New Engineering system - a factual example

sgurr

S
The new system is objectively better for the first ship and it's core internals and shields:
Bulkheads, drives, powerplant, fsd, distributer, life support, sensors, shields

Old system = 288 mats
New system = 268.8 mats

That is better.

However, the new system takes more materials, and therefore time, for any subsequent G5 already done, particularly when you take duplicated weapons or modules into account.

Eg For a new player's first Cobra mk III with 4 MCs with special effects and 2 different utilities it's only a little worse:

Old system = 477 (288 + 36 + 36 + 54 + 21 + 21 + 21)
New system = 510.4 (268.8 + 33.6 + 33.6 + 43.6 + 43.6 + 43.6 + 43.6 )

But for each subsequent Cobra mk III (or equivalent):
Old system = 174 (72 + 9 + 9 + 21 + 21 + 21 + 21)
New system = 510.4 (the same as the first ship)

That is, for this example a second ship and beyond (see what I did there ;) ) the new system will require over 3 times the materials of the old system, and that ratio will get worse the more duplicated weapons, utilities, internals are used.

Whilst it will probably give a more reliable outcome it will be far more time consuming for a player's fleet, however you go about getting the materials (mat broker etc)


See the spoiler for the working. (Feel free to say if I've made any mistakes)

Sandro has stated (livestream last year) that under the new system each level will take an average of 2.8 rolls ( I had to laugh when it took them 5 last night ;) )

Old system material use, first ship:

Allowing for 3 grade 5 rolls it will take:
Grade 1: 3x1=3
Grade 2: 3x2=6
Grade 3: 3x3=9
Frade 4: 3x3=9
Grade 5: 3x3=9

A total of 36 mats per module.

Allowing for core internals and shields:
Bulkheads, drives, powerplant, fsd, distributer, life support, sensors, shields

Gives a material cost of for a base ship of 288 mats

Old system, second and subsequent ships:

Grade 5: 3x3=9

Allowing for core internals and shields:
Bulkheads, drives, powerplant, fsd, distributer, life support, sensors, shields

Gives a material cost of for a base ship of 72 mats

New system material use, first AND subsequent ships:
Grade 1: 1x2.8=2.8
Grade 2: 2x2.8=5.6
Grade 3: 3x2.8=8.4
Frade 4: 3x2.8=8.4
Grade 5: 3x2.8=8.4

A total of 33.6 mats per module.

Allowing for core internals and shields:
Bulkheads, drives, powerplant, fsd, distributer, life support, sensors, shields

Gives a material cost of for a base ship of 268.8 mats

(Each weapon would be 33.6+ ~10 mats for a special effect)

The first ship core modules will be faster to engineer to grade 5. Per module it's 36 (old) vs 33.6 mats (new).


For the core internals and shields it will be
Old system = 72 mats
New system = 268.8 mats

For the first module with a special effect at an engineer (eg weapons)
Old system = 54 mats (36 mats for module, +18 for special effect)
New system = ~43.6 (depends on special effect)

For subsequent upgrades with special effects available at the same engineer
Old system = 21 mats.
New system = ~43.6 (new, depends on special effect)

Without special effects modules take:
Old system = 36 mats then 9 for every subsequent module at the same engineer
New system = 33.6 for every module

My opinion
Pros: I like the more predictive system a LOT. I like the 'buying' of special effects rather than rep. I think everything else in this update from all 3 streams looks great and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
 
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Viking84

Viking84
These numbers confirm what everyone is fearing. The new system is a massive increase in the grindwall for the Engineers for casual players. For the dedicated PvP'ers that need maxed out modules the new system is most likely an improvement given the guaranteed top end results after a few tries. For those of us who were happy with an OK G5 roll the new system will be horrid...
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Said the same thing myself, 2 months ago, in the focused feedback forum.

Basically, your first 20-odd mod's will be quicker (as a result of needing to level-up an engineer) but after that you'll need to collect 20-odd more mat's for every mod' you want and so, by the time you've got 30-odd ships with more than a dozen modded modules on each one, you're looking at an insane amount of extra collecting to do.
 

Wedgetail

W
depending on how you had played, you could almost cut the cost of taking the first ship to G5 in half under the old system, as you could use exploration, bounties, combat bonds etc (even trading, if you really wanted to grind it) for respective engineers. e.g. I think I got my first G5 FSD roll with 1xG3 and 3xG4 rolls before unlocking G5 as I was just coming back from a loooong exploration trip when engineers landed - wonder if there will still be a way to improve without just rolling G1-G5 any more
 
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Funny

F
Hmm. Well, basically it’s not that bad if you still only go for rares, with the caveat that that’s only if if the conversion rates are the same for all grades of materials.
Basically, you’d collect all the rarer mats you wanted, and then convert them downwards. If you onky used the rarest ones for thr blueprint (i.e. the ones listed at G5), you’d need 7.5 mats total, or 2.5 G5 upgrades.

