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Charless

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  1. Preface:Avorion is one of my favorite games. While I myself have always been utter garbage at three dimensional design, The sheer scope of the game captured my imagination. I left the game a while ago for other games, but recently, spurred on by Dark Disciples amazing star wars ship designs, I decided to rejoin the game and see what had been added, what had been fixed, and if the game was still alive. I began building a fleet in creative (I only have one hour a day to play and I don't want to go back to grinding yet). To my delight I found out about custom fighters, and even realized I could fly my own fighters. They were a bit buggy, and seemed to teleport through my ship on impact (no collision damage is what I chalk that one up to), but nevertheless fun and gave a great sense of scale.  One thing remained unfixed however: salvaging using fighters. Salvaging using fighters is still clunky, and requires more effort than just doing it yourself. Anyone who has ever tried to salvage in avorion using fighters can tell you this. When pieces of a wreck get split off they are not targeted by fighters. This means you have to target every little piece of salvage. In creative this is no big deal as I don't need materials. But I can imagine players not in creative who need every bit of material would find this frustrating. The system need not be so frustrating. In this paper I will discuss fleet mechanics, fighter mechanics and other suggestions that could make the game more engaging, give more life to the universe and make having a fleet more practical than just having a single mothership. Without further waffling, I present:

     

    A fleet In Being

    -A in depth look at Avorion fleet, fighter and other-

    -mechanics-

    F5586C619E5BC08DBFCAD746413A44597BAA0802

     

    (All credit for above image to skyworld for the screenshot and Blackdisciple for ships)

     

     

     

     

    Table of contents:

    Fleet mechanics

    Slow movement speed

    Jump range

    Fighting

    Fighter improvements

     

     

     

    Fleet mechanics: One of the coolest things in any space game is a battle fleet. The sheer size and scale of a single battle ship from a drone is visually interesting. A battlefleet consisting of the same battle ship from before with a supporting fleet of anti fighter corvettes, Cruisers, Supply Ships and a carrier is a sight to behold. You would also assume that a fleet would also be to more powerful choice, allowing the battleship to focus of heavy weapons and corvettes to focus on anti fighter weapons. But in game, this is not the case, a single massive ship is the route to go. In its current state, fleets are a liability to bring with you, and are only useful for protecting sectors in your absence. There are several things that make a traveling fleet unpractical.

    Movement:For some inexplicable reason, other ships in your fleet will always be slower than you. It does not matter that the corvette escorting you can move at 2000m/s and your dreadnought can only travel at 800m/s, the ship you are controlling will always lag behind you. This is mostly a cosmetic annoyance when traveling through a friendly sector. But when entering into combat, this can be a massive danger. If you are relying on your corvette escort to take care of fighters and the corvette is relying on you to defend it from larger ships, This can cause major problems. I get it if you are faster than your escort, that obviously it won't keep up with you.

    How it could be fixed: simply have all ships accelerate till they reach the ship they are escorting, then match the speed. For example if a destroyer going 900m/s and is ahead of its escort which is stationary, the escort would boost to max speed until it reaches a certain set distance from its escort where it would stop accelerating and match the speed of its charge, in this case 900m/s

    Suggestion to further improve the escort behavior: add a sub menu to escort behavior and other modes. This menu would have two modes: advanced and, simplified

    Advanced: advanced mode would be a pseudo python programing. This would consist of If/than, If/else, while loops and other settings. Below an example of patrol behavior is shown. The code would run for top to bottom and each blank would have a set of preprogrammed conditions to use. Conditions involving distance or speed would have a blank spot for the player to enter a desired distance or speed.

    Example 1: If than

    If <> then <>

    If <Enemies present> than <Launch fighters

    If enemies are present in sector the ship will launch fighters.

    Example 2: If/than/else

    If <> then <> else <>

    if <Sector is clear> than <patrol> else <Launch fighters>

    if the sector is clear the vessel will patrol. Else, launch fighters.

    Example 3: While loop

    While <>, <>

    while <Sector is clear>, <patrol>

    while the sector is clear patrol

    Simplified: Much like the current system, but with slightly more customizability (Wip)

    Suggestion to add a fleet formation designer menu: A fleet is only as good as its organization. In the current state of the game it is not possible to set formations. Ships just happen to in any order. What this would do is allow for a player to set a formation of his ships. Say for example you are transporting materials to your factories and you have to go through some unclaimed territory and are weary of an ambush. Using the formation designer you could put your vulnerable transports in a line with a battleship at the front, a cruiser at the back and corvettes on the flanks. You would be able to set multiple formations that you could call upon in any situation and use the programing mode to set different formations at different conditions. Formation one for traveling through friendly space, formation two for when entering combat.

    Jump range in fleets: Not all ships have the same jump radius. It is easy to forget this when crossing vast distances. In the current state of the game, you only see the jump radius of your current ship. If you jump further than other ships in your fleet can, these ships will jump however far they can, but no further and will not attempt to reconnect to the fleet. A possible way to do this would be a second circle in red that indicates the max jump range of the ship in your fleet with the smallest radius. Additionally if you leave behind a ship it will automatically attempt to reconnect with the rest of the fleet. This would make jumping whole fleets less painful.

