Engineering / Logaritmic Results

[Roen Soul]

Right now the results of engineering is quite much random.


I would suggest having an engineering system where the mods / features can always be improved but it will take more and more materials in order to progress forward.

Every "level up" feature boost for the mod would require 10 times more materials from the previous level.
When ever you fine-tune a feature upwards it may cause tiny damage to other thing which would then require fixing. Making improvements seems to be quite a task then.

By this we can get extreme ships in the end, but this means that ship has taken extreme amount of fine-tuning engineering and pain in butt to get those results.

Level 1 - 1 materials.

<-- We could have level 1.4 engine. ( x amount of materials used. )

While stacking up features we also have to remember the weight will always be affected in a way or another. So in order to boost one feature, you need to file off another to release weight.
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Level 2 - 10 materials.
Level 3 - 100 materials.
Level 4 - 1000 materials.
Level 5 - 10000 materials.
Level 6 - 100000 materials...
Level 7 - 1000000 materials... This would prolly take a year to collect from a one player.
Level 8....

It would take years to build level 8 or 9 ship. But there would be extreme ships if players can combine their power to collect materials.

We could have god like ships plausible but with god like effort to build them.

Some features that requires real limits could have even harder material requirements. The scale could go up even harder. 2 40 800 1600 32000 ...

Every time we upgrade something, the weight of the ship would increase. We would need to file something off to decrease it. - There are limits that physics can do, weight is something that can not be skipped.

 

[MK Regular]

First, this seems to be about making changes to the engineering system. As such, you should repost this in the beyond updates subforum.

I do not like this idea at all. It is overly complex, and would require absurd amounts of balancing and consideration to keep upgrades balanced without taking away players' progress and making sure future players could still realistically progress to that level. It also seems to me like this idea would increase the engineering grind to levels never before seen in ANY video game, as I will demonstrate below.

A quick bit of math:
Assuming

• All of the materials needed for doing a max level upgrade could be found in various debris USSs
• It would take an average of 2 minutes to find and drop into a USSs and collect everything in it using a never ending supply of collection limpets
• There are an average of 8 material drops in each USS

I could farm 240 material drops per hour.

Assuming that a level 10 upgrade is the highest level upgrade in your system, and that each material drop yielded 1 material:

• In the first example you gave of 10^(level-1) materials needed per upgrade, a single level 10 upgrade would cost 10^9 materials, meaning that it would take over 4 million hours of material farming to get a single level 10 upgrade.
• In the second example you gave the amount of materials needs for an upgrade was 2^(level)*10^(level-1), meaning that a level 10 upgrade would cost 1024*10^9 materials for a single upgrade, or over 4.2 BILLION hours of grinding.

To put that in perspective, a lot players do not put in more than 4 thousand hours into any game they play.

However, the amount of grinding required could be reduced by making the grinding more effective by increasing the material yield of the drops. If your end goal is for an average player to obtain a single grade 10 upgrade in 4,000 hours of play, the first example you gave would need to have material yields of over 1000 materials per drop, meaning that the average player would need to spend every second of their time in the game grinding using the method I described above. Due to the coma-inducing nature of the method I described above, no player would ever spend 4000 hours doing it, meaning that the material yield would need to be increased even more (probably in the neighbourhood of 10,000 materials/drop in order to be achievable in actual gameplay) to the point where players will stop seeing materials in any meaningful way. When this happens, the entire engineering system will fall apart. Nobody will bother engineering their modules, since doing so would be such a colossal waste of time.



As for balancing the levels of upgrades, if the level 1-5 upgrades kept the same values, the max level upgrades would put the current god rolls to shame, and would absolutely game breaking. If the new max level upgrades had the current level 5 upgrade's values with lower levels being crammed in between the max level and stock values, there are a few options with regards of what to do with player modules:

• Compensate players with modules in the current system by giving them equivalent modules in the new system, or let them keep their old modules. By doing this, any players who do not have any modifications on their modules get absolutely shafted, since they will never get modules that are as powerful as the modules that were done in the current system.
• Adjust player's modules to be in line with the new system (i.e. A grade 5 upgrade in the current system would be converted to a grade 5 in the new system and given stats to match). In this case, any players who have already modified their modules get shafted, since they would get their progress taken away.

No matter how you implement this system, at least some players will get absolutely boned, and everybody will need to grind magnitudes more than they currently do. The only alternative to this would be to completely break the game balance (not that anyone would ever have the time to do so, which poses the question of why you ever implemented the option to do so to begin with).

TL;DR A solid no on this one. What you are asking for involves more grind, breaking the game balance, and screwing over large group(s) of players (or some combination of the above).

 

[Roen Soul]

It actually is not complex at all. I have played role games which has implemented this system . It is a very core how players can advantage forward.

When you fine tune your engine, you do changes to it. Every singe thing you do to the engine changes the behavior of the engine improving one and making other worse. However using enough material you could overcome some of these problems.
The entire idea is to use materials and "variables" that can be tweaked. We all could have unique ships with different attitudes. Every tuning could have pros and cons however if you spend your entire time fixing your cobra mk III, you will eventually get it superior for its kind. However, there will be a limit which is based on the physical limits of the ship type. You can not over tune a ship, but you can maximize it's performance by hard work.

Yes you can find materials easily. it will be very easy to take first tuning steps, but going forward toward more perfect ship it will become more and more consuming. You need load more material to build god like ships. It could even take large team efforts to build one ship which is hardcore in every single aspect. But those ships will not be everywhere because as the tech level of the ship goes up, it will be logarithmic scaled up harder to get to next level.

If there are some features that FDEV do not want to overshoot, then they can add extra materials required and having them extremely rare. Then it would become a true task to find these extremely rare materials and parts.