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

[Ian Doncaster]

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.

A third way (for most of them) is destroying high-rank large ships (e.g. Deadly/Elite Anaconda/T-10) - you don't get to choose the material and you won't get Military Supercapacitors or Improvised Components that way, and of course you need a ship which can take them on in the first place, but if you do relatively little G5 engineering in the first place it can provide more than enough of most of them.

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.

Absolutely this. Pretty much all the guidance and indeed helper tools out there is written by people who've played for years, and aimed (intentionally or not) at the same sort of players. It's set around people who have decently full material reserves (and no shortage of credits either), and maybe just need to get hold of something specific quickly. And so it drags actual beginners at full speed into the absolutely worst bits of the design of the engineering process ... to get them an absolutely marginal performance gain on what they could have achieved with a much simpler and easier approach.

Of course, if the ship engineering process was better designed, it wouldn't be so straightforward for people to produce really bad guides to it.
- ridiculously escalating costs for sub-linear improvements are basically impossible to balance - and ship engineering scales up costs even faster than the credit economy. (And so, the suggestions for Frontier to apply the same fix)
- the order in which blueprints appear when you unlock engineers encourages depth-first rather than breadth-first upgrading, so you get hit with the expensive ones very quickly.
- the material trading costs and blueprint generation costs are basically entirely unrelated to either how difficult the material is to obtain or how useful the blueprint is.

(Suit engineering fixes a lot of the problems with ship engineering, but not the one where a bunch of people with empty material reserves approach it as if they were approaching ship engineering with full-ish material reserves and run straight into the resulting wall)

 

[Dillon Fallon]

It's really not that bad. I started bounty hunting in the stock Sidewinder and managed fine. First thing I've ever done with most ships is take it out as soon as it's capable of shooting at something to see how it handles- even my Cutter had it's first run in with pirates with E rated thrusters.

I'd certainly be comfortable taking a ship into a CZ just using modifications from the first tier of engineers. Engineering does massively improve your ship, but the importance of it to a new player is massively exaggerated.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It's really not that bad. I started bounty hunting in the stock Sidewinder and managed fine. First thing I've ever done with most ships is take it out as soon as it's capable of shooting at something to see how it handles- even my Cutter had it's first run in with pirates with E rated thrusters.

I'd certainly be comfortable taking a ship into a CZ just using modifications from the first tier of engineers. Engineering does massively improve your ship, but the importance of it to a new player is massively exaggerated.

Weapons turn peashooters. If you want a sensible kill rate you need to engineer your weapons.

 

[angusmadmac1]

Because engineering is there it's seen as a must have. It just makes the game easier ...
The collection of materials is at the start a pain you don't have those parts so you need to find them .
The progression in engineering is nuts g1 =1 roll G5 = 11 rolls ?
And yes I know you don't really need to max out G5, but I do .
Yes it's become easier with mat traders but the exchange rate is terrible 150 G5 to another G5 all you get is 25 ??
There is plenty of things that "could" be fixed but won't be as they have already been Fixed.
Can't comment on Suit stuff as I'm a console player .

 

[Northpin]

It's really not that bad.

It certainly wasnt.

So, i started at the end of November 2018 on XBox
By the end of January 2019 i had like 3-4bn assets, a Cutter (going through Sidewinder, Cobra Mk3, AspX, Krait Mk2, Python, Cutter) decently engineered and almost all bubble engineers unlocked (i certainly didnt had Lori, not sure i had Palin), Trade Elite and Exploration Elite too.
No mining involved, btw. Just running missions, bounties and the likes - but playing exclusively solo and focusing on my agenda/goals
But, i was really really hooked and i think i already had like 350-400h played in like 10-11 weeks

Exactly 1 year later i got my Steam account - more than 2 months i played with no engineering and it was a really nice experience - the new player experience they introduced in september 2019 made for a really nice alt-start
Another year later, i got my Epic account - and again for more than 2 months i played with no engineering, but then gradually unlocking them all

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Weapons turn peashooters. If you want a sensible kill rate you need to engineer your weapons.

