Ohm is Futile

Unless you abuse bugged factories you don't have instant weapons that can outrange a cannon... The problem of ANY 15 slot ships is the size that presents as target... ...Do the following excersise: - Check the ammount of resources that monstrosity costs. - Get a 3 slot ship of the same materials. Divide the resources of your 15 slot machine with the cost of a 3 slot to know how many ships your opposing fleet can build. - As both can mount equal weaponry... Now use cannons (the 2nd longest range weapon on the game) on both. - Now compare how easily your Monstrosity can be hit and compare to the next to nothing chances to hit any small ship at long range with cannons. On a server were players actually have to gather those resources... Instead of creative were resources are irrelevant... ...Who do you think will win a war? The relative scale betwen the "Monstrosity" and the smaller ship fleet that can kill it is just controlled by how many players the "small scale" fleet can field. And maneuverability is not rotation alone... Strafing also... I would like to see the inertia of that "Monstrosity" compared to the 3 slot ships. That's why I distinguished PvE from PvP... On a PvP server environment... Balance is ok, even if a player is able to hoard the ammount of resources to build a "Monstrosity" ... Others can take it down with a fraction of the same resources. You've got this "equation" wrong. First, a 15 slot ship requires far, far more volume than 15 1-slot ships added together, or even far more than 5 3-slot ships and still more than 3 5-slot ships as the requirements for each additional slot is not linear but exponential. This means that if you split the resources of a 15-slot ship into multiple smaller ships, you can easily end up with way, way more slots and, as such, way more weapons. While this does sound like it would favour making a fleet of smaller ships, it's not really the case, because your 15-slot ship is going to be alive and kicking for a very long time compared to each individual smaller ships. Bottom line is smaller ships means more DPS, but you lose DPS as the battle goes on because ships die. One large ship means less DPS, but until that ship pops, you have full DPS throughout the battle. EDIT: nevermind the fact that you need more players to control the ships. If you factor in the number of players, then there's a good chance that 15 monstrosities are better than 15 smaller ships. Also, maneuverability *is* mostly rotation. We have a newtonian-ish flight system, there's nothing stopping you from only having good forwards thrust, accelerating, turning your ship sideways and then just holding the strafe key to prevent the auto-brakes from firing. Then you can abuse rotation once more to turn your monstrosity and bring all its guns to bear while being very much on the move.

I feel as though we should update the OP to change/add information that was posted later. There's a lot of good tips here, but I have a couple of corrections: Trinium being the lightest material means it will always have a place in a build that values speed/mobility. That hardly ever works. One, you'll get borked numbers because of crew. Two, even if the value was accurate at the moment of placement, it won't be by the time you're done. I haven't found that placing thrusters/engines first is ever practical.

Except in real life you are limited by demand, which usually translates into either small, high margin trades or bulk, low margin trades. Yes, bulk high margin trades happen, and it should remain a possibility in the game, but the way things are, it's incredibly easy and somewhat frequent to come across trades that will set you up for credits for practically the rest of the game.

I get that. I do it, too. In fact, I haven't used gyros or dampeners yet... and that's precisely what we're pointing out. While I did express my concerns that gyros shouldn't be efficient enough to replace thrusters, I didn't expect them to be mostly useless. All I said is they should allow to supplement rotation(on every axis) speeds without being as placement-dependent as thrusters. As it is, I feel their existence does not even matter.

Are you sure about that? The obvious (at least to me) way to handle a shared energy pool would be to build relatively-massive generators and absurdly-massive energy-containers. And with shield blocks no longer being required to handle my shield strength (assumably at least, more on that below) I can focus more on having a crazy amount of power storage and power generation (I like laser weapons so I usually have overly-robust power generation anyway). You missed the very important detail that he suggested that those systems drained your batteries in terms of percentage.......... (tip: the actual values don't matter anymore, you could have a battery the size of a sector, if it drains at a rate of 5% per second, it will be drained in 20 seconds regardless of actual power capacity) EDIT @Maddog: Yeah, I remember those from Freelancer. Hmm. Well yeah we do need a system. I know Eve online does it with a module with limited range. You can either kill the one stopping you from warping, or you need to get out of their range first and then jump. I just don't know how that would be handled best in Avorion.

