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Focused Feedback - Balancing Ship Engineering & Material Gathering
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I just really hope that something changes with the suit engineering I've hardly done any because it's just an absolute grind atm.
It's been six months since this thread was posted, with zero updates or plans for fixes. Extremely disappointing.
yeah, bumping it back to page 1 again.
Why isn't this pinned?
Why isn't this pinned?
1. Agreed on no more random rolls so you know exactly what you need.
2. Fix the crystalline shard farming sites in HIP 36601 and Outotz LS-K D8-3 in Odyssey so you don't have to switch back to Horizons.
3. Make it so you can actually find Military Supercapacitors.
I have engineered all of my ships to G5 and have yet to find a single Military Supercapacitor at a HGE. And Polymer Capacitors are needed a lot. So either make them show up in HGEs or make them much more prevalent in CZs. I vote the latter just so it is something different than relogging HGEs.
The end. That's all that is needed.
If these are the only changes, it wont be enough to hold new players or bring back the many that left. The gameplay surrounding gathering engineering materials is incredibly boring and grindy. Anyone who values their time wont bother.
Not everything has to be easy. The answer is more the "why" you do it.
I only bothered with FSD until I got involved with the BGS. Then I really got into learning about it so I could more effectively help my team. Heck I would have never done it and probably would have stopped playing long ago if it wasn't for the BGS.
Help people find their why and give them purpose, and they will do things even if they are a grind.
Grindy doesnt equate to difficult.
I've been playing Odyssey since soon after update 11 dropped.
I started doing a little material collection for suit and gun engineering as it's new and fun to visit those impact sites, irregular markers and crashed ships for a while. I then checked the status of my materials collection against what I need for even a grade 1 to 2 night vision upgrade on a suit. Not even a quarter of required materials collected, and it was becoming evident that serial criminal acts were needed to get more materials.
If FDev are aware ship engineering and material collection needs balancing, why design a new game mechanic for suits and guns that is even worse for the, lets not say grind, but repetitive 'game play' loops? And apparently with no way to do it but consistent criminal acts.
Sure I get bounties in ship based game play, but one system faction's idea of a crime is another factions idea of gathering essential intelligence or defence - from a role play perspective.
Or does balancing ship engineering and materials collection mean making it more like suit and gun engineering?
It's already obvious raw material collection takes longer in Odyssey than Horizons - harder to find fewer deposits to the point you switch back to Horizons to get what you need. I'm considering several visits to the crystal shard sites to completely max out raw materials stocks sometime before the Horizons game is retired just so I get them in a more reasonable time frame.
I'm not going to focus on suit and gun engineering. I'll collect a few materials when its fun to do it. If I get enough to engineer something, fine. Otherwise, I'm not interested in it. I play Elite for the ship based game play, although I do like being able to walk around the ships. I still want to board and leave ships properly instead of the teleport mechanic we have now - and be able to explore inside my ships...
I started doing a little material collection for suit and gun engineering as it's new and fun to visit those impact sites, irregular markers and crashed ships for a while. I then checked the status of my materials collection against what I need for even a grade 1 to 2 night vision upgrade on a suit. Not even a quarter of required materials collected, and it was becoming evident that serial criminal acts were needed to get more materials.
If FDev are aware ship engineering and material collection needs balancing, why design a new game mechanic for suits and guns that is even worse for the, lets not say grind, but repetitive 'game play' loops? And apparently with no way to do it but consistent criminal acts.
Sure I get bounties in ship based game play, but one system faction's idea of a crime is another factions idea of gathering essential intelligence or defence - from a role play perspective.
Or does balancing ship engineering and materials collection mean making it more like suit and gun engineering?
It's already obvious raw material collection takes longer in Odyssey than Horizons - harder to find fewer deposits to the point you switch back to Horizons to get what you need. I'm considering several visits to the crystal shard sites to completely max out raw materials stocks sometime before the Horizons game is retired just so I get them in a more reasonable time frame.
I'm not going to focus on suit and gun engineering. I'll collect a few materials when its fun to do it. If I get enough to engineer something, fine. Otherwise, I'm not interested in it. I play Elite for the ship based game play, although I do like being able to walk around the ships. I still want to board and leave ships properly instead of the teleport mechanic we have now - and be able to explore inside my ships...
