Does anyone actually enjoy engineering?
- Thread starter Bill Clement
- Start date
I did no engineering, but the peashooting aint no fun either. Stupid powercreep ruined it all.
How are you collecting materials from your detonated ship, once you see the rebuy screen and reappear back at your last dock?
Ah, ok, yes I thought you meant self destructing.
I suppose a further point could be made - why do we even need to destroy a ship to get the components, let's just buy them (components/materials) direct from the manufacturer
The only part I don't like is the unreliability of collecting the resources. Once I have a full stack of engineering materials/data, I absolutely love the tinkering/tweaking the numbers to really personalize my ships to how I want to use them. All my engineered ships very much feel like my ships, and I had a lot of fun really learning them from the inside out to then be able to overcome outfitting challenges like cooling off hot ships, optimizing weights, or inflating a ship's natural strengths.
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If you could buy them, what would happen to Dav's Hope?
And Jameson's Cobra ?
And ......
And Jameson's Cobra ?
And ......
This, at least return SOME of the materials. Perhaps 0.0.1.1.2 for the various grades 1-5. Lets face it, the first 2 grades of engineering are close to free, and rolls can be great sometimes, so we can't be reclaiming heaps of materials since there is variation in the materials required to complete a grade. It would be nice to get something back if you scrapped an item instead of a few credits.
I wouldn't change the system aside from adding some form of reclamation for unwanted modules. I don't find any one thing really holds my attention for long in this game, I feel the need to constantly change activities. Although farming materials might not be the most exciting pursuit, I don't mind it. Done in short spurts here and there, it's actually not that hard to build and maintain a level of material stockpile. If you're only going to farm material when you absolutely need it, it will feel like grinding... Try picking up a few 'nearby' USS Encoded or HGE as you travel around, choosing missions with Eng. Materials for rewards, looking for g5 mats when you explode a ship in RES sites etc.
Engineering isn't very hard honestly. 'The grind' to unlock engineers is pretty mild compared to some other games. It takes some time sure, but mainly doing gameplay activities. Mine this, travel this far, transport this, kill some ships. And last but not least, gather a bit of material.
Might as well not be there. Or is there a way to find them with in-game means?
"Gather a bit of material" - gather my rear, rather. Completely opposite to my experience. Gather "a bit" of material gets you nowhere.
Material Traders - you can argue they shouldn't be necessary, that RNJesus is too stingy, but regardless, they are there. With the ease one can find HGEs for g5 mats now, this problem is easily solved.
As you doubted yourself, using the mat traders is more of a workaround. Now you use stupidly easy to gather mats and trade them at a stupid ratio. Instead we could have interesting game mechanics to get hold of each material type. But instead we have still got disjointed wake scanning and visiting signal sources, both very simple mechanics.
You are the 'dangerous' in engineering. Pirates will only shoot if you don't give in their demands, but you shoot to kill and salvage their ship materials for engineering ! 
The issue I have is I don't have enough materials to engineer one ship. Customising my entire fleet would be a Herculean task! I'd love to be able to experiment, adjust, refine and evolve a better build. But the gathering process is so time consuming all I'm prepared to do is apply what other people tell me is the 'best' modification. I just can't face months more farming, Spiff. I'm losing the will to live as is...
They'd become what I assumed them to be in the first place- cool vignettes adding a bit of colour to the game. Each one discovered would encourage people like me to go seek out another- a fun and occasionally rewarding activity, completely voluntary.
As opposed to the situation right now, where no-one has the time to spare seeking out cool and unusual stuff, because we're far too busy lapping Dav's Hope for the gazillionth time hoping this run will offer those higher grade mats we need...
HGEs are easy to find? Seriously? It took me seven hours this weekend to find one. It's likely to take me at least as long to find another. Apparently combat logging will make the HGE remain in place for a couple of extra runs? So if you carry out an activity FD have explicitly described as an exploit and worthy of enforcement action from them, you might be able to get a handful of runs at a HGE once every seven hours? That's 'easy'?
EDIT- today's patch notes state HGEs will spawn more frequently. I really, really hope so. It could be just what I (or we) were waiting for...
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Bob Lighthouse
Banned
The issue I have is I don't have enough materials to engineer one ship. Customising my entire fleet would be a Herculean task! I'd love to be able to experiment, adjust, refine and evolve a better build. But the gathering process is so time consuming all I'm prepared to do is apply what other people tell me is the 'best' modification. I just can't face months more farming, Spiff. I'm losing the will to live as is...
