Obligatory 2 cents on engineering

[Lord Baron Von Vaderham]

I'm going to try to be careful here because I've seen what these posts can degrade into.

Engineering is a fundamentally problematic system because it is simultaneously required (read, almost every guide to almost everything assumes that you've already engineered almost everything. We can pretty much say the player base has concluded that it is a necessity. Then again, they also assume you have an built-out Imp. Cutter, Fed. Corvette, and Anaconda laying around) and a massive time sink. Trying to engineer a ship without the Jameson Crash Site, Orrere 2B, or similar one-off locations would be hell. I still have no idea where to find Pharmaceutical Isolators in the wild (I'm told "settlements" like that means anything more to me than "a populated surface location".) The engineers themselves are obnoxious to find/please and then you can only pin one blueprint for each (and no experimental effects). There's no in-game way to check what you need for a complete mod (even looking at the mod doesn't tell you how many for a full upgrade, only each step.) And the engineers themselves are these magical geniuses who are unique/near unique in the abilities to do what they do despite half the pirates in the game somehow having engineered modules.

As for how to fix it, I honestly have no idea. It feels like it was a flawed system from the start. If engineers were as common and easy to find as material traders or tech brokers then it would help. It might also help if they front load a materials cost on unlocking the upgrades/effects (think tech brokers) then slash the material expendature (I'm thinking the cost of one full upgrade level should be what it cost per-shot right now. None of this "I have to spend this value once but this value six times" nonsense.) I would also make certain rare materials less rare (Datamined Wake Exceptions are the first that comes to mind. I have sat for an hour outside a busy station scanning wakes and only gotten two hits before, 6 DWE in total) or expand the number of places you can find them (Where, oh where, are those Pharmaceutical Isolators?)

 

[metatheurgist]

Pharma Isolators come from HGE in Outbreak systems, preferably Independent to reduce the odds of other mats. They also sometimes fall off T10s, Corvettes, Condas or Cutters. Dunno where you got your info but it's bad.

Engineering in ED is a ripoff of fantasy MMO crafting wedged into a scifi spaceship game. It has no place here and is completely wrong for this game. Whoever implemented it looked at the brush strokes of the mechanic and applied them here with no understanding of the whole picture. It can't be fixed now.

The obvious place to supply info for the engineers is the Codex (something I suggested). In any other game that is how it would work; it would be both info source and guide. Frontier as usual produced some mutant abomination interpretation of a Codex.

 

[Uthael]

Pharmaceutical Isolators

Wiki: High Grade Emissions (Outbreak system states with pop > 1,000,000 only)
Inara search with filter for Independent, centered on Sol
High Grade Emmisions Finder (shows info only from people with 3rd party software like EDDB installed)

To be fair, they reduced the grind by a lot and that's what made me come back into the game. Out of 4 people I occasionally play with, 2 have quit because of the current grind and one has yet to see what it's like. That means 2/5 find the current state bearable. Not OK, not enjoyable, bearable.

What engineering needs is more in-game info, more consistent rewards for the time invested and more human feeling. I'll elaborate.
More in-game info means the game should make all aspects of the Inara website obsolete. Inara should be in the game itself. With proper tutorials.
More consistent rewards means less RNG. Not necessarily less time spent. For example, make ship scans award fixed amount of specific data based on the ship's type so the player knows what to search for.
More human feeling means give the engineer NPC a model, animations and a workshop. Let us queue all the engineering we want from them and watch them work. Eventually, let us see them work on the module around the ship itself, in the hangar. Much better than clicking the same button 15 times and waiting for a circle to fill 5 times. ... Per module.

 

[CMDR Voron]

Wiki: High Grade Emissions (Outbreak system states with pop > 1,000,000 only)
Inara search with filter for Independent, centered on Sol
High Grade Emmisions Finder (shows info only from people with 3rd party software like EDDB installed)

To be fair, they reduced the grind by a lot and that's what made me come back into the game. Out of 4 people I occasionally play with, 2 have quit because of the current grind and one has yet to see what it's like. That means 2/5 find the current state bearable. Not OK, not enjoyable, bearable.

