Zerinity

This is more of a fun suggestion, so don't take it too seriously, and feel free to add your own thoughts. I think the player drone is one of the most overlooked feature in game and could use some touchup. It would be nice to have a way for the drone to progress with the player and not have to stare at the same old bland drone from the beginning. My current idea is to have one drone design per material: iron drone, titanium drone, ... all the way to avorion drone. The drone player has access to would depend on the repair dock they set as reconstruction site, so if a player set a repair dock in trinium zone as reconstruction site, the player's drone would become a trinium drone. Each drone design should have mining laser of its material type: an ogonite drone would have 2 ogonite mining laser. Each drone design should incorporate new blocks from the material if possible: titanium drone may have some armor, naonite drone would have a little bit of shield and hyperspace core, xanion drone can dock to stations from 1km away, and so on. Having access to new mining laser as soon you set reconstruction site in a new region is quite powerful, so setting reconstruction site should only be allowed if player have excellent relation with the faction that owns the dock. Optional additional suggestion: To increase drone variety further, use procedural generation to generate drone design based on ship style of the faction that owns the repair dock. Player should have the ability to create and update drone blueprint for their own repair docks, with size and block count restrictions. Drone blueprint creation would also cost money and up to 3 turrets, the turrets sacrificed determines what drone is spawned with, so player designed drone isn't restricted to having only 2 mining lasers like typical drones. The 3 turrets break down into 1 armed, 1 unarmed, 1 either.

One thing I find annoying is that when you order a ship (that has a captain) to attack, it will launch all fighters and fire torpedoes right away. Half the time, it's a waste of torpedo because the ship is just on patrol for pirates, the other half the time, it's a waste of fighters, because they blindly launch all fighters into enemy fleets that have strong anti air defenses. So it would be nice to add the option to enable/disable ship captains from using fighters and torpedo. Suggestion for specific UI: There should be a checkbox in each fighter squadron and each torpedo shaft to allow player set the option, in the other words, the option is set at a squadron/shaft level. Additionally, in strategic? (F9) View, when you select a ship, there should be 2 more buttons: Allow/Disallow Fighter, and Allow/Disallow Torpedo. The buttons toggle between Allow and Disallow state. When click, it would override all restrictions player set in the previous UI until no more hostiles are left in the sector. And of course, better or more intuitive UI suggestions for this suggestion is welcome.

As title said, I would like an option when making buying or selling command to restrict the ship to only visit each eligible station in the sector once per command. I have ran into issues where if the buy/sell is not completely fulfilled, the ship just stays in the sector and waits for the stations to produce/consume. and then buy/sell more goods, until the command is fulfilled. Some people like this, so that their trade ships can wait for the best price for high profit margin. But this is undesirable when I'm trying to setup logistics between my own stations. Using one ship per good is often overkill, and runs up on captain salary. And with the way current buy/sell works, if I use a single ship to run multiple supply lines, the ship can get stuck on one supply line waiting to complete the buy/sell while the other supply line starves in the meantime. And here's an example of how I picture the Visit Each Station Once option works: I set my ship to buy 3000 units of steel and 2000 units of aluminum in sector A, then sell until 0 in sector B, and sell until 0 in sector C, with the option checked. Ship jumps to sector A, there are 3 steel factories. ship is able to buy 1000 steel from factory A1, 400 from factory A2, and 600 from factory A3. At this point, ship only fulfilled 2000 steel of the 3000 order. But because the ship already visited all 3 factories in the sector, they ship completes command and then buy aluminum. There is only 1 aluminum mine in the sector, and ship is able to buy 2000 aluminum, completing the order, and ship jumps to sector B. In sector B, there are 2 factories consuming steel, the ship is able to sell 800 steel to factory B1, and 300 steel to factory B2. Having visited all the steel consuming factories, order is complete, despite having 900 steel left. The ship then sells aluminum in the sector. And so on.. you get the idea.. lets say after the ship visited all aluminum consumers once, and still have 400 aluminum left, the ship then jumps to C, and do the same with remaining 900 steel and 400 aluminum. And then repeat, going back to A to buy again. This way, a single ship can service both steel and aluminum supply line, without getting stuck on a single order and starving the other line.

