Ohm is Futile

As others have pointed out, this is early access and the limited features are going to mean that the game is "done" for a lot of people in a short amount of time until the next big update. Also worth mentioning is that a large number of players suddenly flocked to the game since youtubers made a big deal of it around February. One thing some of us might be forgetting is that March/April/May is crunch time for college and university students. As more updates are released and as some group of players get more time to play, player population will stabilize. EDIT: In fact, compared to January, Avorion has gained almost 200 average players, which is almost 50% more.

Well, that's pretty much what I suggested originally. Until the game is at the point where setting up a supply chain is feasible and relatively painless, then the current system can hold just fine. That was exactly 7 posts ago and it's currently sitting at the top of the page...

At that point, I prefer my idea to actually organize a supply chain using freighters eventually than having stuff moving magically. I mean, it's not like the "people" we have handle our money and other things are able to come get physical things from our house that's lightyears away to stash it safely. A simple fix could simply be to make minerals and/or turrets/systems use a little space so that you can actually hold more than necessary to build a bigger ship without requiring a stupidly large cargo bay. Maybe something like 0.1 cargo per turret/system and even less than that for minerals (0.1 for a hundred units of minerals?). As for requiring shipyards, that's a whole other debate which is probably worth searching because koonschi actually said something about... but honestly, if you can use a "little imagination" to magically move stuff from your ship, then why couldn't you use a little imagination to have people build a new ship from tools and materials they have on hand?

as suggested earlier, just let the game move your suff for a fee, if this includes some waiting time or not is just a matter of taste. would solve your problem and it´s still possible to include real hauling of stuff (with your own freighters for example) later in the development I guess it fits the criteria, but it feels just about as weird as the current system where everything seems to be stored in a parallel universe. *cue red hot chili peppers

Building nice stuff is tricky. There were some good tips in here. Snapping to middle and using a grid step that's half of your scaling are among your best bets. Otherwise I'd say it's mostly about getting into good building habits and avoiding X.X5 scale steps as they will inevitably result in fractions you can't deal with. Sadly that makes building at a small scale much harder. Anyways, this is most likely the topic of my next YouTube video now that my semester is over and I've got time to record again. EDIT: my video is live, you can watch it here:

Yes I do find it weird that materials and systems and weapons and all that don't require cargo space. However, I dare anyone to find a solution that doesn't involve hours upon hours of going back and forth between a base and wherever you're exploring/farming/fighting/playing the game. I do enjoy not wasting a ton of time flying to places I've been before just to secure what I've been doing for the past X amount of time. Maybe this could be integrated once we get a good system that includes running the galaxy in the background and controlling ships of the player's faction at a distance. Then perhaps we could build freighters or whatever kind of hybrid ship you want to to do the grunt work of stockpiling or delivering what you need between your currently selected ship and your base.

Wow, I'm off for a while with university and this topic is still going!? Anyways, here is what's still my opinion: 1. Yes and no. The turret factory concept is all well and good, but it needs tweaking. I want more options. Specifically, something I think would be fun would be both/either turret reverse engineering (kinda goes with #2) to allow us to make copies of existing turrets and/or disassemble and reassemble. For example, you break it down (lose it) but get a blueprint and then you can make more of that turret at any factory provided you have the materials. Assembling/disassembling could allow two things, one would be to get turret materials(trade the turret for turret components) to build other turrets and/or reassembling with tweaks to stats within certain limits(rebuild a very similar turret but tweak, say upfront damage for a slower fire rate or range for lower energy consumption, etc.) For example, each stat could be worth a certain number of points and we would essentially move stats around at the cost of others so that the weapon retains roughly the same potential but with slightly different specs (like maybe no more than 25% change from the base stats). 2. Yes, see my bit about reverse engineering. 3. Meh, don't really care. 4. Well, as someone else pointed out, lasers look like lasers and railguns like railguns and that's fine that way. More variety could be nice, but that might be mod territory. Also, can we please please please get something along the lines of a hardpoint block? Something we can put on our ships that creates a slot in the ship menu so we can swap turrets much faster by just sliding them into a slot instead of having to go into building mode and placing them manually into specific locations every time we want to switch? Colour coding the block with regards to the slot could be cool so we can tell what "kind" of hardpoint it is from the menu (aka players could code them both by size and or location/firing angles depending on a self-imposed colour code).

Love the new MFF, not as excited about the Mule and GigaBee. I just feel that they don't look as good as your other designs. Haha, no worries, feel free to steal ideas anytime! I don't mind. Anyways, keep it up, actually quite impressed by the new MFF. Such stats, much style! Wow!

