The Issue of Scale

[Deadonstick]

Introduction

 

Leaving aside all of the more specific complaints regarding combat and trading and such for now I believe there's a singular core issue that is the root cause of a lot of Avorion's problems.

 

The issue I am talking about is the issue of scale in Avorion or, more specifically, the issue of how the player scales in size with regards to the universe.

 

Scale Progression

 

When a player starts his journey in Avorion he starts in a tiny mining drone. In this drone a single sector is a rather huge chunk of space and attempting to cross that sector can take quite a while. When you eventually do cross your sector you've probably found an asteroid that seems rather big and takes quite a while to strip mine.

 

However we all know how it goes, before long every asteroid the game throws at you evaporates before your mighty mining lasers, every enemy seemingly blows up automatically, your cargohold is almost entirely empty because you simply can't find enough goods to buy from stations, you can let enemies fire against your mighty shields and armour for literal hours without fearing for your life and attempting to seek enough specialists for your capital ship is a lost cause.

 

The Two Sub-Problems

 

There are two sub-problems that make up the "player-overscaling" issue.

 

The first is to simply have a more varied scale for the universe. Currently everything from the galactic edge to the core is (roughly) the same size, which is kind of a shame. The universe becomes more dangerous the closer you are to the core but not by changing its size, only by changing the materials of which it is made. This is a great progression IF the player followed a similar progression, but players grow in both material type AND scale.

 

Having the universe do the same is, in my opinion, part of the solution. This essentially means having some asteroids and enemies large enough that even the most hardcore powergamers need some considerable time to deal with them.

 

The second is that currently in Avorion bigger is almost always better. Bigger ships have the most firepower, the highest durability and (counterintuitively) the highest speed. The only thing that you trade away for a bigger ship is your turning speed (which is irrelevant for combat because turrets turn independently) and the price (but what else will you spend the money on anyway?).

 

The solution is to this problem is difficult because you'd need to balance the natural health and firepower something of a large size provides with something else that a smaller ship would provide. Worst of all, this solution would have to work across all size ranges (which is a problem only Avorion has to deal with as only it spans such a massive continuous set of sizes).

 

Conclusion

 

Personally I believe that if solutions to these problems can be implemented properly we have opened the way for meaningful fleets. Fleets consisting of various sizes and specializations that truly test the creative and planning abilities of the players. It would make ship design more meaningful and allow us to move away from the slew of "jack-of-all-trades" ships Avorion currently consists of.

 

And, of course, it would mean that the player can feel like a part of the universe again. A universe that is grand in scale and in variety of scales. Rather than the current reality of the player feeling like an untouchable God annoyed that his ship is so effective that most of his time is spent trying to find a sufficiently large asteroid to mine or for his GODDAMN JUMP COMPUTER TO FINALLY FINISH CALCULATING.

 

However, the implementation of a solution to these problems is difficult and I cannot casually figure one out currently. Hence why I am asking everyone here, including the devs, to think of a viable solution for this terrible issue that is haunting us all.

 

Except of course for those who love roflstomping the entire universe and feeling huge, which, I can get too.

[Ravien]

Proper large anti capital weapons which have a hard time hitting smaller targets. Resource asteroids that scale in size with distance to the core. Enemies of various sizes and more variety in missions with some giving small ships a purpose. Better fleet control so you can have a fleet of anti frigate destroyers, carriers in the back, etc.

[Shrooblord]

You raise a number of valid points, Deadonstick. Why be a small, zippy craft if you could also be a ginormous Star Destroyer and wipe all your enemies off your windscreen like common bugs? I mean, why other than for style or personal preference, of course?

 

I like your idea of figuring out some trade-off between going big and staying small. To keep with the Star Wars analogy, we need some way in which a tiny X-Wing can reliably take down a Death Star, and vice versa, how a Death Star is supposed to deal with tiny shitty X-Wings. Supposedly, the Death Star has to rely on employing equally shitty craft - let's call them TIE Fighters. But perhaps something else can be thought of, too.

 

And yes, tiny craft should soar and huge giants should be lumbering and sluggish. I like those archetypes and they exist for a reason. They're satisfying, and more importantly, physically accurate.

 

However, bigger size does allow for bigger engines - keep that in mind. At the same time, though, bigger size should need bigger engines, so there's a point of balance there...

 

The game already does all of this. Stations get far, far larger the further you go towards the Core, and larger ships do need larger engines to get going. However, you're right, the scaling is off. It needs tweaking, or outright redesigning.

 

Let's see what this Combat Update brings. Perhaps some of these issues will be addressed in ways we're not thinking of right now.

 

P.S.

While on the topic of physics and accuracy, my friend recently noted how you can be travelling at a consistent pace and fire Missiles from your Launcher Turrets, which will then be trailing behind your ship, and how that doesn't make sense. I agree. There's an inexplicable net loss of momentum there. These sorts of issues should also be addressed, in my opinion, but that's rather a different discussion.

[Deadonstick]

And yes, tiny craft should soar and huge giants should be lumbering and sluggish. I like those archetypes and they exist for a reason. They're satisfying, and more importantly, physically accurate.

