Spacefaring_Guy

Ha! What really happens is you find you mark some interesting masses. Then maybe make a note about a particular station that has stuff you want (so it stands out on the map and you don't have to hover over each sector to make the list come up). Possibly put down a note about some nice ore you want to get back to later on. Then you go and look at the map and spend 20 minutes trying to find the note you're looking for amongst all the notes you've made, and it's not much better (and actually probably worse) than just keeping a pad of paper and a pencil next to your keyboard and making notes manually.

'Simply' link damage, range, accuracy, projectile speed and power requirements for turrets, then add more serious weight and thrust penalties for armour and thrust blocks to ensure only large ships can be properly armoured AND they move like cows. Now you're encouraging players to make small, nimble ships that fire light weapons but die quickly on taking a hit, and giant monstrosities that maneuver like they're at anchor but wear a thick layer of armour and can fire station-busting weaponry at other slow targets. You'd more or less end up with two layers of combat in the same theatre. Maybe that's what the devs were thinking with hanger blocks, fighters, and pilots? It makes sense that way since the game already rewards larger builds, and nobody wants to micro-manage a fleet of fighters (and you can't actually pilot more than one at a time anyway). <i>We're already flying the capital ships!</i> Perhaps what's really needed is to make it easier to load up on pilots and ships, to which I say separate the two... have the fighters flown remotely by pilots who stay on the capital ship, so they don't die when their fighter bites it. Then add a new block type, Fighter Manufacturer, that turns out fighters (at a reasonable rate per block volume, and so long as you have raw materials) until your hangers are all at capacity. Err... I think I've drifted off topic a bit, so let me conclude with, "and also adjust the main ship turret parameters so 'bigger, badder, further, slower' is a thing".

What's yours? There's a bunch of stuff in my post if you're paying attention: a rambling story about how to move big asteroids within a sector with an unmodded game, how to move big asteroids between sectors with an unmodded game (but with admin access), and an opinion that stations shouldn't be denied use of movement blocks. These things may not be relevant to the development of this particular mod, but they are points related to and raised by it.

Generic facilities (as in, we assume they're part of 'Crew Quarters' for the most part) work for me. However, adding in specialized blocks for bonuses to survival and recovery rates wouldn't be the end of the world. They should also max out fairly quickly, since at some point a deader's a deader regardless of how many doctors are trying to de-dead them.

This probably isn't helpful... but I've moved asteroids two ways. 1) Build a ridiculously massive ship. Like 'Try to scale up further and the UI gives a "THAT ISN'T GOING TO WORK" error'. (Yes, it really does that!). Now, take that ridiculously massive ship and push the asteroid. Or station. Or gate. Pretty much whatever you want, really. 2) Build a mine on the station and be an admin, then use /teleport. :) Honestly, I don't see why stations and ships should be functionally different - you should be able to put a ridiculously massive and expensive bunch of thrusters on and turn, a big engine on and move forward, or a honkin' big hyperdrive unit and jump sectors. It's just more mass, you know? In game terms, the functional difference between stations and ships is that stations produce goods rather than haul them, but that boundary can be fuzzy if you think about it.

I have previously suggested that you ought to be able to stay in hyperspace - that you'd have to jump in AND out - so while at the waiting screen with the 'Press Spacebar to continue' prompt, your ship wouldn't spawn in the destination sector.

The easiest way to implement planets in this game would be to create a station type of 'Orbital Gateway', and have all business with the planet conducted at that location. Or, you can assume all stations already act that way and do nothing in terms of game mechanics except possibly adjust the odds of station types and product demand based on the type and status of the sector's generated planet. Maybe assign the planet a tech level and that would make crew available - with a delay and a cost, so a recruiter can find people for you. (Honestly, given how difficult and rare yet exciting space travel is compared to living on gravitationally-bound dirt, any inhabited world should be able to provide more crew than you could ever use)

The server needs to have a full overview of the galaxy available, where it can run scripts at a more abstracted level against 'unloaded' sectors, and periodically update them. It doesn't need to worry about the details of battles and mining and construction and trade routes - unless there's a player present who needs those details to play out for realism, broad strokes are enough.

