DivineEvil

There's a tip about holding Ctrl while directing the orders, which moves the icons aside to circumvent this specific issue.

The armor/damage/weapon overhaul is the topic, that has been debated for a very long time. The idea that something has to be done about it seems to be completely undeniable. In the end, it comes down to the opinions and which of them Koonschi and his team will find more appealing. I will respond to your suggestions in order, to avoid quote blocks from taking space unnecessarily. - I agree, that there has to be a principle of increasing turret slots apart from System Modules. From the perspective of the current design, the most viable way to do so might be to add Weapon Control blocks, which provide additional arbitrary slots based on total ship's volume, the relative volume of such blocks on that ship and materials used for building these blocks. It can be vulnerable, but should not be explosive, as the penalty of losing control over the turrets, that rely on Weapon Control blocks to function, is sufficient. I have argued for the turret blueprint conversion and reproduction literally for years, and there's no valid argument against this mechanic in existence. - The question of the dangerous components is open for interpretation, but it is a good idea overall since it allows explosive and penetrating weapons to shine without overpowered stats. It can have a chance component in which the probability of a catastrophic event is proportional to the damage already sustained, i.e. a 50%-damaged Energy Battery has a 50% chance to explode upon receiving any additional damage. - The idea of considering armor angles for penetration is questionable. It might not worth the effort and the potential performance drops caused by additional processing during combat. The use of armor is currently tied against mobility, not firepower, and there's little incentive to go further than making some weapons less or more effective at destroying or bypassing it. - Personally, I despise any notion of the ammunition as a separate commodity or supply, including currently present components for crafting Turrets. Technologically advanced civilizations, that can warp around through the galaxy, should not have issues fabricating any type of ammunition in plentiful amount, and any storage space it might occupy should be neglected entirely. Different sorts of warheads should only exist as a feature of Torpedoes and as optional perk of some Turrets, which modifies its Damage Type. Damage Types themselves should be adjusted to make more sense because currently, they don't make much. - What will have to be sacrificed to make some of these adjustments is irrelevant - these relate to the very basics of the game process, and until the associated problems are addressed there's little benefit from working on something more advanced.

Well, that is just false. Each block can take individual damage and be destroyed. This is why your ship can acquire a "damaged" status, which prevents you from editing a ship since you'd be able to place new blocks and turrets on top of the blocks that are present in the ship layout but are physically destroyed without this status in place. This is also why you have Integrity Field Generators, which multiply the individual health of blocks in its area-of-effect (and are almost mandatory for more expensive designs) while having no effect on the ship's HP pool. This is why it is imperative to have all of your functional blocks to be covered with armor or hull - if you get a hit to a Shield Generator block, the damage to the ship's HP pool can be negligible, but the block itself has very low durability compared to other block types, and if it is destroyed directly, you will instantly lose all of your shields and will have to choose between paying the entire credit and material value of that block to repair the ship or discarding it from the design in the build menu. Placing a solid Block of Hull of a given volume, or using two Slopes with the same total volume, or using Corner 1 + Corner 2 combination for the same total volume, or placing three Corner 3 blocks for the same total volume - either of these additions will give the same bonus to ship HP pool, will cost the same and have the same mass. For every solid block that you use, you can instead place a Slope with any dimension doubled to get the same result, and the chance to hit the block depends on volume, not dimensions. The reason why people usually talk about armor being useless is that it stops Railgun rounds from damaging blocks behind itself, which is utterly meaningless if that doesn't prevent the multiplication of damage again the ship's HP pool. So yeah, a 2000 damage Railgun round will only damage the armor block it hits and not 4 other blocks behind it, but it will still account for those 4 blocks when dealing damage to the ship HP pool, resulting in 10.000 total damage. This is what currently keeps the Railguns ridiculously overpowered, and that was the problem ever since the Railguns were around. Armor is still very good as a source of additional HP since it packs more of it in the same volume and at greater increment to its mass in every case. However, its interaction with Railgun rounds should work differently - if the Railgun round hits the armor, that armor block simply takes full damage. If there's Hull in its place, then Railgun round should do half damage to that Hull, and half of that to the next block, and half of that to the next block, and so on until the penetration score is expended, and the remaining damage is dealt to the last block in a chain. This way Railguns will be a real threat to vulnerable internal blocks, but won't have damage multiplied by their sheer number.

