For anyone not playing beta, Read this, regarding ship design.

[Enzo Matrix]

I wanted to give anyone who may not be playing the beta patch 10.4

 

Just giving a HUGE heads up to not go into great detail building ships because of the major overhaul the game makes to flying and thrusters / engines.

 

It will feel like an OH MY GAWD moment but rest easy! You will need to build new ships with the new mechanic in mind, directional thrusters are very powerful breaking power so use them facing forward and sideways to make your ship stop while you are turning or else it will only stop while going in 1 direction and if you turn it will glide lol.

 

It will take time to get use to but it does in fact fly very nicely when you get nice break thrust of 100+ not hard btw anymore, and decent roll/pitch/yaw 0.6-0.8+ and using burners for sharp turning. Your current stats of even max 2.0 will literally go down ALOT to around 0.3 because of the change with thrusters not being thin sliced.

 

Also note engine thrust is greatly improved, my ship went from 48.5 to over 100m/s and it blasts off like a rocket lol.

 

So anyone who is not playing the beta just giving a heads up to be prepared for this big change. Don't spend 100 hours building a ship unless you don't mind it becoming unplayable by the time the patch hits everyone. Be prepared to build new ships :)

[cy414]

i build almost all my ships from preset modules already. since not only are big changes in beta games a certainty, it also helps unify a fleet aesthetic.

might be good practice for others to try doing this too.

[Blaine]

It's great that "thin-sliced" thrusters will be going away (so presumably volume will now contribute to thruster power, in addition to surface area), but I hope that we won't need enormous, building-sized thrusters on the sides of our ships to achieve halfway-decent pitch and yaw even on smaller designs. I don't mind paying the COST of large and powerful thrusters in terms of credits, materials, mass added to ship, power use, mechanics, etc., but aesthetically, requiring massive black thruster boxes pasted on every design seriously hampers the range of what can be created.

 

The need for large thrusters is already pretty crazy, and I have to compromise most of my designs to get them to fit. If it gets much worse I might try my hand at modding to halve the visual size of thrusters.

[eltanan]

I'd be in favor of just massively increasing thruster power across the board so we need fewer of them overall, period. 

[Blaine]

I fully understand why the development team probably wouldn't want massive dreadnaughts maneuvering at 2 rad/sec, but for me it's all about looks, not about trying to be cheesy.

 

In the real world, thrusters would obey the laws of inertia; sure, you can get that dreadnaught going 2 rad/sec or more eventually (heck, 200 rad/sec), but it would take an identical amount of thrust applied in the opposite direction(s) for the same amount of time to arrest that motion, and if you accelerated or decelerated too quickly any point it would tear the ship apart and/or turn the people inside into pink paste.

 

Avorion is a game of course, not an exacting physics simulation, and I'm sure a happy balance will be found at some point.

[Enzo Matrix]

Currently it takes an enormous amount of thruster space to get even 0.8 points. Trying to find a volume / area that works best is pretty hard, you still end up with a ton of thruster space being used on a ship. Thrusters got nerfed hard from 10.3 also.. my 1-1.2 went to 0.3. So anyone playing 10.2 with full 2.0 rad.. probably drop to 0.1-0.2 by 10.4 lol

 

Personally.. I don't care much for realism of massive ship being like an interceptor.. honestly it was pretty fun lol. We are making ships from blocks.. we should be able to make huge ships that are also great at moving around if we can afford it. It's a lot of fun for me personally. Let other space games act like big ships are suppose to be sluggish, let this game allow for creation without frustration :)

[AstroOwl]

Currently it takes an enormous amount of thruster space to get even 0.8 points. Trying to find a volume / area that works best is pretty hard, you still end up with a ton of thruster space being used on a ship. Thrusters got nerfed hard from 10.3 also.. my 1-1.2 went to 0.3. So anyone playing 10.2 with full 2.0 rad.. probably drop to 0.1-0.2 by 10.4 lol

 

Personally.. I don't care much for realism of massive ship being like an interceptor.. honestly it was pretty fun lol. We are making ships from blocks.. we should be able to make huge ships that are also great at moving around if we can afford it. It's a lot of fun for me personally. Let other space games act like big ships are suppose to be sluggish, let this game allow for creation without frustration :)

 

Well, i don't care much about realism, look from just creative and aesthetic point of view, don't want this game to be a hardcore sim... 

