...or just Let it Gooooo.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
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What I mean is why chase the combat rank? To get a decal or maybe to get harder enemies? I mean being Elite in combat doesn't really mean a lot..
Elite combat has little to do with the "gathering grind", it's about killing other ships (and I think you advance through on foot combat too).
I can agree, that alternative would have its own big drawbacks... but at least the timesink wouldn't be one of them. I think it can be better.
If a lot of CGs were involved, then it definitely took you many weeks at the least... as you can only have 1 CG a week at most, and that's if it happens to be a combat CG. Missions don't grant you extra combat experience in any way.
I'd agree having an alternative would be nice. But there really isn't one - just acceptance of mediocrity through avoiding it/prolonging the task of doing it, or varying degrees of self-challenge.
To me, the game's "play your own way" finally & truely opens up when you surpass the hurdles presented by Engineering.
That's a fair & good question. The thing is, Fdev has set precious few goalposts & achievements in the game to reach for... and the Elite ranks are the most prominent and obvious ones (it is in the name of the game, as well); they are in-your-face right from your first moment in a ship, after all.
I have heard that foot combat can progress it too, which I find to be utterly bonkers. I haven't looked into it though.
Setting that strange design choice aside, your ship's combat effectiveness is easily the thing most affected by Engineering upgrades. Side by side comparisons of Vanilla & Engineered ships are on orders of magnitude of differences in number output. It's not even remotely contestable.
So... if any rank-chasing activity in the game is going to have to do with the gathering grind, it's going for combat Elite. At least, if you care at all about making it as painless and efficient as you can.
Why would you think I'm singling you out?
But while we're on the subject, you don't need to make a separate post for each quoteYou can use the multiquote tool, saves loads of space.
My apologies for assuming it was angled towards my commentary in particular, then.
I admit there's one or two topics I could've merged together recently, I'll apologize for that as well.
On the whole I don’t have issues with the time it takes, it is a game and they are timesinks.
Sorry my bad I meant to say mere weeks, it took me about two years of having fun and ending sessions if I was getting bored.
To me the problem with engineering is everyone is in such a rush to do things and reach the “end” as quickly as possible. Elite isn’t that sort of game.
Of course, but the idea is the time sunk is spent doing something, not effectively being an egg in cryosleep waiting for the timer to reach the appropriate number for activity to occur.
So, in other words, it took you two years while playing your own way.
Most gamers would call that a significantly large chunk of time. Even a few weeks of focused effort is significantly large for one task in the game.
And this is without considering that Elite trading/exploration/exobiology can be done within a handful of days, if it even takes that long anymore.
It is disingenuous to claim that in light of all this, that achieving combat Elite is not a grind.
The "end" is "getting to do what you actually want". That's why you see players seeking to rush it (and thereby make the painful part of the process go by so the good part can come). It's the very fact Elite isn't that sort of game that players want to get to doing what they actually want.
It's almost certain under those condition I wouldn't be playing at all, but oh well horses for courses I guess.
I'd still advocate to just do whatever seems fun at the moment, and to collect mats while doing it.
Like that you're having fun and advancing in the game. 2000 hours later, hey I just got Elite in combat!
Can you get mats from arguing on the forums? They should probably add that
Yep.
It is a fair old chunk of time.
But the effort was focussed on every activity I was doing in Elite not any one thing.
Trading came a long time second with Exploration third again by a whole chunk of time, Exobiology has been quicker.
Here we come into how we define grind for the most part what I do/have done in Elite hasn’t been a grind in my mind.
On console I'd made it to Deadly. I was hoping to make Elite by the time Ody was released.
Various combat encounters had occurred leading up to that point though I suspect most of the kills were ultimately scouts during various Incursions. Though in the immediate period before Transfer I'd been doing refugee runs for rep.
Following transfer we of course wound up in the Thargoid war so more refugees, scouts and ultimately the AX restoration missions which I was expecting to get Merc rank for.
Obviously the primary objective was preventing Alerts and it came as surprise to find my Combat rank climbing the way it did.
Made Combat Elite (and Triple Elite) a touch before Xmas with a bit under 8k hours on the clock.
At no point was I "grinding for combat rank" it just accumulates over time.
Various combat encounters had occurred leading up to that point though I suspect most of the kills were ultimately scouts during various Incursions. Though in the immediate period before Transfer I'd been doing refugee runs for rep.
Following transfer we of course wound up in the Thargoid war so more refugees, scouts and ultimately the AX restoration missions which I was expecting to get Merc rank for.
Obviously the primary objective was preventing Alerts and it came as surprise to find my Combat rank climbing the way it did.
Made Combat Elite (and Triple Elite) a touch before Xmas with a bit under 8k hours on the clock.
At no point was I "grinding for combat rank" it just accumulates over time.
