General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

I'm a player who didn't watch any exploit videos. Never went for the gold rushes. From my experience you don't get anywhere in ED if you just play along. No reputation, no credits (that might have changed by now, but I made less than a billion total back then), no materials, no powerplay thingums. What you get is random loot that doesn't bring you forward at all. And when you want to go forward you have to burn that preciuous stuff in unfavourable trades.

Nah. If you liked doing ED your way, you were screwed when the engineers came. It was yet another dreadful stretched progression bolted on the others of which they alleviated the credits so we can listen to "credits are meaningless today!" when in reality the problem is something else entirely.
OTOH I get everything I want, including engineering, by just playing the game and never grinding. I think the fundamental difference is really between someone who plays the game and someone who doesn't. ;-)
 
I'm a player who didn't watch any exploit videos. Never went for the gold rushes. From my experience you don't get anywhere in ED if you just play along. No reputation, no credits (that might have changed by now, but I made less than a billion total back then), no materials, no powerplay thingums. What you get is random loot that doesn't bring you forward at all. And when you want to go forward you have to burn that preciuous stuff in unfavourable trades.

Nah. If you liked doing ED your way, you were screwed when the engineers came. It was yet another dreadful stretched progression bolted on the others of which they alleviated the credits so we can listen to "credits are meaningless today!" when in reality the problem is something else entirely.

I think one has to strike a balance between "playing along", as you say, and "exploiting".

If you ever find yourself grinding away for ages at some particular in-game activity that you inherently dislike doing, then you're going to get tired of the game even if you achieve something at the end of said grinding, because then your frame of mind will be that you will "have to" go through the same kind of grind again in order to get the next thing that you want. That doesn't sound sustainable to me.

For example, I've been engineering my Type-10 a lot recently, and that has demanded rather a lot of G5 manufactured materials. There are two ways I'm aware of for acquiring G5 manufactured mats; doing missions and HGE farming. Now personally what I do is make use of tools like Inara to find nearby high-population systems in Boom states and navigate between those, scanning the Nav Beacon to resolve signal sources and then go down through the list in the Nav panel, scooping up the G4/G5 mats at each HGE. It's not as "exciting" as doing missions, but it is faster, and for my purposes speed is what I'm interested in at the moment. But the missions are there if I do end up getting bored of HGE farming.

I think it also helps not to get stuck in a rut of doing one kind of thing for too long. Change up what you're doing. I had been grinding Fed rank over the past weekend, but when I received a Tip-Off from a Mysterious Stranger I went and looked into that for a change of pace. I might return to the Fed rank activity when I start playing again, or I might think of doing something else, such as unlocking the Trident SLF.
 
Yes. Praise the Lord. "Credits are meaningless now."
They weren't back then, though, but they piled the crappy engineering on top regardless. Quite right, no one probably cares about credits anymore. There just is the awful hamster wheeler of material aqcuisition (it was even worse than the pitiful credit earning quota).
Grind is FD's development paradigma. It's caked into every of their progression steps. The rewards are never enough and rarely are they worth playing "normally". In order to get something done, you need to do the exploits.
 
Grind is FD's development paradigma. It's caked into every of their progression steps. The rewards are never enough and rarely are they worth playing "normally". In order to get something done, you need to do the exploits.
Grind is a mindset, NOT a gameplay element.
If you're going to continue to comment on a game you don't play, at least state you that each time. Consider it a courtesy to new players.
 
new folks need to experience and play the game and avoid YT videos pushing them to grind this or grind that
they also need to acknowledge the fact that ED is a career game, a game of long term goals, not a game that can be speed run in 20 hours.
Agreed. I've been playing for roughly 5 years (minus a few breaks), and I'm still learning new things. My current break is due to finding out there is no way to get Guardian module blueprints near Colonia. I've got new goals in mind now, with a couple new things to learn first. The end of my latest break is very close.

Perseverance and attention to detail pays off in this game. Rushing and skipping details results in frustration. Baby steps lead to great strides, it just takes time.
 
If you think the engineering is bad now you may want to look at it's first iteration !!!

I remember the first iteration. The scramble to engineer a stack of combat ships before the competition outpaced me, then throwing them all away multiple times as meta after meta fell to evolving tactics and often radical balance patches.

Anyway, the original incarnation being worse doesn't make the current incarnation good.

This game does not have "outdated" stuff, everything can be used / done today as 11 years ago.

Huge swaths of game are functionally depreciated. Sometimes you can go through the motions of what used to be, but without any need or utility behind it to give context it's rather senseless. In other cases, there are hard mechanical barriers in the way of past experiences. In any case, there is no going back to the game that was.

Why isnt that 'information' in the game we are all playing, surely with all the walls of text in game surely someone could have added that one. Google should not be required to play a game if its written properly.

I never found third-party sources necessary. I'm sure it makes things faster though, if one has a particular goal in mind.
 
I understand your frustration, but we're relatively new and still have that "New-Player hope."
If you look at engineering as a shopping list then it's going to feel like an outing to the grocery store. But if you're walking through a field in spring and picking some choice flowers along the way, then maybe one can enjoy the walk and the gathering. There is no immediate need for engineering.
 
