FuryoftheStars

Some suggestions/feedback on improving the behavior of independent targeting turrets. When turrets do not have an active target/are idle (in any mode other than manual), instead of having them continue to track the last target's location, have them return to their "default" facing as determined when we put the turret on the ship in the ship builder. This will allow, say, forward facing turrets to return to the forward position and be ready for the next target we are speeding off to, rather than continuing to face behind us until the new target is in range and then they have to rotate around before firing. Turret groups' Attack Target command is rather tedious to use in its current form. I think something like the following would be better: Keep the current behavior in that when the player clicks on the Attack Target command, the turrets will "hard lock" on the current target and engage until the target is dead, jumped, etc. When turret groups set to Attack Target no longer have a "hard locked" target, then they should switch to auto-fire behavior when there is no active target, or "soft lock" on the active target when there is one. In this "soft lock" mode, when the player switches targets, the turret groups should switch their "soft lock" to the new target. When the player clicks back on the Attack Target command for that group, then they should again "hard lock" on that target. "Soft lock" mode should only fire upon valid targets, ie combat weapons fire on hostile targets, mining lasers on asteroids, etc. If the target is not valid for that group, then they should continue as if there were no active target (auto-fire). "Hard lock" overrides this, so the player can still engage whatever target they want with whatever weapon they want as now. Turret groups that have been given the Attack Target command probably shouldn't be firing at the target while it is out of range. Turrets will all target different blocks on a target, which is OK, but it has some glitches that need sorting out. Specifically: When any block on the target is destroyed, all of the turrets firing on it pick a new block (this actually effects torpedoes, too, causing many to miss even stationary targets that are receiving damage from other sources, such as multiple torpedoes fired at the same time). Turrets should stick with their block until that block is destroyed, then pick a new one. If part of a target is in a turret's line of sight, it's still possible for that turret to pick a block that is not within its LoS and as such will just sit there and not fire until something happens to cause it to target a new block that is within its LoS or switch targets completely.

While I agree that it'd be nice to get rid of or severely tamp down the RNG of weapons, I'm not sure I can get behind this proposal for it. Essentially what I'm reading here is that we'd be forced to create turrets through the current Turret builder, and then would have module slots and modules to deal with to get the turret attributes we want.

I'm not saying replace the ability to make your own, just add in the option to use the RNG. I agree that many look terrible. Some just need a little TLC to make look better. I can work better off from an existing frame than I can from scratch. And while I'm aware of the station founder option, this doesn't work for mines.

Yes, but these do not include stations, mines, freighters, etc. The selections are very limited.

For those of us that are... ahem... less than artistic, it'd be nice if we could use the procedural generator (or actual ship designs from the base game if you ever move away from the procedural generator) for our ships, stations, mines, etc. I know there's the Steam workshop, but it'd still be nice to have access to the stuff from within the game, too. And this goes for turrets as well. I know some don't like the base game turret designs, and I admit that some aren't that great looking to me, but others are pretty snazzy I think. :P

The talk about the railguns made me remember a few things I've seen. The 50% speed of light got me thinking about this XKCD What IF: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ Block penetration reminded me of this video I saw of US Navy Railgun tests. Specifically, a few seconds after the 6 minute mark: And then the likening of Halo's railguns to being more like city killers reminded me of the mass drivers from Babylon 5:

Not that I've seen in game. I currently use a mod that adds this and more, though. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1875903108

There is the option in diplomacy, so that could probably work. Was thinking of this same thing as I was reading the thread. I'm surprised, though, that after having killed several of their ships, my rep with them is still 0. :/

Pretty much agree here, too. I actually wouldn't want the overall max speeds reduced unless we get the ability to issue orders to the ship we currently occupy (if it's going to take longer to get from one side to the other of a sector, then I want to be able to at least issue a movement command so I don't have to be monitoring that ship's movements the whole time). But yeah, love the idea of the modifiers to agility, acceleration, and such based on ship mass. Just wouldn't want ships to max out at drone speeds as then it would take forever to get from where you warped in/were just working to that station on the other side of the sector... unless of course we can start issuing move orders to player controlled craft.