Here's the thing - I played for a week and (while I'm still intending to get back to it) I pretty much figured out the game. There just isn't enough to keep me engaged once the optimal play pattern is obvious. The 'random' encounters amount to either annoying or crushing waves of Xsostan/Pirates and visits from mobile merchants. You can't build a trading empire because the station and trading system is incomplete at this time - it appears the trader types are generated with the sector, so nothing new ever develops. You can't really build your own turrets because you can't find all the parts without exploring the entire galactic map, you can't build your own supply infrastructure because some of the required station types don't exist yet. So what am I supposed to do once I have a decent Avorion-based ship? Fly around and kill waves of Xsostan while hoping that my ship doesn't get torn apart when I log out. That really doesn't engage the player for long. The game's in early days still, and it has awesome potential. You have to keep that in mind. My best suggestion for short term improvement would be for the devs to open up a scripting contest for random events. Crowd source some variety and complexity.

The scripts for generating Xsostan and pirate/bandit incursions are currently overly simplistic, but I don't see it as a big deal - they can be modified. Having said that, I'm not familiar with the scripting language nor the game engine limitations... but I see this as something that should be open to increasing the sophistication over time. The real problem (as far as I'm concerned) is that the scripts are too localized in scope - they need to be aware of activity in the active region and even over the entire galactic map so that more interesting behaviours can be coded. They need to be running at a global level with variables that say something like 'increase the probability if there's an active player in a sector, because we want to keep it interesting'. This would allow things like invasion fleets sweeping across the map, and waves of refugee ships fleeing before them. It would allow wars, with strategies and tactics and allies. Then again, with enough humans playing the game, you get all that and pirates and Xsostan are just annoying and need to be dialed back anyway.

I like that. So, what's needed (most likely for OTHER players who aren't looking at menus) is an animation of shuttles moving back and forth from station to ship and ship to station! Still, that means that the docking block - whether it's actually a docking port or a hanger - should be a mandatory block for any ship that wants to be able to physically transfer anything to another vessel.

Claiming an asteroid ought to involve parking a beacon next to it. And yeah, such a beacon could be destroyed to irritate the owner, but it presumably wouldn't change the actual claim filed with the Galactic Authority or whatever. Regardless of whether a claimable asteroid has actually been claimed, it should show up with the valuable items detector upgrade because (presumably) that's detecting them based on mass.

Well, there's effort of the setup, and also the risk it'll all get blown to smithereens while you're away. And I don't see much difference between my stations earning credits and building inventory while I'm present vs. AFK. In neither case do they require any action from me.

I posted on this subject a day or two ago. I think (to make the game tolerable if you have some bad luck) this would require players to have a safe station with no fees and infinite storage on the galactic rim at their spawn point, free from pirate attack. Otherwise, you probably end up carrying everything around with you and you're at constant risk of going right back to the start.

Find a friendly sector with a station or two and some friendly frigates where the only 'reds' that show up are pirates and Xsostan. (So a friendly sector where all neighbouring sectors are also friendly). Save up a metric buttload of credits, and build a station. That station will start getting visited by cargo haulers and generating income for you. Of course, it only does so when the sector is loaded, so you're probably going to want to have a decent warship with a captain, and instead of closing the game when you're done just leave it running with the ship orders set to 'Attack Enemies'. Between the station profits and the rewards for killing pirates and Xsostan, you'll do fine.

I'm not sure about Elite:Dangerous, but IIRC the original game back in the olden days had an optional docking autopilot. Instead of having to get into the (rotating!) station hanger, you just had to get close enough and engage the autopilot. Something similar could work in Avorion - an Automatic Docking upgrade, so if you get within 1000m of a station or ship you could select it, press 'F', and the 'Autodock' option would be available, at which point the game would guide you in to the nearest dock. As for physically connecting you - I like the idea, but implementation might be tricky. There'd have to be a break point where you lose your dock block and the ship tears free, as well as a manual release option.