Skipping over the fact that I've managed bounty hunting in completely unengineered and not even A rated ships, that's just one engineer (Todd the Blaster) and probably the one that's the simplest one to unlock.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Absolutely this. Pretty much all the guidance and indeed helper tools out there is written by people who've played for years, and aimed (intentionally or not) at the same sort of players. It's set around people who have decently full material reserves (and no shortage of credits either), and maybe just need to get hold of something specific quickly. And so it drags actual beginners at full speed into the absolutely worst bits of the design of the engineering process ... to get them an absolutely marginal performance gain on what they could have achieved with a much simpler and easier approach.

The issue with this is that if you start out with empty materials and nothing unlocked the most efficient way to fill them is still to fill up on imperial shelding or whatever the first HGE you come across happens to be and trade for the lower tier materials - picking up 1-2 pieces of imperial shielding instead of individually scooping up 300 G1 materials.

Veteran-focused guides end up being simpler and easier to understand because they don't bother with the "don't do X because of Y" to avoid all the gotchas and newb traps the game has. This doesn't exactly teach you all the convoluted stuff behind why it's the most efficient way to gather materials, but there's really not much value in that if that knowledge just isn't useful anywhere in the game.

- the material trading costs and blueprint generation costs are basically entirely unrelated to either how difficult the material is to obtain or how useful the blueprint is.

That's actually somewhat self balancing - due to HGEs/trading every material is about as difficult to get and it comes down to RNG for the rarer types of HGE (which fortunatley you don't need that many of for common mods) so you're more likely to run out of materials for useful/common blueprints like heavy duty hull reinforcements or overcharged MCs that you engineer multiples of rather than the useless ones. This feels accidental and could be better.

All of this is due to elite being perhaps too sandbox-y so there's really no progression curve and it's possible to just go from nothing to maxed out somewhat fast in engineering if you focus and do it the meta way or to be permanently lost and stuck in a non-intuitive system. Neither option is fun and there's no real middle way here - that's just slow progression. On top of that as I keep saying - material gathering and engineering just isn't a fun activity in-game due to the balance and menu delays and it's just something people are forced into to become more powerful.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Skipping over the fact that I've managed bounty hunting in completely unengineered and not even A rated ships, that's just one engineer (Todd the Blaster) and probably the one that's the simplest one to unlock.

I don't care much what experience you had. Mine was different. The bulletsponge was extreme.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

It certainly wasnt.

So, i started at the end of November 2018 on XBox
By the end of January 2019 i had like 3-4bn assets, a Cutter (going through Sidewinder, Cobra Mk3, AspX, Krait Mk2, Python, Cutter) decently engineered and almost all bubble engineers unlocked (i certainly didnt had Lori, not sure i had Palin), Trade Elite and Exploration Elite too.
No mining involved, btw. Just running missions, bounties and the likes - but playing exclusively solo and focusing on my agenda/goals
But, i was really really hooked and i think i already had like 350-400h played in like 10-11 weeks

Exactly 1 year later i got my Steam account - more than 2 months i played with no engineering and it was a really nice experience - the new player experience they introduced in september 2019 made for a really nice alt-start
Another year later, i got my Epic account - and again for more than 2 months i played with no engineering, but then gradually unlocking them all

Yeah, my progression was somewhat similar (Sidewinder, Viper 3, Cobra 3, iCourier, Clipper, FdL, Cutter).
Didn't do any engineering until I had my Clipper, which was after about 2 months of playing the game and I think it was 12 months before I could really say any of my ships were 'finished'.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

I don't care much what experience you had. Mine was different. The bulletsponge was extreme.

Said perfectly right there. Your experience was your own and others see it differently.

 

[angusmadmac1]

I don't care much what experience you had. Mine was different. The bulletsponge was extreme.

