"Don't rush into an Anaconda, do Engineering first...."
- Thread starter Starshot_Jigawatts
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Sure but it has no narrative. It's all about the narrative and the fact I have to go back to pin another BP.
And what did it say? Paraphrasing, it said 'Hey come and see me at some point and you can maybe do some of this stuff if you like!'. It's not a quest or linear progression as such, in the sense of 'OH no, now I must do this' - it's some stuff you can have a look at and decide whether you want to do a) at all and b) right now. If you do that's great but you can then do as much of it (or as little) whenever you might want, along with whatever you were already doing anyway.
Same as (for example) the fact I've played for five years, have over 3,000 hours on my main account, yet last got involed with Powerplay about four years ago. It's there if I want it.
Yoiu want to have fun, so what did you do to have in Elite before you started with engineering?
What RNG are you talking about? that stuff have random drop chance? This have been one very common game design for a really long time used in most games. Or are we talking about the random progress when doing a roll, that ALWAYS now progress you to better upgrade?
What are the bad mechanics? I have a hard time following what you are referring to on this one.
You can also enlist the East India Company for engineer unlock requirements, if you want to take the heavy lifting out of it.
LMAO it is quite amusing to see so many people mindlessly defending the game and the crappy engineering system. I feel you OP.
People be like "oh no don't grind, just gather mats while you're playing", but I say F that.
Just play, have fun and forget about gathering, then every one or two weeks, spend a day just to grind mats.
I say rather than grind a bit every day, just grind a lot in one day and be done with it.
Can you imagine gathering mats while playing?
Bounty Hunting: Every time you kill a ship, open your scoop, and wait a minute to grab the drops. Literally. Every. Single. Kill.
Exploration: Oh, you want to explore and scan that planet? Well too bad, go here to this HGE and wait 5 mins to gather the mats. Oh and you can restart the game to reset it too. You can explore later.
Trading: Well, do you mind stop playing for a minute? There's a HGE over there, maybe stop here and scan for some shield data too. Oh, see that high wake signal 10km away? Go scan that too. You can trade later.
Don't. Do. It.
Just don't gather mats while playing. Just play the game, and sacrifice a day just to gather mats and save your sanity.
Grind is user error, its also why people burn out. I'm still playing ED five years post release, haven't unlocked all the engineers, don't have triple elite, never been to colonia, still enjoy the game.
But, you can gather mat's BY just playing the game.
I just picked up more than a dozen PIs from "Assassinate a Politician" missions, which is more than I've ever found by actually setting out to gather PIs... and with the bonus of having an opportunity to kill politicians too!
You'd need to be willfully stubborn to ignore the opportunities to collect mat's that the game DOES offer.
I've got over 1600hrs from starting this year and I think the progression through the engineers is spot on.
The engineer who needs you to mine rocks for access was a great way to learn thruster control as I did only core mining as it seemed the most exciting out of the mining methods.
I definitely wasn't interested in mining before that and it led to me mining a $billion worth of stuff and I still like it - very relaxing.
SRV driving wasn't the most fun in VR so I went to the crystal sites and topped up all the RAW mats and haven't driven on a planet for a few months.
MANUFACTURED and ENCODED mats are an 'as you play' collection - though I did have a crazy few weeks hitting every HGE i saw . They are both now virtually topped up and I do scan every ship I see still - wake scanner is a great thing at stations if you have the room for it.
The game has some really frustrating gameplay like the Guardian FSD unlock - which i couldn't have done without YouTube tutorial.
I still haven't looked at any third-party sites and probably won't. I'd like the game to last as long as possible and either find info on here or YouTube if I'm REALLY stuck.
I can see how you can get stuck doing something as being a grind - but you really need to do something else.
I've also thought of joining a discord - alot of people who would have dropped the game have been given a new lease of ED life by joining.
Have a look through the Groups,Squadrons and Factions in this forum - one of the groups may interest you and also help you grind some of those annoying engineers.
The engineer who needs you to mine rocks for access was a great way to learn thruster control as I did only core mining as it seemed the most exciting out of the mining methods.
I definitely wasn't interested in mining before that and it led to me mining a $billion worth of stuff and I still like it - very relaxing.
SRV driving wasn't the most fun in VR so I went to the crystal sites and topped up all the RAW mats and haven't driven on a planet for a few months.
