Reviire

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. AFKing to earn money is a horrendous method. It doesn't even require player input.

Well, the idea is to prevent that. You shouldn't be able to carry everything with you, unless you invest in some sort of massive hauler, which makes sense for you to be vulnerable. But ofcourse, you could probably store materials at a shipyard.

This is something I thought was very weird in the game. Goods require cargo space, but ore, weapons and components do not. It's just strange and inconsistent, plus it also makes mining far easier and rewarding than it should be. I don't think there's really much to say here, except to make ore, weapons and components require cargo space. I think it'd be a suitable change to mining, requiring the player to haul materials to wherever they need them, such as a ship yard to upgrade their ship or store (If you don't upgrade it on the spot.), or to a space station to sell, rather than amassing a potentially infinite amount of resources. Plus, it might encourage some cooler mining ships, giant containers covered in mining lasers, the cool sorts.

I think for one, better ways of obtaining money would be good. If you're max relations with a faction, they should pay you for every enemy of theirs you destroy, that would be a good one all round. Sustain your crew off being part of a factions military, basically. The current ways are kinda lame. Find a bunch of big asteroids and sell them, go through a salvage yard once.

The random loot is fine, but it's implemented wrongly, I think. Ships should spawn in with random weapons and upgrades, but the loot you get from them is entirely determined on what they have. Say, a 0.001% chance for an enemy to spawn in with +160% shields +90% weapon fire-rate. This ship is far stronger than the rest, but you also get a chance for the sick loot it has, rather than some shitboat dropping an epic.

It should be fine allowing AI captains to jump between sectors that currently aren't loaded, just simply by moving them between sectors in the save file. The sectors may not simulate when not loaded, but you're still able to move data around, and the captained ship happens to be stored as data. I don't know of the modding capabilities of this game though, so may need to be a thing the developers add.

double post woops Anyway, if you need anything to be clarified or expanded upon, I can do that. It may be a bit of a mess because I wrote it over the day, since I was busy, so things might not link together well.

