[Question About AI Ship Effectiveness]

Long/thin provides certain advantages to control (since control surfaces are more effective the further they are from center of mass) and tend to be more difficult to hit consistently if maneuvering correctly, but the maneuvers that make you difficult to hit also make it very difficult to aim weapons.  Those NPC ships that start spinning wildly when smacked on their long ends are also not shooting at you, so the net benefit of their shape is... nothing.

 

Keep in mind that certain weapons are going to hit you almost no matter what and that you're going to lose out on volume bonuses if you have to build your ship like a chain or intersecting chains, and a long ship is going to require more armor to comprehensively protect than a round ship of the same volume.

[This might be helpful]

Also, would it be possible to make the planets in the background have a bigger role than just being aesthetics? 

 

Please tell me if I need to explain anything better.

Yeah this one

[Pushing away from station]

This happens to me too. 

 

On a related note, how rude is it that you can't even force your way out of the grip of a tractor beam, no matter your thrust?

[Player built gate networks, some ideas]

Gates don't really create "choke points" when every ship is jump-capable, though.  Fleets don't need gates to jump into the center of your empire.

Functionally most of their value comes from being able to create long-distance supply chains. 

 

I'm also not sure that we're "there" yet in terms of alliance function and infrastructure.  Your idea is a few steps ahead of all the legwork that would have to be done to make sure new alliances aren't just flattened by larger alliances instantly.  If your idea is "player-built gates" then cool, if your idea is "sov war" then you're gonna have to flesh it out just a bit more.

[Alloys]

Let's think about the top material at the moment: Avorion.

The biggest problem with Avorion is: There's no Avorion Armor, if you want to mount Avorion Turrets on your ship, you can't get the benefits of Armor. If there was an Armor-Alloy, that allowed mounting Avorion Turrets and that stops railgun-projectiles, I'd use it, even if it doesn't have significantly more hp then Ogonite Armor.

That's kind of irrelevant given turret mount blocks - you can just mount a strip of Avorion Turret Mount on top of Ogonite Armor.  This is a non-issue.

It is an issue... You just don't understand it :P

I've got about 12 million Avorion and just 500k Ogonite. Now you tell me to get back into a boring part of the galaxy, to collect an obsolete material just to build the armor for new ships. And even worse, I'd still have to put another ugly block on top of that armor, just to be able to put a turret there.

You can literally make the turret mount as thin as you want to, just as long as it's wide and long enough to mount the turret base.  You can paint it the same color as Ogonite if you so wish.  You're complaining about material collection being boring, yet your whole idea is based on forcing people to collect more materials to do what they already do just fine, with an insignificant stat buff being the only reward.

 

What's about properties of the materials? The first thing that comes to my mind is weight... Any Alloys or composite materials with Titanium or Trinium shouldn't be too heavy. Using those as Armor could offer some advantages to stats like maneuverability and acceleration/braking (well, just because of the mass).

Again, it sounds like a buff for no purpose.

Well, there may be a little buff, but just like the missing Avorion armor, there simply doesn't need to be a buff.

If there's no buff, what's the point of collecting two materials to make one block when you could do the exact same thing with one material?  Again, this idea just leads nowhere.

[Alloys]

Hi,

 

 

Yes, but the suggestion is a statement for developers to consider and act upon. A good suggestion has to clearly state what should be done, and then the reason why it should be done for the betterment of the game. With the suggestion given here as it is, we will either get the alloys, that are better than the pure materials, which will make the pure materials meaningless and applying them more tedious, or allows that are weaker than the originals, which will in turn render them unnecessary.

well, those alloys don't need to be stronger then the original materials to be useful. And we shouldn't think just about alloys, there are also composite materials (think about carbon-fiber or glass fiber epoxy materials, ferroconcrete,...).

If it pleases you, we can call them "composite materials" instead of "alloys" but it's conceptually the same thing.

 

Let's think about the top material at the moment: Avorion.

The biggest problem with Avorion is: There's no Avorion Armor, if you want to mount Avorion Turrets on your ship, you can't get the benefits of Armor. If there was an Armor-Alloy, that allowed mounting Avorion Turrets and that stops railgun-projectiles, I'd use it, even if it doesn't have significantly more hp then Ogonite Armor.

That's kind of irrelevant given turret mount blocks - you can just mount a strip of Avorion Turret Mount on top of Ogonite Armor.  This is a non-issue.

 

Which other advantages would alloys offer? Well, if you just started a game and start progressing towards the core, you usually have got tons of the old materials, the first material that you encounter that is not available in the whole galaxy is Naonite.

Naonite allows you to build shields for the first time, but it also offers advantages in generators (which you need to power those shields) and so on. So you would focus your efforts on constructing shields and upgrade your generators with the first bits of Naonite.

 

If there were any Naonite-Titanium or Naonite-Iron Alloys or composite materials, that would allow you to quickly upgrade your Armor or other important parts of your ship, wouldn't you use those?

Again, I don't really see this as an issue - as you progress through the campaign, you come upon materials that aren't great at everything, but will improve something.  You're just introducing a buff for no particular reason (it's not like this point in the campaign is challenging enough to justify a buff to armor).