I have to disagree. Sure, slopes and corners have less hp than full blocks, but they also have a smaller profile. You may argue that slopes have a greater external surface also, but that is irrelevant - two slopes have the same volume and hp, and the same can be said about corners. You can combine them to match the volume of the full block, and by creating the wedge you simply redistribute the volume. The problem with the current block building approach is actually coming from splash weapons like railguns and missiles, which have their damage multiplied simply by hitting several blocks, which encourage simplistic design with few massive blocks. Splash should only affect the blocks being hit, not the damage being done. If a railgun is capable of penetrating multiple blocks, then each block hit should be half as powerful as the previous one, which progressively leads to a total maximum damage of 1.|99|, instead of making it like 5-8x times as powerful. The same is true for explosive weapons - damage should be somewhat distributed between the blocks from a set total value to prevent damage amplification.

I'm not sure what you're expecting to achieve by using procedural models. They do not look good either, and it takes less effort to just stick whole blocks together to achieve needed stats, than to take a procedurally generated object and correct it to achieve the same.

Accelerating a 1-kg projectile to 50% of light-speed would require an instant kinetic energy transfer equivalent to an average nuke. Hence the point about energy demand. If there's anything in the game, that should make power management problematic, it is using multiple railguns. I'm not against powerful railguns, but they must fire rarely between recharges and consume massive amount of power. Cool, but when you apply physics, looks silly. A 600-ton slug with 600,000 m/s would demolish anything in its way regardless of defenses and should work as a city-killer when fired from orbit.

Just for the sake of clarity, is your computer stationary or a laptop? Many laptops have a function to impede the performance of processing hardware to avoid overheat, which I think can be disabled in BIOS setup (perhaps even in Windows settings, but not so sure). This was the only way it happened to me in the past, and I have a fairly similar hardware setup to yours right now, but it is a stationary PC. I have never seen any similar issues with any of the games I've played so far.

All of this is not really a matter of "changing almost everything about the game", but a set of problems the game had for a while, and many active players repeatedly pointed to them. Most of the suggestions as an implemented task is equal if not less complicated compared to some of the recent changes. I had taken a long break from the game, and the main issue with Avorion remains to be the same: developers have dedicated their attention to more advanced and complex mechanics, but seem to neglect the foundation of the game as a result. That includes weapon balance, item distribution/production, optimization of the trading architecture, and so on. This reduces the positive feedback from the newly developed functions and features because fundamentally the game still feels raw and all-over-the-place. And yes, the activity on the forums seems to be weaker than when I went for hiatus. I would really want developers to refine the Avorion's foundation in the near future to make the game actually enjoyable to play. It is important.

First of all, interesting read. A bit too much for most people, I assume, but not for me. Now, compact comments on all provided suggestions: - I agree with the shield thesis. The correct course of action, in my opinion, is to introduce diminishing returns based on the ship's volume. The greater the volume of the ship, the less percentage of the total shield block output will translate into an actual shield capacity and regeneration. The limit to which that efficiency value goes can be a server-specified value, which can be used to balance more or less against larger ships. - I mostly agree with acceleration and thrust thesis. As you've said, acceleration of any sort needs a diminishing return formula to counter-balance the larger ship's advantage in being a compact and dense unit of firepower and endurance. Maximum velocity, however, must be universal and be a product of relative Engine power of the ship (% of the ship's volume in Engine blocks) and the mass of that ship. Two ships that are only different in scale, but otherwise made of the same materials with the same relative density and proportion of engine blocks within, must have the same maximum velocity. This way you're making the fast ship by increasing the relative volume of engines, reducing armor coverage and using lighter materials - not by just making it larger. Another important gripe for me here is engine Boosters. They're used too freely, especially in combat and make cruise engines semi-irrelevant. There should be more adjustments to mechanics to make using Boosters in combat risky or outright detrimental, because the power management we have now does not seem to achieve that, which subtracts from gameplay and especially PvP. The same goes for Jump Drives, which the player should manually charge prior to the jump. The process should be shorter, but the energy demand should be so high, that the player would be encouraged to adjust the ship systems to prioritize the JumpDrive over other functions, or being forced to stay under fire for longer charge duration if he ever wants to jump out of combat. - Fighters are a complicated problem. Personally I would just replace them with Drones, make them bigger and more durable, but larger and without any invulnerability stuff. Maybe a damage reduction like it was before, but with a meaningful amount of HP. Fighters do not make much sense in the setting of the game, but drones driven remotely by Operators from the parent ship do, and they also would not care about recoil or pulling big Gs, and you would not need to collect ejected pilots. Fighters/Drones should be something that is just expended (and expendable), rather than constricted by the insane replacement costs. Also, as I've said before, Fighters currently are unrealistically small. - Weapons. Ooooooooh man. Yes, scaling is bad, especially when the overblown stats have inappropriately low demands. Power drain and production cost should be directly related to random positive stats, not being random just as much. The problem with Turret Factories remains the same - it must not produce the best weapons and instead allow you to replicate the turrets you got by any means. Factory should only be able to produce Rare-tier turrets at best. Railguns. Actually a completely ballistic weapon and must work like one - smaller projectile with high speed, but an actual projectile. Railguns never had anything to do with beams. The penetration must be removed and replaced with something easier to balance. Railguns should be good due to high accuracy at long range, not due to insane DPS. Every point of DPS the railgun gets must be met with the corresponding pump in power demand. I'm not gonna add notes for other weapons, as I've previously written a lot about all of em, and would hate to repeat myself. Otherwise, I mostly follow the same intuition for the mentioned aspects of the game.

