Morbo513

These are the key points to take home, thanks. A lot of you are trying to use this as an opportunity to tell me I'm bad at the game. The only challenge regarding combat once you have shields is making sure they're enough to take the fire you receive, if not, gathering the resources to do so - unless, like me, you build your ships purposefully weak, so as to make evasion an important part of combat. As for the above poster's assertion that the target being all shields or all armour makes no difference, you're wrong. As I said before, an unshielded ship is subject to degrading firepower, maneuverability and speed due to the destruction of components; a shielded ship can't suffer any of this until those shields are down, making combat a very mundane affair until that happens. Is that not the nature behind making a suggestion? I never said I don't like using shields, I just don't like how easy it is to make your ship practically invulnerable with them. Part of it is definitely the way the AI work - Close the distance and stay there until they or you/their target are dead - there's zero dynamism and it becomes a game of watching those hull/shield values dwindle down. They do nothing to present themselves as a difficult target (Except through wonky needle-ship designs that turn ridiculously fast on the spot, to the point of messing with hit detection) at the very least. As for the simple numbers question of hull vs shield health, armour is to receive a buff according to koonschi Railguns notwithstanding, deflection is a thing. Were it modelled, it'd make for some real interesting dynamics in terms of shields vs armour, and how each class of weapon plays in to it. Typically, energy weapons would be good for destroying the armour block its self, while cannons and railguns would have a better chance of penetrating, and chainguns/bolters have a higher chance of being deflected while doing a lot of raw dps to exposed hull and components I'll flesh that idea out and make a thread for it, since this one's pretty much entirely focused on the shield debate. So while we're on the subject, as food for thought I'd like to bring up how they work in a game some of you might have played (And if not, I recommend): Starsector Now, the systems behind how shields work in Starsector are pretty much completely different. Each ship has "flux" - your weapons generate it, your shields generate it when raised and when hit, and each ship has a different capacity, the rate at which it dissipates and can be actively vented. So, when you're in a fight with other ships, you will be trying to overload their flux, while preventing them from doing the same to you - by hitting their shields with kinetic weapons, making them miss their shots by use of maneuvering, or simply tanking it due to huge flux capacity/dissipation that comes with the larger ships, upgrades and skills. Anyway, when the target's flux capacity is overloaded, their ships are sitting ducks - they can't shoot, they can't raise their shields, their maneuverability is compromised and they can't use any active abilities (eg. phase skimming, a short-range teleport), leaving them open to armour and hull damage. However, to avoid this they'll periodically drop their shields if you're out of range, or even while under fire if taking the armour hit wouldn't be as bad as an overload. They'll maneuver to make you miss, they'll hit you in your shields so expending flux to keep fire on them becomes a greater risk. Oh and I forgot to mention, shields don't (always) cover the entire 360 degrees around the ship - There are several variables governing a shield's effectiveness and how it'll help determine the role of the ship: Its coverage in degrees, its flux cost per second just for being on, how long it takes to reach its full arc on being activated, the flux capacity and dissipation rate and any hullmods that give bonuses to any of those aspects, and the flux-cost for firing the ship's weapons and how you manage this in all aspects of combat - doing so is a good 70% of combat in Starsector. Instead of just beating at each other reducing these values in a long and linear fashion, quick and decisive action can cripple a ship, such as outmaneuvering or flanking the target, committing to an alpha-strike to overload then stick him with some torpedoes, or bullying harder targets into being unable to fire for risk of getting overloaded, to do the former two to a weaker ship in the fleet, all while doing as much as you can to deny the same opportunities to the enemy. In other words, combat in Starsector is decisive, brutal and opportunistic - which while we're making comparisons to reality, is about as close as it gets. Combat in Avorion more a numbers game than anything else. Right now, maneuverability, speed, piloting skill and small profile don't quite add up to the value of shields alone. There is no reward for prioritising the former group, except for making combat more challenging and engaging for one's self - Regardless of what type of ship one builds, you're given no means to exploit a big ship's sluggishness, a small ship's lack of firepower, a heavily shielded ship's energy consumption, a heavily armoured ship's trade for shields. Using them is a foregone conclusion - the mechanics dictating how they affect combat and ship design leave no room for a decision, a trade-off to take place, and for that reason they lack - no - remove depth from the game.

