Duncan Idaho

I think part of the issue is that the sectors are so dense. If the devs were to modify the sector generation to increase the spacing between asteroids and stations it should be much less common for players to hit asteroids.

So people would just build cubes with loads of spikes on them? Fractal borg cubes are just as boring IMO. I guess the devs have to decide if they want the game to be focused on engineering, where the practical design of the ship is king, or instead to focus on a simplified model that gives players freedom to build cool-looking ships without having to worry too much about the laws of physics.

If I understand correctly, integrity field blocks used to promote aesthetics by tying the block HP to the ship's total HP, thus making it so that only the total HP is important irrespective of geometry. The new approach, while less OP, does seem to promote building boring borg cubes (can't spell boring without borg!). Perhaps there is some change to the integrity field that could strike a compromise between the two?

Got my +1!

Hi cepheni, It looks like you have the dev's ear. Do you think you could convince them to expose some of the other hard-coded variables like base salaries, item costs, trade prices, drop frequencies etc? In most games these are stored in some compressed format or, better, in easily moddable xml files, but with Avorion it seems they are baked into the executable. It would really expand the scope of mods if these could be tinkered with. Thanks!

It doesn't cost money to maintain a capital ship in Eve as far as I'm aware. It costs a boat load of money to get, sure, but if you park it somewhere safe and leave if for a week you don't end up with a huge bill. This is the problem that I have with salaries. If you don't crew your ship it decays, if you do it decays your bank balance. I completely disagree. You're saying people will happily stick around grinding in order to get money that buys them nothing more than a few hours more with which to grind without backsliding down the achievement slope? Gotta keep pushing that rock uphill because it ain't no fun when it starts rolling back down. For me the quests and materials are a mere side-aspect. I want to have a great big empire with hundreds of ships and factories and a whole region of space to call my own (and of course some unfriendly neighbors to use my fleets on). X3 never really managed that because the universe was pretty static; you often end up with a big fleet but no-one around to use it on unless you declare war against one of the 5 or so races (which means you no longer have access to their ships or weapons). In Avorion with all the factions and the war system there is real potential for this kind of thing.

Ultimately I expect that there will be passive income sources so the goal is not to grind up money to buy a few hours of freedom from drudgery but instead to maintain a sufficiently large passive income to offset the passive expenses of the fleet. This is not unreasonable actually because it encourages the player to build. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Actually it's entirely titanium apart from the engine I added (which was for testing only). I think I have made sense of it. The force from engines is directly proportional to their volume in the game. As they most likely have constant density we can write F = C m_E / d where m_E is the engine mass, d is the density, F is the force and C is some constant of proportionality. As F = m_S a where m_S is the total mass of the ship and 'a' the acceleration, a = C m_E / (d m_S ) So in the limit that the entirety of the mass of the ship is dominated by engine we have m_E ~ m_S and so the acceleration a goes to a constant C/d. In this limit the only way to make the ship faster is to decrease the density by using a higher-tier material for the engine.

The build menu shows the current speed/truss according to your current number of engineers... In other words, unless you have a large amount of extra engineers, the numbers you see in build mode mean nothing. I read that too, and so added more engineers to my ship before building. With the new engine the amount of engineers is sufficient yet my speed is still lower. Before: http://pasteboard.co/y3mmoQEl7.jpg With engine selected and ready to place: http://pasteboard.co/y3mZiZ4l5.jpg With new engine: http://pasteboard.co/y3nGUkvRU.jpg So somehow despite adding a new engine roughly the same size as my other two, my thrust has *decreased* by 0.1 m/s^2! Edit: I suspect there is some weird diminishing returns on adding engines, coupled with the fact that having more engineers increases thrust. So somehow the amount of increased thrust on my original setup with 4 extra engineers is larger than the amount of thrust added by attaching an entirely new engine which then reduces the amount of 'extra' engineers to 1.

Que? Avorion is just a resource; in that sense the game is about acquiring iron. The game is a space sandbox that supports fleets and player-owned factories. These are the ingredients of a space empire. Who cares whose name is attached to the sector? In the X games I used to build all my factories in pirate sectors that I liberated, long before they introduced the ability to formally claim sectors.

Internal variables like this are unfortunately not (yet?) exposed to the lua API. I've been trying to modify the crew salaries and hiring costs but these are similarly hidden away. Perhaps you could add your voice to my petition to expose them: https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1849.0.html

I have a nice little ship that I have been upgrading, but as I've added to it the acceleration and max speed have slowly dwindled. However try as I might I cannot seem to make it go any faster. Adding extra engines actually causes the thrust to go *down*. Why? I just cannot figure it out at all. Can someone please explain this to me before I tear my hair out?