 

However, bigger size does allow for bigger engines - keep that in mind. At the same time, though, bigger size should need bigger engines, so there's a point of balance there...

 

The game already does all of this. Stations get far, far larger the further you go towards the Core, and larger ships do need larger engines to get going. However, you're right, the scaling is off. It needs tweaking, or outright redesigning.

 

Let's see what this Combat Update brings. Perhaps some of these issues will be addressed in ways we're not thinking of right now.

 

P.S.

While on the topic of physics and accuracy, my friend recently noted how you can be travelling at a consistent pace and fire Missiles from your Launcher Turrets, which will then be trailing behind your ship, and how that doesn't make sense. I agree. There's an inexplicable net loss of momentum there. These sorts of issues should also be addressed, in my opinion, but that's rather a different discussion.

 

Actually the way Avorion currently handles scale IS physically accurate. In space the square-cube law is king, which essentially states that the surface area of a ship (and thus the drag) scales with the square of the ship's size whereas the mass and engine-power does so with the cube of the ship's size. When you are totally physically accurate in this sense (and leaving aside material strength and heat resistance constraints) this means bigger ships are faster than smaller ships. Even more hilariously, larger ships are just as manuverable as smaller ships because the mobility items also scale in effectiveness by the cube of their size.

 

In real life, despite mathemathically larger ships always being better, this is balanced through material strength and the inability to manage waste heat.

 

You did give me an interesting idea though..

I believe balancing larger ships can come through the introduction of a heat-management system. In space in real life one of the issues you run into is managing waste heat. Although space is cold, it is also empty. Unlike here on Earth there's nothing to remove the heat from you and as such you can only get rid of heat by radiating it away, which happens only via the surface of your craft.

 

This new system would mean that all blocks get rebalanced to properly scale with the cube of their size. That meaning, that disregarding the new heat system, a tiny ship that turns at 4 rads/s, accelerates at 4km/s and such will do so regardless of how far you scale it up. To balance this however each ship should be required to manage its waste heat. As your ship grows larger you'll gain the cube of your size in heat to manage but only the square of your size in heat you can get rid of.

 

So say we take the ship "Tiny Terry" and scale it up by a factor of a thousand to get "Big Bertha", Bertha would have to get rid of 1000^3 (aka a billion) more heat but only has the capacity to get rid of 1000^2 (aka a million) more heat. This means that Bertha is now 1000^3/1000^2 = 1000 times more prone to overheating. In order to manage this she'd need to install a buttload of blocks that get rid of this heat or risk overheating. Overheating in this case means that your ship's efficiency drops when you get too hot, after that your ship simply stops functioning (think like in Mechwarrior). Overheating should be a function of power used. So that when you are in combat, zipping around, firing lasers, you overheat faster and you can cool off by turning off systems.

 

Currently, the only thing perhaps preventing one from flying a ship as big as they can is the trade-off in how easy it is to fly. The ship gets a higher top speed but sucks at (de)accelerating and turning. But as I said, this is sort of a moot point when both mining and combat require very little of this due to turrets turning independently (not to mention fighters make it even less required).

 

This proposed new system however will soft-cap the effectiveness of larger ships, eventually requiring you to replace systems with heat management blocks at a greater rate than the other systems grow in size. I say soft-cap because it'll still take a while for your ship to heat up and some people might still make insanely large ships that don't overheat as long as they don't fire and turn at the same time for example.

[MWire]

I do agree, the universe doesn't scale very well, things like alien attacks, pirate raids and ambushes are genuinely threatening at first, but then just a mild annoyance end-game. That being said, the bosses suffer from this too. It might be just that I made an overkill of a ship before pursuing the quests, but they all seemed too weak when I fought them. Exception being the AI, which was a refresher at first, but became a bit monotonous after a while.

 

It'd be great if the bosses scaled appropriately to the size of your ship when they spawned, a vague example would be "scale= (total volume of player's fleet * custom difficulty multiplier)/(Base boss volume)"

 

Some of the mentioned issues can already be resolved with existing mods, but that also depends on what stance you have with mods, and what way the modder thinks the game should change.

 

[Ravien]

Try out the combat update on the beta branch and see if some of these issues are better.

[Shrooblord]

Deadonstick, I like your idea for overheating! I am now also imagining a new weapon type that's focused primarily on cooking your ship from the inside, incapacitating it and perhaps even starting to hurt and kill crew the longer you are exposed to its deadly rays.

[Deadonstick]

Deadonstick, I like your idea for overheating! I am now also imagining a new weapon type that's focused primarily on cooking your ship from the inside, incapacitating it and perhaps even starting to hurt and kill crew the longer you are exposed to its deadly rays.

 

With the current way gathering crew functions I'd think that hurting and killing crew is a bit of a dick move. Considering you can spend hours upon hours finally training a specialist to a high level just to have him broiled alive :P.

