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@Furyofthestars hit on everything perfectly. The biggest complaint I see, and one I agree with, is that the new system is just, click button -> Captain "poofs" ship away into magical space and comes back X minutes later -> Repeat. It encourages MORE afk mining when you can just click a button and wait. At least with the old system there was preparation involved - building the ship correctly, scouting the sector, building escort ships for protection. After work is done, the player is rewarded with a steady income. Too easy? Make it more work, like Fury said. Enemies attack the sector and threaten your ships, perhaps in increasing amounts based on threat level / protection level of escort ships. Resource spawn rates could degrade over time... I'm starting to repeat Fury's excellent post, so I'll stop there. Also agree with his point about mods - when updates break it, and they will - we might see our orders need to be redone all across the in-game galaxy, or have to wait for a mod update. At least make it a checkbox option to bring it back so those of us without any friends that play solo can choose which system we use. The number of complaints about this new system in the Steam forums is pretty staggering. For those unaware, the mod that brings back 1.X queued orders/looping is this one. It's currently the most popular non-ship mod on the entire Avorion workshop in the last 3 months, the 3rd most popular in the last 6 months, and the 17th most popular (still on the front page) in the last year. As of this post, Avorion 2.0 beta was released a little over one month ago. Hint hint. Nudge nudge.

Hey everyone! The 2.0 Beta has so far been very exciting and we're very happy with the performance of the update! We've spent a lot of time on 2.0 and its polish, and we're super proud of what we've achieved with 2.0 and its improvements to the game. We all genuinely love the changes and improvements it introduces. However, some aspects of the update have been received with mixed feelings by some members of the community, and I think it's time to give you all some background info about why we did what we did. I'd like to shed some more light on the decision that was probably one of the hardest I've ever had to make. I'm not justifying here, nor looking for pity, I'm only explaining. Note: You might need to know that we're a tiny team with 5 devs (including me) working on a massive project here that grew over 8 years. 1. Engine Structure The engine of Avorion uses a bottom-up approach (sectors are generated first, everything else comes from them). There are advantages (easy procedural generation, abstraction, perfectly parallel multi-core support, CPU & memory management) and disadvantages (harder communication between sectors, having to load a sector in memory before accessing it (which can take up to 30 seconds), and missing inter-sector coordination) with that. There are some exceptions where we could, luckily, use a top-down approach, such as faction areas. Due to this structure of the engine, the game has trouble with sector-to-sector communication, and especially non-player-sector-to-client communication. This is not something we can change. Keep in mind that I started Avorion as a hobby project 8 years ago, and the original engine design was never meant to support a game that lets you command ships in other sectors. Making a system work that was never meant for this engine takes very very much time, that could be better spent elsewhere. If you're a modder of Avorion then you probably know what I'm talking about. There are lengthy wiki articles about Avorion's complicated engine structure. 2. Glitches Like mentioned above, we have to work around that with everything we do over the galaxy map, and it costs us development time. It also doesn't feel as good as we think it should. You can feel us having to work around that in every single old style command (lags, ships not responding, sectors going to sleep, etc), and the order chain. Ships have to somehow communicate that they need a sector loaded in memory, which is usually only done when a player is online. What about ships of offline players in sectors with online players, what happens when they jump away into a sector that's not loaded? Those are the fun exception cases we have had to deal with on a daily basis. Maintaining this system costs us tons and tons of dev time, it makes features expensive and also costs us money that could, again, be better invested elsewhere. 3. Performance The old system requires sectors to be kept in memory for ships to do their work there. It also means simulating those sectors. There is a reason why we're limiting the number of sectors on multiplayer servers. We're regularly getting complaints and out-of-memory crashes from players who are playing Avorion on 10 year old laptops where they're sending their ships away to mine. Yes, this could be solved by better hardware, but in order to keep the fanbase growing, we'd rather have the game run well on those machines, too. 4. Gameplay, Immersion and Ease of Use A) In the old system you had to find a nice sector or two, find a refinery, equip a ship and get a captain, then click a few times while holding Shift, and your mining loop was set up. I agree that it's a nice mechanic to set up and feels immersive. If you do it right and make a big enough loop with alternating asteroid fields you'll trigger the asteroid respawn, making it a perfectly safe fire-and-forget for infinite income (which is not something we think should be available as early in the game as it is right now, but more on that later). B) In the new system, you have to find a nice area, equip a ship and get a captain, then click a few times and your mining operation is set up. You get a report from your captain telling you that an area is awful/great for mining, and how many resources they think they'll bring in. With a high-enough tier mining captain it's still close to fire-and-forget (mid to late game, for up to 8h), but no more immediately available infinite income. You also have to put more thought into your ship, its armament and strength and the area it's deployed in. We put a lot of thought into this system. Personally, I prefer B (I mean, yeah, duh, that's why we put it in), for several reasons. It's easier to use, more straightforward and more transparent. It's a clear "Mine" command that communicates what equipment it'll need, how long it takes, what your income will be and tells you more about potential dangers. I also think that this communication with the captain makes it more immersive. Easier to use: Did you