Does anyone actually enjoy engineering?

[Navigare Necesse Est]

indeed i do think the problem with those saying "too much grind" is they are attempting to do something to their entire fleet in under 100 hrs something which was really meant to take many multiples of that over the life of the game.

the only time a meta uber engineered ship is needed is for pvp and the simple fact is the game is not created around that... but even then ONE PvP ship does not take that long to create.

mind you as i have said before and others have here too, engineers has completely messed up the balance in the game for everyone. Remember the time when ships like the vulture needed a bit of thought about how to spec out because you just couldnt A rate it?.

No, it's rather perceived grind. Let's take 2.1 and I'd interpolate how long it'd take me to do just 2 ships and I already ended up beyond the anticipated lifetime of the game. No exploit, no meta info - just worst case.
Of course that model doesn't fit anymore today, but it's rather about what I was expected to do for this "content" when it launched. Is like when you go to resto and get served some rotten stuff. Do you eat it? Do you go back to try again if it's not rotten next day? 2 years after?

I simply don't want to mess around with it. Tolerance level: 0. Can't be bothered doing it. I'd have a look at it if it unlocked magically. If it was a SP game I'd cheat around it. It's a red flag. I won't sniff it if you coated it with perfume. It was dead on delivery. Presenting it in that disgusting state at launch just tuned me off. And I don't wanna dance with a 2 year old corpse. I'm done with it. Through. And through.

 

[Krieger]

Not me!

IMHO engineering suffers from exaggeration in both performance gains and the effort required to get the mods. I am still somewhat in shock that FDEV released engineering in one big bang and with all dials turned to 10. They could have taken 10 years of gradual steps to reach that level. (Maybe that's why they took another approach in Colonia?)

After an initial tryout (and not liking it) I ignored engineering for more than a year but FDEV decided to make engineering inevitable by making the NPCs stronger and stronger. Still I only do the minimum amount of engineering to level up with the AI so there is at least some challenge left in PvE combat.

I don't lke the process. It's very obviously designed to be an RNG-driven time sink (even after the changes). My mood always suffers after visiting an engineer.
I don't like the results. The overpowered performance and arcadey special effects ruin combat for me (together with the one-trick-pony AI).

But... it is what it is. FDEV invested a lot of time in engineering so it won't be going away. Fortunately, I can still find enough fun things to do in the game to keep playing.

PS: Talking about exaggeration. IMHO the Thargoids suffered the same fate: tremendously exaggerated DPS and HP plus a lot of grind required to get decent AX-weapons to fight them. And FDEV made fighting Thargoids inevitable too with the new Incursion state.

 

[jnTracks]

I'm a fairly new player --2 months or so-- and just dipped my toe in. Having only unlocked upgrades with 2 of the engineers so far I have a couple of opinions.

I like:
that it actually forced me to do a couple things in the game that I was ignoring before; that is, SRV and USS/wake scanning. This opened up the game and made clear several things I didn't quite understand about what was happening all around me. I didn't know what I didn't know, so now I feel like I better understand the universe.

I don't like:
When there's some specific resource that doesn't seem to be readily available nearby, or it's a random spawn but doesn't seem to be spawning. I feel like the curves could use a slight adjustment, but it's (so far) minor, for me at least.

So far I've generally found that the resources exist in the system the engineer is already in and for the most part it hasn't been a wild grind. I'm only unlocking up to lvl3 so far and I figure it's going to get more crazy when I get into top mods and experimental effects.

Overall I like it and how it's forcing me into stuff I was ignoring before since it's turned out to be pretty fun and not too difficult.

 

[777Driver]

I'm a fairly new player --2 months or so-- and just dipped my toe in. Having only unlocked upgrades with 2 of the engineers so far I have a couple of opinions.

I like:
that it actually forced me to do a couple things in the game that I was ignoring before; that is, SRV and USS/wake scanning. This opened up the game and made clear several things I didn't quite understand about what was happening all around me. I didn't know what I didn't know, so now I feel like I better understand the universe.

I don't like:
When there's some specific resource that doesn't seem to be readily available nearby, or it's a random spawn but doesn't seem to be spawning. I feel like the curves could use a slight adjustment, but it's (so far) minor, for me at least.

