DivineEvil

I'd rather say, ships are RTS units. You design them as you wish and equip them according to the type of the unit you want them to be. Their crew gain experience and progress and thus become easier and cheaper to maintain, but all the specialization and stats depend solely on your initial design. Drone is your cursor, which you move around freely to assume direct control over these units anywhere in the galaxy. Just as in any other strategy game, you can only control something directly one place at a time. What is exact problem case for you to address with these limitations? As far as I can tell weapons has their corresponding brackets already. I've never encountered any issues with stats of weapons myself, which is why I'm asking. If you ask me, I have much more issues with the balance and functions of weapons between one another, i.e: 1.) Railguns should have the greater range than Cannons, as Cannons are just about as imperfectly accurate as them, but more prone to misses against moving targets due to low projectile velocity. Cannons, however should grant much greater DPS due to splash damage. Railguns should have very fast projectiles, not instagib beams and MUST NOT deal multiplied damage against Hull in any circumstances. Additionally, I think that we should expand on the categories of weapons a little bit. In order to do that, we add another Heavy weapon type, an Ion Cannon, that does work as an instagib beam instead of a Railgun, and does multiplied damage against Shields. Lightning Cannons and Tesla Turrets should do damage against Energy of the target - Lightning consumes chunks of enemy stored Energy, while Tesla drains target's generation rate. Plasma Turrets already satisfy the medium-to-short range specialty against shields. 2.) I think that the idea of increased power drain is entirely superfluous. Lasers, Plasma, overcharged salvage and mining beams etc, all should overheat just like any other weapon that already does. Different weapons should just have different heat capacity and thus fire longer before overheat, but also have longer cooldown. Weapons with lower power demand fire perpetually, but weapons with massive power demand deliver massive amount of damage over short periods of time over longer range, then cooldown. Long range weapons like Lightning and Railguns should have massive power demand, that will necessitates using them on larger ships with sufficient Energy Batteries, instead of even larger Generators. Increasing power drain system just make corresponding weapons unreliable and discourage their use in favor of overheating weapons. In fact, it can prove to be a critical mistake in using them on AI controlled ships, as they have no course of action when their energy batteries are exhausted with such weapons. 3.) Missile Launchers should be a very powerful bombardment tool with massive splash damage, but much lower range. As they're designed now, they're little more than worse versions of Cannons, that has very little uses. Their projectiles also should accelerate over time towards a set limit. When they're using Heat-Seeker missiles, these can be used as a heavy variety of Anti-Fighter Cannons, and without them they're powerful tools against capital ships in close-quarter combat. And yes, massive engine flares on them are also unnecessary - they look more like you firing heavy plasma balls, not small missiles. The problem with that, is that its essentially an arbitrary limitation. There's no reason to draw inspiration from other RPGs, because Avorion is not an RPG. Like I've said, it will work just as well if you can find or research a Turret, then bring it to the Turret Factory and convert it into a Turret Blueprint. Then, just like with Fighters, you can reproduce that Turret and name it however you want. You'd be able to feed that blueprint into your own Turret Factory, and it will be capable of reproducing it just like NPC factories produce their own models.