jfc that thumbnail is borderline satirical

Most AI ships of equivalent tech to me are carrying 1/3rd of the firepower. Players are already powerful enough

Nice I've no idea what difficulty the server I'm on is at. I wonder if it's a STALKER situation where both the players and AI do/take more damage as the difficulty increases? That would explain some things,

As the title says, when the shield effects pop up on being hit or just intermittently as they do, it obscures all projectile effects and the glowy bits from dropped turrets/upgrades/resources

You may have caught an earlier thread of mine - the subject there is the same here, but this is a different approach. So, the complaint is that currently, there is no reason not to use a shield on your ship when you have the resources available. There's also little reason to armour your ship at the expense of a more powerful shield. I find this to be backwards. Let's go over some key differences between armour and shield health: Damage to shields is regenerated quickly Shields degrade in a linear fashion under fire Damage to hull is repaired very slowly Hull damage can impair the function of your ship (Weapon/component loss) In other words, you are unable to recover from hull damage for as long as you're in combat, and can suffer degraded performance when it occurs. Those components that can be destroyed by hull damage are invulnerable so long as the shields have more than 0 hit-points. So, there's no reason to prioritise armour/hull HP to the same degree as shields. This means in PvP combat, as well as 1v1 against an AI ship, it's a game of whose shields go down first. The suggestion is to make armour much more valuable. This can come in several forms, the first being to simply increase armour blocks' health by several factors. If one is to be incentivised to choose strong, but irrecoverable hull health over weaker, but easily recoverable shield health, the gap between what they offer in those terms must be much wider. The protection - weight ratio is also currently skewed in shields' favour so armour (particularly trinium) ought to be made lighter. To compensate for these changes, weapons' damage output should be increased. The end result means shields will go down quicker allowing those performance-degrading shots to get through more often, while armour underneath will compensate for an otherwise weaker hull's durability.

I've found a preference for using turret rotation locks with my ship. Using them in combat, I noticed for the first time (Due to the point of aim being the same as my ship's heading) that there is in fact a deadzone for pitch and yaw - There's a small radius around the "crosshair" where you can freely move your mouse about without it affecting your attitude, and only on moving it out of that radius does the ship adjust, by what feels like at least an entire degree. This makes sense for ships with (player-controlled) turrets. However it's problematic when using fixed-forwards weapons especially due to some AI ship designs (Needles) - it can be massively difficult to get all weapons on target and that'd be the case with or without that deadzone. While there's definitely skill in compensating for this, it's just one more thing stacked against the "fighter"-esque ship design.

If the issue you want to address here is the behaviour of AI ships, this isn't a viable way to go about it. I absolutely want enemy ships to present harder targets through maneuvering, instead of just trying to close the distance as they do

I'm flattered, but I didn't "forget". This one's mine. I'd rather show you this: Should give you some ideas