Update after two years. I'm taking off from Avorion for a year and will not participate on the forums. Details are given in the OP.

Well, on one hand, Systems being less variable also means, that they have more stable individual value. You do not need nearly as many of them as you need turrets, they do not need to "stack" together, and any high-tier System is a valuable asset in all circumstances. On the other hand, I agree that reproducing Exotic and Legendary items might be a bit too much. After all, it effectively neglects their "exotic/legendary" status. So it does make sense, that you simple unable to turn any Exotic or Legendary items into blueprints. This way any armament or equipment of that grade is a potential standalone "superweapon" - something even developed player factions would want to get and perhaps willing to spent an excess of resources to research their weapons into. You can even imagine it being possible to find a stash of several legendary torpedoes or fighters, which are otherwise unobtainable, which a player would cherish greatly and use with caution. In the end, it is something the developers will have to decide. In solidarity, I can have ideas about pretty much anything in the game, but I'm fine as long as the glaring issues are resolved one way or the other.

Well, I think that the problem lies with the general picture of the current state of mechanics. It's not that mechanic of turret factories is undesirable - its more that the different mechanics became unreasonably disjointed as they were introduced one after the other. Turrets are looted, bought, researched and produced. Systems are looted, bought and researched. Fighters are bought and assembled. Torpedoes are only bought. These discrepancies create more complexity for newer players, than any solutions targeted at unifying the interactions with these tools could ever produce. What has to be made is a cardinal decision about the universal and balanced model of acquirement and production for all spaceship design and armament. In the frame of my previous description that means, that instead of having a assembly functions tied to Fighters, there should be a separate Assembly tab that handles the production of all spacecraft elements - Turrets, Fighters, Systems and Torpedoes. Turret Factory provide Turret blueprints, Fighter Factories provide Fighter Blueprints, Equipment Docks provide Torpedo Blueprints, and Research Stations provide System blueprints. Players can purchase generic blueprints from associated stations or make a blueprint from an item they've acquired otherwise. All manufacturing costs are tied only to variable Resources and Credits. Type of resources needed depends on the type of the turret, fighter, torpedo or module, which will sustain the value of all resources and trading between players of different progression states. Rarity, relative power and tech level multiplies the needed amount of resource, credit value and production power required. Since the Blueprint framework already exist for Fighters, adapting it for other purposes produces no additional complexity - it only requires careful math implementation and testing. This approach would allow to unify the mechanics under the shared framework, that is much more intuitive for any player. It also further amplifies the value of high-grade Assembly blocks, because they not only allow multiple fighters to be assembled simultaneously - they would allow multiple types of variable equipment produced at the same time. After that or any other unification is implemented, then the prospect of balancing turrets, fighters and torpedoes would become a lot easier as well.