Well, so far its kinda like a strategy game from the third perspective, and the building aspect is just a great facet that allows you to create your faction however you want. Pretty much nothing associates Avorion with RPG genre - you do not even have a character. You have an immortal avatar, that can control your faction anywhere in the galaxy, one sector at a time. However, when the game allows you to create your own content, it is called a sandbox. A "building game", is a game that's primarily designed around making things, and what you do with them comes second, something around a Scrap Mechanics or whatever it was called. That's not what the Avorion is. I only can think of two games, that satisfy your definitions - Starmade and From the Depths. Both games are functionally unplayable due to the obscene amount of time it requires to "fully control your weapons" and making everything work with overly complicated mechanics. Avorion does not suffer from that, and that's why I play it, and have not even checked on the two mentioned games for years. Other than that, I believe alternatives usually have fixed selection of weapons provided. Uh, stigma? It's the feature, that makes Avorion the current best candidate in terms of balance between building stuff and actually having fun operating it. The RNG mechanism for producing weapons and tools is what allows for the sweet middle-ground between having fixed choices and making everything by hand all the time. All the problems lie, as I've previously stated, with the management of obtained items and in effectively applying them to the production of the custom-pattern unit designs. Current setup only allows for the marginally effective outfit of one ship, that diminishes as the player ship becomes larger, and the discrepancy between individual species of weapons becomes unbearable. Then you come down to the mass manufacture of set turret designs, which are superior and preferable to looted ones, even though they lack the variability and distinct style of the random loot. What we need is a random loot, that doesn't occur as often, but can be reproduced at will if you like what you've found. Avorion still has a long way to go to live up to its potential, but only a complete idiot would stigmatize the best part of the game, that makes it more fun than any other sandboxes, where you might spend so much time making shit there isn't any left for actually riding it around and fighting. There's no rules. A game is just a virtual framework, that allows players to do stuff. Developers decide on the rules and on what players should be able to do. Then the market defines what is the genre of the game depending on those developers decisions. Oh and another thing - Avorion is not an RPG in any way. There's features it shares with RPG and other genres, but there's no features that define it as an RPG by any degree. Again, you do not have a character and you do not play a role. You're an ethereal proxy controlling a faction's activity, and you do whatever you want. You may lose resources and parts of your faction, but you never die. This is why a team of players is called an 'alliance', which is a collection of factions working together. Players can define what the game is all they want, but they do not define what the game is supposed to be. Developers do. I do not see anyone really arguing here about how game's building aspects are somewhat wrong at all. I also hold a strong position, that what's people are talking on the Steam forums is completely irrelevant - its a cesspool for people who have opinions, but don't have enough personal dedication even to register here. I've personally witnessed these... characters deliberately ruining the success of very decent games. On the other hand, I've never seen any Steam forum discussion doing any good for those games. Thus, I do not really care how many people are going to call something out for how long - arguments stand on their own merit. If a person is only good enough to whine about what they don't like, but cannot provide a good argument for what would make a game better, they have no ground to stand on. And no, calling for downgrading a game to turn it into another game for no f***** reason is not an argument at all.

Regardless, it should be noted that the vast majority of modded servers do in fact make it easier for their players to do most things, in particular increase the drop rate, which vastly inflate the number of available turrets and modules, while the game itself is already fairly easy even on the Insane difficulty and should be modded to offer more challenges, promote player cooperation, expand the progression path and make it much harder to sustain the hold in the core region. Other than that, you bring no analysis of the situation nor feasible solutions. A first suggestion is just solving the headache problem by chopping it off, and the second one has little to do with the original problem. There's certainly an great excess of available stations and factories due to the overblown economy and rather superfluous attachment of the commodities to the production of turrets, and the entity generation algorithm is severely outdated, but these are three completely different issues, that do not relate to the RNG as much as to the unrefined game design decisions. 1.) The first technical issue stems from the fact, that Turrets in particular have thee independent evaluation metrics - a Rarity tier, a Tech level and the Material. While all of them seem to have an effect, nobody really knows how to associate either of them with the turret's power, and as result of current random draws we end up with shitty Legendary and great Iron weapons at the same time . Developer team should get rid of either Tech Level, so that the Material and Rarity could provide an intuitive power ladder, or the Material distinction, which is an arbitrary limitation that produces nothing apart from the confusion. Some changes are also needed for the player/ship inventory to help manage it - instead of tiny buttons on the turret icons, we should have an ability to hold Shift and Ctrl for continuous and individual selection trough the sorted list and to use separate buttons on the sidebar to Favorite, Brand, Mail or Remove all the selected items. I personally would also favor an option to toggle into a standard vertical list, instead of a tile layout, with the item icon and the outline of the primary stats (Size, Slots, Tech Level, DPS, Range and Accuracy/Efficiency), which would allow convenient selection and comparison and also being able to use these stats for sorting, rather than just few factors we have now. 2.) The fact about superiority of Factory-made turrets over looted ones was a sore thumb for a quite a while now. I'm continuously arguing for the attention to this problem, and my point still stands: Turret Factories should only be able to produce Common-grade turrets, and players can improve that by providing the given faction with Technological commodities, which are consumed by Research Labs and improve the capability up to the Exotic (Or even up to Rare) tier and improve the quality of weapons that are equipped on that faction's ships. Turret Factories mainly should be used to create turret Blueprints, that can be placed into stations to reproduce them. This will put the value of looted and researched turrets where it belongs. Research Lab should output the turrets based on their own average tech level, regardless of its position in the galaxy. 3.) Algorithm for generation of entities has to be expanded upon eventually, before Avorion gets officially released. It has to strictly avoid generating blocks below a certain margin in size, which only inflate the block count without producing any significant stats and are extremely hard to salvage, resulting in the excess of dropped loot items. All types of edge blocks should be used to shape the entity segments, and there are great number of possible variations for the generator to pick. Generator seed must not produce enormous 3-4 kilometer long metal sticks, but instead follow golden mean rule to avoid absurd ship proportions. As players get closer to the core, ships should feature thicker armor coverage, lower hull/functional block ratio and Integrity fields to keep enemies reasonably difficult across the progression path. 4.) I would like for the Turret Control System modules to have perks for the turret to, but I much more concerned with the current state of balance and mechanics of the particular weapons. Variety of weapons is severely limited by the existence of obvious favorites and ambiguous systems, that render about a half of the weapons and tools useless. Other than that, I'm not in gripes with the RNG as such, as long as it allows the player to manifest upon the lucky find and make practical use of it, instead of choosing between using dozens of completely different turrets and mass-producing superior variants with an abundance of Credits alone... It feels like the topic drives my thoughts into a kaleidoscope of all the little problems I see within the game, and I've already said plenty, so I rather leave it with that.