I'm pretty sure the idea behind hull blocks is just that they're crewed space. They require power because of life support and such. In fact, I'd need to test, but I'm pretty sure that if you create a new ship and only stick a block of hull in there it's going to show the power requirement as "life support" in the menu. So yeah, I kinda see your point. I would love some "structure" blocks that are neither armor nor hull and tougher than just frames. Kinda like hull but less bad.

So to get the most out of your thrusters you want them as far as possible from the CoM in a direction other than the facing direction. So to get the most out of your thrusters you want them as far as possible from the CoM and not pointing directly at the CoM.

http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2964.0.html http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2955.0.html Also, welcome to the Avorion forums.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but the truth is that we already know that material don't provide more or less thrust. They are all equal in that regard. So yeah, moving the CoM could influence the data, but if you used a symmetrical design, then mass would be equally distributed, thus leaving the CoM untouched... but we're not gonna learn anything new by doing that. As I said, mass and thrust are already known variables. Anyways, to me this thread is much more interesting in terms of energy consumption.

*brake thrust :P Also, you wrote yaw/pitch but roll is influenced as well, although I do understand that people don't tend to care as much... As for your conclusions, Trinium is infinitely better than Xanion. On some ships, thrusters might account for about 3% of energy required. Multiply that percentage by the actual difference in energy usage between Xanion and Trinium. That's 3% of 6% or 0,18%. Now, consider the mass difference. 0.08 vs 0.11 is actually almost 14%. Then compare that to the rough percentage of the mass of your ship thrusters might make up. Let's go with a fairly conservative estimate of about 10%. 14% times 10% is 1,4% or roughly 770% more significant than the energy drain. Then again, that's all very subjective, at least in terms of energy consumption. Of course, thrusters represent a large share of the energy drain on small ships without shields and hyperspace cores and that kinda stuff... but chances are you don't have much choice in terms of materials for such a small ship and neither will you care about min-maxing something that small. EDIT: might be interesting to compare those numbers with actual generator numbers. How much mass per material do you require to generate a certain amount of energy?

...or just use the hyperspace upgrades if you want to make smaller jumps? I mean, you CAN get your cooldown timer down to 0 seconds because upgrades are in percentage and stack additively. Absolutely no point without calculation time reduction mods.

Hardly matters, you can lower cooldown with hyperspace mods, you can't lower computer calculation times. 99,9% of the time, the thing holding you back from large jumps is the jump route calculation.

TL;DR: Thrusters and gyros should behave somewhat like hyperspace cores at least in terms of rotation. The requirements should be exponential to increase rotation more, thus making larger ships either less maneuverable or require an ever-increasing amount (percentage) of their volume dedicated to maneuverability at the cost of other potentially more useful internals such as shields, generators, etc.

This thread (and others) is why I think we need specialized weapons. Ones with very different stats. Doesn't matter what kinda ship you can fit them on. Number of weapons is limited per ship. Number of ships is potentially limited by resources. Victory is determined by a compound of resources invested and specialization. As such, you can either divide your firepower to fit many roles but not particularly well, or you can specialize. Then you can have small interceptors to kill bombers, bombers to kill larger ships, larger ships that are not suited to fight other large ships but deal well with both interceptors and bombers and larger ships that deal well with other large ships but not so much against small ones. Differences between weapons come mostly in the form of DPS, fire rate, tracking, projectile speed and accuracy. Like we need actual, significant differences between weapon types. Of course, these changes don't work too well with linear scaling of both engines and thrusters since that allows you to make a 15 slot battleship turn as fast as a 5 slot corvette. Heck, right now you can probably make a 5 slot corvette be much faster and maneuverable than a 1 slot fighter.

From your post, I get the feeling that you're using the stable branch, which makes all of this a bit awkward because the mechanics changed significantly. But yes, in theory, the further the better (but can make things a bit awkward). If you want tips regarding thruster placement, I listed the best positions for each axis: Ironically, I was answering you in that post, too. Anyways, for example, looking at your ships: Argento: good placement in general. Audax: wastes a bit of rotation potential with some thrusters closer to the core. The same applies to almost every other ship. Anyways, I'm probably going to make a videos on ship design (not for the aesthetics, lol) to get the most functionality and just generally make the experience more enjoyable and efficient.

...but I fail to see the need for even more rotation for smaller ships..? Plus the increased power drain compared to thrusters means you need more generators, which then kinda pushes you into a larger ship. Makes no sense to me. I mean, the lever effect isn't even that limiting, you can hide the darn things if you don't like seeing them. I guess it forces you to put your important stuff closer to the CoM and thrusters further away. It doesn't even limit what you can put on the ship, just where you put it... I dunno, I just don't get it. I felt gyros were the lazy designer's thing to let them make something decently mobile, but still less mobile than skillfully placing down thrusters. Making mobility stuff not scale perfectly linearly would give smaller ships extra maneuverability across the board, if that was the objective.

