Blaine

I've confirmed that pretty much everything in Aki's Avorion Commands Package still works. https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php?topic=830.0 Basically, for safe building: [*]Start a creative galaxy. [*]Create (or download/subscribe to on the Workshop) a 5- or 6-slot ship. [*]Use the commands to add some turrets, turret upgrades, generator upgrades, and shield upgrades to your inventory, then equip them on the ship. [*]Use the commands (/crew fill) to fill the ship with crew and a captain. [*]Command the ship to Attack Enemies. Now it will destroy all enemies who enter the system while you build for hours and hours. I don't condone using these commands outside of creative mode for building or testing, as it will ruin the game experience. I'm very good at "resisting cheats," as I've run many dedicated game servers over the years and this form of self-control comes easily to me. If cheats tempt you, maybe try to get a defense ship without using commands for your creative mode save.

It's not my script, it's a year old, and I'm not "promoting" it. I'm linking to it because it might help OP create ships in peace. Speaking of which, I believe there's also a script that adds turrets to your inventory directly in Aki's script compilation, but I'm not sure if it still works. I would suggest dialing down your incredibly abrasive and confrontational attitude. I noticed you managed to get yourself banned from the Avorion Steam forum, and it's no wonder.

Nope. Even in creative mode, pirates and Xsotan continually spawn at the player's location, and while there can be lulls, they never stop. It's an unfortunate fact that makes the game feel a bit less alive. You don't necessarily need an entire infrastructure, though. If you're building near the rim of the galaxy, one swift, lightly-armed attack ship can eliminate all aggressors. The problem is getting turrets and modules, even in creative... maybe there's a new mechanic in place since I last played a year ago, but I doubt it. You can use this mod (still works) to give yourself the components asked for by turret factories, provided you can find one: https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php?topic=1784.0

From what I've read (I've only recently returned to the game), as long as you make sure to destroy all pirates and Xanion before you leave the sector, all of your things will be safe from AI attackers. I've also read that you have to leave a ship (even just a tiny block, or perhaps a storage platform) in a sector in order for it to remain "alive" while you're away. If you do this, factories and mines should produce. I've further read that maximum "alive" sectors is 20 at a time, although I suspect this can be changed in some server setting or configuration file.

I don't want to fight bullet sponges either, and I'm generally not one to call for nerfs, but come on now. With two M-TCS-4 and 10x Xanion, Trinium, or even Naonite lasers from a decent turret factory, you just press LMB and ships explode like a bunch of popcorn. Currently they're the opposite of bullet sponges—they're balloons, and your lasers are the needle. I know that everyone has done the same thing at some point. In fact, I removed an M-TCS-4 and replaced it with a C-TCS-5 so I could fit salvaging lasers for convenience, because even 6 factory lasers are enough to annihilate almost anything quickly, except beefy stations of course. I tend to agree. Random pirates and aliens simply appearing at the player's position at intervals is less than ideal, and it becomes obvious after a while that they're just a timer that follows you around.