So far I've generally found that the resources exist in the system the engineer is already in and for the most part it hasn't been a wild grind. I'm only unlocking up to lvl3 so far and I figure it's going to get more crazy when I get into top mods and experimental effects.

Overall I like it and how it's forcing me into stuff I was ignoring before since it's turned out to be pretty fun and not too difficult.

This is pretty much what I hear from all the newcommers I have brought into the game. Think it's mainly the old grumpy ones that complain

 

[Siobhan]

This is pretty much what I hear from all the newcommers I have brought into the game. Think it's mainly the old grumpy ones that complain

I'm both old and grumpy, so I guess it's a fair cop.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Most players do need a meta uber engineered ship for pve to stand a chance against higher ranked npcs. It's only the top 5-10% players at most in games who find pve easy.

IF that is true I don't know what the answer is. I am more of a goose than a maverick or iceman and my mostly non engineered ships are perfectly serviceable against NPC's :/

I have 1 fully engineered ship (no god rolls just a middle of the road g5 ship that has been grandfathered) a FGS and I don't use it because even with my self imposed rules (no shield booster stacking and only light armour (albeit engineered hardened) and I can't use it as it is too much of a snore fest as it makes everything easy.

 

[Han Zulu]

indeed i do think the problem with those saying "too much grind" is they are attempting to do something to their entire fleet in under 100 hrs something which was really meant to take many multiples of that over the life of the game.

the only time a meta uber engineered ship is needed is for pvp and the simple fact is the game is not created around that... but even then ONE PvP ship does not take that long to create.

Agree. I don't see engineering being as much of a grind after the traders came into place. Put the largest collector limpet on a ship and go to every USS you see. Pick up everything. Go to a trader and convert whatever you haven't found.

mind you as i have said before and others have here too, engineers has completely messed up the balance in the game for everyone. Remember the time when ships like the vulture needed a bit of thought about how to spec out because you just couldnt A rate it?.

I'm sad that I wasn't around then. I wish I had been.

 

[[VR] M4st0d0n]

As for the process, it could have been good with a properly fleshed out crafting system. Here it's just ridiculous, it made mats and scans alternative currencies for a stupid mobile game timesink design. It was also the occasion to get more fleshed out unique quests, but nope, grind and three lines of flavour text it is. As for the mods themselves, they just threw balance in the bin and set it on fire. Direct magical upgrades simply negated a lot of ED vanilla mechanisms. It sucks on every level.

 

[Stigbob]

As for the process, it could have been good with a properly fleshed out crafting system. Here it's just ridiculous, it made mats and scans alternative currencies for a stupid mobile game timesink design. It was also the occasion to get more fleshed out unique quests, but nope, grind and three lines of flavour text it is. As for the mods themselves, they just threw balance in the bin and set it on fire. Direct magical upgrades simply negated a lot of ED vanilla mechanisms. It sucks on every level.

I really like it, its great fun.

 

[Siobhan]

I usually have enough materials for grade 5, so repeatedly tapping the upgrade button to get to grade 5 without even looking at the numbers because grades 1-4 mean nothing, just feels stupid. So the process is a bit irritating for me.

You'd think that with a second shot at it they would get engineering right. It's better than before, but that's still not good enough in my opinion.

Must admit I rarely have mats to hand, and if engineering I have to go looking and usually not finding. It must be great having it all on hand, but even then it's suboptimal in my opinion.

 

[Aekero]

I liked gathering mats at first, it was an exposure to other aspects of play. How many of you still haven't even tried some of the mission types out there?

I will say the first time through is the hardest, once you have max rep with an engineer it takes less to get through the ranks. (For me average amount of rolls have been 1, 2, 2, 3 to get through the first four ranks with an already repped engineer...)

Honestly after the first time through mat gathering became "ok how do I get the most of x in as little time as possible", which isnt as fun...

 

[Stealthie]

Very mixed on this...

The actual processes of selecting a module, an upgrade and a special effect and clicking “Apply” is fine. Collecting materials is fine. Where it breaks down for me is the progressively diminishing returns.

One upgrade for G1 is fine.
I don’t mind 2 upgrades to complete G2.
I don’t mind 3 upgrades to complete G3.
I get really annoyed with 7 upgrades to complete G4.
I get really P.O.’d at 17 upgrades to complete G5.

