Depending on changes.
Reducing the number of SDP required to 6 or even 8 - seems a good idea to me.
Having each scan dropping 3 SDP - nope, not that much of a good idea.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
- Start date
Depending on changes.
Reducing the number of SDP required to 6 or even 8 - seems a good idea to me.
Having each scan dropping 3 SDP - nope, not that much of a good idea.
I'd still say the biggest issue with foot engineering is the global storage (how many reach the Beck unlock and find those Cat Media they have been ignoring would have actually been useful). Early on there is too much juggling with storage limits. That is a lesson they should have learned from Ship Engineering, but here we are again
This.
IMO Global Caps/Storage are the biggest issue with on-foot engineering, made even worse by the fact that unlocks are only counted only from the reference and not retroactive like it is for Ship engineering
I mean, i could sell the Cat Media as i find it, to ease the storage pressure, but it wont count since i have not yet gotten the reference so i either ignore Cat Media or i stockpile it taking space that i could use for other useful stuff
I was referring to the likely number of CMDRs who unlocked Wellington Beck, and the possible reasons why. And pointing out that the gain, was effectively only headshot damage.
Steve
You can play the piano without any practice, just not very well
Hi everyone, before I read through this thread:
I've started a duplicate thread here:
forums.frontier.co.uk
Where I was referred to this one.
If this was not mentioned here yet, I think the Colonia engineers should be split from the Bubble engineers, in case you decide to start your journey in Colonia.
I also initially thought that it'd be a good idea to buy materials with credits, but lads that responded to my thread above actually made me understand why this was a silly idea, and that the flaws of the system are actually somewhere else.
I'll gladly go though your previous discussion on that topic here, now. I'm quite curious.
I've started a duplicate thread here:
ED Engineering Grind + Colonia/Bubble Dependency
Hi there, If this is a duplicate please refer me to the original thread below and close this one. I would strongly suggest allowing commanders purchasing materials for in-game money, because the grind is awful. The grind is worse than in Diablo Immortal. And you have no advantage in that...
Where I was referred to this one.
If this was not mentioned here yet, I think the Colonia engineers should be split from the Bubble engineers, in case you decide to start your journey in Colonia.
I also initially thought that it'd be a good idea to buy materials with credits, but lads that responded to my thread above actually made me understand why this was a silly idea, and that the flaws of the system are actually somewhere else.
I'll gladly go though your previous discussion on that topic here, now. I'm quite curious.
I got a set whilst doing AX reactivation missions. I already had OG & YB unlocked so they're still sitting behind the bar on my carrier.
As far as I am aware* we can’t start our journey in Colonia in which case I am not sure what benefit your suggestion has but there again I can’t see a downside but I am sure if there is one someone will be along to point it out.Hi everyone, before I read through this thread:
I've started a duplicate thread here:
ED Engineering Grind + Colonia/Bubble Dependency
Hi there, If this is a duplicate please refer me to the original thread below and close this one. I would strongly suggest allowing commanders purchasing materials for in-game money, because the grind is awful. The grind is worse than in Diablo Immortal. And you have no advantage in that...
Where I was referred to this one.
If this was not mentioned here yet, I think the Colonia engineers should be split from the Bubble engineers, in case you decide to start your journey in Colonia.
I also initially thought that it'd be a good idea to buy materials with credits, but lads that responded to my thread above actually made me understand why this was a silly idea, and that the flaws of the system are actually somewhere else.
I'll gladly go though your previous discussion on that topic here, now. I'm quite curious.
*It is over seven years since I started my one account so I could be out of touch on this.
In theory the downside is that it gives a starting player nine "common knowledge" engineers, four of which are an extremely long way away, which might cause "I have to travel how far?" complaints.
In practice, the Odyssey engineers for Colonia are "common knowledge" ones and I've not seen anyone mention it as a problem. Certainly it avoided the "I have to travel back?" complaints that happened when the ship engineers were added.
A possible compromise would be to have the Colonia Engineers only become common knowledge the first time a player docks in the Colonia system, or have that as an alternative referral route - but that isn't something with precedent in the current framework, so might require code changes.
I feel like this could be solved with just UI changes in the engineering by adding a Colonia/Bubble filter or just coloring the colonia engineers differently, just something to hint that this group of engineers is different.
Having the engineers visible from the start is a good way for new players to find out that colonia exists if they investigate deeper. Having alternate referral routes would be great though, not just for colonia engineers but others for better progression.