I would be more inclined to visit degraded/encoded emissions to collect materials if the pickup rate for grade 1-3 materials was increased. Raw materials and data could use an increase in pick-up rate though since their sources can sometimes be difficult to acquire.
Yeah, that could help. Increasing the amount of grade 4 materials picked up per instance would help with trading up to grade 5 materials or trading down to lower materials as well.
I’ve had the most difficulty finding materials that are exclusively available in High-Grade Emissions - specifically the materials that have the same spawn conditions as other materials:
- Military Supercapacitors and Military Grade Alloys (both found in war and civil war states)
- Proto Heat Radiators and Proto Radiolic Alloys (both found in boom states)
I recently finished modifying several sets of hardpoints to have the grade 5 High Capacity modification. If I had to guess how long it took me to complete one of the hardpoints (not including the time it takes to set up a ship), I would say at least an hour:
- 15 minutes to find a place to bounty hunt ships and collect their materials or look for HGEs containing Improvised Components to trade down
- 30 minutes to look for the raw materials on planets (longer if I’m in Odyssey)
- 15 - 45 minutes to look for an HGE that only contains Military Supercapacitors
I like this idea; this would give us a way to interact with the engineers outside of just modifying our modules and gives us a more direct route to acquiring materials. I think the number of materials offered should be based on how risky engineer missions are. For instance, if failing engineer missions can reduce a player’s engineer level (including the modifications they have access to), then engineer missions should offer much more materials than what players could find on their own. Otherwise, the number of materials offered for each mission can be similar to material rewards from station missions.
I like this idea more than engineering missions! It would allow us to work towards earning materials in various activities anywhere, rather than being constrained by available engineering missions and their tasks. It also gives many activities a purpose that isn’t solely for earning credits. For instance, I could use the minerals that I mine to help others or myself acquire engineering materials, rather than being constrained to just selling the minerals for credits.
My issue with the current system is that the lowest amount of improvement that an upgrade can give is too low - especially considering the effort required to acquire some materials. I would like a system where we know the max amount of materials we’ll need to complete a modification, but also allows for some beneficial randomness. For example, a modification will require at most 10 rolls to complete, but, if we’re lucky, we might be able to complete it in 7 rolls.
In my limited experience of gathering raw materials on planets in Odyssey, gathering materials seems to take much longer than in Horizons:
- The surface deposits that spawn materials on destruction (Bronzite Chondrite, Mesosiderite, Metallic Meteorites, Outcrops), seem to spawn farther away and less often than in Horizons.
- Geological sites spawn a few deposits (Piceous Cobble, Crystalline Cluster, Crystalline Fragments, Needle Crystals) in small areas, but most of them only create one material on destruction. And with the lack of the previously mentioned surface deposits, my experience of looking for and collecting raw materials at most geological sites hasn’t felt rewarding.
- The Crystalline Shard sites (like those in 36601 and Outotz LS-K D8-3) felt rewarding to collect materials from in Odyssey. Despite the time it took to reach them and look for them with the Detailed Surface Scanner, I was able to fill up most of my grade 4 raw materials faster than I could’ve on other planets (it was pretty fun
). But, with the way raw material sources are generated on other planets in Odyssey, it feels like I’m choosing between gathering random materials very slowly or traveling far to gather one material quickly.
Anyways, I hope that helps!
O7
Let me first say that I am a new player with only 1 month of playing ED. So this is from my perspective as a new player.
Engineering my FSD to grade 5 took just over 12 hours of game time. Plus a lot of time researching how to find the stuff. Most of the research ended up with people saying go here, collect this, log out, log back in, recollect and repeat. Personally I want to play the game and not log out and back in over and over. As such I spent a lot of time looking for how to do it without logging out and back in. One solution to this may be to have the early engineers give you information about how to locate the items needed or point you to a simple guide in the pilot's handbook.
Raw Materials
The problems I ran into was finding raw materials by shooting rocks (one of the first ways I found to collect raw materials) on planets was way too time consuming. Driving sometimes kilometers to find a single rock that produced 3 or 4 items (9 to 12 raw materials) Once I found the geological and biological sites it made this a lot easier to collect so I would suggest increasing the number of those sites within the bubble for players to collect from. My trip out to the biological sites to fill up on raw materials was a lot of fun and I spent about 15 hours of gameplay to fill up. (1 weekend of play) as such these are inline with what I would expect from an MMORPG for material collecting.