tl;dr at the bottom. First half is going over what I think is wrong with the progression, while the second half is suggestions to fix it. Sorry if I went over anything already in, or that will be in, I just wanted to go over everything. Always open to criticism and discussion. Most of the length is because of suggestions I threw in, going over what I think is wrong is only around 900 words. Also to be clear, there will be spoilers in here if you care about that. Also unrelated but, is there a way to add custom, randomly generated ships? That'd be cool. Sorry about all the words. The progression in the game does not contribute to gameplay, and there are various reasons for this. There's also ways this could be fixed, while adding additional gameplay/replayability. Progression is an important feature in Avorion, tying in with all core game mechanics and the story of the game. This isn't true just for Avorion either, you can see it in other games such as Freespace and the X series. Progression is important in both of these games, where you eventually are able to get new weapons and new ships. The major problem that exists in Avorion, but not in those games, is the speed of progression. You are able to reach the next tier before you are able to "experience" a tier, rather than the other games, where you are able to get significant amounts of playtime into something before moving objectively better. There are other smaller issues with progression, such as the lack of alternatives or sidegrades, and a lack of general "stuff" to do such as economic/faction influence or a world that is more "alive" and can be impacted. Different features require differing amounts of the players time or effort, and it's important that different features scale with regards to eachother. For example, the main feature of the game is the ship construction, gathering and progression itself, and as such, other features should scale based off of these without invalidating any of them. The accessibility of later tiers currently does not do this, as the effort required to reach a newer tier is vastly lower than the effort required to complete a ship, so it is much easier to build the bare minimum required to retrieve the next tier of materials, rather than building a viable vessel. It is much easier to slap a few next-tier mining lasers onto your ship, get the materials, then repeat this process with the next tier. Aside from the time/effort disparity between ship construction and tier progression, the quickness and lack of difficulty is caused by several other reasons. One of such reasons is the lack of any threats preventing you from progressing. Frankly, enemies are pushovers. Not just because they're relatively poorly designed in general, especially in terms of speed. They can't catch you if you decide to not fight. While if they do somehow manage to find you, the difference between weapon damage and shield HP is enormous, and any ship with shield generators takes an incredibly amount of time to kill (I saw a mining ship doing it's thing, a large alien fleet tried to kill it, I waited for 5 minutes and they didn't get through the shields.). There is also a lack of threats in general, in other "simulator" type games, with a universe filled with traders, (Although I think it'd be good if this was simulated to any extent, even the illusion of simulation such as the X games, where traders are randomly spawned based on adjacent sectors and present stations.) stations you can trade at etc there are smaller events that can be threatening to the player. Random pirate attacks, stealthed pirates within asteroid fields, or sabotage by docking with a "trader". More threats need to be added aside from the ocassional pirate raid that completely ignores you, or aliens who don't actually attack you anyway. But none of this matters when you don't need to fight, when there is no threat to fighting. 5 10,000 DPS weapons mean nothing when you have 400,000 shields, your Avorion hull has 30,000 HP, while the armor blocks have 40,000 because of integrity boosters. Compounded with that, you can warp out at any time, you have a large period of time to do so, if you haven't just boosted out of range because of a warp jammer. There is absolutely no chance of you dying, the time to kill is so large, while it is so easy to run away. I'd also like to bring the X example in again (I'll probably use it a lot, good game.), if you're in a hostile system, chances are you can't go through it safely. Aside from the fastest ships in the game, the enemy will be able to reach you, rather than being able to waltz around freely. I took a titanium ship to the center of the galaxy with no issues, right to the wormhole guardian at 0, 0. Moving on. There are no threats preventing you from progressing, but no incentives exist to make you consider advancing. Lower tier areas of the galaxy are literally just worse to be in, there is no reason to be in them. You find more free-money asteroids the further in you go, while the equiptment is objectively better. Aside from the exceptions of armor and gotta-go-fast ships, higher tier materials are better (Although Avorion is mostly pretty strong by itself, just no dedicated armor.). It's so easy to get the better tiered materials, while there is literally no reason not to. A lack of any sort of influence helps here. You influence nothing, have no affect on the economy or faction relations/strength, why stick around? I'm sure I've gone on long enough about what I think is wrong with progression in the game. I'd just be complaining if I don't suggest improvements, so time to move on to that. First off, just fix enemies. Design them better, increase the thruster:other block ratio, so they can move at a respectable speed. They all move somewhere around 100m/s, compared to even a slow player ship which can probably reach 300m/s at least, although I've never made one that slow. With the velocity upgrade, you don't even have a speed cap, you can just keep going (It's just a badly balanced upgrade in general.). Do they even have crew? Is that why they're so slow? Then, add specialized enemy types. I may be wrong, but it could probably be achieved just by tweaking block ratios and size limits for various ship types. A hunter type ship would be majorly engines and