I feel like you're inverting some things here... taking the path of least resistance means not having to invest massive hours to get to the 'freedom to play the game and have fun doing what you want with your toys' stage, whereas - as acknowledged by many here now (and I in turn must acknowledge this caveat to my statement about reaching Elite rank) - 'just playing' takes a quite significantly longer time to get to the same stage. In other words... roadblock, in the form of time-gating yourself.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to willingly subject themselves to self-sabotaging their time & effort investment because taking the long & arduous way is more fun for certain folks. There's nothing stopping you from doing so and playing your way, in my ideal alternate universe where Fdev takes on all the complaints and issues with Engineering and fixes them, including making it so the inflated grind/barrier to entry are no longer present - and/or, addresses the Elite combat grind by bringing it & other Elite ranks into a time-investment parity.
Speaking on a more personal perspective note: journeys in my experience are infinitely more enjoyable when I'm permitted to prepare fully for it, rather than being forced into an upward climb knowing I'm not fully equipped for what I'm doing - that only serves to induce stress and irritation, especially when it leads to inevitable insurmountable adversity. I get there's people that enjoy that pain or are accepting of helpless failure, but I don't understand it or identify with that myself.
One of the common complaints with Odyssey means this isn't true - at least not for Elite Dangerous.
It'd be entirely possible for Frontier to set up a route where ships, modules and engineering are free which was accessible from the start of the game. No Mans Sky has a creative mode which works that way, Kerbal likewise, X4 has ways to do the same thing. Anything short of that is always going to be too slow for someone (I don't know if that's what you want or if you just want something faster than now when it comes to outfitting/engineering/rank progression)
In Odyssey, things aren't quite there but are a lot closer than in the rest of Elite Dangerous
- you can buy pre-upgraded gear to G3 for an essentially trivial credit value (your first decent exobio world will pay for all of it for the rest of the game)
- G3 gear is sufficient for all Odyssey content (G5+mods makes it easier, definitely)
It's not quite creative mode but you could (with help from the "where's the pre-upgraded gear this week?" thread) spend about an hour of setup and have all the equipment you'll need for the rest of the game.
And so a very common complaint with Odyssey is that there isn't any point to doing the activities in it, because all you get from them is things to upgrade your suits and you don't need a suit upgrade (either at all, or after you've upgraded a fairly small set of items) because to get the things to upgrade the suits you already have to be able to do the activities.
Gradually acquiring things to progress a character is a way that lots of people like to play games - but doesn't work if everything is free from the start. So NMS has various Survival modes, Kerbal has a range of difficulty settings for Career mode, X4 you can set a range of difficulties and starting conditions, etc. And you probably start over with a new character once you've got to the "top of the hill" because climbing it is the point. You can always start a Creative Mode game if you want to mess around with lots of the high-level stuff.
Elite Dangerous has the problem that it needs to pick a single ruleset for everyone [1], so it's far too fast for the "it should take at least 1000 hours to get an Anaconda" players, and far too slow for the "I just want to fly a ship and shoot things without spending 1000 hours on setup" players [2] and any change they make in any direction will probably annoy as many people as it makes happy at this point.
[1] Okay, sure, in an ideal world there would be a singleplayer offline version which you could set to "Creative Mode" or "Excessively Tough Mode" or whatever you wanted in-between. That's even less likely than further engineering balance adjustments.
[2] Who might even be the same players on different days. There are plenty of games I play in "survival" mode and find even that gets to the "you're invincible" stage too quickly, and others where being slowed down waiting for the next bit of resources to come in just gets annoying and 95% of my play is spent building things in the post-scarcity phase.
Being a freeform procedural sandbox game it also lacks any significant other glue to hold the rest of the gameplay together without upgrades/progression of some sort (with BGS being progression for your preferred faction(s)). I can't think of any examples here other than really early access games that are just tech demos or alphas at best that haven't implemented this stuff yet.
Things could be tweaked to either be easier or harder to acquire but it would need some other motivation to smooth it over. The AX Module Stabilizer is a good example here - it received some mild pushback iirc but was generally accepted. If it was just randomly added outside the context of the thargoid war I'm sure the reactions would've been very different and the sentiment that it ruins AX because it removes skill from high end content that there's very little of in Elite anyway would be stronger.
If getting upgrades was made harder then the game would need more low-end content to justify it and add fun/variety for the expected amount of gear a player can quickly reach and vice versa.
