It's been my favorite part of the game because it's balanced, fun, and challenging. You're right though, not being able to be more build creative is a downside, but the part of the game that does permit that doesn't have those other qualities because they are all upgrades instead of mods.
Does anyone else think the concept of engineers is terrible?
- Thread starter Endealon
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I don't understand your logic. In a sci-fi world governed by technology, there should not be any high-tech crafting, but it is fair to see it in a low-tech universe? Have you never prepared any car or motorbike, or even ugraded a PC? How do you do it? You buy parts or you go to a professional, and you need money or ressources to do so. This is exactly what engineereing is. And for the ressources, well, you you can do everthing the moment you want it, then there is no game, because games are about progression and XP. I don't really understand how you would like the game to work then?
That is true. Your reply actually agrees with my post.
Crafting should make sense for the genre.
In fantasy games collecting herbs for potions and gemstones for enchanting makes good sense. In a science fiction space game collecting iron and wake data for module upgrades makes no sense. At the very least it needs to be 'believable' for the setting the game is taking place in.
With just a small amount of imagination and creativity engineering could have been made more 'believable'.
What could have been done differently? (obviously too late now) Some Examples:
- Lower the quantities of mats needed, and make them more interesting. Obviously an engineer doesn't need 5 copies of the exact same data to upgrade your module.
- In general, mats shouldn't be abundantly available everywhere, making the player wonder why the engineer needs these items that are obviously mass produced for spaceships and can easily be found at every spaceport repair shop. Or acquired through large scale industrial mining. Or easily scanned from regular everyday ships.
- Raw mats: Could be unusual compounds collected from unusual planets, stars, nebula, whatever.
- Encoded mats: Could be secret transmissions intercepted from research bases. Weird transmissions read from deep space. Secretive data uploaded from stations and special ships (not common pirates!!!). Data that an engineer might find useful in some way!!! And noooo... upgrading a module an engineer doesn't want 5 copies of the exact same data!
- Mfg Mats: Specialty strange components that aren't mass produced and found at Walmart.
- Simply re-wording 'blueprints' to 'secret plans' might seem trivial, but it makes much more sense. ('blueprints' implies the plans can be easily copied and distributed. That's what actual blueprints are... copies of a design for distribution)
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... Another thing that fundamentally makes no sense with the engineering (crafting) system:
There is no differentiation between Engineering Mats and normal Commodities.
There is no rhyme or reason behind any of this. It is just random things chosen to be engineering materials. It doesn't make any sense.
It seems that whoever designed the engineering "crafting" system simply did not care to put 10 minutes of thought into it. And the project team went along with it. Nobody pointed out that this makes no sense? I find this weird. Anybody that is a sci-fi fan would have loved the opportunity to come up with a fun futuristic crafting system.
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I know it is easy to criticize other people's work. But this is an example of where reasonable thought was not put into the development of a major aspect of the game.
There is no differentiation between Engineering Mats and normal Commodities.
- Iron, nickel, and tin are raw engineering mats. Gold, silver, and palladium are commodities.
- Chemical Processors, Conductive Components, and Heat Exchangers are engineering materials. Conductive Fabrics, and superconductors are commodities.
There is no rhyme or reason behind any of this. It is just random things chosen to be engineering materials. It doesn't make any sense.
- I can buy 500 units of copper but I can't purchase nickel?
- I can mine massive quantities of platinum from asteroids, but get just the occasional handful of iron?
- I can purchase superconductors, but I must blow up a ship to get some basic conductors?
It seems that whoever designed the engineering "crafting" system simply did not care to put 10 minutes of thought into it. And the project team went along with it. Nobody pointed out that this makes no sense? I find this weird. Anybody that is a sci-fi fan would have loved the opportunity to come up with a fun futuristic crafting system.
Edit:
I know it is easy to criticize other people's work. But this is an example of where reasonable thought was not put into the development of a major aspect of the game.
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For me, this is 100% where engineering falls apart ... we are flying around in ships with computers in a futuristic setting ... Blueprints would simply be mass copied and distributed after the very first discovery. I personally think engineering upgrades should be a purchaseable item, like everything else.
Recipes....
Nope, because I think the system in Elite is fair, and something tells me that if I were to ask you how YOU would do it right, you would not answer...
That dosen't really differ from what we have now... Your main point is to lower the quantities needed, which is fair but dosen't change anything to the concept. Then, I agree that having to source mats from unusual sources woud be nice, but it wouldn't change a iota to the game: once you know where you get it, you just go there and farm it, whatever the source, dosent change anything to source it from a nebula or a signal. Now, the idea is nice, don't get me wrong, would add some exploration to the thing... but would also make it much longer, and I can ASSURE YOU lots of CMDRs would complain vehemently, including the OP...
