It has occured to me that Engineered Modules should be FOR SALE!

[Werewolf13]

I do get your frustration.

Lets see if we can give some tips, that might improve on stuff.
Combat and being out turned.
This is game of wits. and you have options available here.

• 50% thrusters. I use this, I have button bound to set 50%, this is when you ship turns the BEST, and you maintain this if you boost! since you are still at 50%
• FA off boost turns, FA on. I do not really use these, but some uses these with great success

So try these out, and figure out what you like, and they both have their own usages on where they excel.

If we go with the easy to start with, 50% thruster, this will make you manoeuvring thrusters work better, and if you end up with those nose-to-nose situations with plasma shooting captains, having a health dose of sideways thrusters going on, will in most cases make the plasma miss you, and give a great view of them flying past you.

Great advice! Been there and done that. And if I were new I'd be thanking you profusely for it but I figured it all out on my own ages ago. And like I said in a prior post I'm 67 years old and in the last 2 years or so my reflexes have gone to pot. It takes quick thinking and fast reflexes to make those tactics work well. Both are gone - I stay out of CZ's because I'm old and slow and rebuys. Not partial to throwin' my credits away.

Conflict Zones, easy way to survive these. Find the biggest friendly ship can, follow that one around, and let that ship do all the heavy lifting. Also keep an eye out for enemy ships that is about to go down, pew, pew a few times and you get credited if they get killed. Having along range laser makes this easier, as you can hit targets far away.
Avoid doing to much damage, because NPCs targets the ship doing the most damage.
If you find yourself in a swarm of enemy ships, bolt to the nearest group of friendlies, do NOT shoot at enemies. when close to your friends, they usual have turrets that shot at "anything" hostile, and soon they will take aggro and you are free to recharge shields etc.

Basically, play a coward that hide behind your friends. Well you are not being a coward, you are being smart. using the game mechanics to your advantage.... And as you get more comfortably you can get more aggressive! But you do not get to keep the war bonds if you get blown into pieces, and you want to spend doing combat getting "kills" than flying back and forth the station for repairs. So let the NPC's do the heavy lifting and just take credits for their work!

Again great advice. I won't follow it though and here's why. I've been playing RPG's since 1972 when D&D came out. Face to face, pen and paper until the early 80's then switched to PC. I play RPG's for fun. I consider ED an RPG (lite).

I roleplay and that includes ED. I don't game the game. I don't exploit game mechanics or developer screwups in ways that break immersion. In real life I am a financial analyst and I'm not going to play games like an analyst, min-maxing, creating complex worksheets diving into the game's algorithms to figure out the best way to do this, that or the other thing. That's just me. Games are supposed to be fun - gaming the game isn't and never will be for me. That's a choice I make and I have to live with the consequences (don't have to be quiet about them though). What I shouldn't have to live with is a developer that almost forces one to game ED if they want to eliminate the GRIND.

For those who gaming the game is fun, who love discovering exploits and consider it a challenge to discover them - great - keep it up! Play the game the way you want - well - unless it's ED and then you have to play it the way FD wants and it seems sometimes as if gaming the game is what they want; either that or they just screwed up (which is more likely IMO).

Also, there is a huge difference between pirates ships and combat ships in conflict zones, the latter now have HUGE amounts of hull reinforcement etc, making them really hard to kill. So by comparison, they have slower time to kill.

Again, just another reason not to enter CZ's and as for Pirates - Strange as it may seem I have no problems in RES' - of any type nor dragging some wanted NPC or assasination target out of SC (well occasionally I run up against a bada.ss NPC target). I can't remember the last time my ship (be it my Asp, Phantom, Python or Anaconda) was aided by an NPC to merge itself with the universe and send me packing in an escape pod. I did try a HAZRES in my Cobra once. ROFLMAO - got out alive, just barely and it took about a minute for me to figure out that - uhhhhh - HAZRES and Cobra don't mix well.

There are so much to learn about this game, and I do think that we get the most enjoyment if we can get to discover most of it for our selves, but there is so much to learn, so getting pointers, hints, general ideas can greatly improve on this. And in these cases, you still have to figure out how this works with your play style.
Play smarter, not harder! and keep the reckless flying going, but be smart about it.

Agree, agree, disagree.

That said: Guides are only necessary because FD failed miserably making the information available in game either thru lore or gameplay. That is their biggest failure of all along with not providing a fair number of various mechanics that can make the game playable by a wider variety of players.

Oh! In an effort to insure full disclosure: there is another reason(s) for guides. They provide an out for the not so bright and/or the lazy as well as those that just want to play the game as quickly as they can. H.ell I bought the Skyrim guide because I got sick and tired of having to waste ingredients figuring out the effects of each (talk about grind - not as bad as ED but still...). Never once looked at a map or quest in the guide though - just potions - and I'd do it again (still play Skyrim by the way - that game has legs). Which group does that put me in? The LAZY, I just want to get on with it group.

