Engineers RNG = Bull

Zeeman

Zeeman
BigBANGtheory said:
how do you store previously upgraded module without losing it?
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I usually transfer it to another ship. I have lots of ships...

2 Anacondas
2 Asps
2 Vultrues
1 FDL
1 Viper MKII
1 Viper MKIV
1 Cobra MKIII
1 Eagle
1 iCourier
Sidewinders galore....


There's always a ship that could use an upgraded part... I find it easier to have several ships for different roles than constantly re-outfitting.

Z...
 
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streki

streki
Engineers. Its not as bad as Powerplay, but I've still given up on it. If its more chore than fun, I'll pass.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
When you go to do an upgrade, always go with enough mats for 3 rolls. Never accept a bad roll (why you did this i have no idea!) and out of 3 rolls you should get something good.

I did grade 5 dirty drives the other night, i had enough for 4 rolls. First one was good, very good. So accepted it (i always tend to accept any first roll on a clean module anyway as its usually an improvement over stock). Second was meh. Third was even better than the first! I had the fourth sitting there, so thought what the hell and made the roll. Wasn't a good one though.

Basically, most rolls are decent, ignore any bad rolls, and always take enough for at least 3 tries just because you can get a bad one.
 

Boomer Kay

B
Agony_Aunt said:
When you go to do an upgrade, always go with enough mats for 3 rolls. Never accept a bad roll (why you did this i have no idea!) and out of 3 rolls you should get something good.

I did grade 5 dirty drives the other night, i had enough for 4 rolls. First one was good, very good. So accepted it (i always tend to accept any first roll on a clean module anyway as its usually an improvement over stock). Second was meh. Third was even better than the first! I had the fourth sitting there, so thought what the hell and made the roll. Wasn't a good one though.

Basically, most rolls are decent, ignore any bad rolls, and always take enough for at least 3 tries just because you can get a bad one.
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If you only have one higher grade upgrade, don't waste it on the ship that already has a decent lower grade upgrade.
My corvette had a decent G4 FSD upgrade (did that pre-simplification, so a lot lot more work to get there for about 35% increase) and I ended up putting the G5 upgrade to my conda, which turned out to be rather mediocre and actually worse than what the Vette had.

The end result however is, that I have two ships with a significantly improved FSD ranges, which for the Corvette is a pretty decent QoL improvement and for the Conda is nice to have to shave off about 1/6 jumps.


Doing a second upgrade on an already upgraded module doesn't seem to do anything (at least my gut feeling after nearly 200 upgrades now - many of them low level ones just to push trough the first levels of the engineer to get the follow-up one and caused by low level mats literally repeatedly hitting the storage caps, even after they have been raised). It just appears to be "worse", since instead of straight upgrades from stock, you can get 'worse' results, if the blueprints have overlap.
If you do G1 to G4 or G5 upgrades, there is no overlap, either.

As for the epic time investment.
I've done about 5 hours of mining that I would not have done otherwise (which includes the Painite mining) and about 3 hours (?) of planetary surface. All the other junk (including several copies of ultra rare mats like embedded firmware, imperial and core dynamics shielding, exquisite focus crystals), I got by doing missions that offered them.

The annoying part that's still in the game is lugging around those "hard earned" (aka "picked up along the road") commodities, not being able to swap into a ship without cargo space (haven't seen my FAS in months) and getting constant interdiction attempts.
 
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V'larr

V'larr
Agony_Aunt said:
When you go to do an upgrade, always go with enough mats for 3 rolls. Never accept a bad roll (why you did this i have no idea!) and out of 3 rolls you should get something good.

I did grade 5 dirty drives the other night, i had enough for 4 rolls. First one was good, very good. So accepted it (i always tend to accept any first roll on a clean module anyway as its usually an improvement over stock). Second was meh. Third was even better than the first! I had the fourth sitting there, so thought what the hell and made the roll. Wasn't a good one though.

Basically, most rolls are decent, ignore any bad rolls, and always take enough for at least 3 tries just because you can get a bad one.
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"Don't gamble with what you can't afford to lose" sounds about the same to me...doesn't help with the problem being that it's still gambling. :p

With the increases to materials gained upon collection, it's somewhat easier, sure, but I still don't think that the RNG is worth keeping unless we fully go to 1 step above being able to just give the Engineers fish.
 

Truesilver

Truesilver
One of the many aspects to the potency of the RNG irritant is that you cannot effectively take several of the same thing to the RNGineer, i.e.:-

(1) With core modules you can't - you can't take several FSD;

(2) With restricted internal modules you can't - you can't take 2 x shield generators;

(3) With guns you can but if you want a particular special (i.e. always) you have to choose the roll to apply it to;

(4) With non-restricted internal modules you can - e.g. HRP - but then you need to do the whole process for every single one anyway.

Maybe module storage / ship transfer will help to shorten the 'ferrying' that the current restrictions entail, if you want to keep lesser stuff but ... idk.
 

