I believe that the roles from engineer with expection of the OT, feels empty mechanic wise and don’t really make alot of difference if they are on the ship or not, i know that sometimes stuff can break and these roles are there for it, or to just load up the OB, but we already got the ASO to help with engineer even if there is no MT or CE and when we talk about the OB, we got many roles that can deal with reloading on their place such as DCC, SO, XO, CO and even the ASO, comparing to the SS13 main game that the engineers have alot of stuff to do and their perfomance impact the round, this roles in CM feel like a “do whatever you want”, RP around, clean stuff, build whatever or deploy planet side so you can be useful to the round in some way.
I know that in the wiki we got a tutorial to fix the engines, i don’t know when that feature got removed and i am not a veteran in cm, so before these roles could have some sorta of real responsability that got removed for some reason, i think that the engineers deserve to have some sorta of role and responsability since that will make these roles more enjoyable to play, when you play QM you know what you will deal with it, when you play ASO you know what you will deal with it, if you play SO you know what you will deal with it, but when you play MT or CE it can be a really boring round that you basically fix broken lights and windows, clean some places, load the OB and when you really got nothing to do you , you deploy to act like an Combat technician with better stats and no sentry.
Overall i want to know how was engineer ship side before, was it bad or good, what can we do to improve the engineer that we got at the moment or do the maintainers believe that it should not be changed?
Regarding the Fusion Reactors being refuelable and repairable, it was (apparently) removed due to MTs not fixing or refueling them at round start and the upheaval that happened when power ran out. Frankly, I find that quite hilarious and a “reap what you sow” as the CO/XO/ASO/IO/PO/DCC/CE/OT/MT/SL/FTL/Combat Tech/Synth are all roles capable of fixing them and refueling them.
Seems like a cool feature but like you said multiple roles could do it, i don’t see the logic behind removing if so many ship side roles can go out of their way to fix even if there is not MT or CE
My experience with repairing generators (planetside) that break down is that 5 minutes after repairing the generators half of them have already broken down again, forcing you to either babysit them the entire round or just give up on it and move on.
I can only imagine how bad it was for the 20 reactors on the almayer. Seems more a case of a really bad implementation than anything else.
The idea of repairing and configuring stuff seems sound to me in principle, and better if there’s some interesting interactivity to it, like setting it up the right way reducing refuel time on dropships or cooldown on the orbital cannon or things of that sort, but having to constantly upkeep it every 10 minutes (At least, assuming they worked like planetside) by just welding and wiring over and over is pointless tedium and no surprise nobody did it.
It really is boring, i never in a normal round feel like im in an actual ship in space, there is no freedom because of the potential to ruin a round (no one setting up power/atmos). I however think it would be good for the MT role, wich is currently just doing a personal/CL/Mess project and fixing windows, wich anyone can do.
I dont think sacrificing freedom as to not fuck up a round is fun, i would kill to be able to do actual engineering on the almayer
But i recognize it may be hard, specially on lowpop, maybe ares could handle that in lowpop ?
I just dont see why we dont bring back a side generator that you can setup and power similiar to the beam in ss13… but it gives money to req…
MT gang for life. But on a serious note. I understand.