In that link I posted, you'll have the info. I personally like the change. Frees up the screen and basically any open menu will have it show up if you wanna see it. I'll agree that perhaps a settings menu checkbox might be nice, but meh, this is alpha.

The reason a lot of people put spoilers is because, without them, it makes finding something specific a lot more annoying because pictures make the posts much, much longer. You put them in like this: [spoiler] stuff [/spoiler] You can add info by doing this: [spoiler=info] stuff [/spoiler] To post XMLs, you need to host them somewhere. Easiest option is probably dropbox. You can simply put them there, right click either the file or the folder and copy the link. Then insert it like this: [url=link to your ship] link text [/url]

I would kinda like more colors, so I'm going to agree here. I'm also going to ask for even more. I want a key to select the color from the block I'm clicking on so I don't have to write everything down every time I use different colors. Something like the color picker tool from paint.

@Wilponderoci: what? what version were you playing before? I don't think I have a single ship that requires more power, if anything, they require less. (much less, actually!) To me, that looks like the only potential offender and possibly a bug, since Koonschi mentioned that gyros now scale with material, so perhaps the power drain does as well. That explains the huge losses in brake thrust and I totally agree that they were too good. Not necessarily a must-have like some people seemed to let on, but still far too effective. Time will tell how balanced they are now. I secretly (not a secret anymore) wish they didn't scale perfectly linearly. That would screw over a lot of large designs somewhat, but just a little bit so large ships feel a little more, well, large and lumbering. The part I'm not too sure about is the loss of acceleration. Top speeds of close to 1km/s are actually fairly easy to reach and that happens even more with large ships since acceleration seems more sensitive to mass than top speed. Like, pretty much all my designs have higher top speeds the bigger they are. Seems backwards. Not sure how I feel about acceleration vs top speed and how scaling could fit in right now. Again, need more time to play with that. Aah well, I was just getting used to the lower rotation speeds. This has to be the bit I have the most doubts about. Not sure I like that change. In a way, this makes gyros even more powerful. Perhaps we simply don't share the thought that gyros should be a subpar solution to helping rotation speeds while getting around the need for strategic placement of thrusters. Maybe you didn't consider that now we could change the direction of gyros and gain massive bonuses to whichever rotation we want without "wasting" power on other directions. I don't know, either way, I perceive this as an excessive buff for gyros. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to answer and looking forward to future updates! (I'm especially eager for weapon stuff, more AI combat tactics, big vs small balance and that kinda thing *wink wink* (being a spoiled little grown-up here, lol) ;) )

So, I know that Koonschi hasn't posted the details here, although some notes are available on steam here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/240220455166387074 Not sure if we'll get more information than that, especially compared to beta branch builds, but I'm going to try to analyze it. First thing I noticed is that thrust has gone down a fair amount. I'm not too sure how it works, but it still doesn't scale with material tier, so I'm guessing engines were simply nerfed. Maneuverability has also changed, and weirdly enough, some ships I designed have different results whether it's yaw, roll, or pitch. Some ships gained pitch but lost yaw, so it's not a definite boost or nerf. My guess is that either gyros have a different behaviour regarding their position on the ship or maybe the lever effect from thrusters was changed. I'm really not sure since I have ships that don't have gyros and their maneuverability has changed in different ways for all of them. Those changes are fairly huge, too. For example, LeonserGT's Megalodon, which I modified, has gone from 0.35 rad/s pitch to 0.57... that's 163% higher. At the same time it lost 0.04 yaw out of 0.35 and 0.15 roll from 0.8. I'm... confused by these changes, honestly. Anyways, bottom line it doesn't look to me as though it's going to be harder or easier to make ships maneuverable, just different. Thrust was significantly nerfed, although I tend to agree that the earlier values were kinda over the top.

After some testing, it's not as bad as I thought. For starters, the values are actually higher than shown in your post. They're functional alright, a bit slow by my standards, but it works. The funny part is that I thought the brake thrust would make things quite difficult, but as it turns out you naturally lose boost speeds very quickly. The last stretches are kinda annoying though. It's somewhat painful to dock, at least with the Claymore, but it's pretty much the slowest ship in your fleet. So, I take it back, those look good and they are functional. Excuse my surprise, I tend to like speedy things. My 7-slot 130kt multi-role trading ship that wasn't designed with speed in mind can pretty much fly circles around your light corvette.