They’ll probably have to at least double materials though, 100 isn’t that much if you downgrade all the time.
They’ll also have to increase the consistency of the first 3 rolls to not occasionally waste your time and resources.
 

CMDR Redcrest

C
Sandro said in the live stream that these changes are "for the long term health of the game". What I understood that to mean is 'we want to keep you running out of materials so you have to go get more thereby keeping you in a gameplay loop'. That seems like a hamster wheel to me.
Anyway beta arrives tomorrow so let's all take a look at the numbers in operation and try to affect positive change via beta feedback.
Hopefully we can at least change the hamster wheel for a hamster ball that let's us run around with a bit more freedom. 🐹
 

sgurr

S
Stealthie said:
Said the same thing myself, 2 months ago, in the focused feedback forum.

Basically, your first 20-odd mod's will be quicker (as a result of needing to level-up an engineer) but after that you'll need to collect 20-odd more mat's for every mod' you want and so, by the time you've got 30-odd ships with more than a dozen modded modules on each one, you're looking at an insane amount of extra collecting to do.
Click to expand...

As did I, thought it worth repeating.

CMDR Redcrest said:
Sandro said in the live stream that these changes are "for the long term health of the game". What I understood that to mean is 'we want to keep you running out of materials so you have to go get more thereby keeping you in a gameplay loop'. That seems like a hamster wheel to me.
Anyway beta arrives tomorrow so let's all take a look at the numbers in operation and try to affect positive change via beta feedback.
Hopefully we can at least change the hamster wheel for a hamster ball that let's us run around with a bit more freedom. ��
Click to expand...

Loving the hamster analogy o7
 

Rennard

R
Steed said:
......stuff.....
Click to expand...
The only assumption you appear to have made here is that in the old (current) system G5 requires a fixed number of materials. If you are unlucky enough to get awful roles then it can take many many more (Sandro gave examples of players doing 1000's of rolls). Whereas in the new system it is pretty much guaranteed within 5 or 6 rolls.
 

sgurr

S
Rennard said:
The only assumption you appear to have made here is that in the old (current) system G5 requires a fixed number of materials. If you are unlucky enough to get awful roles then it can take many many more (Sandro gave examples of players doing 1000's of rolls). Whereas in the new system it is pretty much guaranteed within 5 or 6 rolls.
Click to expand...

Sandro's example is about min/maxers. The new system is great for them but I'm not one of them.

In my experience 1-3 rolls at G5 almost always gives a result I'm happy with. I did do more for particular results early on but I won't spend time that way now.
 

ATrifleMiffed

A
I'll just repost my post on the matter from the recap thread. Just to clarify, I am fairly casual about upgrades, I don't care about min-maxing, I just roll once or twice until I've got a decent roll.

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I am a touch miffed about the decision to stick with the through-tier upgrading process. It reeks of artificially lengthening a process that is already fairly lengthy and not even all that rewarding (since power creep has made engineered modules the new baseline), and goes out of its way to screw people who operate multiple ships, or trade in ships frequently, like me. I have a mostly upgraded Anaconda, Python, Fer-de-Lance, DBX, Imperial Courier, Imperial Eagle and Sidewinder, plus am planning to acquire a Chieftain and Krait once they become available. My current crop have upgraded critical systems for my play style (drives, FSD, reactor, shield gen, boosters, plus between two and eight weapons, more if I am experimenting with builds). I am nowhere near being an extreme example, I have merely played casually since the Standard Beta and haven't even interacted with the engineers until after 2.2.03. I have around six hundred million in total assets to my name, mostly in ships, acquired by just messing around and doing whatever I felt like. Point is, I'm not by any means a hardcore player.


Upgrading that under the old system took me less than two hundred rolls in total (since I already have most of the engineers unlocked and levelling up with them can be done in a dozen or so rolls anyway. Under the new system, assuming the current statistical distribution of upgrades holds (average of four to six rolls per level, judging by the video) it would take me, assuming a perfect streak of god rolls, about a thousand upgrades, and more likely upwards of six thousand to achieve the same level of enhancement plus or minus a few hundred, and that's for partial system upgrades, not all-module upgrades, and not counting hull tank upgrades needed for fighting Thargoids or soloing wing mission NPCs. That means I'd be looking at an investment of between fifteen and thirty thousand units of materials, depending on an upgrade's exact requirements and the luck of the draw, not counting extra materials needed for trading, CGs, or the new tech broker, who draws from the same pool. And yes, I know my current modules will be transferred to the new system unchanged, but that's not the point, the point is comparing a bad system to an even worse one.