Yup, I agree with this, too. The current setup where the higher tier resources aren't found until you hit certain ranges from the core (whether you're talking going from outside in or inside out) is only going to support players going from their starting point and beelining straight to the inner (or outer) most ring and then only really exploring those regions. I'm not sure of the best solution, but my initial thought is that everything should be spread around, with higher tier stuff being rarer/in pockets. This current setup also causes other (lesser) issues, ranging from completely pointless stations until you hit a certain resource tier (fighter factories), to stations that are not worthwhile trying to use in the outer resource zones (turret factories - also add to these that RNG can pooch you if your seed isn't kind), to seeing really imbalanced stuff (weapon drops that can almost win a fight on their own; battles between a titanium and naonite faction). I also kind of feel like the tesla/lightning weapons (and thus the need to use rock hulls in certain situations) doesn't feel right. The concept behind how these weapons would work and hit their targets doesn't even make sense to me. And yeah, the RNG and weapons still needs more balancing. A short while ago, I had a white/common chaingun that had better stats then several uncommon, even a few rare and an exceptional chaingun.

Only helps in some situations, but when you set a ship to one task (like salvage), you don’t need to create a loop for it. If there are no valid targets, it’ll wait until there is and then resume that task. It’ll spam the chat a lot less often (once every 10 mins?). However, note that I have seen a bug with mining (and possibly salvaging) orders that if issued from the map screen, they can often only mine (or salvage) one object, then stop. The work around here is to merely be in the same sector as them then issue the order through the interact menu when you target them. There’s also a mod out there that attempts to fix this issue, though I’m not sure how good it is.

I have been testing collisions with Paladin X-6 and that center always survived. Somehow the game do not allow breaking a ship in half. Try to fly it, try to break it, let us know more about your 'camera' and 'ship in half' results. It must be the root block, then. In testing, I've found that the root block can't be destroyed until the ship's HP reach zero, even if the block is framework. Good use for it, though! :)

Yeah, STO was the game I was thinking of. Hull regen may be percentage based, but I think it's really freaking small/slow compared to the overall damage that gets inflicted in combat. Also, there could be different in-combat/out-of-combat regen rates to help solve this. Also, as for tracking the damage of each individual block, this would be no different than if the ship had no shields/they had already failed, anyway. Just that the damage inflicted to the blocks would be greatly reduced (and the rest inflicted on the shields, which is a single, solid entity). Yeah, don't know which coaxial I had gotten first, so can't say for sure about that. Well, I understand (to a degree) not wanting to hard cap the damage numbers (especially seems they have hard capped the turret numbers), but it does result in some pretty odd snurf. At the very least, I think that the lower quality/material/level turrets should have ranges that they fall in (to prevent being better/worse than the next tier up/down), while only legendary/avorion/max level (if there is a max level) can be uncapped going up. I mean, if an uncommon weapon had better stats than a legendary of the same material/level/type, then shouldn't the uncommon one have been legendary? I get it's just a label, really, but I'm pretty sure the game has % chance drops that are different between the two. But also, as previously mentioned, the power of the ones that you can get already make the game unchallenging. Even Avorion ships are posing no challenge for me with Naonite and Trinium weapons... where my more powerful ones are Naonite. It takes a few seconds to shred them and move on to the next. I think the same deal should be applied to torpedoes. And yeah, I could live with a module slot for enabling torpedo manufacturing. Not components, though. I've given up on turret factories already from how hard it is to get all of the needed components.

Sorry, should've added in there "it'd be nice if the devs could make it so you can select text for a copy/paste."

I'd be afraid of those center pieces being exploited to cut the ship in half.... Well, I guess if at least one of them is the root block and it reaches from side to side, that would actually solve that concern, too.

I'm not sure what system I'd fully support. I just know I don't like the hard limits on turrets. The more I think about it, I think I liked someone else's suggestion where instead of turret slots, each turret added to the ship would have a negative impact on processing power. It's either that or have all turrets require (variable amounts of) power, or both. Though your idea would also allow for uniform turrets in the same breath. EDIT: Ok, so this was the actual suggestion I was thinking of. Close to what I was saying (with some additions). :P https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,5835.0.html

I don't think you can select text in Avorion, can you? I know you can copy from another app and paste to Avorion, but I don't think you can do the reverse.

They face towards the spot that they were last shooting at. And yes, I wish the turrets would return to their default position when they don’t have a target.

Ah, I get what you mean. For thrusters, I put armor over them with gaps for where the actual thruster port is. Engines, I attempt to make it harder for shots that aren't from dead behind the ship to find their mark. I formatted the below screenshots to be half the size to reduce their file size and put them behind spoiler tags to (hopefully) keep them all from being downloaded simultaneously. If they're hard to see, I can try posting the originals.