I'd like to note first and foremost that I adore this game. It's fantastic in many ways, and as a veteran of EGOSOFT's X series with over 1,500 hours put into them all since 2002, I never expected another developer to attempt basically the same thing and manage to pull it off. In many areas, most notably ship customization, Avorion is the clear winner. Now, I've only recently returned to Avorion after being away for a year, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten everything. In my view, there are three major issues to be resolved before Avorion can be the most excellent, definitive space trading, combat, fleet commanding, empire building game that's been developed to date. The Economy Clearly, this needs tweaking. For starters, goods shouldn't be artificially capped to restrict players to 500k profit per single trade. Not far into the game, you can start selling claimed asteroids in for 400-500k each at a fairly rapid pace; an Exotic C43 Object Detector makes this faster still, and effortless. You can probably claim 20-30 in an hour that way. In the meantime, once you've got some decent salvage lasers, you can salvage derelict stations for many millions of credits worth of minerals when you find them. With the cap, trading requires far more effort for a much smaller return. There's also the issue of empty stations, extreme resource and component shortages, and stalled factories producing nothing. EGOSOFT's X series was similar in this way, but in Avorion it's worse (or certainly it seems worse to me), since the economy in Avorion isn't fully organic, as evidenced by the trading cap. Also, even after out-of-sector activity was implemented, most sectors will remain dormant unless a player's ship is there. There are fewer tools to stimulate the economy. Not every good has a proper consumer, and the game's entire economy basically revolves around the construction of turrets. Combat Balance Randomly dropped/purchased turrets are very mediocre (with a few exceptions, like Exotic or Legendary salvaging/mining lasers with much higher Efficiency than can ever be crafted). Factory-built turrets are awesome and deal 5-10x as much damage as random drop turrets, with 50-100% more range, and better stats all around. Eventually the player will obtain lots of strong shield boosters, turret upgrades, and so on. So, the game starts out pretty tough and challenging, but the moment the player gets 6-10+ factory turrets, 2 Exceptional shield mods (or even 1), and the resources for a 6-slot ship, the challenge vanishes from the game on any but perhaps the highest difficulty. Dreadnoughts at the edge of the core barrier can be DPSed down in seconds. The only remaining threats are enemy turrets that bypass shields. In my opinion, factory-built turrets need a significant nerf, random turrets need a significant buff (and should be available regularly and in quantities of 4-6 at a time at Equipment Docks, so the player doesn't feel forced to rush to factory turrets), and shield mods should perhaps be toned down a little... but not too much, maybe by 25% across the board. I realize Koonschi wants people to use random turrets from salvage, stashes, Equipment Docks, and so on, but let's be real: No one does that right now anyway. They're all vendor trash compared to factory turrets, and even research generally just yields a higher-rarity piece of vendor trash. General Quality of Life and Miscellaneous Issues Streamlined and reliable fleet jumping; better fleet management; more commands and more powerful scripts for AI captains; cargo shuttle tweaks; fixes for "AFK" civilian ships; overhauling of certain practically useless system upgrades (like ore detectors that highlight ore from 5km away, when you can easily see the colored glow from 50km away; they should highlight all ore of a type in the sector); faction wars that happen realistically, rather than continuing to spawn in fleets regardless of how much of a faction's infrastructure has been destroyed; your captained combat ships not shooting enemy civilians; and many other small and miscellaneous issues that, if addressed, would immensely increase people's enjoyment of an already excellent game. Also, in my personal opinion, there should be more random things to find when exploring off-the-lanes energy and mass signatures. There are already quite a few, but they mostly boil down to various combinations of claimable asteroids, wrecks, pirates, stashes, smuggling stations, and a few plot- and quest-related things. Just a few more fairly unique encounter types would go a long way.

The other hurdle to jump (get it? jump? I'll be here all week) after implementing synchronized fleet jumps would be to do something about the terrible pathfinding in-system. This affects NPCs just as much as your captained AI ships, but the AI isn't a living being and doesn't care about enjoying the game, whereas we are alive and our ships behaving stupidly is very annoying. There were major pathfinding issues in EGOSOFT's X series. It's mostly unavoidable. Partly, it's because most game AIs "cheat": The developers lay out paths, by hand or by algorithm, that the AI can then follow. You can't lay out preset paths in a 6doF game in which the contents of the 3D spaces that are system playfields can change due to asteroids being removed, stations being built or destroyed, etc. In addition, because it's 3D rather than 2D, pathfinding is that much more difficult due to a third dimension to consider; and because ships have inertial qualities and can't turn or stop on a dime (as can characters in a fantasy RPG, for example), it's more difficult still. In light of pathfinding issues, covering most systems in asteroid fields seems like a poor decision. They should probably be moved to the fringes of every populated system, or even all to their own exclusive systems (with extra rich roids and claimable roids to compensate). We may never have satisfactory in-system pathfinding, but we can have satisfactory fleet jumps, and we can clear out sectors so that the pathfinding isn't made that much worse by asteroids.