Technically that should only be profitable when using your own Turret Factory - then you're excluded from the necessity to pay for the job, as you already pay wages to the workers in the factory. I don't see how turret factories near center are supposed to be something special. Sure, the turrets they can produce on their own will use the better, readily available material as base. Other than that, tech level has no basis and instead make anyone reaching the core first technically undefeatable. Now, that's not my initial contention at all - the problem is that crafting as it is now makes looted weapons worthless. I mostly agree on the topic of Research, although it can work for me either way, whether you can research the very good high-tier turret as a "trump card" for the ship, compared to mass-produced but mediocre factory turrets, OR you can research a decent turret and then reproduce it just as any other turret, but with its own specific features, that generic turrets will never get. Well my perspective is that there's absolutely no consistency in the ways of producing value. Like, at all, to the absurd extent. You mine resources and earn money to build a ship, then you loot turrets, because there's no way you'd bother gathering the same commodities to build turrets at the beginning, then the situation reverses, and all looted turrets go right out of the airlock into the Equipment dock to fund turret building completely by money; You also can make your own fighters using materials, but you need a turret first... You cannot produce Systems at all, and Torpedoes can only be bought. This is like taking principles from 4 different games and combining them in the most awkward way possible. First of all, there's absolutely no reason to specifically tie turrets to the trading commodities. In the end its all credits anyway - the only difference is that you waste time and nerves relying on luck to find factories producing the necessary components. Economy in Avorion is generally oversaturated beyond reason with dozens of goods, that nobody cares about, ever, at all, and the turret components only exaggerate the issue further. Sometimes you might find yourself just spending hours upon hours looking for this ***** Warhead Factory in faction after faction, despite the fact, that necessity of ammo for the production of a turret is in general ridiculous, especially when it somehow capable of changing turret's stats, since ammunition otherwise seems abundant above any concerns (i.e. conditionally infinite). If building kilometers-long ships doesn't demand commodities, then turrets shouldn't either. Or, let cut out all the useless food bars and proteins out of the economy (and there's a lot of that. A LOT) and replace it with commodities, that has to be used for all aspects - ships, weapons, modules and torpedoes. Not a nonsensical in-between. As I've written in another thread before, my own perception is that economy should be primarily used for earning good credits, gaining reputation and, most importantly, supporting the NPC factions you trade with. Factions would have top-end consumer stations, that require specific sets of goods - Civilian, Industrial, Military and Technological branches. Providing the goods for particular branch gives bonuses to that faction in terms of available crew, mission/defense rewards, rate of factory production, lower prices for buying materials, stronger and more numerous ships, better equipment for sale and better results from research etc etc etc. Then it would make sense to invest heavily into helping a faction progress to reap great benefits in the long run, and it would not be so painstaking due to less variety of factories and shorter production chains. Tying turrets into economy is redundant. It has nothing to do with exploits, as they're supposed to be addressed on their own merit - making a conjunction between them is not a solution at all.

