Xebeth wrote:Took the Chieftain to a RES, it was great fun. Did a bit more engineering using the Material Traders, this makes life a lot easier, you just need to pick up what every junk is presented for conversion later, this'll me the first time I've ever picked up material in a RES and actually it gave me something to do while waiting for the next target to come along.
I'm not saying thee system is perfect, but so far the changes to engineering do not appear to be the disaster that it first appeared, I think a few tweaks to the threshold at which you can go to the next grade and it'll be livable.
Have you got most of your engineering done apart from chasing optimal results?
I must admit, I can't see how a 900%* increase in material requirements per module is anything other than disaster for anyone who hasn't got their fleet up to a minimal G5 roll level already.
The other thing is, since you now need basically all the materials, the materials trader only adds some minor convenience as you always lose something. (either lots of lower level mats trading up, or more valuable harder to obtain mats trading down). You also have to go out of your way to collect the stuff you didn't previously need, which doesn't translate into a proportional increase in time spent, but it's not no time spent.
And unless the material targeting display indicates what's in your hold, you will constantly have to keep looking at your materials cargo to check you aren't wasting your time because you already hit the cap. (unless you have an eidetic memory, which I sure as hell don't).
There's also no mats trader for resources or data, as far as I can tell. I've just been trying to gather some cracked firmware and the prospect of having to do this up to 10 times more often has me reaching for the uninstall icon.
* that's 900% assuming 3 rolls per rank gain and 1 roll in G5. Which in the former case is conservative and in the later, will produce inferior results on average vs a single G5 roll in the current system. In practice, this means your mat requirements will sometimes be worse than 30 mats per module (up from 3) and you'd have likely gotten a better result with the new system with 1 roll.
Edit: actually, crack is a bad example since that's predominantly used in grade 5 blueprints wherein the deterministic path to an optimal module should mean you have to gather significantly less of it when you are chasing the best results.