Progression doesn't have to be a load-brearing system, but it is in Elite and there's no real other options for something that relies on procedural content over more designed experiences.
Yeah, but the [2] players are wrong because you can shoot things in a Sidey. They just want the 'conda now...for reasons.
"And so a very common complaint with Odyssey is that there isn't any point to doing the activities in it, "
If I may chip in here ...
A lot of my BGS activity is doing Odyssey missions for the INF, mats are picked up along the way. Doing fetch/deliver or salvage type missions are fairly quick an a number can be done quite quickly and often offer opportunities to gather mats.
As far as combat goes, anything taken from the combat listing counts towards "wins". Don't fancy fighting in a space CZ, take an assassination mission. Or an eliminate scavs or settlement occupants mission. Then loot.
Without Odyssey I would find my BGS activities so limited and less diverse.
Steve
If I may chip in here ...
A lot of my BGS activity is doing Odyssey missions for the INF, mats are picked up along the way. Doing fetch/deliver or salvage type missions are fairly quick an a number can be done quite quickly and often offer opportunities to gather mats.
As far as combat goes, anything taken from the combat listing counts towards "wins". Don't fancy fighting in a space CZ, take an assassination mission. Or an eliminate scavs or settlement occupants mission. Then loot.
Without Odyssey I would find my BGS activities so limited and less diverse.
Steve
Guys, here's a real life example for you, I have been playing for 400 hours before getting my first V1 FSD from the technology broker (cause I haven't yet unlocked even 1 engineer, too complicated) while trying to play the game as I like it without grinding (exploring, doing various missions, thousands of them honestly), but at some point of absolute-no-progress it was inevitable to keep doing some boring stuff for a long time for no reason like staying at the beacon and keeping scanning ships and wakes, for like 12 hours straight, to get the required 26 datamined wakes, which never pop up. Furthermore I had to look for planets with Tellurium and mine with my SRV for another 12 hours straight, where I got everything BUT Tellurium. And this is absurd, because I already:
-got my SOL permission (a load of missions, which basically is another type of grind, but it's a way better way to play the game that way)
-visited 1750 systems
-13,574 detailed scans
-fully scanned a majority of those
-did twice as many hyperspace jumps
-scanned organic data 52 times
-travelled over 30k ly
-claimed 30 bounties (even though I don't enjoy fighting and destruction, but on a few occasions I was forced to do it)
-traded over 3500 commodities
-mined 30 minerals even though I dislike mining, and yet I did some deep core mining just to check it out
-delivered 204 first/business class passengers
Furthermore I mapped multiple planetary bodies, found multiple points of interest, visited multiple stations, you get the idea.
And after all that I only have 1 V1 FSD and I can't think of anything else for now because I'm so much far from it, and it still required about 30 additional hours of no-fun grindy gameplay, because otherwise I wouldn't even be able to get that. I don't even mention the space-suits or weapons, because that's another level of absurd.
I think that that's the actual problem. The in-game progress should go in parallel, organically/naturally, as you're doing all that stuff. But it doesn't. Engineering wouldn't be bad if you didn't have to do all that crap to get one module.
Because, that's my point, I did a lot of stuff in that game, got about 800 million credits to date (it's still not too much but that's okay), but yet I had close to no materials, which should come naturally while enjoying and playing the game at a normal pace, but they do not come like that and you have to, at some point, keep scanning wakes for 12 hours straight or something like that.
So, your arguments about "just enjoying the game" are contradictory. Also, please stop with that nonsense that "you can play the game without engineering". Even the A-graded conda is worthless without engineering. Every ship has its problems, but first up, all of them have pathetic range, even striped down and A-graded. Secondary, no ship can provide enough power, they're all underpowered. It's impossible to have a truly multipurpose ship without engineering. All ships are pathetically slow and are the true negation of agility. Engineering is absolutely crucial in that game to get absolute minimum required performance from your ship, and yet, not organic whatsoever. Requires you to do a lot of useless and artificial stuff.
That's the whole point. Keep the engineering as it is, but give us freaking materials, naturally. Don't make it that complicated to unlock stuff, engineers, systems. Make it a natural progression system instead of a system purely taken from some pay to win scams like Diablo Immortal. There's no monetization in ED so there's no need for such predatory progression system...
That's it. Other than that I get your points and understand you guys. I agree that you shouldn't get modules just like that. I agree with majority of your arguments as a matter of fact. Just the implementation sucks and that's it.