Again, my points still stands - turret factories should only produce Common tier of their own turret patterns, or could be used to generate a blueprint for player's own turrets, so that looting, researching and consciously choosing the turrets that you get will always be preferable end-game over creating factories as close to the core as possible, that magically produce best weapons in the given instance. Ideally turrets should also be completely detached from the commodities and just use resources and credits. I believe it would be easier to balance the sell prices that way, and you also could introduce factory production time, since in that instance you'd only use resource and credits, that are not necessary to carry around like commodities, so you won't get stuck near the factory.

Sure, but it can be worked around by making a turret design with an elevated base and covering it with armor from the sides. That's apart from the fact, that it is rather hard to hit the turret base block specifically, and that this block can be extended both in horizontal dimensions and into depth. Personally I'd prefer to have turret base blocks as they are, rather than having to apply the turret designs every time I replace a turret itself.

- If you don't have money or slots for anti-torpedo turret, then what in the world do you have? All PD turrets are dirt cheap and take one slot, and almost completely protect you at least from a single torpedo ship. If you can't afford that, then you're really in no position to stay near the torpedo-yielding enemies. I've never had issues with torpedoes with just two PD turrets on board all the way to Trinium stage or so. NPCs can counter torpedoes if they spawn with a corresponding PD armament. They can be easily destroyed, but you pay for every torpedo you use. - And? Persecutors prevent you from doing stuff in the sector. That's plenty. - As far as I'm aware, Energy Signature Suppressors do hide you from pirates and Xsotans, but they do not hide NPCs, so in sectors owned by a faction pirates and Xsotans will come, but they will ignore just you until you attack them directly. At least that's how far my experience gone with these.

Wait, if you can use a turret base block of the corresponding turret size, that is completely covered by that turret, where's the problem?

1. I do not see the implementation model, nor do I understand the utility of the feature. There is truly no up or down in space, and whatever the plane you pick when entering the strategic mode, your fleet will follow when orders are issued. Perhaps you could use it to see your adjustment with the galactic plane, but I do not see how it would help you to adjust to that plane and what the point of it. 2. I agree with that, although it think that it's enough to just give the ship a set of behavior models - one for the facing and one for maneuvering and one of fighting. Facing behavior defines which of its sides it should point to the target when reaching the engagement range - nose, closest broadside, top or bottom. Maneuvering defines whether it should stand still, track the target or orbit the target when at the engagement range or any other options possible to instruct. Fighting behavior defines the range of engagement - by highest weapon range, by lowest weapon range, by medium between the two or by a set distance value.

Not sure. So far I've never seen such exploits in practice, and whenever I take commodities from the station and then sell them to it, I get no credits. The limitation to player trading for a station is also weird, since you're directly responsible for providing the storage space for the station, therefore you also control hot much goods can be sold to that station at any given time.

I wonder if just crafting hundreds upon hundreds of iron/titanium turrets in the periphery can be used to produce sheap top-tier legendaries in the core... Other than that, I still think that all of that can be sorted out by allowing reproduction of turrets you have using blueprints in the same way the Fighters can be. This way the randomness can be turned into a personal arsenal tech-base, and spending lots of weapons for research pays-off just by a single successful case, that can be reproduced for a corresponding resource and credit price.

In my opinion, Avorion is just about a point where the work should be done to provide cleaner and more sophisticated entity generation algorithm, that does not generate any blocks below a certain size margin and incorporates greater variety of shapes and structures on top of "rings" and "hamburgers" with use of all available wedges and corners. That would not only entirely resolve the mentioned problems with invisibly small wreckage frags, but also would make the game more presentable to increase the player base. I can understand it's a painstaking coding work even for a proficient programmer, but it has to be done at some point either way.

