Ohm is Futile

Yeah, it's just that it seems weird to me that I need to add crazy amounts of engines to have a higher maximum speed, whereas thrust itself will never be an issue. Maybe I haven't been conducting my tests at a big enough scale, since thrust does seem to be affected more by mass than maximum velocity is. I haven't calculated how the proportions differ and I should. I have a gut feeling the proportion is roughly the same though. What if we actually made engines give less thrust, but compounded thrusters' thrust into forward thrust and not only engines'? And then buffed the engine block's effect on maximum speed? Dunno, just thinking out loud. Interesting, but complicates things a little bit. Also kinda makes directional thrusters redundant then. No, not entirely, I'll agree, but if normal thrusters have the same potential as the directional ones, then why not benefit of the potential extra thrust in other directions of the regular thruster? Sure, it complicates things a bit when performing more complex maneuvers, but still. I'm also debating what is easier for new players to understand? That thrust gets divided by the number of sides of their thrusters are firing (which is incredibly hard to predict when considering maneuvers, even more so if you combine directional and regular thrusters) or that location matters for thrusters? By the way, the numbers in game actually do show that eventual placement of a block in one location versus another is going to have a different effect on rotation. Another thing I'm just realizing and putting out there as I think it is that there is no indicator in game for strafing thrust and its maximum velocity (at least on thrusters alone, not accounting for the fact that you can actually yaw the ship and then glide sideways for a fair bit).

I understand why you would say that, but if you've messed with From The Depths you may understand why I still disagree with this suggestion. Ship design is already a fairly time-consuming process, all things considered and one of the main things I love about this game is the degree of customization vs time invested. I can start the game and sit down for an hour or two and make a ship or at least considerable progress on a ship. If this was implemented, which I doubt it will since it would require a substantial rework, it would mean that ships would need to be built around weapons or weapons around the ship and the time investment is going to increase exponentially as will complexity. A couple of things that could be done and still keep the time investment and complexity to manageable levels is to give the choice of maybe a few different models for certain turret types. Allow scaling. Allow adjusting certain stats with sliders and include a proportional material/credit cost. Also, there's a plethora of threads on weapons and while I understand you are presenting a new idea, it's getting annoying to comment on each individual thread. :-\

To me, this all sounds like we need more checkboxes and sliders for difficulty because it's going to be horrible to balance and any hard changes is going to please some and bother others.

I have to second this. All of it. As for gyros, I dunno. I don't think we need them. The thing I expect is giving a lot of people trouble is that thruster placement has a huuuuuge impact currently. Placing thrusters in line with the center of mass(CoM) will cause them to give only strafing/braking thrust and no torque (which is logical). In that sense, splitting thrusters into different blocks when placed across the CoM so the middle of the block is not lined up with the CoM will yield higher rotation values. Also, given directional thrusters have the same power per cubic meter as regular thrusters, they are plain better than regular thrusters for rotation if you place them strategically. That is, in the sense that you can place them so as to "waste" as little thrust in terms of efficient placement in relation to the direction the thrusters are facing. The big question, then, is do we want to create separate blocks for rotation and strafing. Because if we add gyros, it becomes very simple to limit oneself to gyros for rotation and everything provided by thrusters becomes icing on the cake whereas thrusters would be mostly used for strafing which gyros simply cannot do. Hmm. Then what you can do is use only directional thrusters with gyros and get some very funky flight patterns with some designs. You could make ships with very high rotation speeds and nearly no strafing power, but dedicate a fair amount of volume to thrust and braking thrust and get some extremely mobile ships, depending on how inertia is applied. Currently, inertia in one direction seems to dissipate once a ship reaches its top speed in another direction. With sufficiently crazy thrust/braking thrust values and rotation, the need for strafing thrust would be rendered moot unless you actually like to strafe. You could immobilize a ship by simply accelerating to max speed in one direction and then letting the braking thrusters stop you, regardless of any previous maneuvers. My conclusion is that if gyros are indeed added, they should have lower potential for rotation than thrusters and be used for greater placement convenience to help alleviate the issue people are having to get their ships to rotate. On a somewhat different note, anybody else find that the thrust to max velocity ratio of engines is a little weird right now? Like, it's not too hard to build ships that can go from 0 to max speed in <5 seconds and brake at a similar rate.