I think, that Turret Factories should be able to consume player turrets to produce Turret Blueprints. When doing so, they associate the parameters of these turrets and assign the production cost in Resources and Credits. Resource demands can vary by the type of the turret in question, i.e. Chainguns would require Iron and Laser turrets would require Naonite due to their technological grade, even if they was originally found far beyond associated regions. That would sustain the value of lower-tier resources throughout the progression. A player then can use Assemblers, preferably on his own Stations, to replicate those Turrets over time similar to Fighters, and as such develop his own tech-base of weapons that can be equipped to his ships or traded with other players in a scaleable fashion. Using commodities for producing turrets makes absolutely no sense, since they're oddly the only part of the spacecraft construction attached to them - neither Fighters using these same weapons, System Modules, Torpedoes or ships themselves has any relation to Commodities, and large portion of trading goods exist for the sole purpose of making turrets, which makes their variety superfluous and convoluted. Commodities should exist as an independent source of credit income and as a method of improving relations with NPC factions and increasing their capability to defend claimed sectors, wage faction wars, replenishing casualties, offering better services and greater credits rewards to players, etc. The only other option here is tying Commodities to all space-faring elements and purging them from any unused goods and production chains, which in turn can complicate progression beyond reason. Thus, it is far better to remove all dependency of Turrets from trading, and to eliminate all Commodities, which has no value outside of these dependencies. This coincides with the general Commodity purge, that I've been advocating for over a year now.

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The effect of Solar Panels is specifically defined by the area of a reflective surfaces. That's the point. Solar Panels are perfect for stations, that are not expected to be attacked in the first place, so you can use any disposable material you want. Using standard generator blocks for large stations with high power demand is prohibitive at very least. It's in general a bad idea to build stations and ships from the same materials.

You also can found your own Shipyard by the same method and use it to produce additional Station Founder ships. This is why its wise to do so foremost when you've found a sector you want to develop around.

No. Other than the rarity and type, there's no connection between the properties of original systems and the outcome item. Number of input items simply determines the probability of gaining an item of improved rarity.

1129 hours as of now. Also probably around 1/3 in ship-building and meticulous spreadsheet manipulations.

Railguns are designed as an anti-capital weapon. The multiplication of damage makes them specifically great against big targets. If the mechanic is OP, their overall damage should be nerfed, instead of the removal of something that makes them unique. You have to quote a developer in order to make this claim validated, otherwise its a subjective assumption. Aside from that, they're not working as anti-capital weapon, because they do not possess any mechanics, that specifically target large ships, as an objective fact. If we assume that they're working as intended by design, their purpose is to destroy internal blocks, which can be countered by Armor. That's it. However, regardless of Armor standing in the way, their damage against Ship's collective Hull rating is multiplied by the number of blocks the projectile passes trough, regardless of ship size or speed. My statement DOES NOT mean, that penetration has to be abolished altogether - it simply means, that damage has to be divided between the blocks as they're being penetrated, i.e: - Railgun has penetration rating, that defines the max amount of blocks its projectile can bypass in step-by-step basis, inversely proportional to its base damage. - IF any non-Armor block is being hit, half of the projectile damage applied to it, and half passes deeper to hit the next block. - IF Armor block is being hit, all the damage is applied to that block and no further penetration occurs, even if the damage results in the block's destruction. - IF the projectile reaches the last penetration step (based on penetration score), the remaining damage is applied to the last block hit. - IF the projectile leaves the target's structure before reaching maximum penetration step, remaining damage is discarded (full bypass). This way you actually get the weapon, that can destroy fragile internal components if not protected by Armor, but which deals the total of its base damage or less, but not more. As of now, Railgun is balanced to be roughly in par with other weapons by stats (although also mechanically superior to anything), but in practice its damage multiplication places it far beyond of what any other weapon can achieve, including Lightning turrets, which cannot compete with their DPS even with the bonus damage against shields and Railgun's own overheat mechanics taken into account.