What engineering needs is more in-game info, more consistent rewards for the time invested and more human feeling. I'll elaborate.
More in-game info means the game should make all aspects of the Inara website obsolete. Inara should be in the game itself. With proper tutorials.
More consistent rewards means less RNG. Not necessarily less time spent. For example, make ship scans award fixed amount of specific data based on the ship's type so the player knows what to search for.
More human feeling means give the engineer NPC a model, animations and a workshop. Let us queue all the engineering we want from them and watch them work. Eventually, let us see them work on the module around the ship itself, in the hangar. Much better than clicking the same button 15 times and waiting for a circle to fill 5 times. ... Per module.

That would be pretty cool flair, but… not really FDev style looks at rest of game

I think the OP is right, the engineering is unfortunately necessary. I think it would be a lot less necessary if the Ai was more dynamic.

The Ai doesn’t make mistakes in E they either see you and fly in the same pattern over and over or you cheese them. So, the only way to elevate the players and reduce slog is with the MMO-style leveling (engineering).

Uh, just make the Ai more dynamic. If there’s a wing if 3 and you take out the medium ship, have one of the two smalls book it. Have the NPCs lose their cool sometimes, eject, flee, hit meteors in the HazRez. I’ve never seen an FDL try to run away in a Rez even though my eagle, the guy he tried to rob and six system security vessels are all wearing him down to 19% hull.

They all just execute perfectly/or poorly, until the bitter end - and for what that 1t of Beryllium?

As long as the NPC combat is just grinding in circles, you have to have engineering so that players have a way to progress in power, and as long as there is engineering, E will be ABOUT leveling up and choosing builds for the ship rather than… you know, flying them.

So, pull that one bottom brick out (the over simple Ai) and the rest of it is moot.

Gathering materials could have been the perfect nudge to get people into other parts of the game and mesh the gameplay loops together. Instead, you get engineering materials for guns from doing settlement raids, and you get ship materials from blowing up ships.

Ultimately, this is meant to represent custom mechanical changes to the ships… the percentile changes really need to go. You should just be buying the whole “Stage 2 Engine” or whatever, that just is heavier and more powerful.

The on-foot gear leveling just needs to go away. It’s really clear that in this game your ship is capital - that is just what it is. On-foot stuff should be the great equalizer

 

[CMDR Voron]

If you want to make me do side quests that free up some uniquely qualified mechanic to build me an engine, that’s cool——— idk why I need to go on a different scavenger hunt for each specific part. I can’t even keep track of all the stuff I need to prioritize grabbing.

The items don’t have intuitive names - I.e. for Dirty Drives you should probably have to blow up pirates and find something like “oversized dirty drive manifold” not “iron”
Or if upgrading a suit, I don’t understand why we don’t find “enhanced graphene body armor panels” instead of “base attack plans”

That would allow the player to just look and go ‘oh I probably need that’ instead of genociding a fungi forest on an exoplanet with flak cannons and collector limpets just in case.

I just really don’t see why they randomly generated so much of this. I don’t want to insult FDev, but it does feel like an insult to me that this wasn’t masked better or tied together more. Like, I know these are just meaningless digital tokens. They didn’t have to make it so clear exactly how meaningless they felt it was.

 

[Uthael]

I can’t even keep track of all the stuff I need to prioritize grabbing.

Game's UI sucks in that regard. Inara website for that, too. Make an account and let it pull your game log files. Tell it which upgrades you want and it tells you exactly which materials and how many of them you need to complete everything you want. It even tells you which materials you could trade and how many you should reserve (and not trade).
And just look at that sweet button on the right. "Find nearest material trader".

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I would also make certain rare materials less rare

If you run the higher-value mission types (passenger, combat and cargo variants all available) you can get 12 high-grade engineering materials a time out of the rewards. That adds up fast if you keep doing it.

If you have a home system then pledge to the local Power and you'll also get a steady material income from the care packages as you wander around doing stuff.

These methods are both far more recent than most of the guides on "how to find engineering materials fast five years ago" so don't get mentioned there much, but can be very efficient if your goal isn't to engineer an entire fleet in a week.

I’ve never seen an FDL try to run away in a Rez

They did have more intelligent enemy behaviour and ships which tried to flee when low on health in previous versions. It was mostly removed (a long time ago, now) for being extremely unpopular.

