Out of idle curiosity I played with one of the out of game route plotters and came up with around 60 jumps to get from Leesti to the HIP shards system in a hauler with a G3 FSD and Deep Charge lugging an SRV hanger along. I am unfamiliar with the tool so not sure if that was fastest or economical but either way it is approximately an hour with a ship jumping just under 35Ly.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
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All of which is tediously slow going compared to better methods. And the crashed Anaconda site visits are no more "natural" than guardian or crystal shard site visits.
That is not a raw material. Imperial shielding is the most consistent HGE material to find, as well. I don't see what point you're making here that is counter to the hubris.
For the completionists at heart (like myself) - sure, having an outside resource is good for that. But there's nothing that's tied to your character's power or gear improvement that is going to be gated behind that, you won't be hindered in terms of combat or survival or lacking in QOL or missing ways to make travel easier and so on and so forth.
Now, there are several good reasons to use mods to address things like the levelled-item things (making them level with you, for instance), and that does require a lot of outside time and effort to bother finding all the right mods for your game... but at least that game has the option of mods to fix its game design issues.
With Metro - it's reasonable to see how in a narrative-heavy experience like that where your choices influence the final outcome with world-altering consequences, it's intentional to not spell everything out for you.
I will grant that in other similar games like Battletech, I've actually gone to the effort of diving into lua files to expose the actual effect various dialogue choices have, because I think it's lame the game doesn't warn you of the consequences that affect your crew/ship permanently & save reloading is annoying.
I think there are many reasons why Elite's game experience is not really comparable to those titles, the relative utter void of narrative devices being a rather poignant one. But you are right, the game has a lot going on that still is not explained adequately, though Fdev have made long strides in terms of the ingame codex & information & tutorials, where there used to be none at all. I think that remains one of Elite's problems and one I'd love to see further remedied by more tutorial & codex content to address the information gap.
Yet it must also be observed it's not reasonable to expect an ingame codex to say "You should go out to one of these specific systems that have no ingame reason to be significant so you can farm heaps of high grade materials to get over the arbitrarily inflated barrier to entry to interacting with a core game & progression feature that was deliberately made too powerful to ignore". Part of the issue here is the flawed game design itself lending to needing outside 'metagaming' knowledge to be even reasonably approachable. Many such issues in Elite are tied together in these ways, which for me only reinforces the dire need to address them - any way or fashion would be better than leaving it stagnant and dormant, as has been going on for most of the game's lifetime.
I generally have 1 purposed ship for game activities but several different sets of modules to outfit it with (if we're not including the armada of storage ships to put unused modules in, like all the hull reinforcements I have from before guardian SRPs were a thing).Sometimes I wonder how many ships do you people engineer?
Do you all have 8 corvettes each with 8 skill boosters or what?
Wouldn't making mats much easier to come by, or even make engineered modules buyable for credits result in being able to get anything right away, instead of having to make priorities as to what ship to get and how to engineer it? I did feel a certain amount of accomplishment once I added the 8th engineered skill booster to my corvette.
I don't put much stock in the 'feeling of accomplishment' for overcoming an arbitrarily inflated quantity & RNG hurdle for accessing a ship upgrade system. I'd much more appreciate being able to engage with it without so much time/effort/knowledge requirement so that I could instead focus my desired enjoyment on the actual aforementioned game activities - and earn my sense of accomplishment from those.
That's not even close to being true. Bounty hunting, mission rewards, exobiology, and mining are organic elements of the game naturally presented to you & explained to you via information contained ingame. The crystal shard, 'crashed ship', & guardian sites are not.
Suggesting "just go play something else" when confronted with a game's extant issues is not a commendable way of addressing the real problems at hand. Many games & their communities suffer from this deplorable mindset, and it always results in the game wallowing in the doldrums instead of improving to be a more widely enjoyable experience. Games can always be improved, there's no reason to avoid doing so.
I am on topic. We're discussing the purpose Engineering serves in the game. You are making statements to the effect of "grinding in Engineering is the game". And I vehemently disagree, and take umbrance with any such view that this should be the intention of it.
