JasonB

... I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim. When you post a bad guess its likely to be wrong, which it is. Its never a great idea to start out a post by being wrong. Its a pay to win game. Avorion is not a pay to win game, the developer gets his money upfront. I also played WoT for some time, and I've got several lines to T8 or T10 in world of warships. Here is an obvious point about WoWs, there is no point grinding any shipline in that game, unless you have some desire to play T10. The premium ships, which anyone can buy and use, dominate win/loss. See asia.shipstoday set it to 2 weeks. Clemson, Fiji, a few others are worth grinding, but most of the top ships are pay ships, that are accessible to any walletwarrior. The only bad ship in that game is the flint, but there has to be some reward for being the best. Choosing railguns is not a point of honour or a moral decision. This is a hilariously poor line of reasoning. That is an efficiency decision and one that is so frequent that it benefits the counter decision of defending the ship primarily against railguns. I have a xan ship with some og and trinium armor. 120k hull hps, 350k shield hps, ie perfectly fine for PVE. Max thrust 57, max brake 16, yaw 0.26, pitch 0.11. max v 1167 All of the outside armor pieces (7 visible) have more than the 120k hull hps. I leave the engines at the rear open for aesthetic reasons, presuming that I'm good enough to not face them to a railgun strike or if they are it would be an oblique and thus very small target, the sides of the engines are armored. I've just redone it as a hull tanker. I replaced my 2 exceptional shield subs with 2 generator subs, removed the shield generator , thickened all the armor plates till their values were 50k, and made the overall hull hps 500k, so the armor plates all have 500k hps vs railguns (10x ifg bonus to hp). I added extra drive and thrusters to preserve the performance and as it turned out it now has vastly excessive generator and could be made to perform better than my shield version (the triumph of thrust over mass), or I could further thicken the armor and raise the hull hps within the same visible profile (take the same percentage of hits/misses) as the shield ship. The drawback for that was requiring more crew and a little more crew quarters (thrusters are crew heavy). I expect that on the same generator and same resource budget than using shields, but I decided to make this a first pass rather than a carefully tuned example, since my shield unit wasn't carefully tuned either. Since it has no shields anymore and does not allow multiple block penetration, there is no benefit for shooting railguns against it. In fact other weapon systems might be more effective, since their bonus figures might be better for raw damage instead of only being applied when successfully defeating blocks. ie if I don't accept that railguns are broken, I can easily make them one of the least successful weapon systems against my ship. IMO the actual issues are, - that ifg bonuses aren't shown ingame - armor can substitute for hull - armor area can substitute for armor thickness - hull outside of armor can count for full damage multipliers even if it didn't have the hitpoints to begin with, which makes it impossible to layer a nice visual design outside of a central armored citadel without giving up excessive survivability - ai sucks and thus pve even on hardest settings does not resemble pvp. See above, where changes to the ship design pattern renders railguns non optimal. it is possible trivially to design out railguns vs your ship if it lived in a PVP context. The issue ingame is simply that its aesthetically awful. Its a borg cube.

I used to rage at deaths when I played diablo 3, then I played hardcore, where death was the end of the game, which soon taught me to learn how to not die instead of raging about deaths. In this game (a) you slow down if the sector is foggy (b) you start your initial thrust towards a gate not directly at it, which will reveal any roids that were directly between you and the gate (they can be hard to see against the gate field). © Combat, you do from outside the roid field shooting at all the stupid NPCs caught on the roids, which is literally fish in a barrel. Since I have done that, I have not collided with a roid in a way that seriously damaged my ship.

Against railguns, putting a layer of instantly penetrable material outside thick armor just causes the railgun strikes to reliably deal 2x hull damage even if it doesn't go through the armor layer. Armor is purely volume based, thickness is no more important than the other dimensions, which leads to a few options, but in any case you can build a cube where after the ifg x10 effect each plate on the outside has more hitpoints than the total hitpoints of the hull, which should eliminate the railgun multiplier as a thing. PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to. Furthermore, development of the AI to take advantage of the options afforded to PVP players should make for a better single player experience. The game goes dull fast because the ai is so farmable - ie the whole single player experience feels like an EVE level 4 mission extended adnauseum - where I warp in my battleship to 60 opponents including 10 enemy battleships and destroy them all in turn. I don't think complete creative freedom is required - imo one should be required to organize the internals of ones ship to have damage control or suffer consequences (its why we have different difficulty levels in PVE) and some visual designs are going to interfere with that. The problem right now is that one creative freedom is to put an armored box around the whole thing, where each of the 6 plates has more hull hitpoints than the entire ship - imo armor should be thickness not volume based for penetration management and it should be sufficiently expensive that it can't substitute for an outer hull - ie I shouldn't be able to afford to plate my entire ship and retain good movement performance and more importantly if I increase the area of an armor plate, it shouldn't also improve its penetration defence (which it does). ie the design questions that arise from how badly the game currently plays are pretty serious - and PVP just exposes those issues. I'd even go so far as to ask the question as to why armor plate provides hull hps.