And not even so much with the sheer number, although it can be absurd at times, but more at the massive quantities of materials consumed during the process.

Even the GUI is tedious in that regard. Why do we have to click 100 buttons, instead of "max G5" for X mats, done.

Both of these things.

Look, Fdev, you got rid of most of the randomness from engineering but you just couldn't help leaving some of it in, could you?

People who want a G3 upgrade will have collected mat's to complete it without much effort and people who want a G5 mod' will put in the effort to collect enough mat's to complete that.
The remnants of RNG that remain in the game are completely redundant.

All you're doing is reducing the lifespan of my mouse with all this power-clicking.

Just set it up so that I click on G1, G2, G3, G4 or G5 and it automatically completes that level of engineering and deducts the appropriate mat's and so that if I click on G3 and then go back a week later and click on G5 it simply completes the remaining 2 levels of engineering and deducts the additional mat's.

I realise this would make the operation seem quite simple and lose some of it's "gravitas" but it IS a simple process and you're just trying to make it look complicated.

 

[Old Duck]

I'd like to add that I really enjoy the process of "building" my ships. Engineering plays a role in that, but not a huge role. Speaking of "role", I'm a roleplayer in ED, so I build my ships accordingly. This actually means handicapping some of my ships. For example, my BattleConda has passenger cabins, not because I use it for passenger missions, but because I built it to mimic an actual ship (ex-Navy IRL), which means crew quarters. I also use undersized thrusters, because I hate it when a huge, massive ship is flipping around like a radio-controlled airplane instead of an actual warship with inertia. I don't use the best weapons, but rather the most fun weapons for my own gameplay style.

I tend to use engineering to compensate for nonsensical weaknesses in some of ED's modules & weapons. Long range lasers come to mind. I don't want a "god ship", because I prefer some challenge when battling NPCs. Unfortunately the people with the god ships cried "The game is too easy!" and now more and more NPCs are being given god ships of their own... If ED continues down this road, basically forcing me to build "god ships", that's when I'll walk away from combat and play the game exclusively for exploration.

 

[Mo Ronik]

I'm enjoying the experience. I just recently got Felicity Farseer unlocked and now I'm working out how I'm gonna obtain Meta Alloys. Do I purchase them somewhere or do I take my Cobra and go collect them. I'm more than likely going try both ways of doing this just for the fun of it and then I'm gonna take my surface prospector ship to find all the materials needed for what I'm wanting to engineer. I'll do this process over and over each time I need to unlock another engineer with each one being a different challenge. I've invested time in gaining credits to purchase my ships, I've invested time in gaining reputation and rank to better myself and now I'm gonna invest time in making each one of my ships more capable in the role they are used for. I see the whole process as kinda cool...

 

[Misty_Dark]

With the 2nd take on engineers I find it much more predictable. I enjoy this much more now.

And with material traders, now previous hard to get materials have become easier to get, by trading material you have found. Even though we can also debate over the exchange rates.


Then we have the pinned blueprints, that allows you visit an engineer and pin the desired blueprint, max out G1 and then add the desired experimental effect, now you do not need to visit the engineer to do more rolls, you can do this on any station with remote engineering. And on your next ship, you do not even visit the engineer to start doing rolls on the pinned blueprint. So this was also a massive improvement, as the only reasons to re-visit engineers is to apply experimental effects and pin a different blueprint.





Most of the time, I do like how the unlocking of engineers work, as all of these can traced back to all the activities Elite has to offer. Although they could have made the implementation on some of these better, to explain more what FDev is trying to accomplish. And most of the time, the unlocking is forcing players to do something beyond their comfort zone. Here I had better hopes that Codex would give players better information regarding certain tasks.





For most players, it is a major undertaking to fully max out a single ship, but most of the time, you do not need to max out anything, and there is diminishing returns on the effort. I do believe this is where much of the complain comes from, goals are set and then the task of getting there proves to be to much, and instead of re-evaluating the goal, we get the complain that the process is to grindy.

There is a general rule that often is called 80/20.
It takes 20% effort to reach 80% result, but you need to spend 80% effort to reach the last 20% result.