Manufactured materials
Manufactured materials on the other hand were the biggest pain to collect. I spent the better part of 40 hours trying to find and collect them from high grade signal sources and only really filled up on 3 types. (imperial shielding, core dynamics composites, and proto heat radiators) While I could find systems in outbreak and other conditions they never seemed to spawn collection points. There has to be a better way to do this.
Encoded Materials
These have been the most frustrating thing to collect. So much so that I broke down and did the log out and back in at the Jameson Crash site to collect the bulk of them.
Collecting them from encoded transmissions was not producing hardly anything. I did figure out that putting a wake scanner on my ship and simply scanning wakes as I left each station helped. Ill also note that I recently found out about ground sites/installations where you can collect some of them but have not made it out to any of them to try. So i dont know how long that will take.
I posted this in the suggestions area but Ill put it here as well.
Take each of the major powers and select an empty star system in their region. Create an asteroid belt of broken ships and ship pieces, a shipyard if you will, where they deposit the pieces after battles, etc. (from what ive seen the models exist to do this) pieces can be scanned for encoded data, or shot to break them up for manufactured materials, and some manufactured material spawns could be scattered around for easy collection. You could even have pieces of high grade raw materials spawn when some pieces are shot.
This fits within cannon and is something I would expect to find in a space faring future, kind of like going to the junkyard to collect car parts to fix your car lol.
Most of the MMORPG's Ive played have some sort of mini-game when crafting. You have to follow a sequence of button pushes or clicks and the output is dependent on how well you do. They always use the same number of materials.
That being said, I kind of like the randomness though it can be frustrating when you just need a little bit more and it takes multiple roles to get it.
I would suggest making it always take the same number of materials though i would not object to some mini-game that required a bit of skill to get the max outout.
Again, this is from my limited perspective as a new player who is enjoying the game (Horizons so far)
Engineering my FSD to grade 5 took just over 12 hours of game time. Plus a lot of time researching how to find the stuff. Most of the research ended up with people saying go here, collect this, log out, log back in, recollect and repeat. Personally I want to play the game and not log out and back in over and over. As such I spent a lot of time looking for how to do it without logging out and back in. One solution to this may be to have the early engineers give you information about how to locate the items needed or point you to a simple guide in the pilot's handbook.
Raw Materials
The problems I ran into was finding raw materials by shooting rocks (one of the first ways I found to collect raw materials) on planets was way too time consuming. Driving sometimes kilometers to find a single rock that produced 3 or 4 items (9 to 12 raw materials) Once I found the geological and biological sites it made this a lot easier to collect so I would suggest increasing the number of those sites within the bubble for players to collect from. My trip out to the biological sites to fill up on raw materials was a lot of fun and I spent about 15 hours of gameplay to fill up. (1 weekend of play) as such these are inline with what I would expect from an MMORPG for material collecting.
Manufactured materials
Manufactured materials on the other hand were the biggest pain to collect. I spent the better part of 40 hours trying to find and collect them from high grade signal sources and only really filled up on 3 types. (imperial shielding, core dynamics composites, and proto heat radiators) While I could find systems in outbreak and other conditions they never seemed to spawn collection points. There has to be a better way to do this.
Encoded Materials
These have been the most frustrating thing to collect. So much so that I broke down and did the log out and back in at the Jameson Crash site to collect the bulk of them.
Collecting them from encoded transmissions was not producing hardly anything. I did figure out that putting a wake scanner on my ship and simply scanning wakes as I left each station helped. Ill also note that I recently found out about ground sites/installations where you can collect some of them but have not made it out to any of them to try. So i dont know how long that will take.
I posted this in the suggestions area but Ill put it here as well.
Take each of the major powers and select an empty star system in their region. Create an asteroid belt of broken ships and ship pieces, a shipyard if you will, where they deposit the pieces after battles, etc. (from what ive seen the models exist to do this) pieces can be scanned for encoded data, or shot to break them up for manufactured materials, and some manufactured material spawns could be scattered around for easy collection. You could even have pieces of high grade raw materials spawn when some pieces are shot.
This fits within cannon and is something I would expect to find in a space faring future, kind of like going to the junkyard to collect car parts to fix your car lol.
Most of the MMORPG's Ive played have some sort of mini-game when crafting. You have to follow a sequence of button pushes or clicks and the output is dependent on how well you do. They always use the same number of materials.
That being said, I kind of like the randomness though it can be frustrating when you just need a little bit more and it takes multiple roles to get it.