We already sort of have this "collect raws from unusual places", namely selenium from braintrees and other G4-s from crystalline shards. I completely agree that placing all raw materials to such locations and removing them from all other current sources wouldn't change anything for the better—or change anything at all, really. The idea is nice, but these unusual materials from unusual places should be rare minerals and chemicals offered as mission rewards, salvaged from abandoned military/research bases, stolen from megaships and other such locations that can be inside the bubble and easily accessible for everyone.
For example, heavy-duty armor could, instead of iron and tungsten, require depleted uranium that you can collect from abandoned military bases and high purity tungsten carbide you can salvage from old research labs or steal from research megaships. And both can be found as mission rewards, because mission givers are some shady bunch who would absolutely deal with these sorts of very rare and mostly illegal substances
Perhaps mats sources and drop sizes should operate the way the bonus stock at Pioneer Stores does and change randomly every Thursday tick.
At least it would get rid of the boredom of going to the same places all the time, and allow us to have another thread like caring and sharing only about which crash site or settlement had supplies hopefully most would even report depleting those supplies.
At least it would get rid of the boredom of going to the same places all the time, and allow us to have another thread like caring and sharing only about which crash site or settlement had supplies hopefully most would even report depleting those supplies.
What does fair have to do with anything? The system is the same for all whether the system is good or bad. Unless you mean olde English fair then yes I do believe it's got a face only it's developer could love. As for how I'd do it, you're right I wouldn't bother. I've been spitting in the wind for 10 years and I'm all out of spit. They seem to prefer "feedback" from the voices in their head anyway.
There is a handwave which basically makes narrative sense for the Engineering implementation (though it does break for synthesis). At least some of this has been hinted at by Frontier as maybe what they were thinking, though as with many things (telepresence, artificial gravity, etc.) Frontier are probably better off not pinning down a precise offiical explanation.
1) Engineered upgrades aren't all that difficult to build - after all, every faction is capable of fielding hundreds of engineered ships, every shipyard is capable of replacing your engineered ship. The reason you can't just buy them is licensing - factions aren't generally keen to allow this sort of technology to be in the hands of mercenaries as likely to use it against them as for them.
2) The Engineers are rare individuals (or heads of organisations) with enough shipyard facilities to replicate these upgrades, enough recklessness to be a "flag of convenience" licensor for them, and enough influence through some other mechanism (Palin's Thargoid expertise, for example, or Ryder's base being so heavily mined that no-one wants to attack it) that they're allowed to get away with this. And even they aren't foolish enough to license some of the really good stuff such as reverb cascade lasers.
3) The materials are primarily a payment for the license, therefore, not the upgrade. The Datamined Wake Exception doesn't get printed out and put up inside the FSD to inspire the hamsters to run faster - instead, they're a payment to the Engineer. So obviously they charge more for the better licenses. And there's some highly anti-competitive cartel arrangements between them to ensure prices stay high.
4) All materials are, precisely because you can't buy them, in some way unique. That lump of Iron came from an outcrop on Bla Thua AC-B d1-17 6d. That Focus Crystal came from ship registration TY-198 and still has the scorch marks from its untimely demise. That Cracked Industrial Firmware is from a model RN380 Achilles robot illegally modified by its owner in 3184. They therefore, especially in large volumes, have considerable research value that a batch of Iron from the local mines or the factory-fresh focus crystals in the shipping container over there won't have. And the engineers are negotiating for exclusive access, so you can't just shop around that same CIF to everyone and you certainly can't pay the same engineer twice with it.
5) Recently this has, of course, generated a secondary market where people are willing to collect and trade documented-provenance items of interest to the engineers, and sell them (at highly profitable rates) to pilots. Similarly, the provenance requirements are somewhat at odds with the lifestyle of the average space pilot, so materials tend to be rapidly offloaded and transferred to a trusted custody authority - allowing things like remote licensing of the blueprints to take place in a secure payment environment, allowing factions to use documented materials as mission rewards without the actual object ever leaving some vault, all the conveniences of a modern economy.
I guess I didn't explain well enough.
a) No, lowering quantities is not my main point. It is simply that in this genre it doesn't make sense that the engineers would want you to provide materials that should be commonly and easily be available in massive quantities. Iron? Sulfer? Conductive Polymers? These should be easily available anywhere. Collecting unusual things for the engineers makes more sense in this genre... like scanning unique neutron stars... which would take far too long if the player had to collect large quantities. That's why I say lower quantites. But same player time & effort.