Nice-looking ships. I like that we can recognize your style across different ships. Nice balance of sleek armor and industrial-looking blocks. I'd love to see ships like that fly through my galaxy!

You, sir, need to start making ships for a living. These look amazing, although I'll agree that the palette for the freighter is a bit... excessive.

It's sad how many mechanics the station requires vs how much crew it can sustain. Sleek designs, though. There is elegance in simplicity.

...so use glow blocks? You can make them tiny and shiny or big or dim as you like using the color palette and scaling.

My comment did not target you or your post. I don't intend to dictate what people can or cannot post either. Your comment was actually accurate, as far as I know. What I meant is that it makes me cringe when people feel the need to justify design decisions or features using real concepts in a way that shows an absolute lack of understanding of said concept. I guess that makes me a Physics Nazi or something. Funny thing is I'm not really that educated in physics beyond what I learned watching science shows and playing kerbal space program. Anyways, I'd rather just have people say they think x or y would be better for z gameplay reason. I suppose I should let it go, so go ahead and butcher all of known physics to your heart's content if you so desire. Just letting people know it drives some people crazy.

Glad to hear you agree. Honestly feels this needs to be in the game. This feature should remain useful regardless of what changes may happen to turrets in the future.

Hmmm, UI could use some work, but I'll stick that on top of the "rough around the edges" comment you made. Happy to see fellow "older" gamers around. Also very happy to see such a game. I agree with you on so many levels. This game has some of the best features of other awesome games in the space genre and it's still an early access game. Two thumbs up from me as well.

I think ships should really be kinda instanced out in some way when building because of the aforementioned issues. Also, if you mess up your crew quarters or end up putting a module that drains all your power while building and so on. Your crew may die and that's also annoying.

I tend to agree with you, although I will say that accuracy is a poor balancing factor in a game where you actually aim the weapons yourself. For example, in EVE, turrets aim independently. You can actually set your ship to auto-orbit a target at a certain distance and basically go faster than the turrets are able to track and that's great for small vs big balance. However, in games like these, I'll always remember good Freelancer players using torpedoes against anything and everything. Accuracy is no longer a balancing factor when someone can make sure there's almost no chance of missing. All that happens is that fights become dodging matches with the first one to make a mistake getting destroyed in one hit. Not saying this is exactly what would happen in Avorion, but I'm just not sure if the standard model is the best of ideas to balance this game.

The fundamental question is how important and balanced we want the multiplayer aspect to be. Personally, with the way the AI is, I think multiplayer should be an important aspect of the game. So, what does that have to do with anything? Well, if we want multiplayer to be interesting, it needs to have some balance and as much fun as it may be to make a huge battleship fly around like a dragonfly, it does mean that there's literally no way for a player who has been playing for a lesser amount of time is going to compete. This is why I've already mentioned a few times that a ship-wide penalty to thrusters proportionate to mass would give smaller ships an advantage because they would need to spend less mass/resource/volume than a larger ship to reach similar maneuverability, proportionally-speaking. Yes, currently, with volume-based thrusters, ships should scale perfectly linearly. Yes, it's going to cost you more for a bigger ship, but it's perfectly linear. In fact, it used to be the same, afaik, it was just more annoying since you had to split your thrusters in smaller pieces for them to be more efficient. So going bigger is almost 100% better except for your profile. I know it may feel like I'm hammering on this point, but slapping the name of G-forces on that mechanic is going to get a lot of sci-fi fans who are at least somewhat educated in physics to call BS. I will gladly say "yes please" to a mechanic to help balance small ships vs larger ones, but I'd actually rather we don't try to justify things with real concepts unless they match. For example, it would be a lot better to say that thruster technologies just don't scale that well and that would already be a whole lot more realistic, but at the end of the day, who cares? That's what I meant by discussing balance and gameplay. Let's forget about what's real. Finding good names and "lore" explanations can come in much, much later if there is even a need for it.