I've been trying for weeks to get all the required parts to have custom laser turrets made. No success. Finally, I just found a sector with MOST of what I needed and founded the required remaining stations myself. It's very expensive... but I left my client running to keep the sector loaded, and later today I will to check in and (if I haven't been killed by pirates or Xsostan) I expect I'll have all the parts I need, and possibly some credits on top of that. An expensive investment, but it should work.

Have you tried putting a large stone block on the front of your ship? You'll be as quick and agile as a nearly-dead cow shoulder-deep in thick mud, but you'll probably be able to plow through anything you want. As long as you don't take enough damage to actually destroy the block, I believe your mechanics/engineers will repair the damage over time. Source: using cheats I built a ridiculously large ship and plowed through an enemy fleet, part of an asteroid field, and destroyed a station with no visible damage to my craft. Then I found you can also push gates around. Fun times.

Sorry, not in front of the game right now (I'm being bad and posting from work)... do you mean player-to-player trading already exists, or are you just talking about mobile merchants? I just sort of assumed player-to-player trading wasn't implemented since you can't trade with cargo haulers and the station mechanic wasn't already used for mobile merchants... and the players on the server I'm on are more about salvage than trade so it's never come up.

Why only stations? If two ships with properly-placed docking ports want to meet up in space and trade, they ought to be able to. If this were to happen, I'd think that cargo haulers would refuse, "Sorry, my cargo is being delivered under contract", but two players could use the station mechanic to trade items instead of using mail (which is a convenient but silly mechanic). You'd need a way to mark cargo, turrets, and upgrades for sale so that stuff you want to keep isn't made available for purchase, but the price could be calculated by the game as it would for any station.

Mining and salvaging as sole orders has been implemented. We're talking about ships defaulting to secondary activities when their primary orders don't apply. What I've seen previously discussed (IIRC, I started the thread) was ships overriding their primary instructions when it made sense to do so - such as switching to combat mode (and possibly even jumping out of sector) if attacked while mining, salvaging, or idle.

1 - Rather than summon them (which is a different kind of change, requiring out-of-sector AI), it MIGHT be easier to be able to take control of any ship you have in any sector. Move the player's perspective, not the ship. 2 - There are still bugs with the primary orders that are probably a higher priority, but yes... if a ship isn't told to stay put and it is loaded up with mining lasers in an asteroid field, it should go mining rather than sit idle. If it is battle-capable and the player's assets are taking damage, it should assist (and after the battle, salvage). 3 - Keeping sectors operational is supposedly in the works There is currently a mod that will sort of patch this by calculating what would have been done in a sector retroactively, as soon as a player re-enters. 4 - I don't see the point of renaming them, but a more flexible organization system might be nice. I mean, I'd love a 3D interface where the x axis represents DPS, the y material, and the z the special attributes. But perhaps a nice, robust 'sort and filter' interface would suffice. I believe there is at least one mod that attempts to improve the player's ability to judge the worth of a turret.

General menu fix: Clicks only register on the foreground object. I'm forever shifting menus around to prevent a click on one thing to also click on something in the background. This is particularly problematic with the build menu.

I have no idea what happened, but that post stopped about 1/4 of the way through what I recall having typed up... and now I can't remember any of it. It probably seemed brilliant at the time, too. Developers around the world will mourn the loss of my genius. :) In future, I will attempt to post less frequently while running on caffeine instead of sleep.

I propose a new crew member: Admiral. When the player is in control of a ship with an admiral on board, they can switch to Fleet Command Mode, where their hyperspace bar shows the state of the worst member of the fleet, and there would be a new function that would set off an alert and point to the fleet ship in the worst condition - the one calculated to be most likely the next destroyed ship. There would need to be new orders to give to ships, 'Join Fleet' or 'Leave Fleet'. These orders would NOT override Mine, Salvage, Attack, or Escort commands. They would primarily make the ships follow the admiral's through Hyperspace jumps. 'Attack Enemies' would have to be upgraded to 'Attack any Enemy', 'Attack any Armed Enemy', 'Attack My Target', 'Attack Faction', 'Raze Stations', and 'Stand down'. These commands would not go to specific ships but to the whole fleet at once.