MANUFACTURED and ENCODED mats are an 'as you play' collection - though I did have a crazy few weeks hitting every HGE i saw . They are both now virtually topped up and I do scan every ship I see still - wake scanner is a great thing at stations if you have the room for it.
The game has some really frustrating gameplay like the Guardian FSD unlock - which i couldn't have done without YouTube tutorial.
I still haven't looked at any third-party sites and probably won't. I'd like the game to last as long as possible and either find info on here or YouTube if I'm REALLY stuck.
I can see how you can get stuck doing something as being a grind - but you really need to do something else.
I've also thought of joining a discord - alot of people who would have dropped the game have been given a new lease of ED life by joining.
Have a look through the Groups,Squadrons and Factions in this forum - one of the groups may interest you and also help you grind some of those annoying engineers.
The point is picking up mats, other than mission mats obviously, is breaking the flow of the game. I thought I made it pretty obvious. And what if someone doesn't want to do assassinate missions? What if they just want to explore or trade?But, you can gather mat's BY just playing the game.
I just picked up more than a dozen PIs from "Assassinate a Politician" missions, which is more than I've ever found by actually setting out to gather PIs... and with the bonus of having an opportunity to kill politicians too!
You'd need to be willfully stubborn to ignore the opportunities to collect mat's that the game DOES offer.
It's obvious that people have different playstyles. Maybe some people just want to have uninterrupted pew pew pew fun without having to think about pausing to pick up this and pick up that. What works for you might not work for others, and it's pretty obvious that all these "gather while you play" advice isn't working too well for OP.
I pick up mats while my shields recover a bit in CZ's or wherever.
When I want lots of mats for trading (say I'm after a whole new ship) I fit collectors to a warship, pop a few tonnes of gold in the hold then drop into a compromised nav beacon and rack up bounties and fill a load of bins. I then hand the bounties in where they'll do my player faction the most good.
No grind no looking for specific things and when I buy a new ship it's G5 or near as dammit before lifting from Shinrarta thanks to remote engineering and scooping on the go. Quick run around to add experimentals and it's done, which is also a good way of putting a new ship through it's paces.
Engineering's a grind for the people who think they need a fleet fully G5'd right now if not sooner. Entirely self inflicted problem.
Again, everyone playstyles is different.
Me for example, never wait for shield recovery. Either I use Krait with fast shield recharge, or I use a FDL and I'd just reboot/repair for shield regen.
I don't like having to bring a bunch of limpets on my FDL with zero cargo space or having to slowly manually scoop up items. Even with a Krait, bringing limpets means lower my ship's performance.
I'm not gonna pause my game and spend extra effort just to scoop up some low grade mats. Much prefer spending a day dedicated to grinding to stock up G5 mats once in awhile so I can have uninterrupted gameplay. A day of farming is more than enough for you to engineer at least 3-4 ships anyways and unless you plan on engineering more than that, it's enough to last you a while.
Then you won't get those opportunities to collect mat's in the course of your normal play and nobody will be able to accuse you of being willfully stubborn.
If, OTOH, you are doing stuff that leaves piles of mat's floating around and you choose to ignore them....
I scoop manually with all my ships other than the corvette.
All the more reason why I don't do it. Why scoop lower grade mats manually every day when you can just spend a day or two per month scooping as much G5 mats as you want with limpets?
Why not grab whats right under your nose and not bother spending a day or two grinding mats at all.
Because why would I spend time getting lower grade mats while I can spend even less time using limpets to grab G5? It's simply more time efficient.
And no, before you say something along the line of "but the mats are already there", the time NOT spent getting those lower grade mats are spent playing the game. Limpeting those mats also take time, and even more time if you do it manually.
So farming G5 mats are technically more efficient because the extra time it takes to travel to a system for HGE can be ignored in the grand scheme of things.
Trade bins full of lower grade mats for whatever you like, the reason those bins are full is the stuffs so easy to come by.
Min-maxing is grinding, all the angry ex-players hanging around moaning did it that way.
With the current crappy conversion rate? It's more efficient to trade down G5 compared to trade up lower grades.
Min-maxing how to get mats in the shortest amount of time isn't grinding. It's the opposite of grinding by minimizing the time you spent grinding. In fact, killing NPC and gather low grade mats to trade up is more grindy. A short burst of grind every 5 minutes doesn't make it not grind, that's just an illusion. In fact, that's just you grinding a bit every single day. Grind is grind.
And I think you just made that up because there's no statistical evidence to back up that claim.