And what is new player friendly? Easy mode? Arcade mode, get it all faster and easier?
We all have had to learn the game and try to get the best out of it..
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
- Start date
We all have had to learn the game and try to get the best out of it..
I think it was more or less the plan from the start. Initially NPC didn't equip all the hull reinforcement possible in vanilla. The table was deactivated. Only when engineering released the hit point bloat would bloom by allowing NPC to equip all the stuff. Possibly the game was designed to have a progrerssion curve like this but it didn't make it to 1.0 and a DLC with new content is a sell, too.
The game was also too big in distancces to cover from the start. Noone really likes hitting J a thousand times to go places. The improvement of jump range was likely to be intended to come later. Makes the DLC even more attractive to sell when you can present the "live game" to evolve.
There's several drawbacks of using overcharged incendiary multicannons: ammo duration, weakness to chaff spam, some shots inevitably get wasted so your effective DPS is always lower than on paper, you can't as reliably target modules (which is really important for faster kills), and heat becomes a rapid problem unless you deliberately keep WEP topped up at all times (incendiary MCs have about as much heat as an unengineered beam laser of the same size class, for reference.)
One can also easily use Short Range for gimballed multicannons for better benefits with the only drawback of dealing no damage past 2km - but you're likely not hitting shots past that threshold anyway. However, SR does have the higher heat penalty so that's a consideration if you still want incendiary MCs.
And you ideally still want G5 on those multicannons which is high material investment.
The "cheap and quick" option for low-investment & easy-to-use engineering is really LR1 lasers/railguns with 1 corrosive applicator, with a thermal vent beam to easily simplify heat problems.
Bottom line: the nuances of outfitting & engineering are not simple and it is a big hurdle for newer players that isn't helped by giving "possible" recommendations instead of "advisable".
This is a bit of a side note more for any browsing newer players, but Robigo has been outdated and not anywhere near the level of better credit-generating methods for years. A nice consistent place to pick up lots of mission mats if you don't mind the journey and having rep built up out there, but that's about all that's worth.
This would be horrible. Engineering is already far too effective, thinking about anything that even resembles 'infinite scaling' is taking the balance that was already thrown out the window and serving it with a horrid and torturous eternal damnation in the 7th ring of hell.
"Cookie cutter" problems arise as a result of there not being enough equally balanced, viable, and interesting options to choose from. Not because things aren't powerful enough or because there isn't enough grind.
On this topic, I don't think Morbad is in the minority at all, nobody expected or asked for the massive power creep injection we got from Engineering. Vanilla Elite was a whole different animal, and it was even balanced & fun, for a time. Nothing about Engineering has ever been close to that point of balance.
The jump range thing... I have mixed feelings, because obviously players are going to want to make a massive 1:1 scale galaxy feel 'smaller', because space is really big and even with abstracted wormhole travel it really did take a long time to traverse. I think neutron + synthesis went too far, but the guardian FSD booster is pretty nice. I think supercruise is by far the bigger problem with 'travel time sink', but here we are.
I don't think this is at all the game players wanted, however - the mountain of discussions and feedback just in these forums, let alone the reddits & discords, is a testament to that. I feel there's been a distinct issue with clarity of vision & direction with the game that has manifested in all the problems that active players have all learned to live with, to whichever varying degree.
That doesn't make it not worth trying to improve it. The fun fact about things never being perfect, is that there's always something to improve upon.
That's also very true, and how would one appreciate the good without experiencing the bad.
Just another quick side-note: railguns actually don't have absolute damage. They might have had at one point in the past, but nowadays they're just split between thermal/kinetic.
No, I actually am not - as for me playing the contrarian...
Are they? OK...
A rare Morbad post where I disagree... RNG is the devil, most games force-inject far too much of it, and it should only ever be used in carefully measured & heavily diluted amounts. Nothing sucks more than facing consequences of outcomes completely out of your hands.
The concept of having safety & performance margins, however, I feel has merit - like running the throttle too long at 100% or higher in War Thunder damaging/overheating your plane.
As opposed to having it forced upon you? I much, much prefer the opt-in approach. It's more accessible, more fun, more go-your-own-pace, and less feeling like being punished for bothering to invest any time and effort in a game.
Note that "challenge" and "frustration" are two distinctly different things. Only the former is actually fun.
Sure, but that needn't mean we try to preserve the bad at the cost of the good!
The question is, what is good and what is bad. Unfortunately opinions are divided..
There's an universal difficulty in more non-linear games with judging how difficult a fight will be and if you're prepared enough for it. Which is why many games just abstract that down to assigning a level to enemies. It's good for more casual games.
Elite doesn't have that and the inspect features from targeting aren't enough either and even if they were you couldn't reliably find enemies of the same type/difficulty to fight.
So you have to consider:
- How strong is the enemy ship?
- How skilled is the enemy? (Elite helps you out here, but only a bit - as a beginner you won't know how easy/tough a rank is and as a vet it won't matter)
- How strong is my ship (maybe even in relation to their ship, if you're skilled enough to tell an anaconda from an asp)?
- How skilled am I?
- How much stronger do I need to make my ship to beat their ship at my current skill level?
- How long will it take to make my ship that strong?
Removing engineering from the equation would vastly reduce the problem space of 3-4 of the variables you need to solve for, but that's also what adds depth to the game.
What's the right answer/winning move here with the current engineering system? Do engineering even though it takes forever or just look for the few types of ships you can actually kill until you "git gud"? Neither seems like a good option.
Yeah, none of the new activities are as boring as robigo though which is why I used that to rhyme with the HGE collecting stuff,
Yeah that's right I added rails there to have an hitscan option against faster builds but didn't bother to clarify damage types.
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Of course - apart from the Hutton Truckers, are there many players who elect to do that run more than once?
There are a few systems where the destination for a mission is a very long supercruise journey, should one accept, the nice thing is that the mission tells the player the distance, observational skills and a decision of whether the journey is worthwhile is entirely the domain of the player.
Ah, the usual inclusive 'most' - so opinion, rather than fact.
Not really. I would define "new player friendly" as intuitive, accessible, easy to understand, easy to use, safe to use, minimal drawbacks/trade-offs being made, while still offering the means to improve as a player.
There is a great deal to learn about the options available in the game to get the best out of it, indeed - which is really the rub here. Getting started with misleading ideas or impressions is a quick path to frustration.
First "bad" must be defined as fact, rather than opinion, surely? (as must "good")
It shouldn't even have to be a consideration. Many parts of the galaxy exist only at the far end of a long period of sunk time. That's a big flaw as a game experience.
Nothing about this statement makes any sense. Use of the word "most" has nothing to do with opinions vs factual observations. It is more true to say "most" instead of "all" or "none" or "few". Sometimes I think you're just out to grind my gears, honestly....