Reduce the grind
- Thread starter Ragnascot
- Start date
Sure, 1T per grade. That's about how much CRs are worth.
Not really
Only after you have unlocked all the engineers .
Seeing how unimportant and easily accesible credits are, my gut is against it. I know material collection isn't the most popular thing in the world, but I'm also kind of against buying materials for cash... although it is inconsistent - you can buy Odyssey materials from players, but not Horizons. Also, maybe tweak exchange rates at material traders a bit to make crosstrading G5 materials a bit more viable? If you make a bit of an effort, you can get so many Biotech Conductors, Exquisite Focus Crystals and Modified Embedded Firmware from various missions (yes, I know, most are Thargoid related, but not all, and there are non-combat ones), maybe improve their trading value... I don't know.
As we have pre-engineered modules for suits, it's time to add them for ships too... up to G3 for credits + add possibility of materials dropping from ships.
Preengineered modules isn't the worst idea in the world. It works very well for suits and personal weapons, and G3 is often more than sufficient in the PvE context, as it is in Odyssey (you can do pretty much everything with store bought G3 gear) Shouldn't be off the shelf in large quantities though, more like the unicorn suits and weapons of Odyssey - buy it and it is gone.
Yes, single availability... it should also increase variety of ship builds and help new players.
I do wonder what all these people who hate the 'grind' think when they reach the golden uplands of 'endgame' and realise everything is still based around activities that get you more mats 
Certainly illustrates why games have gone down the road of P2W - there seems a big market for it
Certainly illustrates why games have gone down the road of P2W - there seems a big market for it
I've said it before: You have two choices. Either you enjoy the activities rather than "doing them begrudgingly" for the reward, or you move on. This isn't a game you can "win".I do wonder what all these people who hate the 'grind' think when they reach the golden uplands of 'endgame' and realise everything is still based around activities that get you more mats
Certainly illustrates why games have gone down the road of P2W - there seems a big market for it
True. Though these things are always easiest to see in hindsight - so I do have some sympathy for those who haven't got there yet. Not enough to re-write the whole game around gold.
Yeah. For new players, it is tough; you either find out on your own the hard way, of you have to choose who to listen to. I know I keep harping on them, but those terrible "best start" "make money fast" "easy rank grind" guides out there are so visible and promoted by "the algorithm", I think they spoil the game for a lot of players when they find out there is no pot of gold at the end of the grind rainbow.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
Yes, but only available on Fleet Carriers and sold by players.
Along with the actual ship engi materials too.
P.S. The thread title is absolute rubbish.
Other games are designed around it, Elite is just weirdly designed and progression isn't really tied to what you want to be doing at any given point or is tied to it in such a way that makes the original activity more inconvenient and less enjoyable.Certainly illustrates why games have gone down the road of P2W - there seems a big market for it
ED is designed as DBOBE wanted to.
He didnt want to go down the path of gold selling, microtransactions and pay-to-win
Apparently he did want a career game - where someone embrace a career and go along that path with all the ups and downs, instead of creating an arcade game with 3 lives
Might be out of fashion these days where lot of things seem to be designed around short-attention-span.
It's pretty clear by now that things are often added to try and be as realistic as possible (given constraints) - not optimised for gameplay. So we have many threads demanding the game be made more game-like and streamlined. Then again we also get demands for the game to be made more realistic every time it does get more game-y.
Realism vs Gameplay - the eternal battle.
Realism vs Gameplay - the eternal battle.
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Though on the other hand, the balance is very different for ship and on-foot anyway.
On-foot, unless you're a FPS expert who does HighCZs in their flight suit for a mild challenge, or have already practiced Odyssey stealth extensively, G3 suits and weapons are a massive improvement over G1, and it's tough to take on even a low-end pack of scavengers without them, without resorting to just flattening them with dumbfires from the ship. So that makes it tough (or at least tedious with repeated running back to the ship, taking off, moving around, ambushing another one on their own, repeat) to do even the "easy" reactivate missions and get the initial materials for some G3 upgrades. [1]
The cost of a G3 suit is also about 15% of the cost of a G5 suit (starting from G1) so the G3 pre-bought gives you a pretty significant boost on getting the hardest (as opposed to most tedious) set of manufacturing instructions to collect. And with every upgrade requiring Manufacturing Instructions, starting from G3 on a set of three suits and some varied weapons is roughly equivalent to an entirely free G5 in terms of collection time saved, which is pretty significant.
In a ship, on the other hand, a G3 module costs just 3% of the price of a G5 module (starting from stock) for usually somewhere around 2/3 of the performance gain. The problem here isn't that the modules aren't available for credit purchase, the problem is that popular perception of engineering grind is so horribly messed up [2].
- you can G3 an entire ship (two, if you don't insist on shielding the fuel scoop) more easily than G5ing a single module, and G3 materials are genuinely the ones which show up if you "just play the game". You don't need an engineered ship to take on a medium RES or do a bit of mining or SRV driving, or scan ships in supercruise on your trade runs.
- yet people will regularly and honestly recommend getting the Tech Broker FSD to "avoid the engineering grind" when it costs twice as many materials - including the tedious DWEs - as a maxed G5 for marginal gains, which is "free Anaconda at Hutton" levels of self-deception. At least it's only available in size 5 so you can't make that mistake on every ship.
Having pre-engineered G3s for purchase on an Odyssey basis would be interesting:
- it'd save next-to-no materials if your goal was "must have G5 everything"
- it'd probably psychologically get a lot of people to be happy to stick as G3 (as they have been in Odyssey)
so it'd reduce the perception of grind without changing how hard it was to get anything (it'd almost certainly be way quicker to find the G3 materials for a Charge Enhanced Distributor than it would be to look through hundreds of outfitters hoping one would show up)
[1] Incredibly difficult early game, trivial late game is normal for Elite and Elite-like games, of course.
[2] Frontier's love of exponential cost increases for linear or sub-linear improvements really doesn't help, of course. But a "how to do basic cost-benefit analysis" would be worth twenty "how to grind out 100 Enhanced Consumer Components in an hour" guides to most beginners.
What do you think of U16's announcement of being able to price at 100x average rather than 10x?
For standard commodities, 100x means you can always exceed (maybe Rackham's Wine as an exception) the price on NPC markets, and opens up a new possibility for deep space Tritium for the "I hate mining" explorers since at 5M credits per tonne maximum you could be the top-earning gold rush if you really wanted some and had CG-levels of budget available to pay for it.
I haven't done enough Odyssey engineering since the materials became carrier-tradable to have a good idea of whether this is enough to set reasonably fair prices for them, or still falls short, though.
(If ship materials were tradeable, and they should be, 100x the mission-equivalent price would be more than enough, certainly)
I would like to see engineering altering the structure of my ships.
For example, how about I can raise the amount of utils with engineering from 4 to 6 in a Krait? Or 8 to 10 in a Corvette (as it was initially intended)?
How about if I can increase the HP size in certain combat ships? What if I could add an extra optional module?