I'm personally not a fan of how repairs currently work. Right now, so long as you haven't taken hull damage within the last 30 seconds, and have the necessary resources, you can instantly repair your ship to its full strength. This means that, worst case scenario, a player can be damaged to 1/10th of their hull, retreat for 30 seconds for their shields to recharge and fully repair their ship and jump back in at 100%, rendering moot any damage the enemies had caused them. My suggestion to address this is to have in-flight repairs simply take time to complete - maybe fully replacing the blocks instantly so long as you have the resources, but receuperating the hit-points of those previously destroyed blocks as well as the overall hull strength would be a gradual process, interrupted if further damage is taken. Now, sometimes you will find yourself without the means to repair your ship, out in the middle of space without resources, or miners to mine them. Players should be able to send out a distress call to AI factions, upon which several things can happen: If near hostile or pirate-controlled space, there'd be a chance for them to jump in and finish you off. The main purpose however, would be to call for a tug to "tow" you back to a friendly/neutral shipyard. The closer to friendly sectors you are, the less time it'd take. If it's a neutral faction that comes to rescue you, you'd be charged for the service. The friendlies factions would send armed escorts as well as the tug. Once the tug has attached its self to your ship, it would automatically punch in coords for you to hyperspace to, dropping you off at a shipyard. Alternatively, it could be a repair ship that will fix you up on the spot regardless of the materials you posess, but at a high financial cost. If you're really friendly with a faction, they may even offer this service for free, for the first few times anyway. The last suggestion deals with loading ships. There are a lot of designs that I've iterated on as I've accessed higher materials, but started out as Iron ships. The suggestion is simply to be able to load those designs made entirely from a material of your choosing. If it uses components that don't exist in the material you're constructing it from (Eg Iron generators), they would be replaced with framework of equivalent size for you to transform into that component once you do have access to the material. Oh, and another one that doesn't deserve its own thread - a flat piece of armour that can be applied to any slope or corner - Often I'll make say a crew quarters, surround it in armoured edges and corners, then plonk an ultra-thin armoured plate on top - this usually protrudes from the edges of those slope pieces instead of being flush.

Freelancer still had newtonian flight physics just about - In other words, if you took a ship from Freelancer and put it in Avorion, it'd be one that has thrusters well-incorporated into its design. They are what give you the equivalent of drag. Mainly by exploiting the ability to stack flat thrusters, I've had little trouble ensuring my ships don't have the braking distance of an elephant on ice-skates, and it flies somewhere at a happy medium between Freelancer's flight-style and full-on newtonian. It's my opinion that thrusters are currently awfully underpowered as well as ugly if used in the intended fashion though. Such a mod would almost entirely eliminate the necessity of thrusters, except for attitude control

First one in hopefully a long list. This one's based heavily on a certain ship from a certain RTS. It's been through several iterations, the biggest changes being the addition of another pair of engines, and redesign of the front "nose" bits, cause goddamn shapes are hard. Yes, the design absolutely relies on stacked thrusters, something I don't agree with, but I don't think I'd have been able to make it at all maneuverable without compromising the shape were thruster stacking not a thing. I'll be making ships at a pretty slow rate due to several restarts of the server's I've been playing on, and the fact that I'm so happy with this one. The others I've made throughout gameplay were absolutely not made with form in mind, and usually a means to get the resources to rebuild myself one of these.

As an alternative to turrets, I'd like to see weapon blocks implemented. They would be fixed-forwards weapons, but more powerful than turrets to compensate. This would put ships with a focus on maneuverability on par with tankier ships, and would require a bit more skill to use effectively since you're aiming the ship, not an independent turret - for this reason, they wouldn't require gunners, but increase the overall number of engineers needed. This also gives us the ability to condense a number of turrets' worth of firepower into a single barrel, so the offset between weapons is less of a problem. Finally, they'd also be more aesthetically pleasing, to me anyway. I'm not sure how well this'd work with weapons currently being a separate thing from blocks from a development standpoint. In the ideal world, when the player goes to place a block weapon, they must place three separate block components - barrel(s), magazine/battery, cooling. The X/Y surface area of the barrel is determined by the weapon's damage, while the player can adjust length to balance its size vs accuracy. The weapon's magazine/battery size determines how long it takes to overheat, while cooling determines how quickly it cools down. Both must be placed adjacent or close to the weapon block. This means a player can exchange mass and internal space or increased external vulnerability for higher damage output, provided their ship is maneuverable enough to bring the firepower to bear. As for missile weapons, these would act quite different to the current ones - Rather than a mass-fire weapon, these would be single "strike" missiles that do a big old chunk of damage, but take a long long while to reload - their damage types would be specialised to deal with shields (Plasma missile), hull (High Explosive, doing more damage to individual blocks) or armour (HEAP) They would also be split into components - the hardpoint(s) and targeting core. The hardpoint is the rack the missile(s) is launched from, while the (optional) targeting core determines whether it has guidance, and its quality. The weapon its self would have some stats relating to the missile, ie its mass and payload, determining whether it'd be more suitable as a dumb-fire torpedo, or a counter to fast and small ships. How one would go about acquiring these, I'm not sure. They could have to be constructed in a similar manner to turrets via the turret factory, but I'd prefer the player to be able to freely swap in and out a number of turrets to put in to a template, with the end product's stats, including the material of the blocks it's encapsulated in, being determined by those of the turrets used. 4 chainguns gets you an autocannon, 4 double/triple chaingun turrets gets you a rotary autocannon etc. Not sure how missiles would fit in to that though.