Like wise apart from I never really noticed the bullet sponge ? So my experience was totally different in fact I started 2016 and finished unlocking my last engineers 2020 ? I got my triple elite in 2018/2019.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The issue with this is that if you start out with empty materials and nothing unlocked the most efficient way to fill them is still to fill up on imperial shelding or whatever the first HGE you come across happens to be and trade for the lower tier materials - picking up 1-2 pieces of imperial shielding instead of individually scooping up 300 G1 materials.

Yes, it is.

And if beginners do that without questioning "why do I need 300 G1 materials?" or "why do I need a full material reserve in the first place?" they'll probably end up complaining about the grind very quickly.

The whole nature of ship engineering is that it's designed such that you can engineer an entire ship to G3 (or an entire fleet to G1) for the same materials cost as a single maxed G5 upgrade, and get a much higher performance gain that way. If you're short of materials, doing that might be all you ever need to do (a G3 ship is still massively overpowered for most PvE content) and if you do upgrade it further later none of that early breadth-first work was wasted.

That can be done by HGE downtrading, but the materials needed for an entire G3 ship are also possible to obtain relatively efficiently by other more fun methods, and with a bit of forward planning (say, the sort that a beginner-focused guide might help with) that can be done while going through the engineer unlocking anyway.

but there's really not much value in that if that knowledge just isn't useful anywhere in the game.

Veterans don't need to do cost-benefit analysis because they can afford everything from pocket change, so the cost is always zero no matter how marginal the benefit. Beginners do - but don't have the experience to, and veteran-focused guides are from a "you obviously want the highest possible benefit and don't care about the cost" approach so don't help.

You'd have to fly a ship for tens of thousands of LY for the extra jump range the double-engineered FSD gives to outweigh the extra material collection time over a G5 (or even G4) long-range FSD. If you already have 100 DWEs, sure, what else are you going to spend them on. If you don't already have them, collecting 100 DWEs first so that you then don't need to care about the cost is the sort of thing which gets people complaining about "the grind". Something which will pay off eventually in 1000 hours is only a good investment if you're going to play for 1000 hours and most beginners - even the ones who have a really good time playing ED! - won't.

If the proposal is "change engineering so that beginners can also afford everything from pocket change and no-one needs to do cost-benefit analysis" that's one option to solve the problem, yes. Worked for credits.

due to HGEs/trading every material is about as difficult to get

If trading is the primary way to get a lower grade material that's exactly what I mean by the ease of obtaining it being completely unrelated to how useful it is. At that point the blueprint using the lower-grade material might as well just use 1/3^n as many of the higher grade material, and remove the lower-grade material from the game entirely.

 

[Hellrider]

Some people seriously shoot in legs with shotgun with playing in this game like another korean mmo, where they "need" 100% of power, because with 99,99% they are too weak.
What's even more weird is having such mindset in pve.
In this pve, which is doable without any engineering.
Also, fur future posts- some time ago I did little "test" of npc shields in CZs, for removing "but outside x range you havent 100% of damage" I applied g1 long range for lasers (also- my ship had 20,6 thermal dps, and required time is "time under fire", of course shooting for 100 seconds at 1 target without any break is...little difficult, that's why I usually used lasers for 5 seconds, checked shields of my target, yes, attacked only by me, if in 5s you took 10%, then doing some math to estimate time required for 100% isn't quantum engineering), enjoy

Estimated shield power, and required engineering is based on assumption, that ships have just heavy duty shields, instead some weird mix of resists, so if they would use HD...actually more than 50% of my targets had shields, which are possible to reach without any engineering.
I did that, because a lot of people love claim, that ships in CZs are after "heavy engineering", and "you cannot seriously fight without engineering".

Of course, I could make similar tests for med/high CZs, or even for spec ops/captains, but if people ignore similar tests making additional is pointless (spoiler: they usually ignore it).

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Like wise apart from I never really noticed the bullet sponge ? So my experience was totally different in fact I started 2016 and finished unlocking my last engineers 2020 ? I got my triple elite in 2018/2019.

The statement that you took 4 years to complete the engineer unlocks indicates excessive requirements. Anyway, maybe you unlocked your weapon mods first? Before you levelled up your combat rank and had the hitpoint sponges spawn on you? Bulletsponges spawned on us without such career. We already had levelled combat ranks when they cranked the hitpoints to 11.

