Hi,
I've just started looking an engineer upgrades and I'm a bit confused. It looks like level 1 upgrades offer the best solutions where as I would have thought the higher level ones would. Granted higher level upgrades give one aspect of the sub-system a bigger boost but then they often take it away again with the secondary effects and always have worse primary effects on the other aspects.
So if you try for more power you get hit hard on mass, heat, integrity etc and can loose much of the extra power due to a poor secondary roll.
So given they appear to offer poorer returns, take more resources etc is there any reason to actually go for higher level upgrades other than 1?
Thanks.
First thing I'd say is that if you haven't done much with engineering so far, you might want to wait a bit until the 3.0 update because the engineering system is getting a reworking in that update anyway. We don't have a definite release date but the last we heard was Q1 2018 which should mean by the end of March.
As for a summary of engineering, it really is a bit too complex for me to do it in any kind of detail right now, I just don't have the time.
The absolute basics though are that for whatever the mod is supposed to deliver, the primary attribute which affects that change will always have a higher range of potential improvements as you move from grade 1 to grade 5. In some cases yes, the negative effects will also sometimes increase to provide some balance and ensure we aren't all just flying around in super ships but the positive changes will almost always offset the negatives. Generally though for maxing out
the thing that the mod is meant to change a grade 5 roll will always be the best.
For example take an increased range FSD mod which is about as vanilla as it gets:
https://inara.cz/galaxy-blueprint/2/
Look at the optimal mass stat - the range of potential change at grade 1 is an improvement of between 4 and 10%. The range of potential improvement at grade 5 is 20-50%.
All of the grades also have negative effects that are delivered as part of the main roll, specifically decreased integrity, increased mass and increased power draw and those negative changes get worse as you go up the grades.
None of the increased negative changes at grade 5 compared to grade 1 even come close to making the increased positive change in optimised mass at grade 5 not worth having compared to the grade 1 result. The optimised mass percentage translates pretty much directly into a range increase, so if you start with a 30LY drive and apply a grade 1 mod, that can increase to 33LY with a 10% improvement. If you roll a grade 5 mod instead, that can increase to 45LY with a 50% improvement.
If what you want is a longer jump range, there are very few situations in which a relatively small increase in drive mass and power draw and a decrease in integrity are going to be so important to your overall build that you'd rather take the grade 1 roll with a 12LY shorter range just to avoid them.
(Note - in addition to the changes shown there, there are also secondary effects which are NOT part of the main blueprint and are applied randomly to the modification after the stat changes given by the main roll. Those can improve or make worse the stats affected by the main blueprint changes and in some cases will also affect stats that aren't part of the main blueprint; for example a long range FSD roll could give a secondary which increased the optimal mass even more, or that increased the power draw even more, or did both, or gave a faster drive reboot time, despite a drive reboot time change not being part of the main roll at all. Those secondaries are the source of much of the moaning about the current implementation of engineering and they won't be a feature of engineering after 3.0, which is why I said you might want to wait.)
