Is Engineering Required to Play in Open?

[NecasekO]

It depends on what and where you are flying.

I'd say engineering is required to survive an encounter with a hostile CMDR. It pretty much has been ever since engineers were introduced, but over time players found ways to kill more effectively (feedback rails, long range PAs, massed frag cannons or packhounds, corrosive weapons) and make it more difficult to escape (FSD disruptors, drag munitions) or fight back (TLB, force shell, dispersal field).

These days if you fly a relatively slow ship (and all unengineered ships are slow compared to engineered FDL), there are ways to make it impossible to high wake quickly and you need to be able to tank several thousand HP worth of incoming damage - which is difficult (and on most ships outright impossible) without engineered hull and shields.

 

[space voyager]

I don't think that would have been necessary. The thing is that your combat rank increases with survival (even being killed doesn't knock it back) so it creeps up even for a non-combat oriented person. Added to this is the fact that your ranking in the other "careers" adds to your combat rank for the purposes of NPC-spawn scaling. So someone who is not a combat type will eventually end up facing engineered NPCs. I seem to remember that NPCs would only use engineering in CZs but of course that is not the case any more (I might not be remembering correctly of course).

I agree, but if you own Horizons you CAN do something about it while non-Horizons owners can't. It might help if engineered NPCs only appeared in Horizons.

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

Engineering is required to play ED after you pass combat ratings and the buffed AI turns your vanilla stuff into ridiculous peashooters that have little effect on them anymore. Is not a question of "open" or not.

I agree, even in "SOLO" as I progressed towards Elite in combat, I noticed that the NPC's skill and ships also seem to have progressed.

 

[Hossi]

Depends.

First of all, if you don't fly where other peoples fly, it obviously doesn't matter if you're open or solo. The galaxy is big enough to never meet anybody. So lets say you wanna roam the bubble, some popular systems, engineers, things like that.

Till now is was: If you know what you are doing, choose and configure your ship accordingly, keep an eye on your surounding,than you have not much to fear.
A super light explortion build will explode within seconds, but a halfway reasonable choice of defensive equipment would allow you to high wake even without engineering. Trust me, I have alt accounts with no engineering at all, and I survived more then 400 gank attempts last year.

With the new drag effect... no.
Not a chance.
Without engineered shields and lots of engineered boosters you wont survive long enough to wake out. Not only will you take much more damage since you can't evade enemy fire, you won't evade the fsd-reset.

We run tests with the new drag effect. In multiple attempts I took about 7 times more damage then before. Thats not a problem for my fully engineered cutter and its prismatic shields, but with stock modules its impossible to achive enough shield strength to survive that

 

[ZeroAi]

I ask because of the current debate around Drag Munitions and the potential need for everyone to have one DM on their ships to survive a player attack. Here's the thing - a large number of players (at least on PS4) only have the base game, not Horizons. What does this mean for them? What does it mean for new players who haven't unlocked the appropriate Engineers? Is this just another nail in the "Horizons is P2W" debate?

I'm just curious...

ps - Jenny is still working on unlocking Engineers, so she currently doesn't have DM to choose from.

Great question, and lots of great replies.

Looking at the big picture, and given that I don't believe FDev does a lot of match making like other multiplayer games do, if a new player is put into the same instance as a Elite Pirate, then I don't think it would matter if either had Horizons.

That said, we all can agree that in one-on-one combat Engineered ships can have a substantial stat advantage, however that's pretty common in video games.

If a Player wants to compete with all other Players AND expansions that Player didn't purchase have higher ranked items that give an edge in combat, well I'm not sure why anyone would want to go into a situation at such a disadvantage?

Bottom line: Choosing to play in Open means your are Accepting the risk of being pirated by anyone, including Elite Players Engineered to the Max.

So if you don't have Horizons, why would you take the risk? Well, unless you like taking risks.

If this is a risk the Player does not want to take, they can play in Solo, PG, or join the Mobius PG which has ~20,000 members.

That's what I do because I had no desire to Compete with players who play Every Day for several hours. It's the same reason I don't register for the Boston Marathon, or sign up for a Poker Tournament: This Old Man doesn't spend his R&R time "competing" against people who "play" as much as he "works." ;-)