 

[angusmadmac1]

The statement that you took 4 years to complete the engineer unlocks indicates excessive requirements. Anyway, maybe you unlocked your weapon mods first? Before you levelled up your combat rank and had the hitpoint sponges spawn on you? Bulletsponges spawned on us without such career. We already had levelled combat ranks when they cranked the hitpoints to 11.

I didn't need those engineers at the time so I didn't do them , whilst I do drop bio waste over Marcos place when I'm in the area I unlocked what I needed no rush . Some of the engineers in the bubble were unlocked before the new easier engineering was dropped. I spent a lot of time just bimballing around doing stuff.
Combat was my last rank hence why it took so long to unlock the last engineers and I only needed the last quarter to Elite. I was in no real rush and was enjoying the game in all of it's iterations .

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Also, fur future posts- some time ago I did little "test" of npc shields in CZs, for removing "but outside x range you havent 100% of damage" I applied g1 long range for lasers (also- my ship had 20,6 thermal dps, and required time is "time under fire", of course shooting for 100 seconds at 1 target without any break is...little difficult, that's why I usually used lasers for 5 seconds, checked shields of my target, yes, attacked only by me, if in 5s you took 10%, then doing some math to estimate time required for 100% isn't quantum engineering), enjoy

These numbers seem way too low. How do you account for NPCs putting pips to shields after a while and the speed at which they do that being determined by their rank which caps their APM? How do you account for shield cell banks? How do you account shield recharge on that cutter that takes 100s of continous fire to shield strip during that time? Similarly chaff can also draw out fights long enough for recharge times to start mattering more.

Also I thought CZ ships had varying engineering based on the rank of the pilot which is another factor to consider.

And all that is just if you try to run the numbers without taking pilot skill and other unquantifiable things into account.

A CZ captain can absolutely frustrate even a fully engineered big ship and will just get away if you try to just shoot at it normally instead of dealing with the SCBs somehow so do the numbers really matter there?

I did that, because a lot of people love claim, that ships in CZs are after "heavy engineering", and "you cannot seriously fight without engineering".

Would you suggest anyone who's just starting out do CZs without fully engineering their ship? That's usually the context here - someone who's new to the game touches the stove and gets burnt and maybe comes back with some engineering to enjoy a bit of success. Telling people to not worry about CZs until they have engineered the ship is maybe more encouraging ("its not your fault, the content is just hard") than implying the should be able to do them with whatever loadout they have which can come across a bit like "git gud" unless you're very careful in how you word it.

The tragedy here of course is that it turns out the suggested alternative of going on a personal narrative quest to upgrade your ship is apparently terrible gameplay in Elite, but if you stick to CZs as a beginner you don't get the materials to improve your ship at a reasonable rate.

The other, more veteran, consideration being BGS where the war is actually contested by other players and you want your side to win so you want to clear as many CZs as fast as possible.

 

[angusmadmac1]

Deleted slightly off topic

 

[Northpin]

Would you suggest anyone who's just starting out do CZs without fully engineering their ship?

As long your piloting skills (which do not depend on engineering) are decent, you dont need any engineering to do and win Low CZ.
And learning to fly up to a decent level is faster than fully engineering a ship and much much entertaining than following YT grinding guides

All you need is a ship prepped for combat (all internals hrp, mrp) and then just some common sense as in not engage ships that are not already engaged and damaged by your team

 

[zimms]

Some people seriously shoot in legs with shotgun with playing in this game like another korean mmo, where they "need" 100% of power, because with 99,99% they are too weak.
What's even more weird is having such mindset in pve.
[...]

And the weirdest part would be if nowadays a game developer was surprised a lot of players would behave like that in an MMO.

 

[Hellrider]

As long your piloting skills (which do not depend on engineering) are decent, you dont need any engineering to do and win Low CZ.

What actually can give us some answers.
Example- which sort of people pretend, that they need ultra good engineering to do any combat