General Easy fix to the engineering material grind

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
Navigare Necesse Est said:
I was already deadly when engineers dropped.
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So you had already slaughtered several thousand NPC and were more than capable of playing the game. You just decided not to. Because it changed.

The time & effort for engineering a combat ship is trivial to that of reaching combat Elite. A reasonable combat ship with G3 engineered weapons is very capable of destroying an elite NPC Anaconda, and I'm seriously crappy at combat. G5 engineering gives a crappy pilot like me the over-the-top advantage to slaughter NPCs with very low risk.


Edit: Oh... and this is 2013. How many years have passed since engineers were introduced?
 
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Disemboweled Ego

D
Marvin the Martian said:
Exhibit A is engineering a power plant for use in Thargoid Titan systems. Most just blindly take it to G5 without considering that you don't really need it. Mine is at G3 only because it gives me more than enough power and runs cool enough (at 16) that I don't need to waste the materials on any further engineering.

The same applies to my Krait Phantom exploration ship. Most of it is not fully engineered because it doesn't give me any real additional benefit. It's a waste of materials to max out my shield generator because I'll never take the ship into combat. I need just enough to prevent a catastrophe from stupidity and that's it.
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In most of those cases you can downsize the modules to save weight, by how much depends on how much engineering can improve the base module.

The only real cases for not doing full G5 in an optimal build are downsized power plants where you want overcharged to save weight but don't need all the power and the reinforced 4d drive distributors on a jumpaconda or other modules where you just want some base engineering to put stripped down on it and there's nothing that would save weight and there's also few cases where fully engineering prismatics will result in impossible to satisfy power usage on some builds but I'm not sure those builds were optimal in the first place.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Disemboweled Ego said:
This isn't the problem as people already want their stuff to be G5 and the people advocating for G3 are just telling people to avoid the bad engineering system as much as possible. It's not bad advice but it doesn't solve the problem that FDev should solve, perhaps with some sort of engineering overhaul
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This.

And it doesn't help that a lot of module effects are pretty significant on paper for that module "90% improvement" and suchlike ... and it's only if you stick the hypothetical build into Coriolis or EDSY that it becomes clear that doesn't translate to significant whole-ship performance differences. But the costs are pretty much entirely dependent on the grade of the blueprint rather than on how useful it is. It's as if 6A Prismatics and a 1A Fuel Scoop cost the same amount of credits because "they're both A-rated" [1]

Lightweight life support (a complete non-entity of a blueprint which makes virtually no difference even to the Beluga) at G5 costs almost 1000x more in materials than G1 Dirty Drives + G1 Increased Range FSD which have tens or hundreds of times the effect. It's not as if the shielded/reinforced blueprints are any better: sure, losing life support is annoying, but explorers have space to carry an AFMU to repair it, and everyone else can hang onto a few low-grade raws and synth if they start running out before they can reach a station, and the main way to lose life support in combat is canopy damage which it doesn't help with anyway.

It's easy enough to avoid the traps with experience either personal or borrowed (almost all blueprints above G3 if you're remotely constrained on material reserves, most of the ones below that too) but outfitting is definitely one of the areas where ED has massively increased complexity compared with its predecessors in a way that leads to a balance of 90% of choices being terrible, 5% reasonable, and 5% taking advantage of the system in unintuitive ways. And it was a mess before engineering.

(Odyssey outfitting and engineering, despite some of the frequent complaints, does do a lot better in almost all respects: almost all "modules" and upgrades have a decent use, costs do inflate a bit fast at the really high end but that's counteracted by easier reuse of good stuff when you get it, the engineering addons have varied costs which at least attempt to reflect their power)

[1] Not that the actual credit costs of modules are sensible either. It's just that everyone has too much money to care nowadays, and if you buy something which doesn't work out or you no longer need you can sell it back for 100% anyway.
 

Darrack

Darrack
Navigare Necesse Est said:
And that's why propping up your guns with engineering isn't optional as some would want us make believe.
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Rubbish, im Elite rank so get all the nasty's, yet i can take a stock Annie which requires none of your so called grind to obtain, slap off the shelf guns on it and have no problem in CZs or general play, ive just done it in the recent CG.
Maybe actually play the game and see for yourself?

O7
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Greasetrap42 said:
So you had already slaughtered several thousand NPC and were more than capable of playing the game. You just decided not to. Because it changed.