Well, i don't care much about realism, look from just creative and aesthetic point of view, don't want this game to be a hardcore sim... And i LOVE the fact that big ships can't easily be rotated ar 1-2 rad/s anymore. That was terrible. I was just trying to get decent braking thrust and ended up with terrible feeling of a "battleship" rotating with speed that would kill all its crew. For me, new situation is "creation without frustration". That's just my point of view, of course. In the non-beta version, not building the annoying-but-effective million slices of thrusters is always going to be less efficient. I spent a lot of time building some nice looking ships and the not-slice thrusters are a quite the balancing act to set up if you want to be decently mobile. That said, I'm of the opinion that things should either be given a ship-wide thrust penalty for mass (thus giving a mobility advantage to smaller ships) or scale linearly. As for anyone talking about realism and crews dying to excessive rotation or acceleration forces, please stop. We have force turrets, shields and hyperspace drives and so on. We can only assume that there are ways to protect the crews from such things in Avorion's universe. This talk should be about balance and fun gameplay.

I don't dislike your proposal, it's a good middle ground between From The Depths and the current system. What I'm not so sure about is the implementation. It's going to be hard to balance and it's pretty far away from the current spirit of the game with the random drops. I do dream of a game where you can design your weapons, though not necessarily to the point where it takes hours like FtD. I do enjoy the relative simplicity of Avorion right now.

Damaging, no. Bad fix I think, even for challenge. Null thrust if it is covered, now I think that could work, though I will agree this could be mod territory. One thing I'd like to see in the stock game though is hiding thruster/engine trails/effects in directions where the block is covered, if only for aesthetics. Having armor glow or particle effects go through armor just looks weird.

Making the grid steps half of the scale steps helps, but even that is not perfect. The match block checkbox can be handy for what the OP mentioned, though that is also a little clunky. What I noticed is that each block seems to have its own grid, which causes issues sometimes when you try to attach things to different sides of different blocks. Not sure what the best fix would be, though it definitely needs work.

I agree with this, though I need to add that the UI and controls need to be better isolated, in general. There is way too much clicking through menus and ship reacting to inputs that are intended for menus and vice-versa happening currently.

I absolutely, totally support this.

I agree with most of your points and I especially agree that it is in no way a priority and only an "icing on the cake" kinda feature. I will concede that overclocking systems would negatively affect the value of the slots. I will argue for my turrets upgrades, though. The current crafting mechanic is broken and, yes, the game does offer a lot through random drops. In fact, there are probably too many drops, in my opinion. You get swamped in all sorts of crap and then you have to sift through it. The research station mechanic does offer a fix for this, though it still requires you to sift through all the stuff that drops. My suggestion would allow the game to remain focused on random drops, but, if it were implemented, one could reduce the amount of drops since you would have an alternative to upgrade mods and save players some time by not having to go through as many drops. Is it a priority, no.

500+m-long ships shouldn't be a thing, in my opinion. I get the whole idea of having a very small profile for combat, but for collisions with ships or asteroids, they are crazy-sauce. I will agree that it could be interesting to apply ship-wide modifiers on max velocity and thrust based on mass to give more incentive to try and build smaller or, at least, more efficiently in terms of mass. This would also help balance large ships vs smaller ones although I feel this would be incredibly difficult to balance.

I tend to agree. Galaxy files get crazy big for some reason and it is weird that all the save files would be in a hidden directory, though other games do that, too. Side note: SSDs are getting cheaper for larger amounts of storage though, you may want to consider buying an SSD with more storage if avorion is filling it.

Agreed, awesome for an alpha, even more potential. Agreed, but yeah, pretty sure it is planned already. Not a bad idea to allow that setting to be customized, although depending on the implementation I'm quite sure this can be a fairly lightweight feature. Also agreed, and I will add that I'd like the RTS view to be a full-fledged toggle-mode instead of having to zoom out. Would be great if it didn't leave when you zoomed in and also having camera control would be nice. This may be hard to implement, as interesting as it would be. I second this, though I also think this is planned. To be honest, I think a lot of the X-series features are planned already. Hell yes. I looove designing ships, probably the thing I spent the most time on, though I feel like I'm kinda wasting my time since a lot of things are likely to change. I should also opt in the beta branch since the thruster mechanic changes are likely to screw up my designs a bit, though I tried to plan ahead and still used inefficient volume-based thrusters.

It also shows up if you select the IFG block and mouse over your ship. Not ideal and sometimes a little glitchy, but it works without having to actually place a block.