a high amount of weapons for it's size, while having very little in the way of protection, designed to chase down stragglers, variants may trade firepower for additional protection (Randomly generated ratios for each faction within certain amounts, i.e hunter ship may be between 30-60% engines). A tank would be nearly all armor, moving very slowly but being oriented towards siege or purely winning/chasing away enemies (It doesn't matter if you can barely move, wherever you go, the enemy can't be.). Stuff like that. Lower the time to kill, why is it so high? Why does every ship have infinite shielding, while the guns do laughable damage in comparison? Make combat threatening in some way, most ships shouldn't be able to sustain a fleets worth of firepower, unless they're some sort of super-capital designed to be an absolute beast. Every enemy ship under the sun shouldn't take several minutes to kill, while player designed ships just... can't die. Extremely thick armor plus a ton of shield generators, ggwp. I think the best way to improve tier progression would be to just rework it. Make different materials good at their own things, while being viable all throughout the game, while also adding "internal tiers" in a way. Iron, titanium, other cheap materials would be localized to the same area as a tier 1 material. Possibly others, like power generation materials of different sorts. Uranium for generators. These are okay at what they do, are very cheap and easy to get. Titanium remains a viable choice for being light all game, while uranium is the go to choice because of the rarity of crystal. Then you get tier 2 intermediates, slightly more expensive, do things better while still being somewhat generalized, but still have their own strengths. Some are harder to get, such as Steel only being produced from iron, or salvaged from wrecks. A rare crystal good for electronics and power generation, but can also make specialized armor and weapons, good for stopping energy weapons and piercing shields (Making it viable all-game.). Other stuff? Tier 3 is what we have at the end currently, except are incredibly rare, except when salvaged from large alien ships (So you actually need to challenge yourself to aquire decent amounts.). Avorion, Orgonite, Xanion. Possibly tweaked to make them have benefits over each other and fitting specializations. Avorion would be the ultimate choice in thrusters, power gen/storage, while still having respectable HP. Energy weapons created from Avorion would have high raw DPS, while projectile weapons will gain increased range, velocity and fire-rate, but a weapon with high amounts of all 3 would be exceptionally rare. Orgonite, heavy and can take extreme punishment, nothing really changes with this, except Orgonite energy weapons will have incredible damage but long overheats, not passing Avorion DPS but having huge burst DPS. Projectile weapons would become larger, high raw damage, highly explosive, they're your massive space cannons. Xanion would focus towards electronics, overlapping with Avorion somewhat. Avorion shields can take much more punishment, while Xanion shields can recover faster and get increased benefits from shield upgrades. A xanion hyperdrive will recharge faster, while an Avorion hyperdrive may give multiple uses. Is king of hangars and the computer, giving bonuses to stored fighters, and any other electronic blocks it should probably benefit, and Xanion weapons would have high chances of having bonuses, such as shield/hull penetration, slows or chances to shut down enemy weapons/thrusters. These materials would be very rare, outside of actually salvaging alien ships or raiding alien mining operations, under the assumption any abundance of Avorion or other rare materials is heavily guarded and exploited by the Aliens, or already in use. Just because, tier 3.1. Something to do after finding Avorion, use it to make advanced Alloys that are just good. Avorion + steel, resilient and light armor. Avorion + ogonite, all armor made out of this alloy shares a hp pool. Avorion + Xanion, just combines the best of both. Good strength from electronics, while having various bonuses. These would only be obtainable from salvage after defeating the aliens or whatever. For some reason, everyone now hates you, you're the new big bad. Why is this so long? Another good addition, with the previous changes, add random events and some degree of simulation to the galaxy (Or even the illusion of it, such as how the X games randomly spawn relevant traders that dock with stations/leave stations and warp out.). Let the economy be a thing, sectors have resources and money, stations sell and buy, civilian ships and merchants dock at stations to buy and sell, warping elsewhere. Military freighters freight military stuff. Piracy on a trade route hurts sectors, the player hunting merchants does the same thing. Sectors flourish or starve based on things that actually happen. The faction has military ships and tangible fleets, rather than randomly spawning them for attacks. The ships move around and do their thing, and those ships being destroyed have an effect on the faction, their mines being destroyed starves the faction of resources, killing traders prevents resources going where they're needed and weakens the faction. Make the universe something that lives and evolves, and that you can influence. Get high into a factions ranks and start coordinating fleet assaults. This in and of itself would give you a great reason to stay somewhere. You become part of a faction, you want to stick around, become a galactic superpower. tl;dr and conclusion, I think the overall progression in the game is flawed because while it takes a long time to build a ship, it's very easy to just reach the next tiers of materials. The reasons for that being, there is no challenge to prevent you from doing it, and you have no reasons to stick back. The enemies are pushovers and poorly designed, while nothing exists to actually keep you there, such as having factions to influence or control, or a universe to affect. These ideas would overall be a benefit to the game, not taking anything away, but changing it in a way to better fit together, or adding entirely new mechanics that can be ignored if wanted, but will add tons of gameplay if not.