So remember that line we were all fed, the beautiful prophecy from on high? “Engineering will give the player a time frame to prevent your ship from exploding.” Reference: https://youtu.be/h8fKhnphE68?si=2kAavVURde6pEw__&t=377 Yeah. Turns out that “time frame” is measured in Planck units, because the only thing I’m preventing is my own will to test this patch. Players everywhere are showcasing the miracle of 4.5’s new “longevity,” which manifests primarily through: Critical health regions the size of a dinner plate, conveniently located where every shot lands Powerplants that drop dead faster than my optimism after reading patch notes. Case in point: as one brave soul informed me on Spectrum, the venerable medical ship Apollo, symbol of hope, healing, and second chances, will instantly vaporize if you sneeze on its nose, even while the reactor is still sitting pretty at 99 percent. Ninety. Nine. Percent. The L22 dies in ONE SECOND from other light fighters. I’ve seen toddlers take more damage from Lego blocks. Apparently, engineering gameplay is here to “extend TTK” by gently encouraging us to die even faster. But in a more complicated way. Instead of just exploding, now I get to run around a burning hallway screaming while the critical section of my ship decides whether this is the moment it gives up on life. Truly immersive. And don’t worry, all this additional danger does wonderful things for balance. Turret gameplay already struggles to hit fighters, but now we’ve doubled down: the new meta is clearly “Fly small, fly cheap, fly solo, never get hit, win forever.” I won't even go down the rabbit hole of how single seat fighters get a free 1 time repair on every component, while everyone else has to do it by hand every time. Meanwhile medium ships, you know, the ones supposedly benefiting from engineering the most, have received: No durability No survivability No forgiveness But hey, now you need three extra friends to keep the place from burning down in the first 15 seconds of combat. Not exactly what I had in mind. Neither was what I was fed. Amazing. Inspiring. Revolutionary. Just not actually helpful. And here is the real kicker. The only ships in the entire game that can truly take advantage of the new engineering loop are capital ships fighting other capital ships. That is it. That is the list. Big ships smacking other big ships around. Now you can actually have soft kills, cascading failures, boarded captures, long TTKs, real repairs, system triage, fires, breaches and thrilling close quarter fights in the hallways. That stuff is awesome and always has been. But the only reason they CAN do this, is because they have stupid amounts of hitpoints to start with. It's so much easier to disable and board a capital than to sit there for 15 minutes killing it with guns. But every other ship class below that scale will never see those moments. They will never live long enough. They will never limp, fight, stabilize, repair, recover or claw their way back into a fight. They just explode. They explode immediately. They explode while the parts that supposedly matter are not even being targeted. They explode before an engineer can even turn back around - because it's not an engineering problem, its a hull HP problem. When you go after a Perseus, why would you even care about a component when the critical health zone is only about ninety thousand hitpoints? Why hunt some tiny subcomponents on a Carrack when the hull fragility gives you a much faster and safer kill? Why roleplay as a boarding team when you're just giving the enemy time to get his friends back to the combat zone? And on the daily; When you soft kill a normal ship in ordinary gameplay. Why would you ever board it? Why would you add risk and time for a theoretical engineering fantasy that never actually manifests in practice? You hard kill it. Every single time. That is what players do. Because it is what the game demands, and that is not the player's fault. That is a system design contradiction that should be obvious to anyone actually playing the game. Which leads to the uncomfortable but increasingly unavoidable conclusion. Most of the people designing this system do not appear to actually play the game they are creating. Because if they did, they would know how ships die. They would know why players hard kill. They would know what ship classes need help. They would know what ships cannot survive long enough for engineering to even matter. But here we are with about ~20 viable PvE and PvP ships overall, 2, 3, 4, 5+ years later. Out of the hundred+ ships in-game, this is what we have. Even with the update that was supposed to breathe life into those once-neglected ships. But, alas, here we are. Engineering was supposed to give us more chances to live. Instead it feels like CIG handed us a bigger, more ornate funeral program.