuals made a good effort to educate the user about military tactics, all the possible systems, they told you about the attack patterns the systems were optimised for,...
Elite is complex too, but too much of it seems to be arbitrary, capricious, magic complexity that makes no sense and isn't documented. Systems should make sense. Or, if some balance reason dictates that this isn't possible, at least make sure the users don't have to hunt through the forums for a month to assemble the information that should have been in the manual to begin with.
No, what's in the manual isn't enough. It just says more pips to shields strengthen the shield, but not by how much. Someone reading the manual might get the false impression that 2 pips is a good compromise setting, but in reality 2 pips is simply rubbish and almost as bad as 0. If you're going to include a thing that doesn't make sense like that, the exact numbers, or a graph like the one above, need to be in that manual.
In my opinion, if you feel including power distributor management is needed at all, the shield systems in games like X-wing, TIE fighter, and Wing Commander: Privateer made far more sense than the ones here. Power to shields simply determined the level of shields you could maintain. Full power to shields gave you fully charged shields. Drop the power, and you'd get lower shield charge. Translated to E
, that would mean lower shield charge settings would only give you 2 or 1 ring of shields.Though it would probably make more sense not to have power distributor management at all. That's such a world war 2 era thing to do, manually managing prop pitch and engine mixture settings... In modern military planes, all of that stuff gets managed by the engine computers, allowing the single pilot to keep his attention to stuff that matters more, like the tactical situation and data from the many, many sensor systems his aircraft carries.
The curve was modified a little while back, it is now a bit more linear, still the difference between 2 & 4 is huge.
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I'm not saying you're wrong, but surely this is mad?! If the power gets fed direct to the shields, then what's the point of the capacitors?
With this 'logic', surely energy weapons are more powerful if you have full pips to weapons?
<beats head on wall> :x
No, the WEP capacitor is a cooling system. It would be a good idea to search previous topics, the devs have gone into detail regarding logic of each capacitor.