Homeworld Freelancer Freespace 2 Starsector Anyone ever play Flatspace? Avorion reminds me of it

I'm not sure if this is an issue with the server, or if it's something that can be tightened up in development, but generally speaking my shots have the awful tendency to phase through their target, or even worse connect and look like a hit but do zero damage. It feels like it's worst in the most populous and asteroid/wreck dense sectors.

Thanks for the heads up, but I think the update has dropped now

I don't know, maybe it's a special case where, for whatever reason, the NPC ships being generated have some real powerful shielding but not a lot of firepower. There's also the "meta" for players, ie shield-heavy ships always being the go-to because of the reasons above. I'm not arguing that shieldy-tanky ships should be made pointless, but that their shield strength should come at a greater cost in terms of the ship's other stats - mobility, maneuverability, energy consumption etc. and/or more depth be put into the way the shields themselves work both in building (ie diminishing returns, strength dependent on ship volume/surface area) and combat (Weaker shields overall, but regenerate faster?). Another couple possibilities are directional shields, and specialised anti-shield weapons. The point I'm trying to make is I feel shields should be a small buffer for damage you'd otherwise take to your hull, and to make it anything more than that one should need to make a much bigger trade for that capability.

Awesome

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions about how I'm playing the game and how I approach difficulty. Which is not what it's about - I love the fact that I'm mincemeat if I stay in an enemy's line of fire for more than 5 seconds. It's that in those 5 seconds those shields can barely be dented, and that goes for all the AI ships in the area combating one another. These faction ships are tearing into each other for 20 minutes, but nothing's changed because their shields are holding. When two or three gang up on a single target, its shield still takes ages to come down yet once it does, the hull is shredded within 1 minute. The difference between hull and shield damage, is damaging the hull actually does something to reduce the target's capabilities so I'd rather be in, and against, ships with low shields and high hull than the other way around. I want to avoid combat becoming solely a game of "Is my damage number big enough to overcome their shield number", it takes a lot of skill out of both combat and building - the former because said shielded ships are too slow to pose a hard target, as well as the fact that a player can stay static without real worry; the former because you no longer need to worry about building principles or component placement. It also renders armour pretty much moot. Yes, there should absolutely be ships that can tank a lot of damage and come out okay, but shields so far make incoming fire far too trivial so long as it's not depleting faster than you can kill or evade your attackers. Again, you can fight countless battles without taking a single point of hull damage if you manage your range and the number of enemies you're facing at once. That's the easy part, and if the meta dictates combat should consist solely of that, it's not engaging. So while we're still making assumptions about one another, it's easy to believe that your vehement defence of the current state of shields is due to the advantage you gain from prioritising them over all else in the design of a ship being diminished were they to be nerfed. There is a nicer solution. Buff hull and weapons. The suggestion included the idea of having additional/larger shield generators give diminishing returns. This encourages players to design their hulls to better protect those components, including the shield generators themselves. Oh, and for reference my current ship's mostly Trinium, with a Naonite shield gen for ~1k shield HP. Can't remember hull values, and I think ~700 firepower. With the mobility and small profile it has, I can evade enough enemy fire to kill me ten times over, and be saved from that one salvo that does manage to connect, the hull can take a fair beating but won't hold up to sustained fire. I like how vulnerable I am, I don't like how invulnerable the ships I've encountered, and again, seen battling one another, have been. The suggestion also contained the idea of shields being weaker the higher the ship's volume (With some thresholds to reach and such, there are a lot of variables that could plug in). I think it makes sense for larger ships to need more shield generators to cover their larger surface, while the same size generator on a smaller hull spreads its shield less thin. This would make smaller ships closer to being as viable as huge ones.