That's optimistic for 60 jumps with at least 1min per jump + fuel scooping, but if you go out towards Synuefe/Wregoe to catch some neutron boosts you can maybe cut it down a bit, but it's still going to be at least an hour one way + supercruise time just to get there and the under 35ly range might run into some trouble navigating some of the sparser areas.
Doing the non stop jumping for 2-3 hours will get you in position to start gathering 1/3 of the materials you need for engineering (being generous here and just going by type). This is considered to be good, most effective way to get the materials because it's a workaround to the worse ways. It's also very silly if you stop to think about it.
In practice new players who know about the shards will hopefully be able to get a ride on a carrier to get there.
It's another one of those cases where if they had to accurately describe the systems in a manual/codex then it would be easier to just redo the systems instead of trying to document it.
What's left is literally everything else in the game that doesn't involve blandly sitting in supercruise doing nothing, repeating garbage collection duties, or doing things to prepare your ship to do the things you want to do.I'd tend to think that anyone that doesn't like spending a lot of time traveling in a space ship has chosen the wrong game.
So if we get rid of or reduce time spent in supercruise, remove or speed up the mat gathering, and then possibly reduce the time needed to actually engineer a ship.
What's left of the game?
FWIW, I just took a weekend trip out to colonia, maybe a bit boring to do 120 jumps one after another, but on the other hand the jet cones make it more interesting. Of course entirely my fault as I could have taken my time and done exploration instead.
If you can't recognize what else there is to do in the game, then I think you've got a tinge of space madness or are otherwise lost. There is a whole lot of game to engage with in Elite that has nothing to do with any of those things - not that a new player would know, with these issues staring them in the face, as happened with the OP of this thread.
Well it's not like your thrusters matter much for interstellar traversal
Would be cool if Engineering permitted some way to affect supercruise travel behavior, though... could also doubly be a solution to my grievances with it!
Yes but I put a 3A scoop in the build as I have in my Hauler that I use for Bio hunting and it fills the tank in that very quickly so I don’t think it would be too far off.
Never even considered that but then I haven’t got round to really trying neutron boosting yet.
Yes it’s been a couple of years since I last went there and I had forgotten the cruise at the end. I believe the route planner I used was reliable so it should work out, a slightly less long legged Hauler was something like 75 jumps.
True.
In Traveller, the pen-and-paper RPG that Elite was based on, getting a ship constructed or refitted takes weeks in a naval shipyard. And you can jump once every week or two, from one star system to another, spending about a week in jump space and another week travelling to or from your destination port in-system, refuelling and seeking cargo (which can take days). Imagine that in real time, if it were a MMO game.
The expeditions towards the core of the galaxy took decades or centuries, even with eventual top speeds of 4-6 parsecs (13-20 light years) per jump/every two weeks. And couldn't even get all the way there due to radiation issues.
In Elite people buckyball the entire galaxy in a few hours.
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Though lightweighting them can help with jump range.Well it's not like your thrusters matter much for interstellar traversal
That's nonsense- the whole point of improving suits, weapons etc is to be able to do such quests faster and more efficiently, and to go into areas that are too dangerous for the neophyte. There is a skill called patience. Git gud.
Pfft, went in a 17ly Python lol!
And they've been reworked, removed, neutered etc and you know what? The complaining hasn't stopped, so maybe it wasn't the grindy requirements at all, or why would they still be complaining?
How much is enough? Don't answer that, it's rhetorical because your answer is indeed an opinion also, the correct answer is, "there is no correct answer!"
There are Cmdrs who will complain about grinding mats that have no use.
There are Cmdrs who will try to complete the G5 circle for some reason on who knows how many modules.
There isn't going to be any level that is acceptable to these Cmdrs because they won't say to themselves; 'Stuff it, that'll do!'
There are Cmdrs who will try to complete the G5 circle for some reason on who knows how many modules.
There isn't going to be any level that is acceptable to these Cmdrs because they won't say to themselves; 'Stuff it, that'll do!'
There is a correct answer and that is: Drop the addiction-inducing gameplay and make a decent game instead of a busywork generator for reward junkies.