I don’t think so. The AI isn’t very good yet in this regard. I’m hopeful that it’ll get some improvements.

I can say from experience that for #2, yes, it does. With the beta, it doesn’t seem to be much, though I’ve read comments that make me believe that it is a lot on the current stable.

Yeah, all I can say is that I don’t use long, pointy ships and quite often have the majority of my turrets set to independent (I use a couple of mods to allow all turrets independent and no damage nerf, though). At the very least, I consider the long, pointy design as having a vulnerability of easily getting cut in half (and quite often exploit this against the NPC ships). I have to ask, though, what’s immersive breaking about cladding the engines in armor? Just (try) to make it a unique design and consider it an extension of the engine housing.

I'll just comment that in regards to the "light show", you can use custom turrets and assign your own shot colors. I'm using a couple user made Star Destroyers at the moment with their provided custom turrets, and everything fires green. :D

It probably should be in the base game, but in the meantime, "there's a mod for that". :P I forget the name of it, though. Well, it puts the DPS per slot into the tooltip, though there still is no option to sort on it.

Hadn't really considered the shield aspect too much before. Maybe because most of the games I've played the hull was all or nothing and not block components? I do like your ideas, though. Just to throw out another possibility into the mix (another suggestion), another game I used to play allowed for 10% of all damage to "bleed" through the shields and hit the hull underneath. I'd almost suggest changing shield penetration chance in this game to be more of a how much of its damage is not absorbed by the shields, then allow all weapons to penetrate. Weapons currently that don't penetrate shields could then have their numbers set to something like 90/10, where 90% of their damage is inflicted upon the shields and the other 10% to the blocks they subsequently hit (until shields fail, then it's 100% to the blocks). Then weapons that currently have a say 70% chance of penetrating instead do 30/70 (or 20/80) damage. Course, this would also require rebalancing a lot of weapon damages, which IMO needs to be done anyway.... Definitely agree with engines and certainly the comment "bigger moves more slowly and carefully so it doesn't rip itself apart." You also got to figure, even with antigrav tech, how are these forces affecting all of the living people inside of the ships, walking in hallways, sitting on toilets, etc? I like your suggestions for diminishing returns and counteracting via special modules or having the damage and morale loss on too high of an acceleration. You made some comments about coaxial's, too. I feel like these types of weapons should be best served for big to big ship battles, anyway. Also, I do believe they have Oganite and Xanian coaxials already. I have a couple in my inventory. I am playing on a creative galaxy atm, though I don't think that should affect it? Otherwise, I agree with everything you said here about engines and maneuverability. For fighters, yeah, I feel as though they aren't properly balanced, yet. I think a lot of what you said rings true and your suggestions are good. I like the suggestion with removing the invulnerability during the dodge routines. While I'm sure no one wants to lose them, they are able to survive way too well right now. However, I think costs and production times would need to be adjusted accordingly. I'm also not a fan of the current mechanics for creating the fighters, more specifically the points distribution system that's dependent on the turret used. I like the more conventional approach with fighters in other games where the more powerful ones are typically larger and slower, but more heavily armored, too, and vice versa for the weaker ones. Under this system, there really isn't a way to manufacturer and differentiate between fighters, interceptors, and bombers unless you purposely don't spend all of your points. But I think that goes outside the scope of your suggestions. There definitely needs to be better fleet composition, but the AI used needs some big improvements, too. Like not trying to shoot through friendlies.... Weapons definitely need a bit of work, and while I think your ideas are good, I am in the camp where some limits should be imposed on them. (At the very least their stats should match their rarity and the materials region you're finding them in, but I don't like that we're able to easily get weapons that make the ships we're encountering in the current zone a non-issue.) I don't think we necessarily need a new weapon type, though. I absolutely love cannons, too! And yes, weapon convergence needs a little work. They should attempt to converge at the range of your currently selected target, regardless if your mouse is over the target or not. I have found, though, that the AI (either from a ship of yours being controlled by a captain or using independent targeting) seems to do an "ok" job at using them (better than what I can, at least, apparently). One thing I'd like to see improved on cannons is their heat build up. I feel like it's entirely too fast for the majority of them (the vast majority of the ones I've been finding only allow 2-4 shots before they need to cool down). As for torpedoes, I actually would like to see us be able to manufacture them. I find it primarily an issue to always have to manually restock my ships. If they could produce their own, this would alleviate that.