So tell me, how exactly is this fair to players who choose to, as the ever-so-obnoxious marketing materials put it, play their own way and blaze their own trail? There is only one group of players who benefit from this, the sort of people who, immediately upon starting a new Jameson simply grind passenger missions for twenty hours straight, park their rears in an Anaconda and never fly anything else, and then quit and complain about how there's no content. The kind of player most of us can't stand, in other words. The rest of us are having at the very least five times, and under real-world conditions closer to twenty-five times the amount of grind the engineers have up until now required forced upon us for no sane reason. The condescending response given by Mr Sammarco was the worst part. "People are afraid of change." Utter tosh, we're not afraid of the new system, we're disappointed by how infuriatingly stupid the new upgrading process is, smack in the middle of what is an otherwise flawless update.


I see two solutions to the issue:


Solution 1: ditch the through-tier upgrades, let us start at the highest unlocked tier, jack up resource prices to compensate. The highest unlocked tier is the only one anyone cares about anyway, and doubling prices would make acquiring upgrade materials more deliberate without forcing players to resort to material grinding to the exclusion of all other activities.


Solution 2: ditch the rolls. They are pointless in the new system anyway. Everyone knows what they're going to get, the only uncertainty is how long it's going to take to get there, making it indistinguishable from commuting through London at rush hour. Without the upgrade percentage uncertainty of the old system, the upgrade roll is reduced to nothing more than a randomly-allocated resource cost for a fixed-percentage upgrade. So get rid of it. Give each upgrade a fixed resource cost, plus our pick of additional effects for a further cost. If you want to keep controlled, minor uncertainty, well, we already have that in every other step of the engineering process - finding materials, unlocking engineers, doing missions for both, et cetera. Half of the upgrade's attributes are locked anyway (the negative stats), would it really hurt the game that much to lock in the other half as well? I really, really don't think it would.


There is no challenge to getting engineer upgrades, no test of skill, no obstacle to overcome by mastering the game's systems, they're hard to get because they're so obnoxiously obtuse and more padded than a Tolstoy novel in an insane asylum, and that's just terrible game design. You don't even need to be a designer to know that, you just need to play the game for longer than an hour at a time once a week while doing more than just bouncing off of station walls and crashing into landing pads. Rolling dice is at least compelling when the outcome is unknown, but when it is known, it's just an unnecessary time sink. So please, please change it, or at the very least reign in the number of rolls it takes to go up a grade. Three should be the maximum, not a rare-to-the-point-of-being-unheard-of minimum.
 

Chaparral

Chaparral
Really wished they'd go without RNG and just have flat recipes for performance and special effects. Then you could specifically gather what you need for a given build. This new system is clearly going to expand the time gathering mats/data for a fleet of ships.


Rushing to g5 all my mods...
 

CMDR IPL Victim

C
I agree woth Steed and Epictherumble.

Those that benefit the most are those that grind for the perfect module. For them, tge new system simplifies and speeds things greatly. Others like me, it is a major increase on the level of grind.
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
I do have some major concerns about the new engineering set-up. It worries me greatly that casual players (and selfishly this is me!) are going to give up on Engineers completely because of the perceived "grind". I don't have hours and hours to play to upgrade every module over and over. That said I never had time to go for the "god" roles either! What worries me about is that Engineers skews the ships greatly so in open it really does matter if you have time to go and engineer or not. That said I'm happt to see how the whole thing works in Beta and comment fully on it then. Until we get hands on a lot of the discussion is hypothetical at present.
 

Winterwalker

Winterwalker
Philip Coutts said:
I do have some major concerns about the new engineering set-up. It worries me greatly that casual players (and selfishly this is me!) are going to give up on Engineers completely because of the perceived "grind". I don't have hours and hours to play to upgrade every module over and over. That said I never had time to go for the "god" roles either! What worries me about is that Engineers skews the ships greatly so in open it really does matter if you have time to go and engineer or not. That said I'm happt to see how the whole thing works in Beta and comment fully on it then. Until we get hands on a lot of the discussion is hypothetical at present.
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I think the difference there may be that you can pin an upgrade and work on it remotely? As a casual player, then there's less need to keep revisiting the engineer base so (I think) might see engineer go more in tandem with your regular game and you're less tied geographically. Business as usual then, have been playing three years myself and can't afford Anaconda yet.
 

DialBforBiscuit

D
Steed said:
<snip>
Without special effects modules take:
Old system = 36 mats then 9 for every subsequent module at the same engineer
New system = 33.6 for every module

My opinion
Pros: I like the more predictive system a LOT. I like the 'buying' of special effects rather than rep. I think everything else in this update from all 3 streams looks great and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
Click to expand...

So how would you include gathering time? Right now for g5 rolls some specific items have to be farmed, sometimes needing specific circumstances to spawn and trip time. But in the new system you can pin your blueprint and sit at a station that has a material trader. Do your engineering while also trading in all the junk mats for the specific rare mats you need without any travel time.

Can we compare grinds? Current system, involving lots of travel/planet srving but fewer rolls. New system, more rolls, but mats on hand at station (where you can also do the engineering).
 
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