I agree entirely
My viper build could carry 22t cargo, not exactly 'get-rich quick' material...
Make it hard
- Thread starter Galafrey
- Start date
My viper build could carry 22t cargo, not exactly 'get-rich quick' material...
You could do some rares trading... what's your jump range like?I agree entirely
My viper build could carry 22t cargo, not exactly 'get-rich quick' material...
I have no weapons installed on my T9, nor did I claim I can fight anyone in it. a cargo ship is not for fighting, but it has enough armour and shield to get away from combat ships. yes, I know how to put 4 pips on sys and high wake.
OTOH I am a member of the Federal Viper Division, we do raids on Cubeo and popped plenty of ships there with the Viper.
So you recommend I configure something like this? https://s.orbis.zone/7o8p You've not mentioned weapons or utilities so I left them stock.
Impressive durability against a stock Anaconda, sure. Shame about the jump range. And against unengineered non stock ships durability goes down from 30 mins to under 5 or 10 depending on size of agressor and weapons loadout, of course. No doubt you're an excellent pilot, and can chip away with a SLF, but can you do it quickly enough that your mothership doesn't get destroyed?
All this is rather getting beyond my point. No-one is debating that a T9 can be made pretty tough, nor that it can't see off an NPC Anaconda - my T9 is nowhere as tough as the build you are suggesting (and only hauls 620t, although it does have twice the jump range and certain QoL improvements that make trucking more enjoyable for me) and I was able to drive an NPC Anaconda to high wake. The trouble was that the same Anaconda appeared again - with fully restored shield and hull - the moment I low waked to my destination, which no amount of durability on your part can prevent. Not destroying the chaser, dumping sacrificial cargo, sacrificing a fighter and running also wasn't an option, because the immediately interdicted me again. Sure I could high wake, but then I have to start the run all over again from the star. This is all in response to the guy saying "it's all too easy". There are plenty enough hard things to do in ED, if you choose to.
Suffice to say, I won't running guns for the mob again! I'll also stick to source and return trading missions because the double whammy of fines for losing cargo irreplaceable cargo hurt.
Put a couple of feedback rails on the T-9 and even mediocre NPC crew will stall the SCB charges of larger ships you are fighting, whose shields will collapse in very short order under fire from a heatsink equipped SLF, with the ship underneath to follow in relatively short order. The T-9 also generally won't out damage an SLF so will be largely ignored once the fight starts, unless you slip out of position with it, in which case the breathing room provided when the NPC switches targets can be used to reposition.
If you can't prevent the NPC from lining up for an interdiction, it's best to either submit and destroy the pursuer, or to win the tunnel game. NPC persistence issues mean that driving them off is problematic, as you've noted.
With Tritium or Agronomic Treatment now capable of more per-tonne profit than the best rares, on one jump trips, I think rares trading has run out of in-game uses.You could do some rares trading... what's your jump range like?
Fondly, with full vignette and warm glowing emotions. It was a brief part of 2.1, Sarah Jane Avery (Mistress of Minions) was given free reign on combat, which removed the bug where the NPC's would stop and barely roll for you to shoot at them like they were on a rotisserie. Then some people complained because the new AI that could FLY was having them on first name terms with the rebuy screen, so the AI got nerfed, heavily, with the Inter Continental Nerf Missiles. When it later came to light that half of the devastation was caused by a networking bug allowing the NPC's to have fun mixing and matching the attributes of weapons when they were spawning their loadout. So we had Frankenstein things like a multicannon that fired plasma accelerator projectiles, and a rail gun beam laser that fired a rail gun shot every single frame.
So if you were running at 60frames per second and got caught by one of those monsters, it was 60 railgun slugs per second. But when they fixed the Frankenstein loadouts, they never reverted the nerf on the AI. 
☹Not very usefulYou could do some rares trading... what's your jump range like?
It is one of those ships with a single purpose...Coriolis EDCD Edition
A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous
s.orbis.zone
Actually both threads show the result of the imbalance, that is within combat. Noobs struggle to get kills, which is fine to a certain degree, and pros can go drop a deuce during an NPC interdiction. Therefore I say it again, system security states need more relevance to create areas with noticeably varying difficulty.