Hi WSY, thank you for taking the time to read through and reply to my response. And sorry for late reply, I have a habit of just turning on Avorion when I get home and then forget about things X). You make some good points. I have not considered thruster area for one. On earth, engine nozzle is rarely a problem , but this is more because of how jet engine and ICE works. In space, with theoretical engines that can output orders of magnitude more energy, I can imagine surface area may start to bottleneck engine exhaust. I guess a natural fix would be to have base thrust determined by nozzle area, and then scale to the root(or cubic root) of engine length? (and then some smart-ass is gonna build a giant flying pancake to maximize nozzle area) Anyhow, you have me convinced that the engine should be re balanced. Also make good point about sci fi genre is inspired by modern Earth navy. Though my larger point was that, intention, realism, and game balancing are sometimes mutually exclusive, and this is up to the dev and community on how the game should prioritize in each area. We can already agree on that theoretically realistic fighters would lame and mostly useless. And I think the point I was trying to make was, due to realism being heavily stacked against starfighter, and starfighters being a staple in many of the sci-fi series, it may be ok to buff fighters to be better than what can be realistically expected. This does not mean I want fighters to be op, just good enough to have a niche in the game. And in terms of game balancing, current fighters aren't exactly cheap to make, they either cost a turret which in turn is no small amount of money and commodities, or lots of material of their grade to assemble. And lastly, the point about bigger ships. While big ships dictating the battle may seem unfair, the opposite would be small ships dictating the battle, and this seems like a worse solution because of game progression, on top of previous point about realism. This would imply that a player can just make a tiny ship and speed run the game: if prosecutors show up, just run. This also means there's an effective speed cap in game, because the highest speed you can achieve would come from the smallest ship you can build. And being an open ended sandbox with supposedly no hard limit, this seems to go against it. It's just unfortunate that this ended up being a binary scenario: either small ships are faster or big ships are faster. While the engine nerf mentioned at the beginning would have reduced the speed parity between big and small ships, but unless you completely eliminate the possibility of creating a big and fast ship, big ships will always end up dictating the battle. It may take them much longer to get up to speed, but they can do it, and they probably have big enough armor to protect them till they get up to that speed. And going on a tangent, even if you do make it so big ships cannot run away, players can still get around it by jump in a different ship and jump out the current ship. Emergency jump is easy if you stack hyperdrive upgrades so you have 0 base cooldown. As for big ship vs fleet. I haven't got to do any PvPs, mostly just got into the core and fighting off invasions. I actually prefer a fleet of medium sized ships (8-10 slots) since they have enough slot for hyperdrives and transporter and still be able to carry formidable weapons and shield upgrades., but not so resource intensive and equipment intensive like 15 slot ships. I do have a capital ship, but its meant more to be a mobile base than pure combat, and a bunch of 10 slot battleships. I put captains on all ship, and just command them from tactical view. The RTS aspect of the game need massive amount of QoL improvements, and this may have contributed some players choosing single big ship over a fleet. My fleet design so far is to prioritize firepower, because money has been less of an issue for me than material: I have a lot of factories generating money. My capital ship has 95 jump range with 0 cooldown and almost 1m cargo space, so trading for turret parts is not difficult. But my mining ships are mining sectors faster than I can explore (tangent: mostly because I have to manually explore, since I can only see radar blips from my current ship). So building a fleet of overgunned 10 slotters with just enough armor and shield to take a few salvos is simply the best way to take advantage of my current situation. One side note to mention is, getting upgrades is a pain in the ass. I can visit a lot of equipment docks, and still not find what i want. And I also have to look for bosses to fight for certain artifacts, which is also time consuming. Overall, running a single ship is much easier than running a fleet, at least until the RTS aspect gets improved. But in terms of pure economics, I feel like it's mostly balanced so far. Though I feel like upgrade slots should not be capped at 15, I think the current slot unlock curve is enough to balance very big ships vs smaller ships. it's kinda sad to see an Imperial super star destroyer to be stuck with the same level of firepower as a star destroyer. And I think this is also unfair to players who prefer single ship play style, since they can pretty much max out their ship by mid-game, and there's not more room to grow except add more shield/armor, which also further pushes them into building this impenetrable shield fortress.

