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

[Greasetrap42]

Continuing to further the claim that ANYTHING involved with the very processes and gameplay you're referring to here is "natural" or "intuitive" is utter nonsense.

Collecting materials at crystal shard sites, or collecting mats from bounty hunting, or mission rewards is all as natural gameplay as anything else.in the game. These are all gameplay activities devised for players. No different than finding specific mining hotspots, searching for exobiology samples 30,000 Ly from the bubble, or visiting an ancient guardian site.

If you are looking for activities that quite literally throw themselves at the player... or a linear game where players are set on a fixed path and have no option but move forward and face each encounter... then ED is obviously not a game well suited to your style. If you want everything neatly laid out for you with a nice little story that explains where to go and what to do... play something else.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

Too bad that there is no reason to go to the distress signals opportunistically--you need special equipment you probably don't carry "just in case" for them.

Performing the rescues isn't just the only reason to go to the distress calls... They're a pretty easy way to damage a faction's influence if that's what your aim is.

 

[Greasetrap42]

You have gotten your cart before your horse. Engineering 'progession' is not what an open-world shared-universe 1:1 scale Milky Way simulation space game set 1300 years in the future is for experiencing.

This "learning and progression curve" has no merit in and of itself. It serves to gate content & the true game experience behind a barrier to entry. None of the "skills or knowledge" necessary to perform the Engineering grind (with the sole exception of certain Engineer unlock steps, which are generally trivial) is applicable to any other activities you could be doing in the game.

No.

The open world 1:1 scale Milky Way simulation is the environment.

Progression and acquisition makes the game. Without this all you have is an arena style game where everybody selects stuff from menus. And if all you have is an arena style game, after 25 hours players move on to something else.

--> Can we try to get back on topic ???

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

There actually is a precedent--after the Damnation's fiasco in HIP 22460 there were these big debris fields with tons and tons of up to grade 3 (IIRC) materials laying about. Only problem: whenever you dropped in them 60 seconds later a bunch of very angry Thargoids warped in and whooped your Asp... I would really, really like to see these debris fields with some occasional pirates/scavengers in the Bubble, for example after a war has finished in a system. I think at one point there were some debris fields with pirate spawns in some systems, but they only had few materials and low value commodities/salvage to collect. Haven't seen them for a few years, though.

These were really cool and you could even get ancient keys from them rarely.

Sometimes I wonder how many ships do you people engineer?

Do you all have 8 corvettes each with 8 skill boosters or what?

From inara I have 120 ships with ~90 engineered FSDs which most likely have all their other modules fully engineered too (rest being module storage or event-discount hulls not yet engineered).

Only 3 vettes, but 8 anacondas, 3-4 of which are hulltanks without 8 boosters. Probably around 150 total shield boosters/hd hull reinforcements engineered each which does mean thousands of G4-G5 materials spent on just for those recipes.

Wouldn't making mats much easier to come by, or even make engineered modules buyable for credits result in being able to get anything right away, instead of having to make priorities as to what ship to get and how to engineer it? I did feel a certain amount of accomplishment once I added the 8th engineered skill booster to my corvette.

The game as it is doesn't encourage moderation in engineering in any way due to front loading the negatives on engineering grades and not having ways to reliably encounter easier enemies you can take on solo.

It would be better if it did that and that's part of why I suggested setting a lower cap for engineering materials too so you can't grind as much before being forced to go spend it.

Not having loadouts and having those slow animations uninstalling weapons and overall an UI so slow to navigate that there's multiple tools to design your ships out of game before you build them also encourages engineering multiple ships just to not deal with that crap.

Collecting materials at crystal shard sites, or collecting mats from bounty hunting, or mission rewards is all as natural gameplay as anything else.in the game. These are all gameplay activities devised for players. No different than finding specific mining hotspots, searching for exobiology samples 30,000 Ly from the bubble, or visiting an ancient guardian site.

Going 1000Ly out of the bubble isn't normal gameplay, especially when the crystal shard sites weren't really known about until a while after the FSS/Codex updates which allowed people to discover them. They were a happy accident and not an intentional part of the design of material gathering.

The crystal shard sites are cool, but visiting them always feels very game-y to me - I actually liked driving the SRV around planets looking for outcrops and such even though it was hellishly slow and is probably even worse in odyssey.

 

[Brrokk]

...
Going 1000Ly out of the bubble isn't normal gameplay, ...