Chaingun: Should have less maximum range. Should ignore shields altogether. Bolter: Should have greater overall DPS, that is countered by Armor (reduced damage against Armor blocks). Cannon: Should have lower range, but greater DPS. Already have AoE effect. Railgun: Power Drain per shot must be extreme, requiring batteries to use effectively. Should be a high-velocity projectile weapon. Magnetic acceleration doesn't make it an energy weapon. Penetration mechanic MUST NOT multiply DPS. Laser: Power Drain should be constant, but higher. Lasers should range from Red to Blue frequency. Higher frequency lasers get greater range, shorter firing phases with longer cooldown and massive increase in burst damage, but with greater power demands. Plasma: Power Drain should be constant, but higher. Damage should diminish over range. Pulse: Power Drain should be constant, but higher. Should be mechanically similar to Cannons, but with the same penetration mechanic. Each shot that penetrates shield should cause stacking debuff, that increases the damage of all weapons against target's shields. This together with the Cannon behavior mechanics will make each penetrating shot matter. Missile: Should be revamped as a heavy short-range weapon. Missiles would accelerate over time and produce unmatched AoE effect. Shorter range would reduce the amount of lag that is produced by tracking and particle effects. Can feature multiple warhead types, that cause temporary debuffs against different stats of the target such as power generation, maneuverability, thrust or cause crew casualties. Either way, can be redesigned in dozens of different ways, but as it is now they're unusable and too performance-intensive. Lightning: Power Drain should be constant, but ridiculously massive relative to other weapons, unbearable for small ships. Should be renamed into Ion Beam and inherit current Railgun projectile. When used against unshielded targets, also diminishes their power generation down to maximum 50% (debuff itself is flat and applied relative to weapon's damage). Tesla: Power Drain should be constant, but higher. Should be much less accurate with more sporadic arc that resembles the accuracy rating. When used against unshielded targets, drains their energy directly from batteries. Force: Should be charged via holding the fire, filling the overheat bar. When released, sends a force in a large pulse (the longer you hold, the greater the pulse). Should be more powerful overall, but require more power. Can deal damage to target's Hull with no effect on the separate blocks. Salvage: Should work more like a Flak turret, by firing a special cartridge projectile, that explodes on target's range with AoE effect and releases materials as fraction of all blocks destroyed by the given AoE, instead of individual blocks. That will make it easier to salvage extremely small blocks, allow to collect resources even from them, and visually differentiate Salvage from Mining, that can be mis-identified to the player's detriment. Also more sensible as situational anti-ship weapon.

Solar Panels are useful in that they are way cheaper than generators and already best suited for stations, which doesn't have to care about the overall volume efficiency that solar panels undermine. Introducing fuel will simply add an extra problem for people - it won't change the frequency of use for Solar Panels at all. Not only that, but like I've already said in another thread, that argued for the same mechanic not so long ago, it can cause players to run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere and stuck permanently, because a ship without power cannot move, turn or jump, and player's Drone cannot carry anything. As long as you cannot circumvent this problem in a reasonable and simple way, any such suggestion has no merit to be considered.

That isn't even about dodging - if you're in a Battleship against the fleet of Corvettes of roughly equivalent resource value, they: - Require less upkeep due to lower-ranking officers operating them. - Has more total firepower due to base turret slots given to all ships. - Harder to hit on range regardless of maneuvers. - Will easily hit your large ship from any direction in return. - Require manual re-targeting for each ship you managed to destroy, which reduces your effective DPS. - Intrinsically more mobile due to lower jump-drive penalties from mass. - Have easier time maneuvering trough asteroids and other obstacles. Real problems with small ships are: - Hostile player can abuse engine boost to hit-and-run them individually without being threatened. - Hostile player can jump away at any point, and abuse of engine boost renders the hyperspace block completely meaningless. - They cannot be operated effectively as a combat group. - They cannot repair themselves in case they take severe damage in combat. - Large ships do not have enough diminishing returns to further promote use of small ships. And the solutions are: - Engine Boost has to be suppressed by hostile fire. You should be free to boost outside of combat, you should be free to boost into combat and even ram enemy ships if you've built enough momentum, but you should NOT be able to boost around during combat, let alone boosting away from it. If you're in, you're in. Otherwise, the PvP is dead and will remain to be so. Ships with the same engine/mass ratio should have the same max velocity. - Jump drive should not be recharging after the jump, but prior to it, and you have to face the destination all the way trough, otherwise the procedure is failed. This will prevent people from jumping out of danger that they've put themselves in and facilitate making responsible decisions and facing the consequences for poor judgement. - Fleet menu should allow creating Fleet Groups out of individual ships. Fleet Group would share the AI settings and could be double-clicked in Strategy mode to select the entire group to issue orders. AI settings would include formations, combat behavior (passive, standard, evasive, aggressive), combat facing, retreat rules (how much hull/shield have to be left for individual ships to disengage away from combat) and Home Sector (where the group will look for Shipyard/Repair Docks to restore the damaged and destroyed blocks). - Massive ships should have diminishing returns from Thrusters, Power Generators and Shield blocks. Having a singular armed unit with large health pool over many separate ones is an advantage enough.