 

What's about properties of the materials? The first thing that comes to my mind is weight... Any Alloys or composite materials with Titanium or Trinium shouldn't be too heavy. Using those as Armor could offer some advantages to stats like maneuverability and acceleration/braking (well, just because of the mass).

Again, it sounds like a buff for no purpose.

 

And finally we've got some blocks like the inertial dampener, which can be built just out of Iron or Avorion, because of some subspace-properties... Well, maybe some parts of these blocks could be built out of Trinium or other materials, too. These slightly upgraded versions might offer just little bonuses (like weight-reduction and maybe slightly improved stats).

Inertial damps are fine.  If anything, I'd say that materials should be *more* specialized, like Iron, so that there's some reason to be holding onto materials that are right now made worthless once you hit Trinium.  You're suggesting everything get less specialized.

 

You see, there is no need to make alloys, composite materials or "mixed blocks" overpowered. There could be some minor advantages, like ferroconcrete offers to buildings (on earth).

It's not about things being over or underpowered.  This is still ostensibly a single-player game.  It's about somebody spending time coding and texturing and creating UI elements for the things you're describing so that you can have slightly better armor before hitting Trinium, which is completely unnecessary. 

[Alloys]

Titanium is absolutely worthless for ship construction once you hit Tritium, though.  Cost per unit != value.

 

People who play the game to hunt pirates absolutely want to be stronger, and the way to achieve that is to work your way toward the core.  Coincidentally this also introduces harder pirates.  This system works. 

 

And you CAN build a player-run faction the size of an NPC faction if you so wish.  You can build ships in shipyards (I think there's a mod for this?) and have them crewed and send them off to collect expensive ores from systems nearer to the core and bring them back, or not.  You can build mines and manufacture turrets to your heart's content.  You can send an armada of armed ships to gigadunk on your neighbors.  But I don't really understand how your original idea would transform this, except by making things built far away from the core arbitrarily more powerful than they already are for no specific purpose. 

 

Maybe there could be more specialized purposes for each material like there is with Iron before reaching Avorion, so that there's a need for a trans-galactic supply chain to build the most powerful spaceboats, but blowing up the short list of raw materials with the addition of alloyed materials is just adding a hurdle with no function.

[Alloys]

I'll have you know that I'm always seeking out Iron near the core for inertial dampeners.

 

More seriously - if Avorion later develops into something more along the lines of X3 or EVE, there's still going to be an economy for lesser ores in manufacturing ships and modules for less experienced players, or for building cheap replacement ships for things like solo PVP. 

 

But I don't think as a single-player game there's any point to giving lesser ores a purpose late-game, especially since they become rarer the closer to the Core you get.  It just makes the process of improving and adding to your ship more tedious than it already is. 

[Friend/Foe-Detection for (some) weapons?]

It sounds like the AI could use a little work, if that's the case. 

[Friend/Foe-Detection for (some) weapons?]

I don't think that we would ever implement something like this, though. Friendly fire isn't a side-effect, it was actually planned to be in the game.

Kind of my thought too - hard-coding trigger discipline is boring.  If you don't want to accidentally shoot friendlies, then make sure they aren't in the line of fire.

[Beta Branch Patch 0.20 Patchnotes - AI & Map Commands]

Ah cool, maybe this will make rail/lightning slightly less overpowered?

[Beta Branch Patch 0.20 Patchnotes - AI & Map Commands]

Do the AI actually chase/catch up with you if you try to flee an encounter?  Because that's a game-changer.

[Increase the rotation-speed of laser-turrets]

You have both failed to argue from the realism perspective (since there's no mention of using mirrors in beam turrets anywhere) and from the balance perspective (why the hell do we even need these changes).

 

Lmao

 

Other voxel games (e.g. From the Depths) lets you build the "guts" of a laser weapon in one spot and transmit the energy to an actual firing piece (lens assembly) on a turret base via Transceivers, which are fancy mirror assemblies.  What this means is the actual laser turret can be very small and light even though the damage it projects is comparable with a much larger cannon turret.  I think this is what the OP is modeling their idea on.

 

But that comparison is free of realism because very high-energy lasers (in the GW or TW order) can't be reflected the same way low-energy lasers can.  Any material that "reflects" light at a >0 degree angle is going to absorb some energy, and so a mirror is going to absorb 1) a lot of energy in 2) an extremely small area.  This causes all kinds of problems - even assuming that the mirroring material is able to "sink" this heat without vaporizing in seconds, it's still going to expand, which will create a non-flat surface, which is going to send your beam into a non-intended direction, potentially causing a RAD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) event. 

 

So this means that the laser "guts" or cavity has to be in a position to "project" the beam directly to the lens assembly without any intervening mirrors, which means that it has to be part of any turret assembly. 

 

(lenses can also heat up and cause RADs but that's a totally different topic)

[Increase the rotation-speed of laser-turrets]

If you're arguing in terms of realism then no, you would not have a massive fixed laser cavity with a ~180 degree traversing lens assembly.  The cavity would need to traverse with the lens assembly for the same reason that a cannon shell casing has to traverse with a barrel assembly - you can't just "bounce" huge pulses of light off mirrors without melting said mirrors.  This would make the entire turret quite heavy.

 

In terms of in-game balance, lasers are pretty crummy and could use a buff, but I don't know if turret rotation speed is going to matter (considering how grossly overpowered rails and lightning are).