Re: Upkeep, I find it a similar argument as with the ubiquitous sniper rifles in FPS that are capable of one-shot-kills, but have a slower refire rate/reload/higher recoil/movement aim penalties - In that case, if the shot hits, it doesn't matter to the target if it takes 10 years for them to have the next shot ready, cause they're already dead. Likewise, so long as your logistics are good, the cost of maintaining that ship don't matter once you're in combat. It doesn't directly offset its performance, and a ship with shields will always be able to out-damage and therefore out-resource an unshielded or significantly worse-shielded ship. That's not a problem in and of its self, it's the degree to which it's the case. Besides, those shields will prevent you from taking significant hull damage as long as you don't make any awful misjudgements in a fight, rendering repair costs null.

I do agree - One of the main reasons I find AI ships ugly is due to the fact that for the most part they only use rectangular blocks and often have tech components exposed. The most elegant AI ships I've seen were a set of pirates/raiders, with very slim ships but the parts arranged in such a way to give them depth and a nice profile. They definitely don't compare to player ships and, keeping part/object count and stats/balance in mind, it'd be nice to see some player-made designs integrated into the AI's fleets. Maybe an export function from the ship-builder could be used to send the design to a (moderated) cloud that servers will pull from for AI ships.

As I said, this was a battle between shield-equipped AI ships. I don't like being locked out of being able to make those small, fast and maneuverable ships because "the meta dictates it". There should certainly be drawbacks to doing so, and I already feel them, but there should also be drawbacks to building behemoths, beyond their lack of speed - That lack of speed means nothing if faster ships have to enter their range to engage, and in the short time such a faster ship is able to remain there, they won't dent the shield, never mind burst it and start doing hull damage. It's simply ridiculous how much damage shields can be made to take, and it's nowhere near proportional to the level of firepower usually available, to AI ships or yourself. Shielded ships are essentially invulnerable until a certain threshold of firepower can be brought to bear on them for a certain period of time. This limits creativity and player expression through different play- and building styles

I can't confirm this at all cause I've not made it that far. However, two friends discovered a system containing several asteroid stations named with Roman numerals. One of those friends also recalled encountering a trader carrying an "Artefact (# of #)". I suspect you have to gather all these artefacts and interact with the stations in some manner.

I'm having the same issue, has it been confirmed that it's getting fixed?

Edit: I've removed the other suggestions I made in this thread, since the discussion is almost entirely focused on shields. Here's what I said on shields originally: The key points: Shields work against dynamic, opportunistic combat, Shields are currently the best and main method of protecting your ship, outweighing other factors such as speed, maneuverability, armour, hull strength and pilot skill. Therefore, shields do not present themselves as a choice with drawbacks, but as a necessity you must account for to survive in combat. In turn, combat revolves entirely around being able to take enough damage for long enough to do enough damage to the enemy's shields, before they can do that to you. Shields can easily be made, with few drawbacks, to take that amount of damage for such a ridiculously long length of time, undermining the necessity of all combat principles beyond "shoot gun at enemy [if the numbers are on your side]". The suggestions to address this: Diminishing returns based on ship volume Diminishing returns based on an upper threshold of shield strength, depending on ship volume Energy production/consumption being affected by damage taken to shields (Active, manual shield raising/lowering) General nerf to normal shields, with introduction of stronger but more limited directional shields See post #11 for elaboration on these