I know. I haven't touched dampeners and gyros yet and I've made some decently mobile ships using thrusters and directional thrusters only. ???

It is not arbitrary. The ships are saved as a hierarhy from a single block, that's all others are placed relative to. Besides, if the root block has the same HP as the ship itself, then its destruction is irrelevant - if your ship HP are expended, you will destroy your ship either way, whether root block is involved or not. Hmm, I see your point, but then we have the opposite problem in the sense that you have a block on your ship that can't be destroyed before you destroy the whole ship and that's just weird. What if your root block is a huge piece of whatever on which you stick all your turrets? Then you practically can't be disarmed before your ship goes... I just don't like this idea and much prefer my idea of simply making a quick check for the largest part with crew quarters in case the game has to worry about your ship breaking up and figuring out which one you're in control of and which one is a wreck. Also, I don't like the idea of a bridge block. There's very little point, it'll punish people who don't fully understand the mechanic while everyone else will just stick them somewhere protected that nobody will ever find anyway.

Bad luck, a lot of it depends on the galaxy generation. Some people find very profitable trade routes within the same sector, sometimes you need to jump. Sometimes you have to go around a fair bit and still have a dry spell. But the profit potential is astronomical compared to anything else you could do.

...but it currently does let you get more turrets as size increases right now. ??? The bigger the ship, the more system slots, the more system slots the more potential turret slots you have. If we want to work on damage potential vs size, we may want to introduce a "turret control block" that gives you slots based on its volume, but only compared to the mass of the ship. That way a smaller ship will get more slots m3 for m3... but I don't think it's that big of an issue anyway. The bigger issue is the fact there is very little to no advantage in combat to be faster/smaller right now.

Call me a stickler for words, but it's not "the meta". It's not something players have to gear or prepare for, it's purely a flawed mechanic. Anyone can do it. You'd practically have to be flying an asteroid not to be able to get away from NPCs. Anyways, I tend to prefer maddog's idea of afterburners. It never made sense to me that boosting would somehow continually use more and more energy each second of continued use. Afterburners make more sense and still limit a player's ability to just go "lol bye" at will for as long as their generator will allow. I also like the idea of cruise mode. No need to scale the time to switch modes in my opinion though. If taking damage interrupts the process, there doesn't need to be an annoyance of having to wait after a fight to switch modes. One should be hard pressed enough as it is to avoid damage in a large ship even if only for 5 seconds. I do find the limitation to jumping a bit harsh though. We might want a different way to prevent ships from jumping. You wouldn't want weapon fire to instantly prevent anyone from having a chance of running a way. All we want is for players to have to make concessions in order to have the option of running away rather than being able to do so pretty much anytime regardless of ship design.

Hundreds of Millions of credits? The most I have ever had is 40 million, that I blew on trying to get decent salvagers. And that took literally dozens of sold asteroids. I have a ship with 14 1000+ cannons for direct fire, 4 500+ 40% salvagers, and about a dozen lightning guns on auto, made out of avorion... I am lucky if I can keep myself in the black at ten million. (also 5 squads of mining fighters) What am I doing wrong? should I replace the mining fighters with salvage fighters or something? One word: trading.

Wut?! It's quite the opposite, you could get crazy mobile ships before, regardless of size. If anything, it's bigger ships that have to choose between mobility and other things now. The new mechanics mean you can't just simply go bigger and never look back anymore, not the other way around. Also, no, no hardcore/arcade mode. This is early access, no developer is going to create a different versions/modes every time a change doesn't please everyone, this is crazy talk and, if anything, this is mod domain.

