No more shieldless stripped down paper-thin trader ships loaded to the gills with cargo racks either. Defnitely build your ships out more properly. Shield boosters, at least one point defense, chaff if you have slots. Missiles and torps are more effective, as are mines. A defensive trade ship loaded to the gills with mine launchers is a viable tactic. Run and spam mines until you can jump. The enemy won't sit an spin while you shoot at them either. ;P
My opinion is mixed at this point. I like the tougher enemies, but balance still seems way off in certain cases. Today's patch supposedly tries to remedy some balance issues. For the most part I can get by just fine but occasionally you'll get ganked and blasted out of the sky within seconds and stare at the screen saying "what!?". If you want to minimize interdictions.. fly around without cargo when going from point to point. If you have active missions, expect to be interdicted. A lot. If you carry cargo. Same goes, but maybe just a bit less so. I'm iffy on the Engineers bits. It seems more like a way to keep players busy who already A-spec'd their ship and want to find something else to do. Basically glorified Fed-Ex missions. Get this or that, bring back, make the boss happy, get a module bonus which has a degree of randomness to it.. which could backfire when you upgrade. I absolutely DO like the updated mission system though. Its far better than before. Payouts and rewards feel like they are improved and more worthwhile. Still bugs here and there, but overall better.
You don't need to focus hardcore on doing things for the engineers either. Just going about your business you'll eventually gather the stuff you need for them for the most part. scan wakes for data. scan data points. gather materials from planets, USS, and what not are dropped from ships you pop. The sheer number of materials will throw you for a loop in the beginning. But if you target/scan a material, it seems to tell you in its description... and will state if it is considered rare. But maybe no for everything (?). collector limpets are super useful in such cases as drops often have a limited life before they disappear. Plus its a pain to scoop a lot of small materials in larger ships. I hate material scooping in my anaconda..but its perfectly fine in the cobra.
Oh. Also exploration data and in certain cases bounties can be used as a supplement to buff up an engineer's reputation when sold at the engineer's base. This ups your rep with them, which you can then open higher ranked upgrades at. The primary way... you just gather their materials and build upgrades, and get reputation that way. The new patch is suppose to allow you to sell reputation points, if you wish, to get a guaranteed module upgrade special bonus. Or you can just leave it to RNGesus (the random number generator) to determine if you get a special buff or not (supposedly around 5% chance per attempt or something I think)
All in all. Fly safe. Fly defensive. Most importantly, don't get too comfortable. Its even more Dangerous out there now. ;P