know that 75% of players in Avorion only have a single ship? We want to make fleets more attractive to everyone since that's a very important part of the game, and the new map commands are one of the steps we're taking towards that. And considering being a fleet commander: The new commands make you interact with your ships and captains on a more regular basis, instead of them just being income drones that you don't care about. We also added many commands that are meant to make many aspects of the game more accessible as well. Scouting an entire area, sending your ship off on an adventure to have your captain report the exciting and ridiculous things that (may or may not) have happened, quick ways to trade, gather or get rid of goods, single-click traveling, factory supply, refining, resupply, etc. that were not as easy to set up before. For the ambush chances, we wanted a system where you'll have to put some thought into your ships and where there's a certain feeling of danger. It was also important to us to add a system where you have a certain control over your ships being attacked or not. The armament of your ship, the area where they're doing their thing, safe mode and escorts all influence the ambush chances. Finally, even if we hadn't added the new command system, we would still have added a system where every 1 - 2 hours one of your stations or mining ships would get attacked, to get that certain feeling of lurking danger. I'd also like to communicate our vision for the game here, since I've seen quite some misconceptions come up again and again. For infinite income: We DO want players to have infinite (or at least low effort) income at some point! How would you ever build stations and actual fleets without that? The thing is that we don't want that infinite income as early in the game as it can be achieved in the old system. So, some passive income in the early game: Yes. Infinite passive income in the early game: No. Considering late game: For infinite trickle-in-money: We designed stations for that exact purpose. For massive amounts of resources: Send out a mining fleet with a Tier III mining captain leading them (they'll be gone for 8h, even if the other captains aren't miners), and a warship that protects them and enjoy the millions of income every half hour 🙂 I'll talk about another point here that has been brought up. People have been mentioning the lower income of the mining operations, as compared to the old commands, and they thought that we nerfed passive income to somehow punish them (I'm not sure why we would ever want to do something like that or what you'd be punished for, exactly?). The actual income of the mining operations was based on observations we made while mining ourselves. We timed our manual mining to get some good numbers for the simulation of the mine command. So that mine command income simulation is actually based on how much a player would approximately mine with that ship that you're sending out, and not based on the AI simulation while you're not in the sector. And that's where one of the issues arose from: There was actually a bug in the simulation which has since been fixed (basically in the no-player-in-the-sector simulation ships were always boosting, always hitting with all turrets, no matter how far they were etc.). AI miners would outperform manual mining by up to 5x (!!) while you're not in the sector. This means some of the (completely risk-free!) tactics we've seen players do in 1.3.8 would basically turn the game into creative mode in just two hours. AI miners would make more resources than a player mining manually. Apart from it being a bug, that feels plain wrong to us. The best way to play would be obviously to send out your mini-mining ship, risk free, for massive income. Every other way is not as valid. That means that there is no meaningful gameplay choice here, which to us is a sign of a game mechanic that's unhealthy for the game. 5. Choosing our Battles We're a tiny team working on Avorion and that means we have to choose our battles. Avorion's got so many playstyles and features where we loved having it in the game and where we're only scratching the surface. This is something that ultimately leads to the game feeling like it's incomplete or still Early Access even. With Avorion 2.0 we want the game to feel better as a whole, more finished. We spent months on the update, improving not only quality of life, but adding so many more important features, missions and other content. We overhauled the entire UI. We want to tie up some of these, let's call them "unfinished loose ends" where things feel unpolished and unfinished. There was a lot to do, and we did all this in a free update, because we think that it will 100% benefit both the game and the current and future community. Keep in mind that we simply can't expand and deepen all the playstyles and mechanics as much as we want. Especially given some of the limitations we're having with the engine. So why not keep it as an option? Because if we do that, we get double the work because we have to maintain two systems, and there is no way we can reasonably do that. There is nothing "lazy" about that, it's us prioritizing what we simply can and cannot achieve. 7. Final Note: Modding We're extremely grateful for the amazing modding community that has assembled around the game. If your playstyle doesn't fit our vision of the game, then there is no harm... no, let me be more explicit: then we want to encourage you to make a mod to fit it to your playstyle. Considering the old commands: We knew that this decision would be controversial and we explicitly removed them in a way that they can be easily readded through a mod. I personally still think that a true sandbox game thrives through its (modding) community. So, are we letting the community do something that would be our job? No. Our job is to fulfill our vision of the game, in a way that is doable for us. And it is our job to make it possible for everyone to enjoy the game the way they want to enjoy it. Which is why a few years ago, we spent months of work making the game as modding friendly as we possibly can. And we're still continuing with that! (We'll get to that Scripting API requests thread very soon, don't worry!) So there you have it! This is the full, transparent and whole truth about the map commands rework. We have to choose our battles, to make sure that we can continue to deliver high quality updates in reasonable amounts of time. I hope you can understand that. Now stop reading the ramblings of a dev and go have fun with Avorion 2.0! 🙂 Sincerely, Konstantin (and the rest of the Boxelware Team)