The time & effort for engineering a combat ship is trivial to that of reaching combat Elite. A reasonable combat ship with G3 engineered weapons is very capable of destroying an elite NPC Anaconda, and I'm seriously crappy at combat. G5 engineering gives a crappy pilot like me the over-the-top advantage to slaughter NPCs with very low risk.


Edit: Oh... and this is 2013. How many years have passed since engineers were introduced?
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Engineers isnt wine. Crap doesnt get better each year.
 

Wendelstein Stellar

Wendelstein Stellar
I am not going through this thread because the discussion is the same everytime anyway. I'll just say this:


People who try to reinvent engineering always sound like startup dudes who think they have reinvented and made cryptography easy because they're genius.

Think about this:
1. Good game design (as in balanced, fun, not too short-lived and so on) is hard.
2. There is no grind. It's only a grind if you make it one.
3. Maybe the game is not for you. Or maybe it would be if you discovered something. ED has a lot to discover.

If something takes a looooong time, it's meant to be that way. You have no "right" to a fully engineered ship. I have seen people play ED for a few hours then give up, because magically after they had taken the road to riches, road to combat rank, road to cutter... harder opponents (NPCs still) went after them and just deleted their cutter. I have seen people explain that it "takes too long to reach endgame" - which supposedly is AX combat. Uhuh. (I'd like to ask them if they fly FA off. I still don't.)

Too many smartasses out there.
 

Wendelstein Stellar

Wendelstein Stellar
Ian Doncaster said:
And it doesn't help that a lot of module effects are pretty significant on paper for that module "90% improvement" and suchlike ... and it's only if you stick the hypothetical build into Coriolis or EDSY that it becomes clear that doesn't translate to significant whole-ship performance differences. But the costs are pretty much entirely dependent on the grade of the blueprint rather than on how useful it is. It's as if 6A Prismatics and a 1A Fuel Scoop cost the same amount of credits because "they're both A-rated" [1]

Lightweight life support (a complete non-entity of a blueprint which makes virtually no difference even to the Beluga) at G5 costs almost 1000x more in materials than G1 Dirty Drives + G1 Increased Range FSD which have tens or hundreds of times the effect. It's not as if the shielded/reinforced blueprints are any better: sure, losing life support is annoying, but explorers have space to carry an AFMU to repair it, and everyone else can hang onto a few low-grade raws and synth if they start running out before they can reach a station, and the main way to lose life support in combat is canopy damage which it doesn't help with anyway.

...
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What's the point here? You have to decide what to spend materials for. It's an extra layer of complexity which is good™.

If you waste mats on something that is "A-rated and G5" but the mod is crappy, then cool, game works. You made a mistake. Do you want games without any possibility to make mistakes? Boring.

Also, the number of times I've been surprised by module choices or engineering mods which had been considered wrong/stupid before is significant. There are some surprises in there. And I love that.

Edit: Damn rabbit hole.
 
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Disemboweled Ego

D
Darrack said:
Rubbish, im Elite rank so get all the nasty's, yet i can take a stock Annie which requires none of your so called grind to obtain, slap off the shelf guns on it and have no problem in CZs or general play, ive just done it in the recent CG.
Maybe actually play the game and see for yourself?
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What's the takeaway there?

Is it actually good that the game has no high end content because engineering is a grind best avoided so it should be pointless anyway?

A player will eventually want to progress to other content, there's not much of that in elite vs NPCs but I guess there's soloing wing assassination missions and Pirate Activity signal sources would be more difficult and not really feasible with an unengineered ship without being a massive challenge run.

The Maelstrom/Titan exploration stuff really exposed some of those flaws - adding new even moderately difficult content that requires a tougher, maybe specialized ship will be met with backlash because "it's a grind". The issue isn't that the new content sucked or that requiring a specialized module/ship was unreasonable, it's that the process of getting those things sucks in general and people have been burnt and burnt out by engaging with engineering in the past, either because it's a grind or because they fell into one of the traps and had to grind even more and don't want to do it again.

A lot of the "you don't need an engineered ship to do X" stuff is also pretty elitist crap, if you went back to closer to the launch of the game or just engineering where everyone was less experienced with the game you'd get different responses to that than you do now from a bunch of vets in an aging game.

Marvin the Martian said:
No, you do not. That generates heat. That's the polar opposite of what you want on Titan runs. The weight is irrelevant.
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An under-engineered armored or low thermal plant would still be better just like with overcharged and having less weight (those blueprints add weight) is better since it reduces thruster load which reduces heat (but this is all very minor).
 
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