Replying to first part. Having been a fan of Drachinifel's youtube channel and War Thunder, I understand what you are proposing, however I largely disagree with this direction. The short version is that, you are taking Earth Naval doctrines and trying to apply it to a sci-fi space fleet, and that simply doesn't make sense to me. The long version is, there are 3 factors we need to look at, and they are: intention, realism, and game balancing. So first off, intention, what is this game trying to do? What do players are trying to get out of the game? To me, Avorion seems like a game that is inspired more by sci-fi spaceship genres rather than Earth navy documentations. So I don't believe Avorion should be another Earth naval arcade or simulator games, and when you are dealing with space and theoretical/fictional technology, it make sense perfect sense to have completely new doctrine developed as oppose to trying to force existing Earth naval doctrine onto it. Realism: While shield is a fictional technology. But we could still apply some sort of realistic analysis to it. There is a famous rule of physics, and that is matter and energy, while can be converted between each other, the total cannot be created or destroyed. This would have some interesting theoretical implications: We may not know how shield tech works, but we do know, since energy cannot be created or destroyed, a shield can only be as powerful as the amount of energy the generator pumps out. And in order to destroy a shield, you need a weapon that can output more energy than the shield. The same can be said for energy weapons, or even engines to some extent. And here's why comparing Earth navy to space fleet is bad: On Earth, fighters work because fighters have weapon parity with ships. A fighter can destroy a ship just as easily as a ship destroys a fighter. In space however, assuming shield, armor, and weapon tech are identical for ship and fighters. A fighter with a puny generator, puny shield, and puny weapon is not gonna have a good time fighting a shield, and so in space, ships and fighters do not have weapon parity. Fighters are faster than ships on Earth, but this is due to fighter and ships have different propulsion methods and move through different mediums with different endurance. In space, in theory, if the ship and fighters are using identical generator and engine technology, then does it make sense that speed of the craft depends on how much energy the generator can dump into its engine? And here's an equation for reference: Kinetic Energy = mass x velocity^2, and as you know, quadratic increases faster than linear, which means the velocity a ship is trying to achieve will trump the ship's own mass in terms of energy cost, and the implication here is that, yes big ship absolutely has a huge advantage (at least theoretically speaking), since mass is less relevant, and more about how much energy the generator can output (assuming perfect engine that can take everything generator outputs), which in becomes who has the bigger generator. You also mentioned WWII escorts, but these escorts were generally meant for antisubmarine warfare, which raises a whole new topic: stealth. I would actually want stealth to be in game, to make the scanner more useful, and also because cloaking device is common in sci-fi, but this is will be a completely new mechanism. And finally, game balancing, is a single big ship with big shield is op? Let's look at it from each category: Cost wise, whether you build 1 big ship or 10 ships that's each 1/10th the volume of the big ship, you are spending the same amount of material and money. The total base hull and shield would be the same. Upgrade slots is a tricky one to judge, as each small ship's upgrade would only apply to that one ship, which is 1/10th of total volume, while big ship's upgrade applies to 100% of the volume. However, the small ships would have more slots combined due to the exponential slot unlock cost and big ship is also capped at 15, this gives small ships a huge advantage in firepower due to slots can be use for more turret slots, meaning a fleet of 10 ships would be able to bring a lot more guns to the fight, especially if the big ship is slot capped. Swinging the other way, the huge ship would have a big defensive advantage: in order for it to get damaged, its shield needs to be stripped in its entirety, where as small ships can be picked off 1 by 1. So in the end, So comparing these differences, 10 small ships would perform roughly as well as a single big ship. Big ship has a significant economy advantage, due to a fleet of ships require more upgrade modules and turrets and tends to lose a ship here or there, but nothing too unreasonable. And by the time you get to the point where you have the money and material to build such a capital ship or fleet, you would be op either way, so it's up to you if you want to kill your enemies faster or make your enemies kill you slower. You brought up shield bleedthrough from STO, another game I played. I thnk I'm ok with that, would be interesting to see. Would be realistic for shields to not be 100% foolproof. If you think big ship's shield advantage is still too much, I would suggest making shield works the same way as integrity field generator, and once the shield generator goes down, the blocks previously covered by the shield can take damage and be destroyed. This should bring in some very interesting game play, as you can poke holes in enemy shield, and it aligns with some of the sci-fi inspirations, like star trek, where ships have multiple shield facing, and ships with overlapping shields (scimitar). So at the end, to sum it all up. I don't think Avorion is trying to be a Earth Naval combat game and I don't want a space game to become an Earth naval simulator, so I'm ok with the different doctrines implied. The game seems to be realistic in theory so far, unless avorion takes place in a universe with completely different physics. And the game balancing isn't too bad, but some improvements can be made I guess. But if you believe Avorion should rebalance their current focus on intention, realism, and game balance, you are free to disagree. And if you think I'm wrong or incorrect on some info or assumptions, feel free to correct me.