It's a farce unengineered just as well. I have to grind down bulletsponges with peashooter grade weapons. It isn't really fun.
Any Improvements on Engineering / Combat Balance?
- Thread starter Frenotx
- Start date
Let me guess - FDev never occured the idea to compensate you for the nixed efforts. I don't think they even get the concept of player time investment. It's just a thing their PR department parrots to them to keep repeating.
Not something that should be possible for the higher-tier NPCs.
NPC's in ED are artificially handicapped in their abilities and tactics. They won't use FA off, they won't coordinate effectively, most of them have dumb loadouts. The latter is particularly telling because we have the ability to give NPC, in the form of crew, sensible loadouts, and they will crush high-teir NPC opposition with such vessels.
Elite ranked NPC AI can essentially solo a wing assassination mission, with trivial difficulty, if given a ship with a rational loadout:
If NPCs flew more sensibly and had the same equipment CMDRs do, they could be a real threat even without having to be particularly 'smart'.
I do enjoy the experience, irrespective of how transient some of them are. The only compensation I'd want is a game with fewer bugs and more sensible gameplay mechanisms.
I don't care much about having thousands of rolls flushed down the toilet while paying to alpha test their game, but I'd like to see some evidence the game is improving, rather than endless reiterations of the same sorts of mistakes.
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I'm not going to have a meta argument about whether change is good or bad. That wasn't my point at all. And so the perspective of nerf/change isn't my point either.
If elite was perfectly balanced then I'd agree it's fantastic they've not changed anything about it for years.
I'll assume you're not suggesting Elite is perfectly balanced.
I quite hate it. Unless it's early access, then I expect iterations. But also improvements.
Usually when a successful game launches I have had my fair share and don't bother with another playthrough. In many games the early game is the most interesting and I have countless restarts. Only the rare good games I complete.
I've never played any game where the community ever thought things were "balanced". No matter how much devs tried or how many changes were made.
So I guess that's my whole problem. Either balance is impossible, or nobody will ever agree with what is and isn't balanced to any overlapping degree. So is it even an attainable goal? I don't know if Elite is perfectly balanced, especially when nobody will ever agree on what "perfect balance" would even look like.
Nobody does this is real life, so I guess it's something weird about video games where we just cannot accept unfairness exists. There's not some old man out there saying his P-51 Mustang should be as "viable" in combat as an F-22 Raptor.
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I agree - without reservation - that it should be possible to encounter NPC's that present more of a threat than Spec Ops or ATR etc. But, in order to accommodate the 'average' player (whose combat skill may be 'adequate' rather than 'capable') potential threats have to be tucked away into opt-in content - yet even the greatest threat (AX combat) is insufficient as we regularly see youtube videos posted showing the 'end-game' content being solo'd by players who have learned the 'how' in defeating them!
In all games the skill level of players will exist from absolute beginner to gifted, this game doesn't give the 'better than elite' combat players any other challenge than players with similar interests. It is likely that no meaningful change to whatever 'balance' is perceived to be simply because, even taking the minority numbers of the playerbase posting here, it doesn't appear to be a major issue for most - although such reasoning could easily be proven wrong too .
Yes it's done in real life. It's called fairness and important part of sport competitions.
But this isn't a sport competition, it is a game... (and not even a (forced) competitive one!)
Skill doesnt matter when unlocking gear and w+M1 does the trick.
I didnt ask for real life comparison. I know that game worlds have nothing to do with real life.
Agreed that perfect balance isn't objectively possible.
It's definitely my opinion that Elite was both way more balanced and much more malleable for balancing purposes before engineers, though. Feature bloat has the effect of complicating future balancing efforts, yes. But engineers took feature bloat and compounded it with power bloat, then fdev left it far too long before realising it (I'd suggest that was "after beta" because beta is supposed to be when stuff like this rings alarm bells and gets nipped in the bud before the masses get addicted to it).
Attempts to even suggest they remove the OP builds caused unparalleled rage and fdev shied away from that. Then spent a year blasting engineering (much of which was great work, less so on the bit that touched balance though).
By the time the budget for that blast ran out, they had to release and that's basically it since then.
It wasn't nearly enough to yank the game's combat meta to a sensible, more malleable position (where low value tweaks = easily measurable impact, such as it was before engineers). If I took one look at it now as a project manager I'd just say "get PR to say we're happy with it" and spend my budget elsewhere, too.
As a player, I see lots of weapons and blueprints that are worthless. I see my Corvette with something like 9k relative shield health versus thermal. I know very well that isn't nearly meta topping. I know that those worthless weapons and blueprints wouldn't even scratch that over several minutes.
That alone, even before we start looking at the intricacies of finer balance that are just buried too deep now, is enough for me to know change would be beneficial for Elite's combat. But to achieve that you either nerf hard or constantly buff elsewhere, which just layers on more bloat, further exacerbating the problem.
I maintain none of this would be as critically impractical had engineers been introduced very differently... or not at all but... Yeh, horse, dead, bolted, etc.
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I have no idea what you just said...
But wasn't it your good self who made such a comparison? If you didn't, naturally I'll delete the post...
I answered to the guy who couldnt figure out game and reality and thought rl had no examples for balance. I dont know why so many people have problems grasping this aspect of games not being rality but you see it all the time coming up.
Hey I'm 'that guy" and that wasn't my point or what I was saying at all.
And you know what - I'm starting to find your act here pretty stale and tiring to be completely frank. I'm sorry things in Elite didn't work out for you, I truly am.
I support this
The underlying mechanisms of reality are universally applicable. That's pretty much my definition of balance. You can certainly have radically unbalanced concentrations of power, but everything is playing by the same overarching physical constraints.
This is rarely the case for games fictional/fantasy settings deliberately deviate from the reality we know, but rarely consider how the constraints they substitute in will interact with the rest...which leads to excessive arbitrariness and a breakdown of cause and effect.
That's because we know why it's not, at least for the air superiority role. A lot of similar comparisons in games are inexplicably arbitrary or unintended results of ill conceived mechanisms.
Why is the Federation (or anyone else for that matter) still fielding FASes that cost essentially the same (as configured) as an FDL that is broadly more effective and no less available? Why are the super powers still building new Farragut and Majestic class capital ships (vessels, by all accounts, which are vastly more expensive than the actually invulnerable Fleet Carriers) when they can be routed by a single fighter?
Purely opt-in content is also problematic from a credibility perspective especially with regard to the degree to which one must opt in.
My CMDR has murdered countless NPCs, been scanned while transporting all sorts of contraband, etc. That should permanently opt him in to all sorts of retaliation and other plots. Perhaps it should be possible to avoid most high-threat encounters if one keeps their nose clean, but having to explicitly sign up for every actual threat is too much.
With few exceptions (multiple accounts and grandfathered exclusives), the game provides players with as much equality of opportunity as it can be expected to.
People were doing just fine without engineering for years.
I think the issue with this game is that skill levels are all over the place. Most games with a higher ceiling on personal skill see this phenomena where progress is relative to the player.
I'm 100 percent confident that you would have progressed just fine without engineering if you didnt have that option because your personal skill would have made up for the slack.
Seriously are we not doing phrasing anymore?