My experience in the last week, doing just missions mixed with "manual" settlement raids of my own and just a little (two hours) of POI resetting to build up some bottleneck stock (ie MIs) is this:This is one major bottleneck
The other is bolted on mods. Requiring to engineer more suits/weapons and craft more mods.
And getting a suit or an weapon to G5 costs insane number of materials, then you bolt on it some mods... then you realize that, well... you should have used other mods on it
So i'm not even sure that 3x multiplier on engineering materials is enough.
It should be That plus a reduced materials on blueprints
For example:
This are the materials needed to G5 long range a 5A FSD. May look like a lot, but actually you need 3 DWE - can be scanned outside any station, and getting 3 should be a less than 30 minutes job, Chemical Manipulators takes even less. And rest are lower grade and can be easily traded
And then you can put this G5 FSD in any ship that can accommodate it
Then compare it with the requirements for a single G5 weapon mod. That is bolted on.
And i dont even have the compiled requirements to upgrade a suit/weapon to G5, but there are a lots and lots of materials involved...
G5 Long Range FSD (9x G5 rolls, 4x G4, 3x G3, 2x G2, 1x G1)
Atypical Disrupted Wake Echoes: 3
Chemical Processors: 5
Phosphorus: 3
Strange Wake Solutions: 3
Chemical Distillery: 4
Eccentric Hyperspace Trajectories: 4
Manganese: 4
Arsenic: 9
Chemical Manipulators: 9
Datamined Wake Exceptions: 9
Greater Range: Improves the weapon's effective range.
Asset Metal Coil 10
Asset Electromagnet 10
Good Ionized Gas 1
Asset Motor 5
Asset Electrical Fuse 5
Data Chemical Formulae 10
Data Mineral Survey 15
- To upgrade, I sometimes need to go to a settlement or two to stock up on specifics (tech/circuits/chemicals)
- Every time I do a settlement, where possible, I will steal the PR from the PWR room as well
- Data mats for engineer blueprints are all gained via missions so to get a specific module I just do missions
- I've had a blast doing almost all of this
- I now have:
- A G5 Executioner with:-
- Faster Reload
- Extended Magazine
- A G3 Executioner
- A G4 Dominator with:-
- Damage Resistance
- Night Vision (preloaded)
- A G3 Maverick with:-
- Extra backpack
- A G5 Executioner with:-
- I'm ready to start getting mats for my next upgrades now and yet to continue... oops... I still have:
- 34 OPs to find
- ~15 media (cat, classic etc)
- 6 heists (currently broken? Not tried yet)
- Out of those, I'd be excited about doing the 6 heists (they're fun)
- The rest would take me an extremely long time to complete "grinding" them and I'm not going to do that
- If we multiply mats by x3 OR if we reduce mats costs across the board, I would have just hit this bottleneck a few days ago instead of now and I'd have an abundance of mats that I have nothing to use for until I unlock the engineers
What you're talking about is something I am on board with, the idea that the mats requirements may be a little too steep but I don't think they are across the board. I think MIs are too unilaterally demanded and so grinding them out is necessity: and it can be done which is the self-sustaining Engineering loop of grind (i.e. it can be done so do it, stop complaining about it). But univerally reducing or increasing won't achieve balance. Care should be taken to change specific things that need attention. So multiplying everything by x3 still doesn't stop that MI grind being necessary because it's just 3 times less grindy but still the same level of demand in comparison to everything else (which just got more abundant).
Opinion Polls is one of those things that needs specific care and, honestly... just cutting it down to 8-10 required would instantly make it perfect (I'd be close to unlocking it now, when I'm ready to start working on new engineering modules and I've not spent a lot of time "grinding them")
Balance of progression is something that needs specific care in specific areas. It doesn't need complicated fixes either. Reductions can work but they need to be specific.