This can be observed when trying to engineer an exploration ship, where most of the light modding done have very little effect on jump range compared to FSD engineering, and lightweight sensors.



So if you have limited time or do not want to spend to much time collecting material, be smart about the process, play around with any of the ship builder online tools, like Coriolis, and here you can see what the difference is on simply doing G3 instead of G5, or even just doing G1. So you can now decide how much time you want to spend on this, and you can always improve this later on and if you have pinned the blueprints, you do not even have to visit the engineers to do so!





So for general PvE play, I like Engineering, and this gives us more options to tinker with our ships. But the bonuses we get from engineering is to great...

Is it perfect? NO!
Can it be improved? YES!


----------------------------

For PvP this is totally different story, as anything competitive will make this a mandatory task and here everything could be important to max out the potential, but this is totally different topic. So my take is that for PvP, engineering have been disastrous as this simply made this mandatory, as the bonuses you get from engineering is so massive, that skill cannot overcome this gap.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

This is pretty much what I hear from all the newcommers I have brought into the game. Think it's mainly the old grumpy ones that complain

Ye, wait until your new players rank up a bit and suddenly find out their guns are now peashooters if they haven't ground enough. I concede it might be a totally different experience since they actually might have time to prepare and not tossed into unplayable gameplay over night.

 

[Stealthie]

Most players do need a meta uber engineered ship for pve to stand a chance against higher ranked npcs. It's only the top 5-10% players at most in games who find pve easy.

Kind of an interesting point there.

My knee-jerk reaction is to disagree with this on the basis that I can easily take out any NPC ship/s in the game while flying my Krait or Chieftain.

Thing is, though, whether that's how FDev thought things would work out.
I mean, I buy a Chieftain for Cr20m, spend roughly double that on parts, spend a bunch of time engineering it and I end up with a ship that can whup any human ship in the game.
If engineering wasn't a thing I might have to be a lot more selective about what ships I fly and what fights I pick.
I might end up having to fly a Corvette or Annie to complete assassination missions and they might get damaged which'd cost me more credits to repair and/or replace if I suffer a rebuy.

Maybe the whole "problem" is that engineering has expanded the capabilities of ships way more than FDev intended and their NPCs can't really compete without also being hugely over-powered against ships that aren't engineered?

I'm not a great combat pilot but I do okay, but there's been times when I've been flying, say, a fairly new, partially-engineered, AspX and I've been interdicted by a Python and engaged it without a second thought, only to find that the fight is quite a bit tougher than I was predicting.

If it was up to me, as I've said before, I'd just use the player data & stat's for engineering to generate NPC ships that reflect the make-up of player ships.
That's NOT to say that if you're flying an uber-engineered FdL you would always meet uber-engineered combat ships.
What I mean is, if, say, 10% of players fly an uber-engineered FdLfor combat then 10% of NPCs should fly similar ships.
If you happen to meet one of the other 90% of NPCs while you're flying yours, you can still kick it's butt.
If, OTOH, you happen to meet one of the 10% of NPCs who are flying one while you're flying your mining AspX then it'll be you who gets your butt kicked.

 

[Phisto Sobanii]

Same. If the PvP meta in a game is such that pure grind trumps skill, I usually refrain from participating.

‘Pure grind’ doesn’t trump skill in Elite - whether competitively or ‘in the wild.’ Engineers gets you in the door but it’s up to you to get the rest of the way.

 

[777Driver]

Ye, wait until your new players rank up a bit and suddenly find out their guns are now peashooters if they haven't ground enough. I concede it might be a totally different experience since they actually might have time to prepare and not tossed into unplayable gameplay over night.

Well I plan to take a friend for a bit of RES site combat over the weekend, rule is no engineered weapons or shields, only engineered thrusters. We'll both be using Eagles or Vipers.

Best way to learn in my opinion, have told him to not even think about engineering his weapons until he gets efficient at killing with a stock multi/pulse combo, then move onto fixed... Then look at the weapon engineers.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

‘Pure grind’ doesn’t trump skill in Elite - whether competitively or ‘in the wild.’ Engineers gets you in the door but it’s up to you to get the rest of the way.

Pure grind will trump in all the cases where average player meets average. It's not like the minority of good players can be everywhere stomping noobs with their leet skills.