    Fighting as a fleet: A third reason it is impractical to use fleets over a single massive ship is how inept your ai captains are at combat. At the current moment, ai ships will always hold fire till they point bow forward at enemies. This not only looks terrible but it can lead to larger ai controlled ships being defeated because even though an enemy ship is in a good to be fired at, the ai won't. What I'm suggesting is ai controlled ships use their weapons like independent firing weapons. This could lead to much more aesthetically pleasing fights with ships emptying broadsides into each other. Additionally, the player should be able to set roles for each ship. Some possible roles could be: anti fighter, artillery, charge, hang back. An example of one of these roles would be anti fighter for example, set a frigate to hold its position in formation and use its chain guns, lasers or missiles to target enemy fighters. This would give reason to build purpose built ships rather than just battleships

    Fighter Improvements:Fighters are one of the most interesting features of Avorion. Fighters while at first may not seem all that dangerous, can deal great amounts of damage. The mining, salvaging and healing fighters also have great potential, sadly however, they are still impractical to use. Every time a wreck splits, you need to Manually select each piece of wreckage. Same goes for mining with fighters. There is a easy way to fix this luckily. Regular fighter wings have an option called, defense, where the fighters target anything attacking in the general area of your main craft. Simply apply this to salvage and mining fighters. Target one piece of wreckage. After salvaging that, the salvage fighters will target all wreckage in the area of the first wreck and spread out from there. This would make salvage fighters more viable. A possible change for fighters would be target priority. For a air defense screen, the player would select a fighter squad and set it to target enemy fighters.

     

     

  2. What exactly are you looking for that would constitute a "VLS missile" to you?  There's no fixed up or down in space, so all directions are "vertical"... and all directions are not.

     

    My understanding of the purpose of VLS systems in the real world is to take advantage of ships/tanks/etc. tending to have thinner armor on their upper surface, but, again, that doesn't really apply in space.  A starship may have one or more lesser-armored facings, but, depending on how your craft are oriented relative to each other, the weak armor could just as easily be on the left side as the top.  And there's less incentive to have a weak facing in the first place when you're operating in an environment where threats are equally likely to approach from any direction.

     

    The only thing I can think of that you could be looking for is just that you think it looks cool for missiles to launch in one direction, then turn 90 degrees to pursue their target, and that's already possible in Avorion: Get a launcher with the "guided missiles" feature, then mount it on the side or top of your ship instead of the front.  Add a turret lock if you really want to force it to fire sideways instead of trying to launch directly towards its target.

    In space it would allow for more efficient layouts of missiles, why would a missile that can track need to be on a turret? VLS tubes also have a certain atheistic appeal to them. as for how its already possible, its a very crude solution, by having vls blocks layed out you can fit more missiles in a smaller area. I dont expect it to ever be added, but it would be nice.

  3. In most Sifi large capital ships have parasite ships. Frigates, corvettes and other ships. Wouldn't it make sense to have this ability in the game. How this could work is you would be given a small grid to design covets with a smaller block size. You would choose weapons to be put on them and save the design. You would buy these designs from shipyards. These would take up much larger amounts of hanger space but act as other fighters albeit slightly slower.  Frigates would have five weapons two main and and three point defense (chainguns) corvettes would only have 1 main and two point defense. Further more, when boarding is implemented boarding shuttles could be added which would ferry certain amounts of raiders to ships. once they get within a certain range they disappear indicating they have deposited the troops. this would make it so unless you severely cripple a ship boarding shuttles are likely to get shot down. This would make it more for a more interesting game mechanic and would make it easier for larger ships to board without crashing into the other vessel. Transport shuttles could also be implemented into the game for large ships trying to dock with stations. Still a rough idea but i want to hear what you guys think about this.

  4. I know you can create fleets to escort you, but what about having other fleets that stick together that you can say bring in for re enforcements, say you have mulitiple fleets all over the galaxy and you have a menu of fleets. You select a fleet and it travels to your position assist you

  5. Imagine designing trade convoys with your supply ships and a escort. You set up a rout they follow to trading posts and back to your factories. There would also be other factions trade routs which would dynamically change. This would make the world seem more alive. Rather then pay every few hours these fleets would be payed by cuts of the trade.

     

    What do you think of this?

  6. THIS IS MY DREAM GAME. I saw Lathrix play it and my mind salivated. IMagen fleets of supper dreads on a super large map.This game has everything I want. So i got to buy it. CRAP, im a mac gamer. I bought it anyway to support the devs and to have it in my library if I get a pc or it comes out for mac. I saw on you page that it will come out on mac, but I was wondering if you have a better date. This year next month. Any info would be nice. THANK YOU DEVS FOR CREATING THIS AWSOME GAME. Take your time good things are worth waiting for.

  7. Imagine designing trade convoys with your supply ships and a escort. You set up a rout they follow to trading posts and back to your factories. There would also be other factions trade routs which would dynamically change. This would make the world seem more alive. Rather then pay every few hours these fleets would be payed by cuts of the trade.

  8. It is a commen thing to see in space games, massive ships often carry corvets and frigates and even smaller capital ships (if large enough) in their hangar bays. I think this would be awesome to put in the game as it would allow a super ship two store it's own personal fleet within it that could be deployed when needed. You would be able to besign these ships in a template that would restrict you to a certain size so that the ships would fit.

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