Does anyone actually enjoy engineering?

Call me a sadistic person who loves pain, but I actually liked the old gambling way of doing things- sure I snapped my fingers gambling for that ultimate G5 DD but with the mat traders to gain the bits required (CIF, mainly) for me I would be much happier. Why? Because then builds would be more individual and not inevitable like they are now with guaranteed results. FD could have made some effort to make the spinning wheel more skill based (a bit like the interdiction game or like Splinter Cell did).
 
I fully acknowledge that it's intentional for NPCs to be fodder.

I think this feature is one of the game's most blatant conceptual failings. Conversely, Engineering is a failure of execution, rather than basic concept.

I can understand that desire, though I can also say I enjoy combat being self sustaining as far as credits for pilots of middling skill. It's one of the areas the game is content to be a game.
 
I can understand that desire, though I can also say I enjoy combat being self sustaining as far as credits for pilots of middling skill. It's one of the areas the game is content to be a game.

Combat could be extremely profitable without feeling overly gamist.

Indeed, most of the potential rewards for combat are wholly absent from, or trivialized in, ED. Namely the reputation/influence/notoriety system is but a scaffold, and there is no system at all for taking prizes.
 
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Call me a sadistic person who loves pain, but I actually liked the old gambling way of doing things- sure I snapped my fingers gambling for that ultimate G5 DD but with the mat traders to gain the bits required (CIF, mainly) for me I would be much happier. Why? Because then builds would be more individual and not inevitable like they are now with guaranteed results. FD could have made some effort to make the spinning wheel more skill based (a bit like the interdiction game or like Splinter Cell did).
I hear GTAV gets now casino DLC. You can even spend real money in it to bet. I must say - lootboxes had at least the decency to give something out - even if it was just the most mundane crap been thought of.
 
In terms of tactics, loadouts, and abilities, the current AI is near the best it's ever been, except for bugs.

Unless it's one of those high-threat opt-in encounters (wing assassinations/massacres, pirate activities, thargoids, CZ Spec Ops, etc), I generally don't need any Engineering at all to defeat a wing of ships similar to the one my CMDR is flying. Obviously Engineering makes things a lot faster though.



Doing missions and dropping into the odd HGE that shows up on the way to or from those missions is where my CMDR gets the overwhelming bulk of his materials and data from.



Yes.

While I still enjoy the game greatly, I think most major updates, with the possible exception of vanilla Horizons (2.0), have been one step forward, two steps back.

Neither Engineering, nor most supposed QoL changes, have really improved the experience for me.



An Elite NPC in the same ship as my CMDR simultaneously should always have had, never actually has had, and probably never will have, a significant chance of besting my CMDR.

I completely agree that NPC kills per hour have increased and completely understand that this feels like a nerf to some.

I just don't think we ever should have been able to measure our abilities against NPC combat vessels in terms of kills per hour. My CMDR has at least ten, and probably closer to a hundred, times the number of NPC kills as I'd consider plausible in any well-conceived and executed system.
Totally agree with all of the above, but I will add the "playing for a while but still a bit noobish" take on AI in this game. Pre-engineering was a real challenge for me, especially if I stacked missions. One horror afternoon of missions out of Leonard Nimoy station still leaves a bad taste in my mouth! I did not play for a couple of days after that.... Anyhoo, I finally bought Horizons a coupla months ago just because I had started exploring and wanted to land on planets to find out what a "geographical signal" looked like. The 40% discount I got thru the Xbox store was a nice bonus!

So as soon as I landed I accidentally drove my SRV down a very high cliff! Then I found lots of mats at the bottom of the ravine, then spent a hour trying to get back to my ship (yep, did not realise I could just whistle and the ship would come to me like a big flying dog. Noob!) So I then had some raw mats, plus all the mats from 6 months of mining, bounty hunting etc, and so I started looking at engineering. Apart from some annoying unlocking of some of the engineers (Didi and Hera specifically, the others were fine), I was pleasantly surprised that just picking stuff up after mining, bounty hunting etc had resulted in me gathering a significant amount of mats, so upgrading all of the modules on my 3 ships between G3 and G5 was very quick. So yes, now I am OP for the npc's I am encountering in low and high res sites, and around nav beacons. And those pirates and mission breakers who used to give me real problems are no longer a problem.

So now I have graduated to open, hoping to one day be engineered and skilled enough to wing up and take on gankers and griefers, and give those Arxholes a taste if their own medicine! I think that was always my end goal:to eventually take down gankers and griefers, 'cos I loathe bullies and other sociopathic types. ☠
 
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Totally agree with all of the above, but I will add the "playing for a while but still a bit noobish" take on AI in this game. Pre-engineering was a real challenge for me, especially if I stacked missions. One horror afternoon of missions out of Leonard Nimoy station still leaves a bad taste in my mouth! I did not play for a couple of days after that.... Anyhoo, I finally bought Horizons a coupla months ago just because I had started exploring and wanted to land on planets to find out what a "geographical signal" looked like. The 40% discount I got thru the Xbox store was a nice bonus!

So as soon as I landed I accidentally drove my SRV down a very high cliff! Then I found lots of mats at the bottom of the ravine, then spent a hour trying to get back to my ship (yep, did not realise I could just whistle and the ship would come to me like a big flying dog. Noob!) So I then had some raw mats, plus all the mats from 6 months of mining, bounty hunting etc, and so I started looking at engineering. Apart from some annoying unlocking of some of the engineers (Didi and Hera specifically, the others were fine), I was pleasantly surprised that just picking stuff up after mining, bounty hunting etc had resulted in me gathering a significant amount of mats, so upgrading all of the modules on my 3 ships between G3 and G5 was very quick. So yes, now I am OP for the npc's I am encountering in low and high res sites, and around nav beacons. And those pirates and mission breakers who used to give me real problems are no longer a problem.