Edit: The thargoid materials (most of which have no purpose in the game) make much more sense to me. As a player I can believe they are not commonly available at Walmart. They are rare and harder to get. They are not mass produced in human factories. And not available in planetary deposits that could be mined on an industrial scale.
b) My main point is whatever is being collected should make sense for the game. Otherwise... it just doesn't make sense. Activities that don't make sense feel bad. In a game... not fun.
c) Yes, the main concept remains the same. There is nothing wrong with the main concept: the player collects stuff and gives it to the craftsman. The craftsman upgrades stuff. Better upgrades requiring more difficult items. Following the exact same mechanism as many other games with crafting/upgrade system.
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Engineering upgrades require materials even when we are using the blueprints in our fleet carrier 10,000Ly away from human space. That suggests they aren't payment.
While I agree the materials might not be consumed by the item we are upgrading, the payment concept doesn't make sense either. It just doesn't make sense. Why would the engineer want 5 identical copies of wake data? Or several handfuls of sulfer? My main point is it just isn't well thought out. The materials don't make sense in this gaming environment provided.
I completely disagree with this. Most materials used for engineering upgrades should be very commonly available in the ED universe we are playing in. Whether they are raw materials easily mined using large scale industrial methods. Or massed produced as evidenced by spaceships, fleet carriers, and giant space stations all around us.
The exception to this is alien materials. IMO this part of engineering makes pretty good sense. Rare items, not easily accessible, not mass produced in factories, being used for very non-standard upgrades.
That works with the "custodial holder" theory. You aren't actually carrying the materials with you in the first place - they're in a Bank of Zaonce vault somewhere, which is why they're not lost with your ship - so you arrange to make an ownership transfer to Elvira Martuuk of 5 DWEs and once that's confirmed she sends back a licence for FSD usage, which your FC crew then use to legally apply the modification (which might even just be a software change anyway)
I don't see why DWE #1 and DWE #2 should be assumed to contain the same data - they came from different wakes, after all. The grade there is just a measure of how unusual the data is.
If you read the flavour text on things like CIF captures from Horizons-era data points there's several different texts available for the "same" data type.
By "Materials" I don't mean "Sulphur", I mean "Documented-origin Sulphur of scientific interest".
Obviously you can pick up several tonnes of sulphur from the nearest refinery if you aren't trying to pay an engineer with it. But we're pilots not industrial chemists or engineers, so we never have any need for several tonnes of bulk sulphur or a shipping container of factory-fresh heat vanes.
(I do agree that scrapping all non-max-grade materials so it at least sounds like we're handling something vaguely exotic and worthwhile would be an improvement for other reasons too)
Because two cmdrs in the same instance can scan the same wake and collect the exact same data. The engineer never says "nah, I already got samples of that wake data... go get me a different wake data".
This is handwavium and player interpretive quasi explanation using stretched imagination skills to try to make sense out of something that doesn't.
Nice try though.
Players have much less criticism of game crafting/upgrade systems when they make sense. It is up to the game developer to make the game make sense. If the developer chooses to implement major game elements that are illogical and don't make sense... its not fun and players don't like it. Couple that with being repetitious and it sucks.
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Similarly the Odyssey counting oddity where if you both scan the original data point you get two copies of the data, which can then be handed over so one person has two copies, whereas if only one of you scans it you obviously can't just clone it yourself.
If people believed the rest of the system they'd be more willing to wave little things like that off as "no point in tracking it that specifically", of course.
Obviously.
Any attempt to relate anything which happens in ED to real-world-plausible occurrences has to involve a lot of handwaving. The only bit that's realistic (and, for that matter, the only bit Frontier market as realistic) is the system generation - everything else might as well be magic for how little sense it makes if you prod it even slightly.
Though, in a game where our ships break conservation of mass and conservation of energy, and then they take off and get even less plausible, nothing should make sense.
A good story doesn't need to be realistic. But it does need to make sense based on the premise of the story and environment it takes place in. If it doesn't make sense, if logic errors exist... then it sucks.
In Minecraft a player can cook pork chops in a furnace fueled with lava. And a ladder is created by throwing sticks in a crafting table. Obviously this isn't realistic. IRL this is crazy! But it is okay because within the context of the game it does make sense. It is logical. And it does not create a contradiction with underlying concepts of the game.
Engineering in ED is a good concept. But the implementation presents logic flaws to the player. Normally logic flaws in a story can be overlooked. But if they are a major aspect of the which gets revisited repeatedly.... it becomes hard to overlook. If an activity in a video game is illogical within the context of the game AND isn't much fun AND is repetitive... then it sucks.
I should add that the engineering system in ED doesn't bother me very much. I have a large fleet of fully engineered ships, and my material bins are usually quite full. I don't find collecting mats very difficult. Whenever I want a new ship I buy it, build it, and insta-engineer it. Its not a big deal for me. And it never was. When I started playing several years ago I thought engineering was fine. My progress was similar to other games I had played.
But I do understand why it is an unpopular aspect of the game. Much more so than crafting/upgrading in other games I have played.