Engineers Do you stack rolls or reroll every time?

[Deleted member 38366]

I tend to keep rolls and improve from there.
If I got the Mats, I commonly aim for being able to do 4 rolls.

If something reaches approx. the top 85%-90% area, it's a keeper.

Disclaimer : currently got 24 Ships to Mod, so eventually "top notch" rolls can often cause existing "quite good but now I got a better" be re-distributed onto my other Ships.

 

[Codger]

I did this short video to help explain the engineer screens to newcomers. It demonstrates how I approach the process. I just roll right on top of my old upgrade, so I can see clearly the odds and results.

Perhaps it will help someone, if not the OP.

[video=youtube;sXZLgaG72mM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXZLgaG72mM[/video]

 

[CmdrKull]

As is spending hours playing "Find the magic rat tails" only to throw them at a roulette machine.

https://www.http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/10/12/destineering
Penny-Arcade illustrated how these painful "collect X" mechanisms feel. It's both better and far, far worse in Elite. Better because they come to you while you're doing what you would be doing otherwise and that's damned smart. It's so much worse because you have to haul them around with you, sell them to get pirates off your butt or to switch to a combat ship, and keep them in your sleek lightweight explorer ship because someday you will want them to upgrade your Vulture but you really can't deal with unlocking another engineer right now and oh by the way you didn't know about engineers a year ago so you stored the vulture without a cargo rack!!!!!! Ahhhh!
. I'm ok with engineers and materials and data and all of that... but I think FD should change the way you acquire mods. We should sell the materials and data to the engineer for "favor points" or some such, and then use favor points + credits to purchase a mod. They can keep or drop RNG depending on how much they hate us, but please let engineers be the useless junk pack rats instead of us.


I posted all that and then didn't even reply to the Op... I keep the first mod if it's remotely passable and then keep anything that looks like an improvement so that I can see how much better or worse the next roll is. I actually don't store decent rolls but I'm sure I will in 2.2

 

[Spacecat]

If I'm replacing an existing mod, I reroll because it shows the stats relative to what you already have. If you reroll from scratch every time, you have to write everything down, and who has time for that?