I've been playing since Dec 21st, 2017 and I've got more than 2500 hours logged. I LOVE THE NEW CHANGES! Managing ships with trade and mining loops before was just annoying. I spent most of my time manually trading to build up income, as well as exploring. Now? Exploring is almost too easy - my current gameI have over 7500 sectors explored, thanks to my explorer ships and captains (almost triple that of older games). For me, a game didn't really start until I had a rare or better trading system. Now, it's find a merchant captain and send them off to make $$$. That means more time I can spend looking for new captains, checking out station missions, and other higher level stuff. I'm going to say a happy goodbye to order looping. It was wonky to set up and it caused performance issues. Missions are great, although expeditions feel kind of... underwhelming, honestly. Expeditions should have effects and events that only happen on an expedition - you get more items with salvage, more credits with trade, etc. I used to make ships for specific tasks like mining and trading, but they'd often sit idle. Now, every ship I have is almost always working, to the point where I feel guilty if they're not off on a mission. Captain traits are interesting, but they seem a bit limited - there's definitely room for more. There's also a great opportunity to have captains gain abilities as they level, like a maybe a daredevil getting a 5% bonus to a specific type of damage at level 3, 10% at level 5, etc. My fleet is definitely active, and the shield module changes actually resulted in my ships being outfitted and ending up wth more shields than I'd normally run. I've also made a 15-slot ship for the first time ever because of 2.0 and it's amaaaaazing! Fighters are even tougher than prior to 2.0 - being able to fire from extended ranges was their biggest strength before, now it's massive HP per fighter. I have fighters with over 1250 HP each, and they're still wrecking everything they face, only faster now with the range boost ability. It's like commanding a swarm of space piranhas! Nothing I've faced so far uses anti-fighter cannons, which means I've destroyed entire sectors and not lost a single ship (that's bad - I should be taking losses). Trade has gone from a bit of a pain to "I have SO MUCH STUFFFFF". Procure missions are so good, you can't even imagine how happy I am to have them. You know what would be even better? Making a way to have a turret part list populate a procure mission's item list - there's a nudge, nudge suggestion for you from me 😉 And having smuggler captains being able to sell stolen goods without having to find and visit a smuggler? YES PLEASE! The changes you've made for 2.0 are really, really good. Some people are always going to be unhappy with any kind of change, and there's nothing you can do to appease them. Just keep going and make the game even better!

It would be nice to be able to do it in one step, though, similar to downscaling.

Just to add to this: in addition to the great suggestion to add a little more differentiation between the functional and non-functional hull versions, it'd be great to revisit the relationship between hull blocks and armor. In general, you can swap in armor for hull at a 1:2 ratio and up with similar weight, half the volume, and *way* more HP. It seems like there's a way to make each of the blocks (both hull variants and armor) have their own role; "smart" hull could be a main/important source of processing power but give less HP, blank hull could be the best and most efficient way to increase HP, and armor could stay specialized by giving less HP than blank hull and weighing considerably more. Right now, you can (and maybe should!) just ignore hull blocks entirely. Which seems weird.

Hyperspace travel showing your ship running inside the warp tunnel instead showing the loading screen, would be possible?

That'd be really cool! And as a tagalong idea, use the calculation time and other wait between map sector selection and jump as a low-thread-priority preload of the new sector (in a disposable temp cache in case nobody actually ends up jumping there). It'd be really slick if we could eventually get to the point that you just see a predictable few seconds in a warp tunnel every time you swapped and it'd REALLY boost the immersion aspect.