It's a mod, man. It's optional. There could be several different variants of the mod: A slight nerf that reduces the mods' power by 25%; a middling variant that reduces it by 50%; and the hardcore variant that reduces it by about 75% (the author's preferred version). I'm just thinking of maximizing the number of people who'll download and enjoy the mod.

One major problem I see is that your low end is way too low. 5-10% bonus shields with steep downsides is basically an extremely marginal system module that no one will use, i.e. a useless mod. Players could slot a turret mod and more gunners instead, pack more weapons, and kill enemies much more quickly. In other words, you nerfed them too hard. It's important to think not only of Exceptional and Legendary mods, but also of whites and greens. I'd say start them at 20-25%, and finish up around 50-60%; this applies to energy mods as well (the main stat, not the bonus[es]). That would still slash their power roughly in half, without rendering them a near-waste of a slot.

I've been playing the game for maybe 20ish hours since returning, and I can pull 5-15m+ credits worth of minerals from deep scan station wrecks in a matter of minutes, or (now that I have factory lasers) I can clear out a pirate sector, lase down the shipyard's shields, and salvage it while it's still "alive," getting 20k+ minerals per glowing block destroyed (and toggling a few lasers back on whenever the shields regenerate a little bit). That's ~150-300k credits per block, depending on the material (this is pre-Ogonite/Avorion), and they take moments to destroy. Before that, you can start claiming and selling asteroids for first ~100k, then up to around ~500k each at the barrier to the core. This takes far less effort and preparation and logistical planning than trading. So basically, trading—the staple of space trading and combat games—isn't viable at all anymore. In my view, it should be completely uncapped and the economy balanced and tweaked properly. As it is, the economy is literally just a scavenger hunt for some starting turret parts until you've saved up enough credits to build your own factories and produce your own turrets.

Well, I think it's important not to lose sight of the many ways in which this game is amazing. Look at the Steam Workshop and compare some of the ships people create in Avorion to those created in Space Engineers, Starmade, Empyrion, or Interstellar Rift. I own all five of these games, I've created ships in every single one of them (here is the only one I've ever published), browsed many pages of other people's creations in the workshop, and the game that allows the most freedom in modeling ships is Avorion. This is largely because you can distort, rotate, layer, and finely position Avorion's blocks and greebles to get oblique and acute angles of all kinds and near-curves, but also, we have a powerful and easy-to-use ship building interface. The game plays extremely smoothly on max settings; at least, it does for me, even in busy sectors full of asteroids. I'm running a G-Sync monitor with a 120 FPS cap in the settings, and the game looks great. The broad strokes of the features Avorion offers are fantastic. It's like a combination of EGOSOFT's X series and EVE Online, and more besides. You can build your own factories, mines, and stations, completely custom-made in some cases, hold sovereignty over your very own star systems, run fleets of ships including AI-controlled ships, etc. There are some hiccups and issues, of course, but overall this is very impressive. As far as combat goes, I think random turrets need to be scaled up in stats by about 30%, while factory-built turrets should be scaled down by 30% at the high end. Right now I've got lasers on my ship, built completely legitimately, that deal over 1400 DPS each at 5.5km, with perfect accuracy, and that use so little energy I never have to worry about it. Higher difficulty settings can certainly help, and actually I think the balance is a little better than it was a year ago... but only a little. I can still defeat a pirate fleet solo in a six-slotter.

They're weak because randomly-generated turrets (which is what the AI uses) are terrible, while factory-constructed turrets are insanely powerful. AI ships also tend not to utilize very good mods, and of course their randomized designs aren't very optimized. On top of that, they can't use boost. It's a quadruple threat. So when you've got 10+ factory-constructed weapons and 2-3 +100%/+20% shield capacity/recharge mods on your carefully-designed ship that can use boost, you have far better weapons, defenses, and mobility than entire fleets worth of AI ships. Avorion was like this a year ago when I first played, and it hasn't changed at all. It's a huge problem and I don't know if Koonschi sees it that way, but I absolutely do.

