What would prolong your game time in Avorion?

[Asjo]

Avorion as a game excites me a lot, and I was overjoyed to have come across it recently. For the last few weeks, I've been diving into this universe, and also watching around 60-70 hours of Youtube videos of people exploring the game.

It feels to me that while the initial appeal of Avorion is great, but I fear that it does not quite fulfill it's full potential. That is, it ends up being a interesting little space game that you completed rather than an in-depth space game that you just want to keep on playing and experimenting with.

What I've observed is that once players get a way of gathering resources efficiently, they have a straight forward progression through the game, where the can just keep repeating the same steps. If they do it quickly, it will be challenging, but once you've reached the center, it's all over. If you do it a bit more slowly, it will be more grindy, and eventually, nothing you encounter will give you any challenge.

However, I've never wanted to complete games. I've always wanted to keep on playing them, building up an interesting universe with its only history and meanings. It is my impression that empire building is the thing that could set Avorion apart and make it into one of those games that people won't leave on the shelf. When I see DLCs adding more missions and bosses, I think that's acceptable, since we need a minimum of those to keep us stimulated and for the "game completers" to have more stuff to encounter. However, if feels like more of the same, not something that truly adds to the game.

While multiplayer interaction might be even better for the game than empire building, I think our current limitations in terms of processors means that we will never see enough players or activity on a multiplayer server for player wars to be an ongoing source of entertaining for more than few percent of the player base. Therefore, we need AI-generated content. As I understand it, factions currently work this way:

• A player alliance cannot build up a meaningful sphere of influence. You can gain nominal ownership of a sector, but it won't have any in-game effects.
• You won't come across spaceships that are not aligned with any faction or minor factions that you can sway to your course.
• AI factions will wage war on each other, but this content will only happen when the player is around, and this not have a natural progression.
• Factions do not have an economy or long-term goals, only traits that guide their short term actions.
• Only factions with the aggressive trait will actively settle in conquered areas, and never so much that you will ever see a single strong AI faction with the strength to stand against the Xsotan.
• Once at war, factions will not declare peace.
• Factions won't form coalitions, perform expeditions, make new settlements (only on conquered areas) or advance in tech.
• A strong AI faction attacks the player alliance because this player threatens their monopoly on silicone mines in the area, worsening their economy.
• A small AI faction that the player chose to disregard manages to get ahead in tech and is able to beat it's neighbors and grow strong.

All of this means that while a player will initially be excited from seeing faction warfare, it won't take long for the player to find out that this is a very shallow concept. With all the above listed limitations, the is no meaningful empire building for the player. If there was, there would be something other than just ship-to-ship combat to occupy the player. And once the player has made a sufficiently powerful ship, the game cannot provide any challenge in that department.

I realize that one of the reasons that the developers have not focused on this might indeed be due to CPU and memory limitations. That is, meaningful empire building would mean more ships and more constant calculations happening around the map. However, I think that having some more parameters guiding faction warfare and behavior, even if they were limited and some of them a bit arbitrary, would add more excitement and more of a story line to the map. And adding more effects of the player having a empire, allowing the player to recruit independent AI entities to join them would reward the player for their effort in building an empire and make it more worthwhile.

I imagine some interesting story lines that might develop:

• The Xsotan make a settlement in the outer rims of the galaxy and several factions band together to eliminate them from the area.
• The Xsotan manage to cut a swathe across the southwestern part of the galaxy, leaving a big hole of unsettles sectors. An expansionist factions near the center is quick to make use of this and end up having a dominant position in the galaxy, declaring war against the player.
• The player alliance takes our three factions in a row, only for four factions to enter into a coalition against the player alliance to try to beat it back.
• Smugglers establish a strong factions and being taking control of large chunks of space next to the player. Due to border struggles, they end up making aggressive raids against the player, while not normally engaging in faction wars.
• The player eliminates a big faction, leaving a hole for two powerful pirate factions to establish a pirate haven, which grows strong enough to start ravaging the sectors of some of the nearby factions.
• One of the more central factions grows extremely rich and are able to buy a humongous mothership that is strong enough to deter the player from harassing their sectors.

Either way, I'm curious whether this is just me - hence why I've added the poll 🙂

Edited August 22, 2023 by Asjo

[AvorionCraft]

There's a small laundry list of things that would make this game better in general.
 

We'll see how well the behemoth update works out, as apparently some of the data flow/networking problems are allegedly being fixed. That's probably the biggest issue--networking overhead. 

• Networking issues
  • 180,000 ping should never happen. Not in this day and age. Its all apparently purely engine latency, of too much happening locally, and its almost like its running FTP rather than UDP. Result is ludicrous rubber banding on servers, insane ping, and too waiting upwards of five minutes for reactions to reply from the server.
• UI issues
  • Torpedoes and fighters---an integer input. How this has not been done is a head scratcher. If there's 45 torpedoes of a type the player wants, we still have to click it 45 times. The engine lags, the ping goes crazy, and then you wind up either underclicking or overclicking and either not buying enough or buying too many torpedoes or fighters. Fighters are far worse for some reason, and I haven't been able to figure out why. Huge optimization issue with this.
• No in game localized builder.
  • As mentioned in suggestions forum: 

    When you need to make small edits to a ship while on a server, the server has to acknowledge every change. You cannot convert a ship into lower elements without making it two elements only. Its like that tool aspect was half way completed. Instead, a local version that allows the player to load the ship before "submitting for build" would allow full local engine alterations before submitting the changes to the server, and thus building your ship without any issues. This would allow down converting of a ship from X slots to X-y slots as the player is capable wherever they are in the galaxy and with whatever permissions they have, upconverting, or converting from one element to another without a hassle. It would also get rid of the server latency associated with making alterations. Since the server apparently reloads the ship with every change you do--literally every change. That is an enormous amount of networking overhead that is entirely, completely unnecessary. Local build. Submit to server. You cut down on 99% of the network load related to the build screen with just that. The only thing server side necessary would be whether or not they are broken stacking blocks like the old 1000stacks, or if the ship exceeds server limitations or something to that effect. In which case, the build does not get submitted, and the server notifies the player that "hey you can't do that, make a change, lower the volume, size, slots, materials, whatever."

 

It has to be admitted that there are vast limitations to a game that was designed as a college project that turned out to be good enough to release. There are rumors of a second Avorion coming at some point. I think I'll draw up a different post regarding that.

Most of the problems with Avorion are back end and how the server handles data, voxels, internal systems.

I've thrown out a boatload of suggestions over the last couple of years that could dramatically improve the game overall. But the things listed above are definitely the biggest issues I have with it presently. Rubberbanding and watching 200k ping (I think the record is 384k presently) because of how the networking traffic is structured is the biggest thing to tackle.