[The Trouble With Guns]

Right now, I do not have plans to make fully customizable weapons, in terms of stats.

 

There are very simple reasons for this, and it's not because of doability or performance:

1. It would make the entire current looting system obsolete. This loot system is a very important aspect of Avorion that makes it fun, you can always find a better weapon.

2. It would be hell to balance, we're already running into issues where players say the game is too easy because the AI ships can't beat them, even on the highest difficulty. Players build their own ships, meaning that the difficulty is basically set by yourself and your ship. But that's a completely different point and I won't get into this any more here now.

 

So when I say I don't want you to be able to completely, freely choose your weapons stats, I'm not doing this because I want to annoy you, but because I think that it leaves more balancing control in my hands and it will be healthier for the game in the long term.

 

I hope you don't mind if I toss in my two cents here, based on my own experience playing Avorion.

 

I don't find the loot system enjoyable.  Not quite.  Also, given the stackable nature of turret drops, fighting a tough AI only gets easier every time you beat it because now you have the last X attempts' worth of turret drops.  I've killed The Four about six times today, it took me maybe half an hour to do, and now I have about 10 railguns that pack 1-2k damage in each.  I'd like to have missile turrets primarily, but they just don't match in nearly any manner.  I like the trading, salvaging, and/or pirating aspects more than the turret drops.  In the end, I don't want to have to go out and fight for hours (should I not get exceedingly lucky and get one quickly) grinding pirates, Xsotan, or anything else that I can make explode into loot, even if I only have to find just that first one, to make a weapon suited for my preferred playstyle.

 

My second cent; the AI will never be a real challenge in a fair fight.  Not for me, at least.  I've played pvp games and killed off dozens of players even while intentionally heinously handicapped (read: Robocraft).  In another RPG game, I'd spend more time preparing for a combat run than actually running it, and that I could do that was what made the game fun.  That game has since oversimplified the combat system into booger-eating levels of fun, unfortunately.  All it was was playing with a bunch of predefined items with +/- stats and finding the right balance for what I wanted to do.  The turret system now lacks that kind of specificity, and while I still find the game fun, this limitation does significantly reduce how fulfilling my time playing it seems.

 

As goes the saying, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”  ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 

Also, that aforementioned Death Star superlaser really is infeasible with the current turret system, no matter how scalable they are.  A point about balance there, though, is that while the Death Star was powerful, it certainly had its limits.  I recall reading somewhere that the first was only capable of firing all of once per day.

 

Regardless, I'll keep playing for now, and give anything you do a fair chance, but I don't foresee my continued enjoyment or recommendation in the future if the game's turret system remains too similar to what it is currently.

[The Trouble With Guns]

I would be very happy if this system happened.

 

@Ohm, seriously, if you think there are problems with the system, please ask questions about them and offer your preferred experience for more effective constraint-solving.  Trumpeting your own idea (I've seen some of the other turret threads) in this thread is not constructive.  Contributing to the idea such that it suits your desires as well is.  This, ideally, is why there is more than one thread.

 

Here's what I see when I consider the two possibilities:

 

 

If you read the fine print, I don't think you'd have too many problems if this were implemented.  I haven't yet made a graphic for rotary turrets, but the subassembly concept totally applies there, too.  Turrets can still drop, you don't have to think about your ship any more than you want, but those so inclined could make some incredible stuff with this system that otherwise is completely infeasible (see: Death Star superlaser above).