What's the Point of G5 Engineer Access?.

[[VR] scipio_77]

I would probably be better if you just started with the max access, I agree that the "first run to G5" is a bit tedious.

if the issue is just to have a sink to put mats into, just make it a requirement to bring them so and so mats for the access.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I think a better question is what is the point of g1-g4?

1) Frequently in my experience, a G1 to G4 rating is more fit to purpose than a G5 rating. Penalties increase as the rating increase, and in the ships I design, minimizing the penalties is at least as important as maximizing the bonuses. The only module I ever automatically G5 is the FSD.

2) Frequently in my experience, the bonuses of a G5 rating isn't worth the effort required to get them. IMO, if you've got time to spare in this game, you're better off improving your skills at this game, as opposed to grinding away for hours to save yourself fractions of seconds of while playing the game... especially when getting good at what you're trying to do can save you minutes.

3) Frequently in my experience, I get more "bang for my buck" from trading G5 materials and data down to get the stuff I actually need.

Or why does "E" rated internals (esp FSD) exist when you buy a ship?

It's a holdover from the early development of this game, before Frontier caved in to the Veruca Salts of the community, and castrated the economic aspects of this game. Once upon a time, when credits actually mattered, E rated internals had one important advantage: they were cheap to operate.

Some aspects of this game needs a logic re-think.

I agree. The Monty-Haul Campaign level of income currently in the game has reached ludicrous heights. I'd like to see the economic sim restored to its Alpha 4 glory; a return of maintenance and operational costs; the addition of docking fees based on ship size; mission and exploration rewards dialed down to sane levels; exploiters being punished for the cheaters they are; and core mining income reduced to reasonable levels.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It's just time-gating for the OP power creep that noone had asked for.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

For many engineering mods you get kind of diminishing returns. A G1 mod will typically give you a relatively large part of the final G5 mod. Like G1=+30%, G2-G5=+15% per level. The G5 mods are also more expensive material wise. Therefore in many cases I typically use G1-G3 for experiments, and G5 with experimental only for my favorite ships, the keepers.

This. G4 gives basically all the performance of G5 for maybe 10% of the material costs. G3 is basically free - either from lower grade materials picked up while looking for higher grade ones or just generally playing, or by trading down tiny quantities of G5 materials - and still pretty good.

If Frontier introduced a G6 that gave a 1% performance improvement over G5, took 100 rolls to max out, and used up 10 different G5 materials per roll ... far more people than actually have any use for that performance improvement would do it, just because they feel they have to. Conversely, if it had only ever gone up to G4 in the first place it'd be far less "grindy" to max out a module and no-one would miss the performance difference.


(Likewise C-grade modules I used a lot back in the 1.x and early 2.x releases because they gave most of the performance of A-grade while being really cheap. Nowadays there's less use to them.)