Okay, Ian, I'm not sure I'm following this. I'm finding that it still takes quite a bit of time to collect materials for G1 engineering, and that that exchange rate for lower materials to higher materials isn't all that great, so I end up focusing on grinding for the higher materials ultimately. Or, maybe I'm really missing something cool and just doing this all wrong (I can be taught!).
Sure - maybe an example will help.
To get from level 2 to level 3 with plasma accelerators will take 4500 research points.
Every time you do a G1 roll, that's 1 research point.
Every time you do a G2 roll, that's 2 research points.
So doing G2 rolls gets more research points for the same time spent at the engineer handing in materials, plus you have to switch blueprints less often (because it takes more G2 rolls to max G2 than it takes G1 rolls to max G1) which lets you get slightly more rolls in the same time.
However, a G1 roll takes 1xG1 material
A G2 roll takes 1xG1 material and 1xG2 material.
If you traded the G2 material
down at the material trader, you'd get 3xG1 materials, so with the materials needed to do 1 G2 roll, you could instead get 4 G1 materials and spend them for 4 research points. You also only need one material type for the G1 roll, but two material types for the G2 roll, so collection of the G2 materials is more complicated.
But ... it would take you four times as long to roll 4 G1s as it would to roll a single G2. So you're more efficient for time spent collecting materials, but less efficient for time at the engineer.
So, let's say you're trying to get materials for the Long Range Plasma Accelerator blueprint.
G1 requires Sulphur
G2 requires Sulphur and Modified Consumer Firmware.
So, for efficiency, what you might do is get some Ruthenium from volcanism sites, and trade that down (at 27:1) to Sulphur.
You then might run some missions with Modified Embedded Firmware (MEF) as a reward (5 at a time, for the right missions), and trade them at 27:1 for Modified Consumer Firmware (MCF).
So, your options are:
- collect only Ruthenium, for each Ruthenium found, get materials for 27 G1 rolls (27 points per high-grade material collected)
- collect both Ruthenium and MEF, for each Ruthenium-MEF pair found, get materials for 27 G2 rolls (and collect some extra Ruthenium to let you do the G1 rolls to unlock those G2 rolls). (still 27 points per high-grade material collected)
- collect both Ruthenium and MEF, use the Ruthenium for 27 G1 rolls per unit, trade the MEF down (at 81:1) to Specialised Legacy Firmware, and put those into 81 G1 rolls on a different blueprint maybe on a different module (e.g. Charge Enhanced Power Distributor). (an average of 54 points per high-grade material collected)
In this particular case, my personal preference would be to do a few missions for the MEF and use it on the Plasma Accelerator blueprint - you get 135 MCF at the trader for each 5 MEF mission you complete, so you can grab the materials needed for G2 rolls pretty quickly, so you're not adding a lot of time to the collection process, but you double the research points you're getting for the same time spent handing in.
Conversely, for Long Range
Sensors, the G2 material is Hybrid Capacitors, and those are hard to quickly get in large quantities. So I'd do G2 with the ones I had on hand, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get more - I'd stick to the G1 (just Iron, which like all the raw materials is easy to trade for)
Does this make things clearer?
So how this will work? Pick an engineer, a mod for a blueprint and do g1 followed eventually by a g2 then another mod for the same blueprint, then again g1, g2 - repeat?
Basically, yes, until you get bored or run out of materials or both. Blueprints that are at G1 or G2 a single person can make visible progress on (getting it to the next 5% marker in the local news) relatively quickly. Easier blueprints to pick are ones people are already working on (Plasma Accelerators, Frag Cannons, Interdictors, maybe some others), or ones which are getting close to a grade boundary already - maybe 80% complete or better - because if you can push them over the line that really boosts the research points they'll get from people engineering modules for personal use. Harder blueprints to pick are ones (e.g. AFMU, DSS) which only have a single blueprint, because you can't easily swap - you have to go to outfitting each time to strip the mod off it entirely.