Eh? More than one of the engineers actually insist that you do so. And many players would consider 1000ly as just like popping down the road to the chemist.

 

[SteveWW57]

why I suggested setting a lower cap for engineering materials too so you can't grind as much before being forced to go spend it.

Having a lower cap would take us back to the early days, when people lobbied for high caps, and even today there is a lobby for even still higher caps.

Steve

 

[Markov Chaney]

Having a lower cap would take us back to the early days, when people lobbied for high caps, and even today there is a lobby for even still higher caps.

There will always be lobbies for every possible combination of rulesets, even Arcuturan-Megabat-insane combinations of rulesets. It's simply not relevant unless there is a true threat of 50% of your users flouncing.

The volume, frequency, and toxicity of a particular lobby is not very well correlated to whether it makes any bleedin' sense either.

 

[varonica]

There will always be lobbies for every possible combination of rulesets, even Arcuturan-Megabat-insane combinations of rulesets.

As a long time DnD player, this is spot on!

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Having a lower cap would take us back to the early days, when people lobbied for high caps, and even today there is a lobby for even still higher caps.

It was maybe more needed with the old engineering with infinite rolls, I think it's worth having the friction of low material caps over letting players self-harm by overfarming/grinding materials they'll never actually spend because there's no useful recipes for them.

It would play a bit into using ammo synths too but a shorter grind-play-grind loop there would maybe help too - a lot of it would still rub against travel times making up the majority of time spent on the gathering gameplay though, but that's an overall issue with the game that should also be solved one way or another.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Eh? More than one of the engineers actually insist that you do so. And many players would consider 1000ly as just like popping down the road to the chemist.

The engineer thing is an one-time thing generally unless you go to engineer your stuff in Colonia without pins on the regular.

It's well over an hour just spent traveling back and forth, maybe more than 2-3 if you visit a second system to fill up on all the raw mats.

This is comparable to the Hutton Orbital run probably.

In any other game this would be mocked as insane and I don't think we should further try to normalize long travel times as acceptable like that in Elite.

 

[Brrokk]

The engineer thing is an one-time thing generally unless you go to engineer your stuff in Colonia without pins on the regular.

It's well over an hour just spent traveling back and forth, maybe more than 2-3 if you visit a second system to fill up on all the raw mats.

This is comparable to the Hutton Orbital run probably.

In any other game this would be mocked as insane and I don't think we should further try to normalize long travel times as acceptable like that in Elite.

So, not tried exobiology? Not been to Colonia? Not looked at Guardian sites?

In the good-old-days you had to go to Sag.A* to achieve Exploration Elite.

 

[angusmadmac1]

In the good-old-days you had to go to Sag.A* to achieve Exploration Elite.

It took me a trip to Beagle 6 months and only received 400 mil in the good old days( 2017)

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Going 1000Ly out of the bubble isn't normal gameplay.

Wait what? So the Dynasty Project stuff, etc. doesn't count as 'normal' for you?
Isn't there a DBOBE quote somewhere regarding those who don't go anywhere?

 

[Jack Winter]

I'd tend to think that anyone that doesn't like spending a lot of time traveling in a space ship has chosen the wrong game.

So if we get rid of or reduce time spent in supercruise, remove or speed up the mat gathering, and then possibly reduce the time needed to actually engineer a ship.

What's left of the game?

FWIW, I just took a weekend trip out to colonia, maybe a bit boring to do 120 jumps one after another, but on the other hand the jet cones make it more interesting. Of course entirely my fault as I could have taken my time and done exploration instead.

 

[varonica]

FWIW, I just took a weekend trip out to colonia, maybe a bit boring to do 120 jumps one after another, but on the other hand the jet cones make it more interesting. Of course entirely my fault as I could have taken my time and done exploration instead.

On my way back from Colonia with my FC, but what I do is stop at each bridge systems and check for Tritium supplies, I am actually filling up as I travel, by the time I get to the bubble I'll have a full hold, picked up 5k tons of Tritium and I'm not even a quarter of the way there. Of course I do the, send carrier off first then fly up or down a couple of hundred LY to get to guaranteed virgin territory and do some exploring, but it's a relaxed trip.