Well, I usually just hide all blocks aside from one I'm interested in and replace it, or I remove it and highlight another block nearby to use it to place new blocks on. That is incorrect. You can place the blocks trough the hidden ones easily. You just cannot clearly see where you're placing them, because the placement ghost is overridden by the hidden blocks still, but it uses the same placement logic as usual. Its a matter of figuring out what blocks are adjacent to the ones needed to be replaced and using their faces to place new blocks.

And where is the justification to force players to do so? Like, I've read your initial suggestion, and I struggle to see why the balance is negatively affected by the lack of limitations, and why limitations you offer helps the case in any way. You just assert both points. I'm not asking you to clarify. I say that it will technically not going to work. It also won't make it easier for anyone, because it will just conceal relevant information from players for seemingly no reason. There's no issue. Again, there's no point to establish any of these arbitrary distiction. A size 1.5 Railgun turret is just that, a turret on a 15 meter-wide mount. If a Plasma requires smaller turret than a Railgun, then it will be so. If a ship can handle the upkeep, then it can use it. If there's issues with the balance, it is between different weapons, not between different ships. They are fictionally different, but are of the same size class - small craft with a single pilot. What weapons they're armed with and what their stats are is again up to the player, who buys or constructs them, not for anyone else. Gap between fighters and bombers is irrelevant in scale, where ships can reach up to several kilometers in highest dimension. You shouldn't waste your time with suggestions to begin with if they are based solely on your personal preferences from other games, where everything is governed by arbitrary limitations. The reason developers of such games do so is to facilitate the pre-designed game world. Avorion is a sandbox, so it doesn't need to incorporate some specific vision of what everyone considers to be a Destroyer. You are way too focused on specific yet irrelevant details of 'how', and haven't paid nearly enough time to think about 'why' part. Moreover, its not about numbers, but about the idea of asking developers to establish named ship classes across 15 slot brackets, where you cannot manage even half of that. Ship classes used on NPC ships were and still are arbitrary, and literally nobody uses them as reference for their own nomenclature. They're given to ease the identification of threat level, nothing more. What I mean is that there's already all the relevant systems for the same idea in place, and any ship can carry Torpedoes to an appropriate extent. What makes them a threat is the same weapons (which you apparently are against), greater total turret slot count, lower target profile and reduced upkeep for the same amount of resources. I've played Avorion for over 1000 hours, and I can clearly see, that smaller ships are overlooked for a half-a-dozen different reasons, (easy casualty, abuse of engine boost and jump-drives in combat, lack of effective management and control, very poor combat AI, etc) none of which has anything to do with weapons they can or can't use. This is not about small ships in the first place - its about fleets as a whole. There's no point in using smaller ships if you cannot use them effectively. This looks more like a proper suggestion. If you have more specialized torpedoes, then you don't need to invent a whole new weapon system, that is essentially analogous to the present one.

There's simply no point. You already can see the number of systems your ship can support. There's no visible reasons to force the player to stick to specific brackets. So what will happen if your building the ship and being attacked? You wont be able to leave the editor because your ship isn't big enough to satisfy stated size class? And if you can, then the limitation is arbitrary and pointless. Your Corvette is not my Corvette. This won't work simply because different weapons have different size variations, so displaying a text definition will not clearly inform a player how large the turret is and how large a Turret Base Block you need to have to mount it. A Corvette should get whatever Corvette wants. That's why turrets are slot-based - this way you can arm your ship however you want, depending on its role. You can have an Assault Cruiser almost entirely loaded with long-range cannons, or a Brawler one with lots of small weapons, or a Defense Cruiser that uses less weapons, but dedicate more slots for stronger shields, etc. If you want to define your ships by system slots in a particular way, do that. If you want to predefine weapon layouts for your ships, do that also. Just don't assume your nomenclature is best in the world, and the game has to be changed to suit it. Aside from the fact, that you've managed to name only 8 definitions, two of which are small craft, and yet another one is a role, not a size class. We already have Torpedoes.