I personally turned off collision damage, not because I don't want consequences for hitting asteroids, because it also means I can't have fun ramming smaller ships. No, I turned it off because I don't want to get smashed by cargo ships around stations or upon entering a system because there's an obstacle right on the gate/jump point. ...but I'm seeing all this talk of "root" block and while I can technically understand that you need a way to check on which side of a broken ship you are if it survives being split in large enough pieces, buuuuut... Instead of somehow having a determined root block, shouldn't the game simply ask itself whether or not there are crew quarters on any of the large fragments first, so that if your ship gets split into two parts and only one has crew quarters you end up in the one with crew quarters. Second, if multiple parts have crew quarters, it should put you in control of the one with the greatest volume/mass. To me, it's just crazy to pick a block arbitrarily that, if destroyed, destroys the whole ship/kills you.

Assuming eventual balance changes to turrets and such, different factions may have different ship generation patterns along with distinct, matching combat AIs and weapon preferences which would bring variety and potentially different challenges for which just getting a bigger ship may not always be the answer. For example, a faction may favour smaller, faster ships with powerful short-ranged lasers. One may field large, slow ships with long range cannons. Others could be dodgy with independent targeting/seeking missiles. Some could favour shields, others hull, or a balance. Maybe some factions could simply use long range weapons and fast ships and actually kite you. With a better balance for weapons and proper AIs, I feel the game could be made a lot harder without actually touching HP or DPS directly.

Some hyperspace systems reduce cooldown. It's only useful up to a point because it doesn't affect the time it takes for the navigation computer to calculate. Getting to 0 is possible, but useless.

The more you post, the more I like you. :P Although I didn't think you'd prove it possible to have anything rotate by other multiples than 90 degrees, I don't think we even need that. My own solution was just perhaps a couple more basic shapes, given we can scale and all. The most important one which would allow sloping at various angles really easily would be a parallelogram prism block. The block is still treated like a cube for placement, like edges and all those, but it looks slanted and has connection points both on the top and bottom. Admittedly, it may have to behave a bit weird with scaling to fit in with the current control scheme and all, but it would add a significant number of options I would think. By a bit weird I mean: you couldn't control the thickness of the slope, only the angle through making the "cube" thinner or wider. Of course, for it to truly do more for us than edges, it would need to be slimmer than edges placed back to back will allow. That means both the top and bottom connections need to be less than 50% of the surface area compared to the "cube" surface area. 25% would probably be a good benchmark? It may seem useless, but it would allow, at the very least, to create armor slopes that waste either a lot less space or don't need to be broken down into such small, weak pieces.

I'm not afraid. Well... maybe a little. :P So far, they've been neutral with me. Actually, they won't. Not as long as you don't fire a weapon or a mining/salvaging laser. Never. Do they follow you around? I also don't think so. Once they've warped in, they're in that sector and that's it. The only thing that follows you around is the "aliens are going to attack" thing that you basically can't escape until they've warped in. Presumably, you could just mark that sector as the sector that doesn't exist anymore on your map and be done with it. Too bad if you have a lot of nice stuff in there, though. That should do it, yeah. Although it doesn't fix relation changes after they've spawned, but honestly it's kind of your fault if you wait for 60 ships to warp in... (I'm kidding, it's unwanted behaviour regardless)

Aah, thanks for the feedback! I didn't mean to make anyone feel bad about not posting, I just don't get the download stats and I honestly didn't know what to make of the views and lack of response. I'm kinda edgy since I've been putting in a lot more time into Avorion than I should with the midterm season and all... Thanks, I'm glad people like my design philosophy. Although, the more I'm messing around with my campaign, the more I'm realizing that my upgrade indicator, as fun as it may be, is made rather moot. The fact is that I'm just building more variants and sub-variants that basically allow you to simply hit "apply plan" every now and then without looking back. That makes it more "play along" than "make it your own", but I'm fine with that, too. Actually, I've been going from variant to variant and ship to ship without pause, so quickly that I'm asking myself why I'm making so many variants. I don't think I've spent more than half an hour in a single ship/variant. ??? I'm quite happy with the SW-300s too, although the funny thing is that I sat down to build the SW-200, and it turned out much bigger than expected. :P Also, yeah, the AMR series is my biggest line so far, the 101 is pretty much as big as the Nomad, but better for combat due to the higher shield to hull ratio (especially since shield can be boosted with systems). It's a lot slower, but after trying it out for a bit, it still feels decently mobile. I'm probably gonna work on the 200 model pretty soon, it's going to be my biggest ship so far without a doubt and I really want it to look nice, I'm actually kinda thrilled!