I'd argue, that you cannot design a game accommodate everyone. You will need to take compromises, that make one or even both sides unhappy in the end. Besides that, and I know people will disaggree with me on that, despite ED providing a lot of options, it still is about "a cut-throat galaxy". Enemies are supposed to pose a threat in inhabitat space. This kind of danger is obviously inherent to all Elite games. Therefore I think, even though it might work to some extent, those who want a game without combat, devoid of most challenge ultimately, are expecting ED something to be it was not designed to be.
It feels like someone plays GTA mainly as a taxi driver and demands NPCs should be less aggressive.
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Yet here we are, where people wine when an absurd source of money making or combat meta got nerfed, not realizing it is for the better of the game.
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You make a good point & I like the GTA/taxi driver analogy, but I think for the most part they have made those compromises & they just aren't balanced at a level you are happy with. Once an obstacle can be overcome it becomes a matter of how many can be overcome per unit of time - or grind. I don't really want that.
Personal feelings and preferences aside and even not considering cooperative play, the way ships are balanced is cannot be deemed a very "exciting" way in terms of recent game design standards. Combat is either very hard (or even tedious) in a small non-engineered ship or way to easy in a modifyed medium ship (not even talking about large ships).
People who think they should be able to get away with they paper thin T6 everytime have not the right perspective on the game. The Dev diaries should make that clear.
Edit: If FDev would have shown this game as a sort of truck simulator in space, I would be fine with it and avoid it probably. It is their game, their marketing and their design. Given the number of combat related additions and changes, the focus should be clear.
I guess you are referring to hitpoint inflation. Thargiod Interceptor combat or combat in smaller ships is suffering from that. You have one tactic and you a forced to repeat it. Combat should be a bit less about loadout and more about skill. But defense modules values and scaling have gotten out of hand.
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Fondly, with full vignette and warm glowing emotions. It was a brief part of 2.1, Sarah Jane Avery (Mistress of Minions) was given free reign on combat, which removed the bug where the NPC's would stop and barely roll for you to shoot at them like they were on a rotisserie. Then some people complained because the new AI that could FLY was having them on first name terms with the rebuy screen, so the AI got nerfed, heavily, with the Inter Continental Nerf Missiles. When it later came to light that half of the devastation was caused by a networking bug allowing the NPC's to have fun mixing and matching the attributes of weapons when they were spawning their loadout. So we had Frankenstein things like a multicannon that fired plasma accelerator projectiles, and a rail gun beam laser that fired a rail gun shot every single frame.
I still don't know which version of ED people were playing, who keep spreading the fairy tale of the NPCs being so much better at that time. The only thing which indeed actually made those enemies dangerous were the bugged weapons like the mentioned railgun-multicannons. NPCs without them were neither more dangerous nor more interesting to fight against.
The only real change of behaviour was that they retreated out of range when their shields went down, to return after recovering them. Combat against AI at that time was even more boring than at any other time. I was actually writing forum postings here WHILE IN COMBAT in the game when the ship i was using was not fast enough to keep up with my target. After all, it just meant that the NPC stayed outside of weapon range for a while. We both recovered shields till it returned, then i smacked down its shields again, did some more percent of hull damage and it ran outside of weapon range again.
If your ship was fast enough to keep up with them, you could boost after them and still take them down. No big deal there, as their method of retreat reliably was to boost away in a straight line. It was that time when i migrated to long range railguns, resulting in extremely easy kills.
So really, i have no praise of the AI of that version. It were the bugged weapons which resulted in people getting sent to rebuy, the AI not only had nothing to do with it but even was less interesting than at other times.
And on the topic of the thread itself: indeed things are too easy for everybody with a fully engineered ship. And indeed the proper answer can not be "then don't engineer your ship". That kind of answer is no better than "don't play the game".
The correct answer also can not be "simply make NPCs stronger". Merely doing so would be pure slaughter on newer players who don't have well engineered ships yet. The proper answer thus would be "nerf the hell out of all the overpowered engineering -insert censored word here-".
The game would need the nerf of engineering blueprints since years. With the nerfs being applied to all existing equipment, too. But based on FDs former and very gentle attempts of nerfing just the worst aspects of engineering, how parts of the community reacted on it (see: taking candy from a child) and how FD caved and rolled back on any nerfing attempt, it's unlikely that they ever dare to try to fix the problem again.
Indeed, that's the nice and polite way of describing the core problem.
imo there is a place for a paper thin T-6, even if it is only for increased jump range and increased risk if fired upon - greed. In the right circumstances I will fly a paper thin ship, the difference between me doing it & the imaginary player you have in mind is the attitude to taking that risk & it not working out; I take that risk knowingly.
