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Confused by Impulse Engine stats

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Can someone explain to me why Impulse engines have no or almost no improvement in thier listed stats in the game tooltips throughout thier tiers? I'm in my Exploration cruiser and still using a tier 2 engine becuase it still has the best listed speed and turn rate I've seen. I tried crafting a new engine set as I was able to upgrade most of my consoles that way and the crafted engines have essentially identical stats going from tier 3 to tier 8!

No other component does this, so either thier is no reason to ever pay the costs in energy credits or matierals to upgrade your engines or there is some hidden math or stat I'm not seeing. The wiki for example shows the expected linear improvement in stats through the tiers, but it's player made and known to be behind in some things.
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Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    I'd like to know too. That changed sometime during the F2P Beta. Always thought it might be a display bug or something.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    Yes. I see it too. But I also experimented. There is no difference on a ship between a Mark IV and Mark VII combat engine. No difference. I tried and got no improvement. No change on the actual performance during combat.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    i think ithe stats may have been changed since there are at least 2 skills in the new skill tree that affect engine speed and turn rates. if nothing else. pick up the efficient engines and leave it at that until you need stuff for sets. lol.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    I ticketed that very thing last night. I was going to replay the Past Imperfect mission for an upgraded version of the Efficient Impulse Engines and noticed that the stats didn't change at all between the MK VI and MK VIII versions. Then I noticed it went from +1 to all subsystems to +0 weapons, +0.02 for something else and +2.5 for some other thing. I wish they hadn't fixed something that wasn't broken...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    I've encounter the Engine stats strangeness myself while revamping my Engine Guide. Detailed here.

    http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3943036&postcount=6

    No quite the same things that other are seeing. But strange nonetheless. I'm going to be testing things out more tonight with a wider range of engines and ships.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    There are so many things about equipment that confuses me, engine stats are just one of them. I just stick with, "if whatever I'm wearing has higher numbers in the stats that I understand than what I'm trying to put on, then I keep the old".

    Has worked well for me so far, I don't die as often as you might think.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    Blizzard36 wrote: »
    Can someone explain to me why Impulse engines have no or almost no improvement in thier listed stats in the game tooltips throughout thier tiers?

    Because they don't improve much as far as Speed and Turn go. Mainly only the Full Impulse stat is changed to an appreciable degree when levelling.

    Ship type has an effect on things, due to impulse and turn rate modifiers, and each ship type also has an impact on when the payoff point comes for Combat and Hyper engines I believe.

    Really, it's one of those things that should probably be reworked. Like shields types. And ship balance. And... well, a lot of stuff actually.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    I've been playing around with a lot more engines and ships. And I've compared current engine stats to stats in various forums, blogs and wikis. It appears that all of the Engine stats have been changed to be near the Mk XII range. Engine top speeds do improve with the higher Mark engines. But the Speed different are about 3. Turn rates all appears to be the same. There are still major differences in speeds at Full Impulse. Although the magnitudes of speeds are down to around the 2x range between highest and lower speeds.

    So it's either a huge bug, or they've improved the low mark engines to make space movement a lot better at lower levels. The downside is that people may be upgrading the engines for virtually no reason. Upgradomg an engine to a like engine with a higher mk is not an upgrade. It's a was of Dilithium. The only worthy upgrades are getting a better quality engine (i.e. getting ones with [SPD], [TURN], [FULL], etc.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    fuzun wrote: »
    I've encounter the Engine stats strangeness myself while revamping my Engine Guide. Detailed here.

    http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3943036&postcount=6

    No quite the same things that other are seeing. But strange nonetheless. I'm going to be testing things out more tonight with a wider range of engines and ships.

    One thing I've discovered in my testing is that the stats that show for the engines include the modifiers for your current ship. Change your current ship and the stats change as well, even when the item is sitting in your inventory or on the Exchange.

    While this doesn't effect the core question I had of why there is so little improvement in the Engines nor impacts relative comparisons, it definately makes it harder to tell what the real base values are and so how much or how little base improvement there is.

    For example a Mk VIII Efficient engine I was debating finally replaing my Mk II [Spd][Turn] engine with had a 4.5 listed turn rate on my Exploration Cruiser, same as the old Mk II. This same module had a turn rate of 13 when I had my Light Cruiser set as my active ship and a 27 when I looked at it with my Klingon character and his tier 4 Bird of Prey.

    Turn rate is in particular what I'm trying to increase since it is so terrible on the Exploration Cruiser. Up until that class all my cruisers have been noticably less maneuverable than the other ship types but I could still squeeze just enough maneuverability out of them by playing smart, using good tactics, and planning ahead. Not so with the Exploration Cruiser, which has just under 2/3 the turn rate of the preceeding Heavy Cruisers. I tried the consoles that improve turn rate, but since they are a multiplier of your base turn rate even the 22% improvement one I used barely helped since the base number being multiplied is so low. I'm beginning to think that with as huge a mobility penalty it has there is essentially no way to improve it. Even getting expensive modules 6 tiers above what I previously barely improved it by a full point becuase of the Exploration Cruiser's modifiers. That same level of effort applied to an Escort ship with it's much better mobility modifiers probably would have resulted in at least a 5 point improvement.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2012
    Good to hear I'm not the only one. I picked up a blue-quality engine that was Mk.3 many levels ago (with a "well, the stats are almost identical, but it's slightly better because of this extra bit"), and I've just kept it up through Admiral. Every time I get a new ship, I take all of my blue gear off of my old ship and compare with the higher-mark white-quality stuff my new ship has. Invariably, the blue engines will always be almost identical and just slightly better than the white ones.

    My friend was also looking at this, noticing that all of the white engines from the NPCs had the same exact stats, even though they were all being sold for different prices. He looked at it on his lower-level character, and the numbers were different due to his different ship, but the engines were still all identical to each other.

    I was worried that there were some hidden numbers that were improving that just weren't on the tooltip for some reason, but if it's just broken, I feel a lot better.

    Why even have different Mark engines if there's no improvement when you upgrade? I can see a lot of people wasting money on high-level engines because they assume they just don't understand how it works, and if it's a higher level, it MUST be better.
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