I was asking because even with mirroring, you'd need to manually place at least half of those. The time investment in this thing must be crazy. But I have to congratulate you on getting it to look like that, that's some massive attention to detail to get cubes and triangles to look so smooth. I'm not too worried with performance issues. Yeah, filling it with crew at that scale would be a major pain, but nothing's stopping you from scaling it down some. (unless you used some very small blocks, then there's that stopping you from scaling it down while still looking so good.) I wonder how it would perform once crewed. Looks like it could be mobile, that design naturally has some width and length to it so you could probably get some good leverage with smart thruster placement.

I suspect a problem with the UI not showing the right values, but I'll agree with you that if those values are correct, it's probably way too little. I also did notice the fact that it mostly shows roll and very little if anything to pitch and yaw, which makes no sense. Then again, if you can get either a decent pitch or yaw, roll can make up for the lower stat if you're smart, so from a design perspective, I could see a reason for gyros giving more roll than anything else. It's funny though, 'cause I was the one to say that we'd need to be careful with gyros, but I honestly feel they're either bugged or useless at the moment. Then again, it's a new block, we should be patient, adjustments will come.

You wut mate?! How many blocks is that? I am speechless.

So... hum... I hate to triple post without having much of an update, but I'm rather baffled that I'd have over a thousand views and only one reply. Do you guys like these ships? Do you like their functionality but find them a bit bland? (I know I do) I'd like some kind of feedback as I'm really designing these ships for myself and only taking all this time to take screenshots and write descriptions because I thought some people would like some functional designs that are not the visual equivalent of a cereal box. If nobody cares, I'll just keep them for myself and save me time I already don't have by not taking screenshots, writing fancy blurbs and all that. :-\

If anything, you've managed to make me feel nostalgic. I did grow up with most of the things you mention. Good times.

Yes, it does. Thank you for that! I'm going to have to mostly agree with you. I can understand the average joe raising the issue of development resources when people are suggesting major overhauls, but it shouldn't be anyone's main argument, especially if they are not well informed on the matter. Here, I have to somewhat disagree. I think you are confusing "depth" with "complexity". Depth means there are lots of possibilities from a given pool of tools. Depth is fun. A good game with depth is easy to pick up, hard to master and that's great. Complexity is more difficult to appraise. Make a game too simple, and it becomes boring. I don't think that will ever be an issue for Avorion, though. Make a game too complex and then your player retention goes down as well as new play influx. Complexity is also a bit hard to define, but the way I see it, the more options, screens, etc. you have, the more complex a game gets. I also feel that it doesn't matter if a game allows you to ignore certain aspects and still manage to play. Putting in features that are complicated, hard to understand and even harder to fully exploit will turn off players even if said features can be ignored in my opinion.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, especially since in my detailed list, I do mention blueprint in option 3 and option 4 practically makes some blueprint implementation mandatory. I do agree with you about the need for a better system to manage equipped turrets/weapons. Perhaps I didn't phrase option 2 very well. It does not exclude the creation of a management screen nor of a placeholder block to make swapping easier and faster. What I intended option 2 to mean compared to 3 is that players wouldn't have a crafting system that influences the stats of weapons, only its looks. That's the main difference. Option 3 is there for people who'd like some control over the stats of their turrets without having a block-by-block system, be it separate from ship building or integrated in it. Where do I state that I intended the poll to overrule any decision Koonschi has made or will make about turret mechanics? I fully expect him to make his own decision, as he has been, but to at least consider the player base's opinion, as he has also been doing. I'm just trying to satisfy my own curiosity with this poll and perhaps help Koonschi have a better idea of where players stand. I do, wholeheartedly, agree with this! That, I will disagree with. Perhaps it's "case study" type of thing, but I am my own example here. I joined this forum to suggest things, not to be a complete fanboy. Although, I will admit that I like to express my enthusiasm and agreement when something pleases me. Anyways, I don't think the bias, if any, will be such that this poll won't be worth anything.