-got my SOL permission (a load of missions, which basically is another type of grind, but it's a way better way to play the game that way)
-visited 1750 systems
-13,574 detailed scans
-fully scanned a majority of those
-did twice as many hyperspace jumps
-scanned organic data 52 times
-travelled over 30k ly
-claimed 30 bounties (even though I don't enjoy fighting and destruction, but on a few occasions I was forced to do it)
-traded over 3500 commodities
-mined 30 minerals even though I dislike mining, and yet I did some deep core mining just to check it out
-delivered 204 first/business class passengers
Furthermore I mapped multiple planetary bodies, found multiple points of interest, visited multiple stations, you get the idea.
And after all that I only have 1 V1 FSD and I can't think of anything else for now because I'm so much far from it, and it still required about 30 additional hours of no-fun grindy gameplay, because otherwise I wouldn't even be able to get that. I don't even mention the space-suits or weapons, because that's another level of absurd.
I think that that's the actual problem. The in-game progress should go in parallel, organically/naturally, as you're doing all that stuff. But it doesn't. Engineering wouldn't be bad if you didn't have to do all that crap to get one module.
Because, that's my point, I did a lot of stuff in that game, got about 800 million credits to date (it's still not too much but that's okay), but yet I had close to no materials, which should come naturally while enjoying and playing the game at a normal pace, but they do not come like that and you have to, at some point, keep scanning wakes for 12 hours straight or something like that.
So, your arguments about "just enjoying the game" are contradictory. Also, please stop with that nonsense that "you can play the game without engineering". Even the A-graded conda is worthless without engineering. Every ship has its problems, but first up, all of them have pathetic range, even striped down and A-graded. Secondary, no ship can provide enough power, they're all underpowered. It's impossible to have a truly multipurpose ship without engineering. All ships are pathetically slow and are the true negation of agility. Engineering is absolutely crucial in that game to get absolute minimum required performance from your ship, and yet, not organic whatsoever. Requires you to do a lot of useless and artificial stuff.
That's the whole point. Keep the engineering as it is, but give us freaking materials, naturally. Don't make it that complicated to unlock stuff, engineers, systems. Make it a natural progression system instead of a system purely taken from some pay to win scams like Diablo Immortal. There's no monetization in ED so there's no need for such predatory progression system...
That's it. Other than that I get your points and understand you guys. I agree that you shouldn't get modules just like that. I agree with majority of your arguments as a matter of fact. Just the implementation sucks and that's it.
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Wow. You are really, really bad at this game. You should practice.
Yeah, that's a very smart response, isn't it. As you see I have been practicing for over 400 hours, and the numbers are pretty insane. And yet, no engineering.
This is a bad game design and there's no discussion about it.
Well I suppose you just have to do it. After 400 hours I suppose you'll be at least scout in exploration ranking?
Why not go to Felicity Farseer to upgrade your thrusters to g3 dirty drag? For the unlock you'd need to pick up a meta alloy which you can get in game or buy from a fleet carrier.
For the upgrade itself you'd need something like 6 chromium, 12 specialised legacy firmware, 6 mechanical components, and 4 mechanical equipment. For the drag effect you'd need another 5 iron, 1 security firmware patch, and 3 hybrid capacitors.
These are all easy to collect materials and you ought to have them already if you haven't completely ignored mat collection, and if something specific is missing you could probably trade for it at a mat trader.
I can somewhat sympathize as I found myself in a similar situation, not having scanned all that I came across, not having collected many manufactured mats after combat, and not even having tried mining. IMO, the problem isn't really the collection of the mats, it's rather that as a noob you really have no idea that you ought to fit a wake scanner, and bring collector limpets to combat. I think the game isn't very good in helping you understand that you ought to collect mats for future engineering, nor is it very clear what mats you need for specific upgrades at an engineer. For this purpose I can't recommend OMH highly enough: https://github.com/jixxed/ed-odyssey-materials-helper
That's probably very useless for ship engineering if you haven't unlocked some of the bubble engineers..!
Though you should be able to do the on foot engineers easily, and get started on a nice suit and some weapons.
OMH, will be very helpful for that too. And if you don't know, do look in the stores as it's not too hard to find a G3 suit, possibly even with some useful (or not) mod already applied.
Though you should be able to do the on foot engineers easily, and get started on a nice suit and some weapons.
OMH, will be very helpful for that too. And if you don't know, do look in the stores as it's not too hard to find a G3 suit, possibly even with some useful (or not) mod already applied.