Boomer Kay

B
V'larr said:
"Don't gamble with what you can't afford to lose" sounds about the same to me...doesn't help with the problem being that it's still gambling. :p
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It's more "don't invest your entire pension fund into fish". :p
You can get an upgrade on every roll *) .. if you don't overroll already good results.
If your G4 is already far above average, consider yourself lucky.
Ranges to check where the investment is worthwhile can be found here:
http://inara.cz/galaxy-blueprint/2


*) which is a pretty silly concept for a casino. You win on every slot machine as long as you don't play the same machine twice?
If you only win 1$ on one and 4$ on the second, you did not "lose 3$" - unless you spend a lot of time telling yourself you did and the bank cheated you out of 3$ you never had .. somehow. :D

And yes, one of my suggestions to "fix" all those "RNG grieving issues" was to fix the improvements . 1%-2%-3%-4%-5% and increase the mat requirements by a factor of 5 (compared to the old requirements). :p
sooo much better.
 
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Ddraig

Ddraig
I never do a mod if I cant at least do 4 or 6 rolls. Odds are you will not get a better result right off the bat.
 

SxChuck

SxChuck
Flash_Baggins said:
SOMETHING THATS NEVER BEEN COMPLAINED ABOUT BEFORE!
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I know this has been brought up before.
AND THERE IS NO REASON TO YELL ABOUT IT!
I posted this to be one more squeaky wheel on this wagon. Every one of us that dislikes this aspect of the game needs to post something about it and continue to do so. That is the only way this issue will be addressed.

A low roll on a LVL5 upgrade should at the least be the same as a high roll on a LVL4 upgrade.

.
 

Truesilver

Truesilver
SxChuck said:
A low roll on a LVL5 upgrade should at the least be the same as a high roll on a LVL4 upgrade.
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Indeed.

"NO, ah demand a restoration of mah right to refresh the bulletin board for unobtanium missions / to drop into unobtainum USS / to 'assault' (lol) unobtanium bases for g5 mats for weeks in order to waste them mats on a sub-g4 roll ............ cuz mah immersion!!"

- Something nobody would ever say if your proposal were implemented ... ever.

May sanity one day prevail.

P.S. Of course if we just moved to a fixed number of 'points' per upgrade which within balanced boundaries the player could choose to allocate, as it appears most of us would love, we wouldn't have any of this fruit machine claptrap ... sigh
 

Boomer Kay

B
Truesilver said:
P.S. Of course if we just moved to a fixed number of 'points' per upgrade which within balanced boundaries the player could choose to allocate, as it appears most of us would love, we wouldn't have any of this fruit machine claptrap ... sigh
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Heat weapons had balanced boundaries. With the initial system getting a full heat loadout with decent overcharged values was a thing to be accomplished in month, if not years.
A full heat loadout was possible, but so unlikely that you had to think hard whether it's worth it to dump a few hundred hours of your gameplay time into trying to obtain it.

They changed the system and everyone was able to trade some grind time for the perfect weapon and that resulted in 'everyone' flying full heat loadouts, which had to be nerfed to a point where going for a heat loadout is not nearly worth the lower time investment ... which means they could have just not implemented them at all.

It doesn't matter how balanced you think boundaries can be. As long as you can put the plusses where it matters for a specific task and the minuses somewhere else, it will be op. If it's op, it will have to be nerfed, if it's nerfed, it's useless. This is not an ED issue, this is 20 years of mmog history.
Do you love the FDL? That thing is the perfect example of a perfectly boundary balanced ship. It sucks for anything but PvP. (it ranks somewhere no 4 to no 6 in PvE Combat ships - which means you only fly it for style points, not for efficiency).

Is the overlap of values necessary? Not really, it just adds another dimension to the upgrade decisionmaking process. You can actually lose something, which is this fabled feature that alledgedly makes "open PvP" so much more rewarding than CQC.
And that's just some self-delusioning to start with, since the option to get about 10 FDL rebuys for 2 hours gameplay makes rebuys almost irrelevant.
Imagine the 3-4 mio per hour you can get as top PvE Combat pilot in a RES would be the maximum income you could achieve. All of a sudden the decision whether to take your 5 mio rebuy superior ship or the 500k rebuy functional ship into random encounters suddenly as a tangible impact.
 
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[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
Zeeman said:
Always do upgrades to clean items only. If it's been modded, don't mod it again. Seems to be a thing that unmodded items get better rolls.

Z...
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Disagree.. clean items just start with clean stats in the little line graphs. The mods are applied to the base module anyway, but the graphs are intended to show you the 'risk' of re-rolling your mod.

Removing the previous mod does nothing.
Starting with a 'virgin' never-before-modded module does nothing.

As the OP found out, the FSD Range mod grades have some overlap (quite a lot when you consider the max Fuel per Jump secondary effect too).
 

DragoonKnight

DragoonKnight
SxChuck said:
I had a LVL4 FSD upgrade that gave me a 24.60 jump in my python. After rolling for a LVL5 upgrade, I now have a 23.33 jump range in my Python.
I don't see why upgrading from a LVL4 to a LVL5 frame shift drive jump range would decrease the jump range.
In the gaming world. If you go from a (Level 4) to a (Level 5) there is an upgrade.
It's bad enough that the RNG has us running around collecting all this stuff at random.
And hauling it around as pirate bait.
Come on Dudes get it together. I love this game, but this is really annoying.
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You should have discarded it if it was not an upgrade. Looks like user error to me.
 
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