- if you're not using high-DPS low-ammunition weapons and instead going for sustained damage over time like lasers or multicannons, it's really easy for a ship to spend 15 seconds high-waking when the going gets tough, and you're not going to finish it off in that time
- this is even more true if you aren't in an engineered combat ship, or aren't very good at combat flying yet, etc.

So a good amount of the combat-style enemies are set to have very low or no fleeing behaviour (mission targets will never flee unless lured into a station no fire zone, combat ships in general will leave it far too late if they try at all) just so that an average player stands a chance of killing one occasionally.

The items don’t have intuitive names

Both ship and surface engineering just have far too many different types of material to start with, many of which are only used for one or two fairly minor things. Cutting down the number of types to about a third at most of what there currently is would make things a lot easier to remember what you needed (and also make it more likely that any particular find would be useful later)

 

[Koma Pahu]

So, off the bat you don’t need to engineer to play the game.

I started playing my alt at Odyssey launch and didn’t start unlocking the engineers until the week Cocijo moved to Sol.

A YouTube guide that says just play the game and see what happens wouldn’t get a lot of views…

That being said, engineering is a part of the game and the system is imperfect.

G1-3 makes a significant difference, G4-5 are generally diminishing returns.

As I see it there’s two main issues with it. One from the legacy of the system that requires you to do a ton of pointless clicking to get from G0 to G5.

The second is some of the unlocking requirements that require you to go back and forth picking up a few rares at a time.

I don’t think there needs to be more of them, we have pinned blueprints after all so we only need to visit the actual engineers occasionally.

Realistically there’s not many practical choices for each module, and if you’re using guides you’re really not doing much experimenting with different options.

With the Material Traders it’s easy to get all the required mats even if you’re grinding. And if you actually play the game, doing missions, you can fill up your bins faster than you realise while doing something fun.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

HGEs now drop tons. Its the sort of thing you drop into once and then don't need to do again for ages unless you're going crazy engineering dozens of modules that require the stuff.

Material traders are the lifesaver that make it all much more bearable. Once you've got plenty of materials, doesn't matter if you have the right materials, just trade for what you really need or had trouble sourcing.

Its not perfect, but its a lot easier than it used to be.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Whereas after 2-3 months of doing powerplay I'm engineering ships and modules just to use some up because my material storage is full. Yes, some of the initial unlocks are repetitive, but even a ship modified by only tier one engineers is unstoppable in combat against NPCs. Other than combat, aside from a g5 FSD (a tier one mod) there's nothing else you need to do whatever it is you're doing.

 

[Nidoboros]

I kind of want to yeet the original system and replace it with something more like the Odyssey weapon/suit mods. You get 1-4 based on the level/rank of your module, and then you can mix and match what upgrades you got. Make some of them exclusive, so everyone doesn't just lightweight everything for maximum jumprange... maybe lightweight has a better chance of taking damage during FSD or something.

The system is simple, but it will never happen because it will just nuke everyone's builds. Alas, to dream.

 

[Shadowsnog]

Fundamentaly engineering isnt required to have fun. If you want to have an edge in combat or a finely tuned specialised ship, its a great tool. And this reward takes effort. At least the miniscule amount it is required now after the changes.
Practically i make silly fully engineered corvettes just for fun. I was able to ship one out every month or two with just casual play and very rarely mat reward option from missions. With powerplay and colonisation the mat stream dried out, so i opt to completely empty my bins and then grind them back. This grind, from empty g5 and almost empty other grades, to full g5 and almost full other grades, including crosstrading for things like biotechs and crystals, took me about a days worth of play. Few hrs daily over three days. I do it this way because i want to do it this way, and im now ready for many more silly corvettes.
The only real flaw in the system is that encoded signals werent boosted along with other sources, and for data grind we have to milk jamesons cobra. And still its so easy i almost dont mind.
This is the only thing id really want to update to match the current level of difficulty of engineering, and to have a fun gameplay option instead of sniffing jamesons grave over and over.

Engineers have their own menu, they tell you everything you need to know, you can even see how many rolls of which grade you can do with the mats you have on hand. They are visible on gal map, with bookmarks available that can take you right to their base.

For the power you can get from engineering it really is as easy as it can get.