Nanaki

A lot of people (myself included) are probably waiting for the game to cook in the oven for a few major patches before giving it another play through. But we are here, watching, waiting, patiently.

Just did some digging and found the planned features list for Avorion, which does alleviate a huge part of the problem. The only thing I would suggest now is to add some vital function to hull blocks, because of the meta where specialized blocks are always a better choice for ship interiors, and armor always being a better choice for exteriors, but that probably deserves its own thread.

This is true, but the issue in the first place is that (assuming crafted turrets) you can only increase your firepower by mounting turret modules. Thus, it makes sense that, if you want to increase your durability, you use more blocks to do so (because there is no downside to it aside from cost), wheras if you want to increase your firepower, your only way is to mount more turret modules*. Even if you do decide to mount something like a shield module, you never want to use more than one, as the added durability does not justify the loss of firepower. Of course, specialized ships do benefit from modules affecting their specialization, but in terms of meta, I am talking about general purpose ships that most people are going to use on a regular basis. *Fighters are an option, but far more expensive than simply expanding your ship, between hangar bay costs, pilot costs (and the additional sargeants/lieutenants needed for them), and the costs of fighters themselves, they are a prohibitively expensive and not very effective option. So far, I have only seen fighters as a viable replacer for miners/salvagers on general purpose ships, where you do not need that many and they tend to not die.

The meta of higher difficulties does sound interesting, but the constant alien spawns on the player and the inability of the factions to defend against them make me a little apprehensive on the prospect. The current system in my creative universe that I use for ship design is already nothing but a roving band of 30+ alien ships.

I also feel that just tying it to ship size would be a bad solution, since it will not change the meta aside from making it possible to fit more turrets on at a time. The only real change can come from having a block that increases turret count, which will compete for Shield/Generator/Hyperspace blocks for internal volume. Yeah, I always avoided switching out turrets because I assumed that the turrets would pop out (much like systems pop out if you can no longer mount it), but now, yeah, it does help the usefulness of non-combat upgrades like the cargo bay one.

Armor does that job far better than hull. The only time I ever use hull is for weapon mounting for materials that do not support armor. That is fairly niche for a block that is supposed to be a basic building material.

I have found this is caused by certain blocks, so far, I have only confirmed the hologram block and hangar block as culprits. These blocks will make your ship systems dissapear if they are mounted anywhere, including inside the ship.

As I mentioned at the end of my post, I find that the only toxic part of the current meta are the turret control systems. In my own game, I currently have six slots, four are permanently fixed to turret controls, one of the remaining two is permanently hyperdrive, and the remaining is a 'flex' slot I change based off of what I need. Even with that, I was toying with the idea of replacing the permanent hyperdrive with another turret control because I needed more firepower, but I just unlocked Trinium so decided to go for bigger ship and some computer cores for more slots. That is why, at the very least, I suggested adding a turret control block. PS: One of the things I did notice is that hull blocks have absolutly no purpose at all aside from aesthetics and the occasional weapon mount for materials lacking an armor plate equivilant. Maybe adding turret slots can be the hull block's purpose?

I just got this game for early access, and one of the things I noticed immediately was the usefulness of system upgrades varied wildly, and the big, core question behind the usefulness of them ended up being the question "Can I replace the functionality of this module with more blocks?" Generally, the most useful system upgrades in the game tend to have features that cannot be replicated by blocks. There is no block to increase turret count, no block to increase deep scanning range, as a result, system modules are your only way of enhancing your capabilities at that and the game very heavily pushes you in that direction. Because of the limitation of systems, and the fact that blocks are not likewise not limited, this enforces a meta where you want to replace system modules by blocks in every situation you can. This destroys the usefulness of the cargo, engine, battery, shield, and generator boosting system upgrades. The Hyperspace module would also likewise be in the same boat, were it not for the fact that it reduces hyperspace recharging time, which is invaluable for larger ships. So, we have a situation that for general-purpose ships half of the modules in the game are mostly vender fodder, which is not an ideal situation. The only solutions I can think of, however, are to either add blocks for all stats, such as turret control blocks and sensor blocks, or add features in all system upgrades that cannot be replicated by blocks, for example, the cargo module system upgrade might shield your cargo bay from NPC scans. This would still make it specialized, but at least, situationally useful in certain circumstances. I do believe that adding a turret control block would enhance the system upgrade diversity a bit, at least, since, for the average general-purpose ship, turret control upgrades end up dominating a player's system upgrade list because of how necessary the extra turrets are. The game even acknowleges this, since the Xsotan upgrades are all Legendary Turret Control Systems in functionality.