 

And i LOVE the fact that big ships can't easily be rotated ar 1-2 rad/s anymore. That was terrible. I was just trying to get decent braking thrust and ended up with terrible feeling of a "battleship" rotating with speed that would kill all its crew.

 

For me, new situation is "creation without frustration".

 

That's just my point of view, of course.

[Yeedo]

I rebuilt one of my ships using this new system, and I have to say it's a huge improvement. Forwards and backwards acceleration are easy to get up much higher than before (so you no longer have to fill the interior of your ship with engines) and 100 ms⁻² deceleration is very achievable (no more smashing into stations by being unable to slow down). The thrusters have taken a heavy nerf, but the directional thrusters still allow you to get reasonable turn rates without a crazy amount of them.

 

Now you can make a hull with a couple of decently sized engines on the back and a few big directional thrusters inside and be pretty agile, without sacrificing looks or shield projectors or other internal components.

[Ohm is Futile]

[...]

 

Well, i don't care much about realism, look from just creative and aesthetic point of view, don't want this game to be a hardcore sim... 

 

And i LOVE the fact that big ships can't easily be rotated ar 1-2 rad/s anymore. That was terrible. I was just trying to get decent braking thrust and ended up with terrible feeling of a "battleship" rotating with speed that would kill all its crew.

 

For me, new situation is "creation without frustration".

 

That's just my point of view, of course.

In the non-beta version, not building the annoying-but-effective million slices of thrusters is always going to be less efficient. I spent a lot of time building some nice looking ships and the not-slice thrusters are a quite the balancing act to set up if you want to be decently mobile.

 

That said, I'm of the opinion that things should either be given a ship-wide thrust penalty for mass (thus giving a mobility advantage to smaller ships) or scale linearly.

 

As for anyone talking about realism and crews dying to excessive rotation or acceleration forces, please stop. We have force turrets, shields and hyperspace drives and so on. We can only assume that there are ways to protect the crews from such things in Avorion's universe. This talk should be about balance and fun gameplay.

[Tsunamik]

After all, our ships are capable of accelerating at 15g or more... some rotations are not a problem :D

[AstroOwl]

As for anyone talking about realism and crews dying to excessive rotation or acceleration forces, please stop. We have force turrets, shields and hyperspace drives and so on. We can only assume that there are ways to protect the crews from such things in Avorion's universe. This talk should be about balance and fun gameplay.

 

Last sentence is the most important one, i agree with it.

 

Gameplay need some means of restricting and G-forces are plausible explanation for why restrictions are there? Okay, G-force it is.

 

Gameplay don't need such restrictions? Good, in that case ships have, ehuuum, inertia dampeners and G-forces are not an issue.

 

I won't defend the idea of G-forces just for the sake of realism, it's not a sim.

 

G-forces, as any other phenomena, is just a way of justificating desired gameplay changes or moving towards desired gameplay, be it hard, easy, casual, hardcore, realistic, arcadish - whatever. Nothing more.

 

[Enzo Matrix]

What I found in 10.2 building big ships to make it move very effectively actually costed quite a lot to do. I really thought it was pretty balanced like that. My 10.2 ship costed me like 800k minerals because of the thin slices adding up lol.

I understand it may seem to not make sense but again.. we are using blocks to build ships, I do not wish to see this game go if you want to make a massive battlestar, forget about it ever moving around. That takes away the whole creative and fun aspect.

 

If I mined up and spent 100's of hours just to build that 1 titanic battlestar of a ship that I could fly around like an interceptor.. heck why not. I really loved that. During pvp this could be intense stuff lol. I don't care about G-force.. or anything realism.. I want to build awesome ships and conquer the galaxy!