FWIW I think they made a mistake basing exploration rep purely on money, but they did the same with exo so I guess that idea isn't going away anytime soon. I would have applied a rather different rule, you could fly around and earn enough money to become rank Explorer V but you wouldn't see an increase in rank until you achieved certain objectives, like the 5kly from start type of thing you get a rank if you have earned the money already, visited X number of nebula, get another rank and etc, but that would be harder to implement I suppose.

Way to late now for this sort of change.

 

[Northpin]

In any other game this would be mocked as insane and I don't think we should further try to normalize long travel times as acceptable like that in Elite.

In any other game that you're suppose to play more than 100 hours and that cannot be speed run and that has no end and in which the story is what you make for your character?

Basically a sandbox in which you pursue and develop a career (and a story) for your character?

 

[Jack Winter]

On my way back from Colonia with my FC, but what I do is stop at each bridge systems and check for Tritium supplies, I am actually filling up as I travel, by the time I get to the bubble I'll have a full hold, picked up 5k tons of Tritium and I'm not even a quarter of the way there. Of course I do the, send carrier off first then fly up or down a couple of hundred LY to get to guaranteed virgin territory and do some exploring, but it's a relaxed trip.

FWIW I think they made a mistake basing exploration rep purely on money, but they did the same with exo so I guess that idea isn't going away anytime soon. I would have applied a rather different rule, you could fly around and earn enough money to become rank Explorer V but you wouldn't see an increase in rank until you achieved certain objectives, like the 5kly from start type of thing you get a rank if you have earned the money already, visited X number of nebula, get another rank and etc, but that would be harder to implement I suppose.

Way to late now for this sort of change.

I could have done something similar, but decided that a roadtrip on the neutron highway would probably be more fun.. haven't done that for a long time. A nice change of pace from the normal bgs war / mat gathering I've indulged in lately.

Yes, it would probably have been better if the different careers weren't based on credits earned but rather on tasks achieved.

 

[Shurimal]

you wouldn't see an increase in rank until you achieved certain objectives, like the 5kly from start type of thing you get a rank if you have earned the money already, visited X number of nebula

INARA ranks and medals do it best IMO. And they use the available journal data, so Fdev could do it the same way if they so wished.

 

[Brrokk]

On my way back from Colonia with my FC, but what I do is stop at each bridge systems and check for Tritium supplies, I am actually filling up as I travel, by the time I get to the bubble I'll have a full hold, picked up 5k tons of Tritium and I'm not even a quarter of the way there. Of course I do the, send carrier off first then fly up or down a couple of hundred LY to get to guaranteed virgin territory and do some exploring, but it's a relaxed trip.

FWIW I think they made a mistake basing exploration rep purely on money, but they did the same with exo so I guess that idea isn't going away anytime soon. I would have applied a rather different rule, you could fly around and earn enough money to become rank Explorer V but you wouldn't see an increase in rank until you achieved certain objectives, like the 5kly from start type of thing you get a rank if you have earned the money already, visited X number of nebula, get another rank and etc, but that would be harder to implement I suppose.

Way to late now for this sort of change.

AFAIK that's exactly how it used to be. It was just before my start in the game, but I was told we used to have to visit Sag.A* before getting Explorer Elite, but the requirement had just been removed and it was now just credits. A rather daft dumbing-down IMO, no doubt in response to moaning. In my first year (2017 I think?) they then had the bright idea of buffing passenger mission payouts. Because sightseeing missions counted towards exploration, a good proportion of players yomped Explorer Elite very quickly.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

In any other game that you're suppose to play more than 100 hours and that can that cannot be speed run and that has no end and in which the story is what you make for your character?

Rush B my friends (the B stands for Beagle point).

Most games will either have fast travel (limited or full teleport depending on how kind they are) so the only games that really come close are games where traveling is the point like Kerbal Space Program (lets you time warp) or Death Stranding (the cutscenes are longer than the longest time you spend traveling when not exploring/building out routes). I may have spent that much time stuck in mud in the swamp on the first map in Spintires, but that was a skill issue and on me mostly (I'm gonna make a rule that it doesn't count since I wasn't technically moving/traveling!).

Euro Truck Simulator 2 probably has some routes that can take that long, but while I haven't played it in years it's probably not required for progression to do those long routes and I have no idea how the community there feels about what the ideal mission length is.

EDIT: Actually X series games and NMS would be good comparisions too, I don't remember travel in X3 being excessively long, but getting to the end of NMS could take a while unless you use the stargate stuff (haven't played it in a long time so I don't know how much has changed there).