Perhaps we need to clarify "grind". To me, grinding is where you fixate on reaching a single goal and loop the gameplay to reach it. You're not thinking of what you're doing, you just want to reach the goal. I don't do this, never have for any of my achievements, as that makes the game very boring - case in point, OP's complaint.
Yes, it took me 4 months to reach Elite in Combat, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting there, organically. I didn't think this was a very long time at all as reaching Elite should take a while. If you really want to know the details, here's the account of my Harmless to Elite journey: Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/myjsiy/elite_rank_in_combat_story_plus_nerd_stats/
The point to OP is that 'grinding' a goal just to get engineering done at all cost might not be the best approach. Play the game, and those goals will reach you.
PS: brace yourself, I just turned Elite IV with 110K kills so far, still doing the same bounty hunting thing. Griiiiiind!!
I think that's a somewhat unfair characterisation (I was not a DDF member)
- the DDF had no actual decision-making power; Frontier still had full and sole responsibility for any actual decisions, as well as the need to implement them in concrete form. Plenty of things discussed as design outlines by the DDF didn't make it into the actual game (some of which I miss, some which I think most people are quite happy about nowadays, some which are both...) ... and that includes the use of microjumps alongside supercruise.
- insofar as the DDF did have a serious bias towards old-timey FFE players, it wasn't at all unrepresentative of the future players hanging around the forums in general at the time; the instinctive dissatisfaction with microjumps that the DDF members had was certainly shared more widely (and it's hard to see how a pure microjumps approach would have worked well with planetary landings later; at least, it doesn't seem popular in Starfield!). "Implement the DDF!" was a frequent call on the forums for years afterwards any time any old-timey FFE player thought something Frontier was doing was the wrong direction, from far more than its former members [1]
- the DDF documents were really high-level; things like "how long will it take to supercruise between distant binary stars?" or "will there be distant binary stars?" or "how will your in-system arrival point be determined?" just weren't covered. You could read the DDF documents, implement a game based on the same subset of them that ED 1.0 implemented, and have a game that barely resembled ED 1.0 in any detail whatsoever (especially if you didn't have "just like FFE" as an implicit requirement).
- there's no guarantee you'd have been any happier with microjumps; getting across to the other side of a system could easily still have taken a very long time (especially if you didn't have an ADS, and were therefore limited to 500/1000 Ls jumps between POIs...)
Frontier I think has learned by now that the usefulness of asking players to comment on a high-level design in advance of there being a low-level implementation to try is basically nil. And possibly even with a low-level implementation: the set of things people complain about Engineering now and the set of complaints during the Beta of and shortly after the release of 3.0's reforms have virtually no overlap!
[1] To drag this subthread back on topic, "they should have implemented the DDF rather than wasting time on Powerplay and Engineers" was a very common sentiment. Arguably both Powerplay and Engineers were implementations of high-level proposals in the DDF, if rather different in the details from what was expected, but still.
Oh, I'm certainly not saying that CQC isn't flawed in many respects (though the powerup dynamic is much less bad in a match with eight top-level players) - but in terms of a model for engineering it could have worked very well. It still surprises me that the boost diverter sidegrades from CQC never made it into the main game in any form.
Interestingly enough, Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 is a title that I find misapplies die rolls, generally by ignoring, or simply not having the ability to recognize, relevant situational considerations. This overly literal application of the rule system often results in slapstick humor, but it rarely helps immerse me in my characters or the settings. Intimidation checks are a prime example of this; an NPC with negligible combat abilities will watch my party annihilate three squads elite of city guards in moments, then belligerently refuse a simple request because the spokesman for these bloodstained gods of murder only had a 30% chance of coming off as eloquent enough to talk said NPC out of suicide by muderhobo. In a tabletop game, or a video game with a more nuanced interpretation of the rules, this roll would never have been called for. An NPC resolved to die rather than be bullied is one thing, but that wouldn't come down to an intimidation skill check. A situation where the relative status or threat posed by other other party is uncertain might come down to a contest with some random elements to it, but that was very rarely the case in this game. The rolls were still there, mostly to allow for absurdist comedy and give some token use to skills that would otherwise rarely have come into play.
Anyway, RNG isn't the problem, when and how it's applied is.
I did get Elite in combat (which was my first rank to reach elite) by just playing the game, without combat rank ever having been a goal, because I'm a combat oriented player playing a combat oriented character and combat was a major way in which I interacted with the game.
It took quite a long time, but that was never a problem because the rank never precluded me from doing anything I wanted to do.
There is still a lot that can be done without Engineering, but the 'end' of Engineering is a prerequisite for certain activities. Engaging in what PvP is left is functionally impossible without a nearly fully Engineered combat vessel. Same goes for getting in a higher-skill Thargoid wing and not being a liability.
For many people it feels like an arbitrary hurdle to content they'd otherwise be enjoying, or worse, used to enjoy before Engineering showed up and excluded them.
The problem with alternatives is that anything with similar results for less effort automatically depreciates the other methods, rendering them moot. Players (and any rational characters) are going to take the path of least resistance.