I would suggest making it always take the same number of materials though i would not object to some mini-game that required a bit of skill to get the max outout.
Again, this is from my limited perspective as a new player who is enjoying the game (Horizons so far)
IMO, the best way to get these is to take mission awards and to bring limpets to a RES site and then hover up what is spawned by exploding ships. Unfortunately it doesn't drop all materials, but it does spawn some low grade as well as some G4-G5 mats, once you start getting full crosstrade at a material trader and repeat. You can farm a lot of credits at the same time.
All of mine have been done in game without relogging, visits to material traders though are a must.
Encoded Materials
A wake scanner with long range mod will allow you to get a couple of scans at most stations between the time you leave the slot and when you can jump, don't worry about warnings of weapons you can get at some stations. you can also scan ships as soon as you leave the landing pad. Signal sources can also provide another source along with Manufactured materials.
Manufactured materials
Any Signal source will get you something, unless I am in a hurry I automatically scan a system as soon as I enter it, if you get into the habit of doing one or two you will find that you can gradually build up a decent stock of most mats. If you are flying a smaller ship just scoop them up, when using a large ship a small limpet controller is a useful addition.
Raw Materials
Most, not all can be obtained by mining rings, some have to be surface mined or traded for at your local material trader.
Mission awards can also be a useful source of some mats.
If you get into the habit of collecting a bit here and there you will soon find that most of the time you will have enough for basic engineering needs.
@Bruce G I thought I would come back and update my findings. I just did a couple of base runs for encoded mat's
I used the optimized list of bases from @Down To Earth Astronomy , Started at the first base on the list and used it to learn the layout etc.
The next base on the list if 79.14ly away which my Cobra MkIII can do in 2 jumps. So I timed from the jump out of the first system to the point where I broke orbit on the second.
Total time to run the base was 32min.
For activating the 5 data terminals I got 1x G2, 1x G3, and 1x G4 mat.
Around here we would say the juice is not worth the squeeze. That is a lot of time and effort to get 3 mats.
Now, if each of the 5 data terminals output 3 to 4 mats of G4 or G5, that would be worth the run.
Note: To do these runs you are landing on a planet, have to park 2km to 3km away from the station, your ship goes back to orbit when you drive that far away, once you have done all 5 data terminals you have to drive 4km away from the base to recall your ship.
I used the optimized list of bases from @Down To Earth Astronomy , Started at the first base on the list and used it to learn the layout etc.
The next base on the list if 79.14ly away which my Cobra MkIII can do in 2 jumps. So I timed from the jump out of the first system to the point where I broke orbit on the second.
Total time to run the base was 32min.
For activating the 5 data terminals I got 1x G2, 1x G3, and 1x G4 mat.
Around here we would say the juice is not worth the squeeze. That is a lot of time and effort to get 3 mats.
Now, if each of the 5 data terminals output 3 to 4 mats of G4 or G5, that would be worth the run.
Note: To do these runs you are landing on a planet, have to park 2km to 3km away from the station, your ship goes back to orbit when you drive that far away, once you have done all 5 data terminals you have to drive 4km away from the base to recall your ship.
The "squeeze" is the gameplay... the "juice" didn't even exist until Horizons, and yet people enjoyed the "squeeze" anyway...
After two hours or more of SCing around the one high sec system in Colonia, the game did not proc a single chemical distillery or manipulator for me. Now, maybe it's because that system has no shipping lanes. So maybe that makes this case an outlier. Tried some SS in a bunch of other systems, and nothing.
With this I am reminded of why I hated engineering so much.
With this I am reminded of why I hated engineering so much.
There are no systems in Outbreak in Colonia right now, so you will not find Pharmaceutical Isolators to trade down to chemical distillery or manipulator. Collect anything from any High Grade Emissions site you find and head to Foster Terminal megaship in Coeus and trade it for what you want.
I can't find infrastructure failure in Colonia today, so no ground installation restore power missions around which will have the personal equipment engineering materials I'm collecting. I doubt I will ever engineer any personal equipment - not important enough to me to spend the time on it.
If you can, best to plan your engineering projects that you want to do while in Colonia and collect the materials for them while you are still in the Bubble.
Just checked again and there is actually one shipping lane to the station, but just no ships coming and going. And I found Juniper to be in Outbreak so maybe I'll find some phiso.
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