 

[Bill Clement]

My own experience is that most of the combat against NPC's is not about reflexes or split second decisions. For killing NPCs, it is about playing is smart, realising stuff like that 50% throttle is basically the only throttle settings you need in a dog fight situation.
Then we have engineering, that basically allow you to brute force your way past skill against NPC's. Basically, many NPC's will stay nose-to-nose with you and trying to brawl fight you, and if you have the bigger shields, better engineered weapons and lots of pips into shield, you will win these stand-offs easily in your engineered ship, against similar sized ship.


So what I am trying to say, is that there are LOTS of information out there, and just having someone coaching you about them, playing with you and pointing out areas where you can improve, and even show you what the difference is has, can have a huge impact on your gameplay and how you progress.


I do get where you are now, as I can recognize the feeling, as I have been there too. I have also been playing for about 4 years (exactly 4 year next week actually) and felt like I got stuck at my combat rank, etc. I was a terrible at combat, died left, right and center. So I had to learn a few things, and quickly discovered that engineering the crap out of my combat ships more than made up for my bad combat skills. Do not get turned down, as even some moderate G2/G3 upgrades with experimental effects have a HUGE impact when it comes to compensate your lack of skill against NPC's. So I was the 3rd in our group to start playing, and once I figured out a few things, I caught up with my friends and keep discovering new stuff to tell my friends about. Just being curious and seek information can have a huge impact on your game play.



Stay curious CMDR! and fly reckless.

This is exactly what hacks me off about engineering. Before it dropped, in most cases, bigger ships were clumsy, but well armed. Smaller ships were fast and/or agile. The turreting issue didn't really exist, at least against NPCs.
If you had a fast ship (most of mine were) you could blat past a bigger ship, flip around and hit him from where he was most vulnerable. It was possible to embarrass one of the big three in a much smaller vessel. Some called it jousting and cried about taking damage on the way in, but that's where player skill and experience came in. If you knew where the weapons were mounted you could minimise your exposure to them. Boom and zoom worked well, with enough practice and a bit of prior knowledge of what your opponent would be carrying.
With agile ships the aim was to get behind an enemy and stay there. The Eagle was king against smaller targets, Vultures were particularly deadly, even to end game ships. Human players would take precautions against getting into that situation in the first place, but the AI didn't, leading to lots of complaints about NPCs being too easy. MoM, for a very brief period, had them flying smart, which was one of my happiest (combat) experiences in the game.

When skilled play could allow surviving or even winning an encounter with a much more powerful ship, combat was challenging and fun- for me, at least.

Sadly, things have changed. Every engineered ship is fast, well shielded, well armoured, well armed and turns on a sixpence. NPCs have massively boosted stats and even get engineering of their own to keep a base level of challenge for the average player in her engineered ship.
It's not really possible to out-manoeuvre enemies any more in an unengineered ship. It's difficult enough just surviving a fight in anything other than a dedicated combat build without at least mid level engineering.

When the answer to getting attacked in game isn't 'git gud', it's 'git upgrades' there's something seriously wrong with the game's balance.

 

[Maolagin]

Anyhow, back the the original topic at hand...

Which begs the question: Why can't we move materials to the engineers that use them and sell the things to 'em. What's wrong with those prima donnas? Do they find it distastefull to participate in the galactic economy or something? Are they closet socialist utopians who eschew the very concept of money?

That way those of us who hate the damned grind to collect materials and then fly half way across the bubble to see the right engineer and a lot of the time have to evade the gankers hanging about because they know people are coming can avoid all that and just go to the nearest engineered module market (which may or may not have what you're looking for).

I think it's been covered why you can't buy materials with credits, but I suppose there's no particular reason to forbid selling them. Given the values you can infer from mission rewards (about 500K for a unit of G5 material), I don't think very many players would be willing to make that trade. But in a sandbox more options are usually better than less, and it would create an additional reason to hunt down those choice harvesting spots. So it might lead to some interesting new interactions. I guess the biggest problem, from FDev's perspective, is that it would unavoidably lead to a never-ending series of requests to be able to buy as well as sell materials.

For what it's worth, I think the backstory of most of the engineers includes being fantastically wealthy. Rich enough that they can get away with doing what they do without apparent interference from the superpowers. So that at least would explain why you can't just pay them to do stuff, and can't just buy engineered modules. But again, I do think it would be cool to have some kind of junkyard mechanism, that you could rummage through in hopes of scoring a module or ship with useful engineering already applied. As long as there's no deterministic "go here, buy X" I don't think it would distort the current system too much.

Again great advice. I won't follow it though and here's why. I've been playing RPG's since 1972 when D&D came out. Face to face, pen and paper until the early 80's then switched to PC. I play RPG's for fun. I consider ED an RPG (lite).

Fair enough. Although I daresay the NPCs and locations are very shallow by RPG standards. But certainly nobody's gonna force you to use Inara etc. Still, based on the frustrations you've voiced, I'd really suggest you go hunting geological sites instead of getting swindled by the material trader, next time you need high-grade raw materials. That's not a guide ... just think of me like a helpful stranger who suggested "plastics" at a party.

 

[Werewolf13]

... just think of me like a helpful stranger who suggested "plastics" at a party.

Is your wife older but still got it???? Oh wait... You've got a daughter, right?