There's more to it than just "getting credits." The game mechanics should work properly and satisfactorily, holistically (that is, altogether, taken as entire system), without Band-Aids like getting free stuff from wonky player-owned trading stations. This is tangential, but I've noticed that very little has changed about turrets. Random turrets are horrible, weak, and wildly varied in range, material, and type. They're almost impossible to find for sale at equipment docks in any quantity, even whites which are close to useless; but if you embark on a many-hours-long scavenger hunt for the materials needed to build turrets in factories, when you finally succeed the game becomes a joke and you can vaporize any and all enemies with your super-overpowered "crafted" turrets. That needs to change immediately. It should have been changed a year ago. Not only do players have boost, which allows them to always choose their battles, always have the initiative, and always have an escape route, but entire fleets of NPC ships can't match a handful of turret factory turrets, either.

Devs should remove the rep hit for shooting at enemy civilian ships, at least temporarily. It's really only there for flavor after all, and if it's screwing up actual faction/patrol mechanics, then that flavor isn't worth it.

Seems to me the game needs actual wing/fleet mechanics. Fleets would be automatically limited to the lowest jump distance of all ships in the fleet, would be unable to jump until all hyperdrives are off cooldown, and would jump in unison when the lead ship jumps. After all, mechanically speaking, you're just being "teleported" by the game engine from one playfield to another, and can probably do it instantly with some dev console command. Shouldn't be too hard to implement... probably. People say that a lot, but often it's more complicated for the developers than we'd think.

The fact that there seems to be nothing available for sale anywhere drives people away from this game. It's one thing if extreme scarcity is in service to a real, living economy, but apparently it isn't—if a hard cap in some .xml file determines what spawns where, rather than actual economic factors such as availability of resources, then it's just annoying. When you're starting out, chances are you'll have to look around for hours just to get a complete rack of titanium mining turrets. It's nuts. At the very least, equipment docks should have much larger and more comprehensive selections. Being an old X veteran, I soldiered on through anyway. I accumulated a few credits during my first playthrough: That was just my first billion. Indeed, I earned so many credits that I broke the game. I wonder if they've fixed the 32-bit integer restriction? Most likely, posts and comments like mine were the reason trading was nerfed, but it really shouldn't have been. OP, if you could upload that mod, that'd be great.

And then more common for people to bash into stations as they build ships optimized for higher speeds, and end up overshooting more often. Well, that's the dilemma. If any of you have played the X series, and I suspect many of you have, you may remember waiting minutes to travel from a gate to a station after jumping into a system while piloting a larger, slower ship, even with 1000% SETA active. It's pure tedium, and it's not even justifiable in terms of preserving economic balance, because on the whole competing NPC traders will move just as slowly—or as quickly—as you do. The problem is that outer space is vast, and there are a lot of dilemmas faced by games like these. You could have just a single station, asteroid, planet, moon, or other interactable/land-able/contestable object per "sector"—and that would probably be more realistic than cramming a lot of stuff in one very small area—but then the "sectors" would be somewhat boring, because they'd have only one object in them rather than a much wider possible variety of arranged objects. You can instead place stuff really far apart in each sector, but the problem then is that most sci-fi ship combat in games is very "cinematic." This requires ships to move at unrealistically slow velocities, usually with artificial top speed limitations, and often involves unrealistic scales as well. The Helios 2 spacecraft reached a velocity of 70 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, and spacecraft are capable of much greater velocities. There's usually no perfect solution to this. Avorion has boost but not SETA, its ships move faster relative to objects than those in the X series do, and most of its sectors have objects significantly closer together than in the X series, and the scale is somewhat higher; in general, it's faster to get around in Avorion even without time acceleration, especially with boost. I can't help but think there's a more elegant solution, but then again developers of these sorts of games have probably put more thought into it than I have and run into limitations and problems I'm unaware of.

