Build Upon Ship Size Concept

[nivina]

I've played.... way too many space games. The one part of this game that stands out to me is how ship composition is handled. I find the solution to ship "class" and progression to be pretty clever, by far the best system in the voxel universe.

 

For the sake of argument, I'm going to refer to "rank" as the number of module slots your ship has unlocked.

 

A few suggestions to take advantage of this feature:

 

Pick Up Range

As your ship ranks up, so should your pick up range. This would allow flying larger ships (20mil m3 and up) to be much less tedious. Perhaps each rank increases the base range by 25%, something along those lines.

 

Turrets

Turrets are interesting, because they can progress in a number of ways; size, damage, range, rotation speed.

 

Size

As you rank up, turrets should increase in size, requiring more space to mount. I'm thinking something like, at rank 10 your turrets require a space equal to a 2x2 block. This would allow the aesthetic of turrets to match your ship, in addition to be large enough to have more visibility.

 

Tracking Speed

As you rank up, and the turrets grow in size, their tracking speed should decrease. This would allow an EVE like balance of small ships being agile enough to possibly evade being shot down by huge ships because the turret tracking speeds are so slow compared to how agile the smaller ship is. This means that smaller ships have an easier time hitting larger ships, but to balance that out, the larger ship will more than likely have a defense that would allow them to treat the smaller ship like an annoying fly.

 

This also introduces the concept of fleet composition, which also magically adds a very compelling reason to play with other people (co-op).

 

Damage

Seeing as how rotational speed will decrease, damage should increase. I'm not saying, take the turret damage as is today and multiply it, but the turret damage system should have some sort of lower variation base damage that is multiplied, based upon the rank of the ship. This way you can be pretty sure that a giant cannon mounted on the top of a ship is going to do serious damage to you, if you sit in front of it. This would remove the need to have that "fire power" stat displayed to players, allowing them to more-or-less trust their eyes.

 

Range

Base turret range should be multiplied, based on the rank of the ship. Pretty much every turret in the game has a frustratingly low range. I would suggest boosting the range of all turrets mounted on a ship by +25% per rank. This allows larger ships to be more stationary (which they should be), allowing them to just fire away at longer ranges, while smaller ships can dog fight and be more agile due to their shorter ranges.

 

This also works for stations, as guns mounted on a station would be rather large, and used to defend at long ranges against battleship (and greater) classed ships.

 

Types

Now you can actually get into different types of turrets for different sizes of ships. For example, long range weapons, such as rail guns and cruise missiles, could be reserved for rank 8 and greater ships (as well as stations).

 

Maneuverability

As a ship ranks up, it's maneuverability should be restricted. I don't mean, make the player add a bunch more thrusters to compensate; i mean hard limits. Large ships should never be agile. Large ships (rank 8 and up) should be more-or-less carriers or armed to the teeth with long range weaponry. They jump in, do their thing (kill everything), and then move on. This would further add to the dynamics of fleet composition.

 

I'm going to stop here. I suggest you run with this concept. Like I said, I really think the ship size / progression system you have in place has a ton of potential, and definitely sets this game apart from other games I've played of similar style. Also the combat is actually fun.

[Spacefaring_Guy]

Two notes:

 

1) 'Rank' should be ship value, so you always have the option to build a low-rank ship.  Rising through the ranks would be limited by resource acquisition.  Handling turrets on such a ship as you're building is difficult though - what do you do when a 'level 4' ship crosses over to 'level 5' and has a bunch of the previous level of turrets already placed?

 

2) No artificial hard limit on movement.  Rather, have a physics limitation - your ship takes hull damage if you move it beyond its limits (keep it simple, based on total mass).  So yeah, you can build a Death Star that could rotate through 360 degrees in under a second, but as it does so so it will tear itself into a nice expanding ring of debris.

[cepheni]

@nivina: Quite a lot of what you are suggesting sounds really cool. We won't hard restrict movability of ships, because that is up to the player to build. After all, Avorion is a lot about enjoying to build exactly the ship you want.

The size and damage (and range) is a good idea and we will keep it in mind for when Koonschi going to rework combat and turrets/fighters.

[Sable Phoenix]

I don't think that weapon size should be tied directly to ship size, or rank, if the two are ultimately different things.  That should be based on how you decide to arm your ship when it's built and what role you want it to fill.  At the same time, large ships should be able to mount small weapons for point defence and CIWS roles.  Layered defense envelopes have been an aspect of ship design since armored hulls were established as a thing, and truly became de rigeur in World War 2 when anti-air defense was necessary for any vessel.

 

A good example of this kind of design is shown in the space battle in the episode "CQB" from the first season of The Expanse.  When engaging the suspected Belter stealth ships, Donager first engages with torpedoes at long range.  Their point-defense cannons are employed in a CIWS role to intercept the torpedoes fired by the stealth ships.  As the enemy continued to close range, the Donager engaged with railguns, and finally when close enough for boarding action, the PDCs that were no longer being used for torpedo interception were turned on the enemy craft and their boarding pods.

 

And yet, with all its armament and seeming self-sufficiency, the Donager carried two Tachi-class gunships, each armed with torpedoes and six PDCs, to fulfill specialized roles that required ships with a smaller profile and with more maneuverability than the Donager.  Bigger isn't always better.

 

I think the "bigger is better" trend in Avorion is actually a weakness.  While bigger ships should definitely have by their nature more flexibility than smaller ones, anything that reinforces the trend in Avorion of piling system upon system into one massive, invincible dreadnought is, to my mind, taking the game in the wrong direction.

[Warrax]

I like many of the suggestions, but i also appreciate the value of "designing" quality ships.

 

Even my large builds 12+ slots, and my half built Tie Fighter (15 Slots) are highly mobile and turn quickly.

 

So, any "restriction" or "prescription" that limits my design and creativity to optimize my ships would just piss me off.

 

Anyone that can build well, deserves the freedom of what genius and engineering brings: Advantage in combat ...

 

Cheers