The PvE/PvP gap is frustratingly large but in practice the actual risk of being shot at by another player is vanishingly small. A player's first visit to Deciat isn't a great way to learn that lesson but it is a learning opportunity.
The PvE/PvP gap is frustratingly large but in practice the actual risk of being shot at by another player is vanishingly small. A player's first visit to Deciat isn't a great way to learn that lesson but it is a learning opportunity.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
There at least two gaps:
1) the gulf between the survivability of ships optimised for combat and non-combat roles that existed even before the introduction of Engineers;
2) the combat skill gap, i.e. fully half of players are at or below median skill.
Then there's the inclination gap - not all players are particularly interested in combat in a game with two paths to Elite rank that don't require the player to fire a shot in combat.
WAIT, I don't understand something.
When I look up the changes that Engineers make, it's always +x with -y (and maybe even a -z thrown in there, also). I have no idea how that can be appealing, with such tradeoffs at work. Like, if the benefits from Engineering was either +x or +y, that I can appreciate, like a neat way to give your ship 110%.
I can appreciate the sentiment of "less about loadout and more about skill," which might explain why all the weapons seem so "BALANCED" to me, at a cursory study of their stats side-by-side. You get puny lasers that barely scratch shields, fixed guns that can always so easily miss with no tracking at all (even the CQC has better fixed weapons), and then the big guns (like the plasma cannons and torpedoes) that you have to be either on a ship's bumper to hit, or you'd better be attacking a capital ship with it. (and the Class 4 Plasma gun, basically the Elite version of "The BFG" wouldn't one-shot shields of most ships).
But the story of the bugged weapons sounds ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! Where can I get a railgun that fires 60 rails per real second?!
Moral of my opinion? I swear, "Tradeoff" should be a swear word.
When I look up the changes that Engineers make, it's always +x with -y (and maybe even a -z thrown in there, also). I have no idea how that can be appealing, with such tradeoffs at work. Like, if the benefits from Engineering was either +x or +y, that I can appreciate, like a neat way to give your ship 110%.
I can appreciate the sentiment of "less about loadout and more about skill," which might explain why all the weapons seem so "BALANCED" to me, at a cursory study of their stats side-by-side. You get puny lasers that barely scratch shields, fixed guns that can always so easily miss with no tracking at all (even the CQC has better fixed weapons), and then the big guns (like the plasma cannons and torpedoes) that you have to be either on a ship's bumper to hit, or you'd better be attacking a capital ship with it. (and the Class 4 Plasma gun, basically the Elite version of "The BFG" wouldn't one-shot shields of most ships).
But the story of the bugged weapons sounds ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! Where can I get a railgun that fires 60 rails per real second?!
Moral of my opinion? I swear, "Tradeoff" should be a swear word.
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The additions from engineering are an order of magnitude more powerful than the subtractions, which in some cases dont matter at all (oh noes my Multicannons use 15% more distributor draw!... wait. naff-all +15% is still naff all.. or OH NO! my MCs max range is halved! oh, wait, it didnt affect the drop off range, they still have 1.8km full damage range, but now do 1.75x the dmg)
Have any of you tried the training challenges? Now, maybe I'm just a literal novice, but "Incursion: Competent" definitely made my stress level go up a notch (though for the record, I DID beat that, even if not on the first try - and I'm a lot less afraid to die in the "training simulations")...to say nothing about the PvP mode CQC (assuming I can actually FIND a match in that mode). My point is, even if that's isolated from the main game, there are signs that things are plenty hard.
There are a minority of players for whom the game presents both no challenge or engaging content, they 'suggest' global changes in the game in order to tailor the 'difficulty' to their perceived ability.
The rest of us just enjoy what the game offers and have fun - then when the game doesn't provide entertainment any longer, will surely move on rather than demand the game be changed
It's a challenge, but I would not say it's brutal. Honestly, I'd like the whole game to be brutal as fudge. I want to feel nervous about flying into the wrong system. I want my palms sweating while fuel scooping, landing on a planet, or in NPC combat. I want every decision I make while exploring to have consequences. There should be logistics involved for food and water. Getting to Beagle Point should be one of the biggest challenges in the game, but's just a repetitive time sink. I'd have put double the amount of hours into ED, and I've already got an embarrassing amount, if the game would kick my booty to a pulp for my mistakes. Space should be unforgiving like it is in reality.