If you really hate collision, you can tweak the collision damage. You might need to edit some .txt or save file if you've already begun your game; I forget which at the moment. I've had 100% collision turned on since the beginning of my game, earned billions of credits and many hundreds of thousands of minerals, destroyed hundreds of pirates and xenos, and I have yet to die from collisions except when purposely ramming asteroids and stations for fun. I tend to lose bits and pieces while salvaging or in a cramped dogfight, though. Very occasionally I'll nudge an asteroid and get a couple of dents, but I've never full-on smashed into one. Just be careful, especially in foggy sectors as Tsunamik mentioned. Aside from fortifying turrets, I don't mess around with integrity fields on ships (I do on stations/stationary ships) precisely because I do worry about possible collision bugs. @Thundercraft You underestimate the immense mass of an asteroid. Mass increases exponentially with volume (density being equal), and our human-scale brains aren't used to estimating just how much mass a very large volume can contain. A single good-sized asteroid (in real life) contains more metal than all of the metal human beings have mined in our entire history, and additional minerals besides. Imagine jamming almost every bridge, building, automobile, bicycle, factory, and power station on Earth into one big lump, then ramming something into it. Even a large, heavy, and heavily-armored ship is going to be a hollow, super-lightweight feather pillow by comparison. You'd go from X m/sec or km/sec to 0 or nearly 0 in a fraction of a second if colliding with an asteroid.

Stupid ideas? Yet real-world navy ships have roles; real-world air force aircraft have roles; ships in Homeworld and Homeworld 2 had roles; ships in FreeSpace 2, widely considered to be the best combat space sim ever released commercially, had roles; I could easily go on. You're all entitled to your opinions, but it's objective fact that bigger = better is one-dimensional. If that were true, the US Navy would only have aircraft carriers and nothing else. Instead, they continue to also field several classes of submarines, frigates, corvettes, cruisers, two types of amphibious assault vessels, support vessels, and various cargo, supply, and miscellaneous vessels. In the past, there were many other active-duty roles that have since been retired, most notably battleships.

Indeed, although if they work out some of the kinks in autonomous salvaging turrets, you'll be back in business. As it is now, you have to babysit them. This is a cool mining cube and I may use it, or part of it. Although it's cool and that's all that matters, I find the main issue with mining asteroids (in endgame quantities) isn't necessarily mining them quickly, but finding them and reaching them quickly. There are only ever one or two rich asteroids per sector, and it's rare to even find two.

You must be new to space sims if you believe that bigger = better is the end-all, be-all of ship role design. In EVE (using it as a convenient example), most types of battleships have serious trouble taking on frigates, which are the smallest player-operated ship class in the game. Destroyers specialize in killing frigates: they're somewhat larger and heavier than frigates, and are designed to fit a lot of small turrets that can easily track and hit frigates, among a few other technical factors. Battleships on the other hand can be destroyed by a couple of frigates swooping in to inhibit its engines and jam its warp drive while their buddies flying a couple of battlecruisers with long-range weaponry pummel it from afar. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist of things. This sort of rock-paper-scissors-style role balance may not be feasible for Avorion, but I assure you it's superior to and much more interesting than bigger = better. Bigger = better is easy, simple, and boring. That doesn't mean a game without complex ship roles is bad, but it does means it's missing the additional interest to be gained from nuanced ship roles.

Absolutely. However, we can hear fleet battles we aren't participating in from dozen of kilometers away. It's perfectly normal for a space game to have unrealistic sound in vacuum. I just think it's funny because lasers specifically have no sound. I'm a big fan of beam lasers in general, and I'm really glad Avorion has beam lasers rather Star Wars-style "energy packet" lasers.