Nobody is saying its not an option. I still see no functionality. The question of why it was removed in the first place still stands, and it might be relevant as well, but I don't care enough to explore the answer. Because there's nothing you can plan without interrupting the flight anyway. There's no ship stats that you can use as a reference to do so. All you can do is to check your resources at a glance. There's nothing this knowledge gives you on its own. Resources are displayed when they're relevant - when you gain them and when you have options to spend them. There's little point in making a change, that simply allows people to be too lazy to open Building or Player menu to check resources. If you'd want to make it work that way, you'd have hundreds of different options for every little thing.

I'm fully aware of that mode, and its functionally useless. Again, the problem is not with the controls, but with what the player is supposed to look at. In both modes, it is focused on the ship, rather than the environment and potential targets. In both modes, mouse movement should control the camera angle. In mouse-steer, you should just hold or toggle (depending on settings) Ctrl to issue the ship to steer where the mouse is currently pointed at. In keyboard-steer, ship should simply respond to keyboard commands without affecting the camera angle at all. Camera focus should not be affected by anything other than the player's mouse input. Even the original problem with the ship immediately steering into the angle from the building menu could have been avoided if that were the initial principle. Another interesting function would be to tap a key to "lock" the camera into the current target, which would automatically chase it and allow the player to use the mouse to focus specific blocks with manually controlled weapons. Also, weapon groups should not be manipulated by manually clicking on them and choosing what they're supposed to do, and just toggled by tapping the number keys - instead it would be perfect to hold the number keys to open a command wheel in the center of the screen and drag/release the mouse to change the behavior of that group or toggle it on/off in less than a second. All of that might allow for more convenient controls and truly engaging capital ship combat, but as of now were limited to the choice between a kilometer-long fighter standoffs and another mode, that nobody uses for pretty much anything ever.

Personally I don't see a reason for it. It got removed because it was irrelevant in the piloting of the ship. It is displayed in build mode, which you can enter at any moment, and the total number of resources is displayed while you're collecting them.

I think one of the most significant downsides mentioned here, is that there's no way to conveniently operate turrets and look around your ship. I've made a suggestion thread over a year ago, requesting the settings for the Ctrl functionality customization, that would allow to use Ctrl to toggle between free camera and ship steering, etc. Unfortunately it still have no been addressed. That still limits the effective ways for using ships to just sticking as many weapons on the nose of the ship as possible, as broadside or gundeck builds simply cannot be controlled effectively. The perfect model for me would be to free camera being active by default, and by holding Ctrl you would order your ship to steer towards the cursor. Other than that, I also agree with the sound problem presented, as most of the effects are very generic, sharp, high-pitch sounds, that prevents any immersion into the space environment of the game. So far only the scraping collision "submarine" effects offer that feel. I find particular Cannon fire with air whistle especially annoying at the moment. Most of the sounds should be more muffled and low-passing. Not sure about camera shake and graphical effects. I might agree, that damaged blocks (by %) could use some minor particle effects bleeding smoke and flames, and perhaps texture overlays, that show external damage, which also make it easier to identify the damage, but it should be adjustable in the graphical settings from the get-go to prevent performance issues for players with lower specs right from the gates. In that case, I would even like destroyed ships to have a delayed explosion effect with a shockwave force depending on size (Descent : Freespace anyone?). Camera shake is largely unnecessary, and many players in my experience will likely see it as clear negative with no benefit.

Well, technically there's such a tool accessible to a player. It's just Force turrets with Self-Pull and Self-Push respectively, which NPCs fire onto the docking hatch block.

Personally I don't see any value in changing the color, or how it can make a ship look different in any way except silly. Shield is a shield and has a specific technology behind it nad is perfectly fine as now. The way I see the suggestion, author seems to be concerned about the shape of the field, that disregards the slopes and only expressed by enlarged bounding boxes of the ship parts. At least I don't believe he would seriously go as far as to advocate for rounded shield boundaries, when there's no any rounded blocks or elements anywhere else. I completely agree, and see no reason why it still looks as awful as it is now. I also support the author's idea of the impact "splashes" mapped onto the bounding shape, instead of the entire thing flaring. The effect really should only be that dramatic when the shield is blocking some massive damage momentarily, like from a torpedo or a cannon burst. Hope there will be the time for such stylistic improvements sooner than later.

I'm not an expert in any sense, but intuitively it feels like the problem is with the used screen resolution. Do your video settings reflect the hardware? What monitor resolution do you have? Is it a first-launch issue or something that haven't been observed before?