Ditto. I did it because combat is way more fun to me than the other ways to make creds, even though at the time it was one of the worse ways to make cred. Did it in 3 months when I wanted to make the creds to buy a Corvette. Did 90% of it in an unengineered Cobra, which is funny because along the way I also bought a Vulture and a Python and it didn't occur to me to switch to either of those until the very end. The Cobra was just that much fun.
I only engineered a few weapons for space combat, and decided that it (ship combat) did no do much for me so essentially stopped chasing ship engineering as my game play did not require much beyond FSD, thrusters and long range range scanners.
When Odyssey came out, I did suit/weapon engineering big time, did loads of ground action and achieved Combat Elite. And Merc. Never thought that would be achieved.
So, I did what I liked engineering wise to suit me. Changing the process would I suspect make little difference to me as a newbie, I would still do the engineering only as far as I needed to take it to mesh with my play style.
Steve
I sort-of did get Elite in combat by just playing the game, but it was a special case. I got into an AX group at the time when you could save systems from infestation by killing loads of Thargoid Scouts; thousands of them, and they all counted as Elite.
I actually didn't want to get Elite rank before someone else I knew who had been playing longer, but in the end I couldn't avoid it.
I'm still rubbish at combat though.
I actually didn't want to get Elite rank before someone else I knew who had been playing longer, but in the end I couldn't avoid it.
I'm still rubbish at combat though.
I've played in versions where becoming elite rank was nigh on impossible. Even earning faction rep was a pita. I didn't even manage to unlock the rank to buy a bloody Federal Gunship.
Credit rewards were bad, rep earning was bad, ranking up was an eternal affair. I made deadly in combat because combat was the thing that was most fun, earned cash in way more interesting ways than earning minuscule margins on pitiful cargo spaces and tied in to interesting gameplay and group activities concerning the BGS.
This way of "just playing the game" didn't get you far. And any attempt to getting farther just meant preoccupying with extreme amounts of repetition and boredom different to "just playing the game".
I never even managed to unlock the power play items. 4 weeks of real-time subscription and do all the requirements in the last week? Noone tells me when and how to play which game and if they do, I quickly lose enthusiasm to play the game.
And that's where they propped on engineers on top and buffed HP of the environment. And introduced AI that can fly and accelerate in reverse as fast as forward. There is only so much nollocks you can stand.
If you ask me the credit inflation was long overdue, but it didn't offset the tedious acquisition of engineering mats. The curve may be different today for new players but they threw their existing players by then under the bus. You see - when you totally make over the way core elements are supposed to be played and nerf stuff that has been painstakingly earned under another regime, you simply give some recompense so existing players need not start the crap all over.
Credit rewards were bad, rep earning was bad, ranking up was an eternal affair. I made deadly in combat because combat was the thing that was most fun, earned cash in way more interesting ways than earning minuscule margins on pitiful cargo spaces and tied in to interesting gameplay and group activities concerning the BGS.
This way of "just playing the game" didn't get you far. And any attempt to getting farther just meant preoccupying with extreme amounts of repetition and boredom different to "just playing the game".
I never even managed to unlock the power play items. 4 weeks of real-time subscription and do all the requirements in the last week? Noone tells me when and how to play which game and if they do, I quickly lose enthusiasm to play the game.
And that's where they propped on engineers on top and buffed HP of the environment. And introduced AI that can fly and accelerate in reverse as fast as forward. There is only so much nollocks you can stand.
If you ask me the credit inflation was long overdue, but it didn't offset the tedious acquisition of engineering mats. The curve may be different today for new players but they threw their existing players by then under the bus. You see - when you totally make over the way core elements are supposed to be played and nerf stuff that has been painstakingly earned under another regime, you simply give some recompense so existing players need not start the crap all over.
In my opinion credit inflation killed elite .
You don't have to progress through your ships, you don't have to progress through modules why use b rated ? Or c rated ?
You don't have to worry about rebuys or your actions . A bounty or fine meh I've plenty of money .
I want a FC but don't have 5 bil just mine for a week ( never understood it when FC were so overly priced and then exploited byany to get them ) ? Then they buffed the mining but did drops rather than the credits and broke other stuff like tritium .
Power play is even easier as it doesn't affect your game play . NPC ships stations don't care if you are the enemy or not and finding or instancing with a player who cares is about PP is like hens teeth .
You don't have to progress through your ships, you don't have to progress through modules why use b rated ? Or c rated ?
You don't have to worry about rebuys or your actions . A bounty or fine meh I've plenty of money .
I want a FC but don't have 5 bil just mine for a week ( never understood it when FC were so overly priced and then exploited byany to get them ) ? Then they buffed the mining but did drops rather than the credits and broke other stuff like tritium .
Power play is even easier as it doesn't affect your game play . NPC ships stations don't care if you are the enemy or not and finding or instancing with a player who cares is about PP is like hens teeth .
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