I have nearly 3 billion credits in my current game, so I think I've learned a thing or two about trading. I may write a guide at some point, but I can offer a few pointers right now. Firstly, the best way to make money in the very beginning is by doing three things simultaneously: Jumping/taking gates toward the galactic core while also investigating unknown mass signatures (the yellow dots; make sure you have a +Deep Scan scanner upgrade equipped), claiming and selling the large asteroids that you find along the way (there's a small Steam guide about claimable asteroids here; unknown mass systems with pirates almost always have 2-3 claimable roids), and finally being on the lookout for wormholes that will lead you even closer to the galactic core. The closer you are to the core, the more money you make for selling claimable asteroids. Selling them also increases your reputation with whomever you sell them to. Additionally, you will want to visit unknown energy signatures (green dots) along the way, explore various NPC organizations' space, and check every Equipment Dock for Improved Trading System upgrade modules. You want at least a an Exceptional (gold) ITS that will record the trade routes of at least the last 3 systems visited. Kill pirates and xenos alongside selling asteroids in order to increase your reputation with the civilizations you're exploring. The higher your rep, the cheaper they'll sell you things and the more they'll pay you for what you're selling. Selling off unwanted upgrades won from combat also helps increase rep, in fact later on you can sell 100+ upgrades and max out a new faction's rep almost instantly. Mine higher-tier minerals along the way too, of course, and scavenge upgrades that drop from fleet battles you're too weak to directly participate in. Once you have 1m+ credits, a good enough Improved Trading System, a good amount of explored territory where you've increased your faction reputation, and ideally are at least up to Trinium tier, you can finally begin trading. Build a ship with at least halfway-decent cargo space (1000+) and a respectable jump range, then jump between systems in areas you've explored that have Trading Posts, Military Outposts, and/or lots of tech-type factories (avoid systems full of cattle ranches, farms, mines, solar power plants, and other low-value factories), letting your ITS software find some routes for you. Always be on the lookout for a better ITS. When you find a good trade (the ones near the top of the ITS menu are usually the most profitable), always check to see how much stuff the destination factory is buying before trying to run a route. You don't want to buy 2,000 Targeting Cards only to find that the place you're selling them to merely needs 100 of them. Faction reputation is the main factor in good buying/selling prices, but also, the amount of goods a factory has in stock plays a major part. If a factory is full of the items that it produces, it will sell them much cheaper than if it's only got a few. Similarly, a factory that needs Targeting Cards and is at 0/2500 Targeting Cards will pay much more for them than if it's at 2230/2500. Body Armor, War Robots, and other high-value, high-profit trades (usually from Trading Posts to Military Outposts, but sometimes from one Trading Post to another, or from a factory to either a Military Outpost or Trading Post) are where you'll make your first fortune. There's a lot of RNG, so be patient and explore a lot. You can make hundreds of millions from a single Body Armor trade. You'll soon find you don't need the ITS anymore, but it's very useful when you're just getting started. By this point, you'll know how to trade and don't really need my advice. The most profitable trading of all is trading Accelerators to Research Factories, but Accelerator Factories are extremely rare (you can build your own, but their production is highly complex). Trading Accelerators also requires massive superfreighters with tons of cargo space, because each Accelerator uses up 12-15 cargo space and it's best to buy and sell in bulk (if you buy and sell a little at a time, it's less profitable because the cost to buy them steadily increases, while the profit from selling them steadily decreases). I was lucky enough to find a full Accelerator Factory S in my game, and made almost 2 billion from it.

Well, if we're talking about realism vs. sci-fi, I suppose I might as well take the plunge. Often in sci-fi games especially, energy shields are set up to be good at blocking energy weapons like lasers, while armor is good at blocking projectiles. More plausibly (but still not very plausible), shields would be good at blocking projectiles, perhaps diverting their course magnetically or burning them up before they can reach the ship. Armor would be good at blocking both projectiles and energy weapons, because armor should be able to absorb certain amounts of both kinetic energy and EM/thermal energy. You know what's funny? In Avorion, weapon-type lasers seem to be silent, which might seem like a nod to realism on the surface... except that there's no sound in space period (barring potential outlandish interactions between celestial bodies and the interstellar medium), yet we can hear chainguns, railguns, engines, etc. just fine, even if they're not affecting our current ship in any way. Also, while lasers themselves produce no sound in vacuum (in atmosphere very powerful lasers could superheat surrounding gases, creating sound in much the same way lightning does), the heavy equipment that produces high-powered lasers does produce sound. Within the logic of the game, lasers should make some kind of electronic whining buzz when fired.

Yeah, I've been discussing this in other threads, as have others. It's especially brutal on fighters. I assume at this point that the developers are aware of the issue and will probably do something about it sometime in the future.