I don't see anything, that can be attributed to the thread's author in the OP. As far as the Koonschi's approach, I completely agree with every point, as I've already argued for much the same ideas recently. As long as the Turret Templates are introduced, the system will already be almost perfect, as the inability to replicate the weapons you find and research is the most major detrimental for them. Allowing the player to reproduce them will . All the additional features he scheduled is a great addition for the introduction of player's own hand-made tech base. All the logic behind the decisions and solutions makes sense, which is unfortunately not that common in current game design and much of why I respect Koonschi and love the game he and his team are making.

0.) If you have ideas and suggestions, don't call them an "advice". Such reference can unintentionally affect the context of your post for other community members in a negative way. 1.) The thing is, a spotlight block will Not be as simple as any other block from the get-go. Current Glow blocks do not actually light-up the surrounding blocks, but rather produce a correspondingly colored radial overlay, aside from their own glow falloff. That means, that for all intents and purposes, it is static. Creating a block, that would produce dynamic light spots can have a significant effect on game performance. It is possible to make, but personally I wouldn't expect it. There's no feature in any game, that stands firm merely by being amazing. 2.) There is a plethora of issues with such idea. First off, such regions are technically impossible within the galaxy. Even away from any parent star, there's thousands upon thousands of distant light sources, which produce ambient illumination especially apparent in such conditions. Second, it doesn't make sense to have sectors literally in the middle of nowhere. All of the sectors represent the area of interest in the gravitational influence of a celestial object - there's no reason to navigate to them otherwise. All the interesting environments and resources in space are bound to planets or stars with relatively stable location, otherwise its impossible to have them as a waypoint. Third, I can "just imagine" a lot of things, but from my experience such sectors will in the end be neglected and avoided from purely utilitarian reasons. Fourth, if spotlights are introduced, then they're supposed to be valuable and desirable on their own, and introducing a feature to support their use is redundant. 3.) Not a new suggestion, but fair enough.

Personal preference. I'd prefer Triple cannons, and I'm more concerned with the overall geometric appearances of weapons. I'd rather prefer for weapons of higher tier materials to have more high-tech look and textured by the materials they're made of, and of course for being able to paint them the same way the block can be, that to have some sort of control over turret barrel count. By they way, Plasma is not trashy. It's a 2-slot weapon, that shreds shields (approx +200% damage), similar to Tesla (1 slot) and Lightning (4 slot). This was probably achieved by manually clearing or deleting the "_overlay.png" files, in the Avorion's Data/Textures directory, that are responsible for these features. Trinium has no pattern overlays.

Its important to note, that multi-barreled weapons provide no functional differences. It's a random aesthetic feature, that only creates several origin points for the fired projectiles.

From how I see it, ships now should get universal turret slots as well as the module slots, which players can use to expand the capacity even more. That can compensate for the increased slot demand for larger weapons introduced by the Combat Update. Thus, with every system module slot you get, you also get 1 universal turret slot. If that end up insufficient for the general player base, then the issue can be addressed further by increasing the slot bonus from all turret slot modules by 1 for their corresponding type.

First suggestion is the obvious one. The current parameter for the mineable asteroids were intended for a long gone phase of the game, where you couldn't tell which asteroids are rich and which aren't. Second one is a bit questionable though, not sure it will improve the use cases for the module. My take on it, is simply add the bonuses for the mining or salvaging turrets, i.e. range, efficiency and damage. Lower rarity modules only give one parameter bonus, and higher can have two at a time or one with greater values, but always with a focus for either the mining or the salvaging. This way not only you'd want to use them, but you'd want to look for the module that has parameters fitting your needs and giving the combination of bonuses for convenience, output and/or speed that you'd prefer. You can use the same approach for Turret Modules, that make each module amplify the parameters of turrets installed, just a little bit on their own, but stackable together on a larger ship. Can be limited to secondary stats, like range, tracking and accuracy to avoid heavy min-maxing. And of course, that would remedy the All Turret Modules, that would give bonuses to all turrets, rather that specialized Turret Modules, that gives just one slot more, but give bonuses only to their respective type of turrets. I can even see them sometimes having bonuses to very specific types of weapons.