. If I'm in open in my G2-G3 ship that I've done without relogging and some FDL murder boat with full G5s takes me out instantly
...then the problem with your ship has nothing to do with the engineering blueprints grades.
G5 weapons can be about 70% more damaging than stock.
A G3 reinforced shield plus just two G3 heavy duty shield boosters will give you almost 80% extra to your defensive strength compared with the same unengineered modules.
So you've made three G3 modules - approximate cost, 12 G3 materials, plus some cheaper bits.
To get only most of the way towards countering that, your attacker has had to engineer their full weapon array to G5 at a cost of around 50 G5 materials plus a substantial amount of lower-grade ones.
If they're still taking you out instantly, engineering is not what's causing that - they'd also be able to do it, even faster, with you both in unengineered ships.
Grinding out a full G5 set of modules is probably necessary if you want to
win a fight versus that sort of opponent. If you just want to run away, G3 is more than adequate and
much cheaper.
On the engineering grind / relog issue more generally...
In general, G3 gives you about 75% of the performance of G5, at under 5% of the cost. G4 gives you 85% of G5 performance at maybe 15% of the cost. Deciding how much to spend for the performance you need is part of the game.
A-rated versus C-rated modules work the same way. A full set of A-rated core modules plus 6A shield generator for an Asp Explorer will set you back around 35 million credits. The same modules in C-rated will cost you about 4 million credits. Is it worth spending almost
9 times as much to be:
- about 10% faster
- about 15% better shielded
- about 50% better jump ranges (FSD is one of the few modules with significant scaling between grades)
- have about the same amount of power left over for non-core modules
- about 20% more power distributor
- about 15% more sensor range
....the answer is of course "yes" because what's 35 million credits nowadays. And therefore we get lots of threads about how C-rated modules are entirely pointless, because their original use of decent performance at a cheap price is no longer relevant.
(And I didn't even add a fuel scoop to this build...)
Broadly these threads all come down to "should cost-benefit tradeoff be part of the game", and as the general consensus seems to be "no, it shouldn't" perhaps the easiest solution would be to make engineering and modules all free? (Gate them behind Elite rankings and similar if you still feel some initial progression curve in the early game is valuable)