The point is that they can't go anywhere out of sector unless you are in the sector with them. Why not just tell them to follow you then trundle off to the next 1500+ roid system? You have to go there anyway.

I've played virtually every space game out there: XBTF, X-tension, X2, X3, X3TF, X3AP, X-Rebirth, Eve-online, Freelancer, Unending Galaxy, Space Engineers, No Man's Sky, Kerbal Space Program, Empyrion, Elite Dangerous, Frontier Elite II, Rebel Galaxy, Void Destroyer II, SPAZ, SPAZ2, Starpoint Gemini II, the list goes on. I don't think any of those games have crew salary systems! Why? Because it's an unnecessary mechanic that brings nothing to the game while detracting from the fun. There's nothing worse in a game about building an empire than being rushed because of some arbitrary countdown siphoning your hard earned money away. I just don't see what's wrong with having lots of ships. Why should this be discouraged? With an up-front cost only system there's still a cost involved as you have to build the damned things and replace them if they get destroyed. But you don't get punished for having a nice fleet. As it stands the game drives players to have one-size-fits-all battlewagons, stifling creativity and limiting playstyle.

It seems that deleting a ship using safemode causes a loot drop even if all modules and turrets were removed prior to destruction. These drops however do not seem to be able to be picked up, even after waiting for a while.

You misunderstand me. It's not that I can't afford to pay my crew, I just feel the whole mechanic places a psychological burden on the player that discourages doing activities that don't yield a profit. Every moment that you are not actively engaged in a profit-generating activity is a moment that *costs you money*. If you're not getting ahead you're falling behind - you can never just take some time off. At the moment the burden is rather small. It is not hard to generate exorbitant amounts of money in a short amount of time by trading such that the salaries are trivial. However it is not going to stay that way, obviously. The dev has already discussed nerfing trade routes in the next patch. Even so, if ultimately the salary remains a trivial expense I have then to ask what is the point in keeping it?

One thing I have noticed is that the internal variables such as the crew salaries are baked into the executable and not accessible from outside either via either an external file or from the lua mod environment. I would really like to make a mod to change the way crew salaries are handled, specifically removing the salary and increasing the upfront cost by a substantial amount. To do this I need to modify the hiring fees and salaries, which does not seem to be doable currently. Is there any chance the devs could expose such internal variables? This would really enrich the modding possibilities I feel.

I would say that a transparent, up-front cost is a far more obvious and easy-to-manage form of limiting progression. You don't have to ask whether the benefit of hiring this guy is worth the extra grind you are burdened with to maintain their salary, you don't have to ask this nebulous question as to whether it will ultimately be worth buying this guy. You just say, I want more ships and now I can afford to have them, done. This is much more *fun* - it's not about realism.

Personally I think that turret factories need a nerf. As it stands the fact that we can buy the best weapons means there is little point in going out hunting pirates, unless you just like the big explosions. Factories have the benefit of consistency and tune-ability, but the fact that they also produce way OP weapons compared to loot drops makes them completely unbalanced.

Accumulating ludicrous amounts of money is one of the most fun parts of the game for me. Perhaps this is all moot because presumably there will end up being lots of passive ways to make money, e.g. setting your ships to defend friendly sectors, mine and of course player factories. Then the game will be ensuring that your profits are larger than your costs, and this drives your expansion. In this context I am fine with crew costs. However as it stands we have to manually accrue money which causes us to trend towards a single multi-purpose megaship rather than lots of specialized ships.

Interesting, it was my understanding that turrets only come off when the block that they attach to is destroyed. Can anyone in the know confirm/deny this?

Are your turrets mounted on weak blocks? I always put mine on nice thick armor plates and have not had one break off for quite a while.

It's certainly doable but its damn risky in those crowded sectors. Scrap a roid at 100m/s and say goodbye to your ship.

Problem is those miners only mine when you are in sector currently; other sectors are frozen in time. It's on the dev's todo list fixing this, but for now at least you have to babysit your miners.

thats why i suggested that if you have less than 250k that crew pay only be a % of what you have. since at that point you could go off and do whatever you want at any time and not end up sliding backwards. since its not difficult to make 3 or 4 million an hour once your fleet is established. I'm not too happy with this idea. Firstly it doesn't remove the backsliding if you have more than 250k in the bank, it will instead simply feel like a punishment for having a fat wallet. It's also perhaps a bit too complex a solution where a much more simple one exists - namely increasing the upfront cost while removing the salary entirely.