So now I have graduated to open, hoping to one day be engineered and skilled enough to wing up and take on gankers and griefers, and give those Arxholes a taste if their own medicine! I think that was always my end goal:to eventually take down gankers and griefers, 'cos I loathe bullies and other sociopathic types. ☠
Welcome to Horizons, CMDR! o7

Protip: Gravity sucks, lol ;) Good to hear you're making progress with the engineers.

I'm not a fan of the gankers either, so OPEN just ain't worth the adrenaline spikes. :p
 
Welcome to Horizons, CMDR! o7

Protip: Gravity sucks, lol ;) Good to hear you're making progress with the engineers.

I'm not a fan of the gankers either, so OPEN just ain't worth the adrenaline spikes. :p
Been playing in open for 4 days now, havn't seen another commander let alone been griefed. But the galaxy is a big place, so it may take a while before I come across another human being. And I'm down on the South side of the planet. Guessing most commanders are in the Northern hemisphere so while I'm playing most other commanders will be in the way to work? But the weekend is coming up so I may meet some Northern hemisphere Xbox players over the next coupla days? Only time will tell.... 😀
 
I hear GTAV gets now casino DLC. You can even spend real money in it to bet. I must say - lootboxes had at least the decency to give something out - even if it was just the most mundane crap been thought of.

The problem with engineering now is- whats the point? Everyone is going to max out so there is nothing special about it, its simply replaced A grade kit with a AA rating. Old engineers gave inconsistent results but made modules unique that few others would have.

My other suggestion would be to strip out the gambling part and just have the engineers give flat, experimental style boosts to modules. Nothing gets overpowered, and you have simple tweaks.
 
The problem with engineering now is- whats the point? Everyone is going to max out so there is nothing special about it, its simply replaced A grade kit with a AA rating. Old engineers gave inconsistent results but made modules unique that few others would have.

My other suggestion would be to strip out the gambling part and just have the engineers give flat, experimental style boosts to modules. Nothing gets overpowered, and you have simple tweaks.
 
Same thing with different distribution. That is the way power creep goes. It becomes the new normal - no matter how obfuscated and grindy it's designed at first.

With sidegrades - like it was marketed - the whole thread would be largely unnecessary.
 
The problem with engineering now is- whats the point? Everyone is going to max out so there is nothing special about it, its simply replaced A grade kit with a AA rating. Old engineers gave inconsistent results but made modules unique that few others would have.

My other suggestion would be to strip out the gambling part and just have the engineers give flat, experimental style boosts to modules. Nothing gets overpowered, and you have simple tweaks.
I started playing after the random engineering had gone the way of the dinosaur and had seen the 'old' way on youtube so was surprised when I saw nothing of the like on my first engineering trip.

It actually looked like fun, in that the 'best' roll might not be all roses...

What we have now is ok and consistent (bar RNG after 3 rolls) but bland :)
 
I started playing after the random engineering had gone the way of the dinosaur and had seen the 'old' way on youtube so was surprised when I saw nothing of the like on my first engineering trip.

It actually looked like fun, in that the 'best' roll might not be all roses...

What we have now is ok and consistent (bar RNG after 3 rolls) but bland :)
The problem with engineering now is- whats the point? Everyone is going to max out so there is nothing special about it, its simply replaced A grade kit with a AA rating. Old engineers gave inconsistent results but made modules unique that few others would have.

It always felt to me like the lack of blandness was functionally superficial. A few percentage points here and there but not a change to how the ship fundamentally works or what the mods were that people chose to fit. The kind of thing you'd know from a factual perspective but never feel compared to the next person doing the same thing.

And you might say, "but what if you aren't doing the same thing?" In that case you never needed engineering to make things distinct, fitting worked just fine and current engineering offers plenty of further distinct options even if everyone can hit the peaks.

My other suggestion would be to strip out the gambling part and just have the engineers give flat, experimental style boosts to modules. Nothing gets overpowered, and you have simple tweaks.

The current engineering system has capped results. The power peaks can be tweaked at any time but won't be due to fears of invalidating time invested (an issue they created through designing the system to sink as much time as they could get away with) and complaints about nerfing the effectiveness of player ships now that we've become accustom to the results of power creep.
 
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I certainly enjoy the process, I even like having to unlock engineers. I don't like the sheer quantity of materials involved. You said about experimenting with different engineering upgrades, I've never done that. The material expenditure is to high, I just seek advice on what to do. It's like unlocking guardian tech. I enjoyed doing that as well at first, scavenging ruins. But to unlock it all you need 2 and a half times your max guardian tech components which is frustrating and when you keep relogging to collect from a site it strikes me as a broken gameplay system
 
Not terribly looking too forward to it tbh, but it something that is on my to do list once i have grown the warchest. Also tbh haven't much need for it, since the stock weapons seem to get the job done for the most part. Powerplant, Shields, & Jump Drive is the priority for me.
 
Engineering is behind a grind-wall cos ED lacks gameplay
it's obvious
just sayin

Overall ED is a good game, the canvas is there, for me it the lack of having skin in the game or with any faction, maybe i'm just unaware of certain systems worth fighting over that would/could affect my profitability, the realm v realm mechanic is there, but no one as any real skin in it apart from building good relations and getting access to certain gear, which is all well & good but doesn't scratch that itch for me. If i had stake in a system that was partially player controlled/small stake holder via a 'percentage share' system that paid me a weekly dividend, i'd more likely do my upmost to contribute to its economy and defence while undermining surrounding competitor systems. I suggested an idea here

As for the thargoid, i'll wait until they get to the gates of Rome before i sign up
 
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