 

That being said.. the 180 flip and burn is fantastic in 10.4 lol

[Ohm is Futile]

[...]

The fundamental question is how important and balanced we want the multiplayer aspect to be. Personally, with the way the AI is, I think multiplayer should be an important aspect of the game.

 

So, what does that have to do with anything? Well, if we want multiplayer to be interesting, it needs to have some balance and as much fun as it may be to make a huge battleship fly around like a dragonfly, it does mean that there's literally no way for a player who has been playing for a lesser amount of time is going to compete. This is why I've already mentioned a few times that a ship-wide penalty to thrusters proportionate to mass would give smaller ships an advantage because they would need to spend less mass/resource/volume than a larger ship to reach similar maneuverability, proportionally-speaking.

 

Yes, currently, with volume-based thrusters, ships should scale perfectly linearly. Yes, it's going to cost you more for a bigger ship, but it's perfectly linear. In fact, it used to be the same, afaik, it was just more annoying since you had to split your thrusters in smaller pieces for them to be more efficient. So going bigger is almost 100% better except for your profile.

 

[...]

I know it may feel like I'm hammering on this point, but slapping the name of G-forces on that mechanic is going to get a lot of sci-fi fans who are at least somewhat educated in physics to call BS. I will gladly say "yes please" to a mechanic to help balance small ships vs larger ones, but I'd actually rather we don't try to justify things with real concepts unless they match. For example, it would be a lot better to say that thruster technologies just don't scale that well and that would already be a whole lot more realistic, but at the end of the day, who cares? That's what I meant by discussing balance and gameplay. Let's forget about what's real. Finding good names and "lore" explanations can come in much, much later if there is even a need for it.

[AstroOwl]

[...]

 

My bad, of course: for something restricting rotation speed and using stress on crew as explanation, "inertial forces" would be better term.

 

But, whatever, maybe i said it wrong way, so i must clarify: imo, gameplay comes first.

 

If we have a suitable explanation for a gameplay change - good.

 

We don't? Well, better to not explain that change at all, than to explain it in an obviously unfitting way.

[Blaine]

As for anyone talking about realism and crews dying to excessive rotation or acceleration forces, please stop. We have force turrets, shields and hyperspace drives and so on. We can only assume that there are ways to protect the crews from such things in Avorion's universe. This talk should be about balance and fun gameplay.

 

It's not up to you to dictate what I post. I mentioned real-world physics in passing because they were relevant to the point I was making about thrusters, and immediately added that realism shouldn't constrain Avorion's game design—yet you still chose to be rude. Well, I can't dictate what you post, either.

 

Yes, the goal is to create the illusion of ships in outer space rather than a hardcore rocketry simulation, and Avorion does try to do that rather than being a straight-up arcade game. The developers have been heavily iterating the way thrusters work for the last couple of patches now, and using real-world thrusters as a frame of reference for what might be done in-game is pretty sensible. Using them as a frame of reference is quite different than arguing that the game has to be realistic.

[Ohm is Futile]

[...]

My comment did not target you or your post. I don't intend to dictate what people can or cannot post either. Your comment was actually accurate, as far as I know. What I meant is that it makes me cringe when people feel the need to justify design decisions or features using real concepts in a way that shows an absolute lack of understanding of said concept.

 

I guess that makes me a Physics Nazi or something. Funny thing is I'm not really that educated in physics beyond what I learned watching science shows and playing kerbal space program. Anyways, I'd rather just have people say they think x or y would be better for z gameplay reason.

 

I suppose I should let it go, so go ahead and butcher all of known physics to your heart's content if you so desire. Just letting people know it drives some people crazy.

[Blaine]

Nor was I "butchering physics" with my simplified but accurate description of inertial forces, so now I really have no idea what you're on about... but we agree on the points relevant to Avorion's gameplay, so it doesn't really matter.