If you look at engineering as a shopping list then it's going to feel like an outing to the grocery store. But if you're walking through a field in spring and picking some choice flowers along the way, then maybe one can enjoy the walk and the gathering. There is no immediate need for engineering.
Until the engineer asks for a dozen eggs, some bacon, four pints of milk and a ton of meta-alloy 🤣
 
If you look at engineering as a shopping list then it's going to feel like an outing to the grocery store. But if you're walking through a field in spring and picking some choice flowers along the way, then maybe one can enjoy the walk and the gathering. There is no immediate need for engineering.
There's some truth to you what you say, but you selected which field to walk through. You can enjoy the process so not consider it a grind, but unless your field had 15 financial projections, you had to go looking for them at some point. Same with opinion polls and settlement defense plans. Some just want to do nothing but the most efficient A to B activity, foregoing any "wasted" efforts. Again, it's goal dependent. I don't believe anyone who says something like "I have 5 Dominator suits to grade 5, all with engineering slots full, just from playing around and not even focused on getting any materials". As someone who's collected and sold boatloads of mats, the odds of having everything you need for those upgrades before filling everything else up, through random material acquisition, is extremely low to impossible.
 
There's some truth to you what you say, but you selected which field to walk through. You can enjoy the process so not consider it a grind, but unless your field had 15 financial projections, you had to go looking for them at some point. Same with opinion polls and settlement defense plans. Some just want to do nothing but the most efficient A to B activity, foregoing any "wasted" efforts. Again, it's goal dependent. I don't believe anyone who says something like "I have 5 Dominator suits to grade 5, all with engineering slots full, just from playing around and not even focused on getting any materials". As someone who's collected and sold boatloads of mats, the odds of having everything you need for those upgrades before filling everything else up, through random material acquisition, is extremely low to impossible.
So, on the way to the field traffic was bad.
 
Until the engineer asks for a dozen eggs, some bacon, four pints of milk and a ton of meta-alloy 🤣
lol, I get it, but for a new player there is no immediate need for engineering, ship or onfoot. It's a shame that I see some quick to pull the criticize the game trigger rather than suggest that there are better ways to enjoy the start of the game and that the engineers are really mid-late game level activities.
 
lol, I get it, but for a new player there is no immediate need for engineering, ship or onfoot. It's a shame that I see some quick to pull the criticize the game trigger rather than suggest that there are better ways to enjoy the start of the game and that the engineers are really mid-late game level activities.
Oh I disagree. The amount of early on time wasted by not taking materials you could need later on seems to be a particular sore spot for a lot of new players. This is why guides exist.
 
Oh I disagree. The amount of early on time wasted by not taking materials you could need later on seems to be a particular sore spot for a lot of new players. This is why guides exist.
I was continuing on from my original post about gathering mats while looking around so I didn't think I needed to specify that I wasn't suggesting to ignore material gathering in the early game, rather do it as you go along. I'm saying that because that's what I did and when it came time I was able to pretty much engineer G5 on mostly everything I wanted to for multiple ships. There was no material grind for me. I will say I haven't gotten around to the onfoot engineers, but again, because I'm taking my time with it and finding some G3 pre-engineered weapons and suits has served me just fine until I get around to it.
 
There's some truth to you what you say, but you selected which field to walk through. You can enjoy the process so not consider it a grind, but unless your field had 15 financial projections, you had to go looking for them at some point. Same with opinion polls and settlement defense plans. Some just want to do nothing but the most efficient A to B activity, foregoing any "wasted" efforts. Again, it's goal dependent. I don't believe anyone who says something like "I have 5 Dominator suits to grade 5, all with engineering slots full, just from playing around and not even focused on getting any materials". As someone who's collected and sold boatloads of mats, the odds of having everything you need for those upgrades before filling everything else up, through random material acquisition, is extremely low to impossible.
I used to do a lot of power up settlement missions. Frequently in Bust systems so Financial Projections were picked up along the way.
I picked up Opinion Polls mostly by stopping to check dataports in hab blocks at settlements I was trading with. So yes they just happened to be there to pick up as I went along. In fact I still do, I have Opinion Polls coming out of my ears now.
 
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While I understand and appreciate the advises of seasonned cmdrs about gathering materials now that I've started some engineering, I also remember recently when I just started the game some months ago, that there is already a lot to learn and get used to with the basics, like for example: hud reading, ingame menus, remembering every keyboard mapping for on foot, SRV, ship, galaxy map that has a load of functions, ACS, then the ship handling itself, how to land on stations, on planets, various cruises, types of celestial bodies...
I mean, even if you are relatively used to simulations, gaming, sci-fi and so on like I am, it is already a little bit overwhelming at the beginning, and I don't know about OP and their family, if they are scifi/gaming nerds or maybe some of them are casual people willing to give a try and enjoy a moment with the family, but what would you do with grades and so on whereas you don't even know yet you actually have a cargo bay and a button to open/close it. (example not random but relatable to my own case)

Say, you are an 80s guitar hero, heavy metal high velocity soloist, this time giving a first guitar lesson to a complete beginner that doesn't handle the instrument properly yet, doesn't know how to tune the strings fora start, and you teach them chords, scales, sweeping/taping/shredding techniques already, this one is going to give up, disgusted by how complicated the matter is instead of helping build some confidence and will to persevere.

But here in the end, it's a game in which you can do whatever you want with no harm: RP, micromanaging material boards, incarnate the Evil and murder a dozen of poor inocent biologist NPCs for an epoxy adhesive tube, aimless wandering in space with a beer and the music after a crappy day for the sake of chill... all of this at once or something else, it's not a job accountable to some hierarchy watching for your efficiency I humbly believe, so if you only have a few hours a week to sink for the game and your main purpose is to share a moment of fun with the beloved family, you can still have fun for cheap and rock that vanilla Adder with the 380 free earned arx pink paintjob if you wish, Omnipol is not going to deny your permission to play because of that.
 
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