They'd become what I assumed them to be in the first place- cool vignettes adding a bit of colour to the game. Each one discovered would encourage people like me to go seek out another- a fun and occasionally rewarding activity, completely voluntary.
As opposed to the situation right now, where no-one has the time to spare seeking out cool and unusual stuff, because we're far too busy lapping Dav's Hope for the gazillionth time hoping this run will offer those higher grade mats we need...
HGEs are easy to find? Seriously? It took me seven hours this weekend to find one. It's likely to take me at least as long to find another. Apparently combat logging will make the HGE remain in place for a couple of extra runs? So if you carry out an activity FD have explicitly described as an exploit and worthy of enforcement action from them, you might be able to get a handful of runs at a HGE once every seven hours? That's 'easy'?
I seem to recall that HGE spawn rates were being buffed in the current patch.
Also, they are in fact much easier to "find" than they ever were, in the sense that you never have to fly around randomly in SC anymore.
I don't play anymore because of Engineers. Shame, I used to enjoy ED.
HGEs are easy to find? Seriously? It took me seven hours this weekend to find one. It's likely to take me at least as long to find another. Apparently combat logging will make the HGE remain in place for a couple of extra runs? So if you carry out an activity FD have explicitly described as an exploit and worthy of enforcement action from them, you might be able to get a handful of runs at a HGE once every seven hours? That's 'easy'?
EDIT- today's patch notes state HGEs will spawn more frequently. I really, really hope so. It could be just what I (or we) were waiting for...
They really are easy to find (even before this patch). I was finding 1-5 HGE's in each system I went to when I was farming HGE's last week. I picked 5 high population systems near where I am currently based and just jumped between them, scanned the nav beacon and went out to get the HGE's that showed up. I collected all of the materials I needed to finish engineering 9 ships in probably 5-7 or so hours of doing this and I combined it with pirate assassination missions to break up the monotony or it would have been faster.
Now that I have my main fleet done engineering (other than thrusters, working on unlocking Palin right now), I plan to just scan nav beacons and check for HGE's when traveling within populated regions doing other things....I'll gather materials I don't yet need while doing "other stuff" so I never have to actively farm the darn things again.
Ninja'd!
Edited above. I disagree with the 'fly randomly' bit, though.
For the last month or so HGEs didn't always spawn when you entered the system. As far as I can see that left three options:
Log to regenerate the spawn. I'm not sure if that worked, I never tried it.
Jump to the next system. That gave another roll, which sometimes generated a HGE.
Start visiting other signal sources. Eventually RNGsus would smile and a HGE would spawn.
It was all horrendously random, with a pretty decent chance that the thing you wanted to spawn wouldn't, even when the HGE eventually showed.
Previously it was just a case of driving out far enough from the stellar primary for the HGE to spawn. I'm not saying that was better, in fact it felt even more frustrating, but I was gathering mats a lot quicker before the ADS became a (rather cool) thing.
Mileage varies, obviously. Which gets us back to my main bugbear- it's all horrendously random! Hopefully the new patch will improve matters.
Bob Lighthouse
Banned
Ninja'd!
I disagree with the 'fly randomly' bit, though.
For the last month or so HGEs didn't always spawn when you entered the system. As far as I can see that left three options:
Log to regenerate the spawn. I'm not sure if that worked, I never tried it.
Jump to the next system. That gave another roll, which sometimes generated a HGE.
Start visiting other signal sources. Eventually RNGsus would smile and a HGE would spawn.
It was all horrendously random, with a pretty decent chance that the thing you wanted to spawn wouldn't, even when the HGE eventually showed.
Previously it was just a case of driving out far enough from the stellar primary for the HGE to spawn. I'm not saying that was better, in fact it felt even more frustrating, but I was gathering mats a lot quicker before the ADS became a (rather cool) thing.
Mileage varies, obviously. Which gets us back to my main bugbear- it's all horrendously random! Hopefully the new patch will improve matters.
I have thousands of mods under my belt, so I'm going to suggest I have a much larger sample to draw from.
It's way easier now.
That's not to say it's not tedious, still.
Good for you and congratulations on your good luck or better choice of system. But I haven't seen more than one HGE spawn per system in months, usually I've seen no HGEs at all. Meaning that either it was outrageously random- 5 HGEs for where you were, less than 1 in 28 systems where I went looking!- or there was some HGE spawning mechanic I failed to find in weeks/months of research.