 

That being said, a weapon that adds heat to the enemy ship is an amazing idea and a great addition to a proper overheating system. It can either be a seperate weapon like a flame or plasma thrower or a special type of block. This special type of block would allow you to extract heat from your ship and transfer it to the projectiles of whatever weapon is mounted on said block, essentially adding heat damage to your weapons. The amount of heat transferred shouldn't be too large though, to avoid undermining the entire point of the overheating system to begin with.

[Summin]

I'm wondering if the speed should scale down in speed from engine volume in addition, give smaller ships an easier time to escape, but leave the larger ships for station bashing duty and larger scale fights. Smaller ships might also have a better role in scaling with jumping range as well, or jumping times with equal jumping ranges.

 

The overheating idea is pretty clever and intuitive, I'm all for it.

[DivineEvil]

- Avorion does have a difference in scale between the areas. Both stations and ships do increase in size, which is easily evident if you'd try to get your ship from late-game areas all the way to the iron region. The problem here is more about that AI ships doesn't seem to gain that much more of firepower, and they also do not combine several weapon types, which makes fighting them predictable.

 

- Argument of bigger-is-better is invalid, since for the same amount of materials and credits used, several ships are always better and cheaper to maintain, than a single ship. For example, a ship that is built just as large to support 15 module slots is equivalent to the 185 ships of a 5 module-slot ships or close to 5 ships with 10 modules.

 

Each given ship has base stats and weapon slots that are given by default, and necessity of captains for commanding the ship is outmatched by the price tag for higher-tier officers required for maintaining the dreadnought. Additionally, smaller ships are harder targets for any accuracy-based weapons, while a large ship is essentially impossible to miss even with Lightning cannon discharges. A larger ship will be dramatically outgunned sitting duck for multiple ships of the same total value and will have to choose between meticulously focusing its firepower on individual ships or spreading it all over the place with independent targeting weapons. Finally, a fleet of smaller ships has smaller warp calculation time and thus are a more mobile force.

 

Thus, the discussion is limited to completely different topics where size is largely irrelevant, which are:

 

- It is way too easy to escape the fight, which allows single large ships to incur casualties to the fleets and then simply boost or warp out without being threatened. This is the main, fundamental problem with both PvE and PvP combat models in their current state, which do not punish players for mistakes and miscalculated risks whatsoever.

 

- There are some issues in commanding the fleet effectively, which is why people prefer to keep to their dreadnought, even though it is functionally less powerful. Strategy mode controls in particular may warrant a redesign, that is entirely independent from the default piloting mode and is closer to conventional RTS control style.

 

- Perhaps there's not enough penalties in place for using extremely large ships, or too many necessities for using fleets. Particularly, there's no clarity for the Captain's necessity for commanding a ship of any size remotely. Captain is just another rank, it is in no way different from any other officer tier on board, that has to make decisions and relay orders. At the same time, large ships probably has to suffer diminishing returns from engines and maneuvering modules, since their output has to be reduced to maintain structural integrity of the vessel under its own inertia. Accelerating a larger ship with larger thrusters still requires the same materials to conduct the momentum without being deformed and broken by stress, which is much easier on smaller vessels.

[Wanderer]

And yes, tiny craft should soar and huge giants should be lumbering and sluggish. I like those archetypes and they exist for a reason. They're satisfying, and more importantly, physically accurate.

 

However, bigger size does allow for bigger engines - keep that in mind. At the same time, though, bigger size should need bigger engines, so there's a point of balance there...

 

The game already does all of this. Stations get far, far larger the further you go towards the Core, and larger ships do need larger engines to get going. However, you're right, the scaling is off. It needs tweaking, or outright redesigning.

 

Let's see what this Combat Update brings. Perhaps some of these issues will be addressed in ways we're not thinking of right now.

 

P.S.

While on the topic of physics and accuracy, my friend recently noted how you can be travelling at a consistent pace and fire Missiles from your Launcher Turrets, which will then be trailing behind your ship, and how that doesn't make sense. I agree. There's an inexplicable net loss of momentum there. These sorts of issues should also be addressed, in my opinion, but that's rather a different discussion.

 

Actually the way Avorion currently handles scale IS physically accurate. In space the square-cube law is king, which essentially states that the surface area of a ship (and thus the drag) scales with the square of the ship's size whereas the mass and engine-power does so with the cube of the ship's size. When you are totally physically accurate in this sense (and leaving aside material strength and heat resistance constraints) this means bigger ships are faster than smaller ships. Even more hilariously, larger ships are just as manuverable as smaller ships because the mobility items also scale in effectiveness by the cube of their size.

 

In real life, despite mathemathically larger ships always being better, this is balanced through material strength and the inability to manage waste heat.

 

You did give me an interesting idea though..

I believe balancing larger ships can come through the introduction of a heat-management system. In space in real life one of the issues you run into is managing waste heat. Although space is cold, it is also empty. Unlike here on Earth there's nothing to remove the heat from you and as such you can only get rid of heat by radiating it away, which happens only via the surface of your craft.

 

This new system would mean that all blocks get rebalanced to properly scale with the cube of their size. That meaning, that disregarding the new heat system, a tiny ship that turns at 4 rads/s, accelerates at 4km/s and such will do so regardless of how far you scale it up. To balance this however each ship should be required to manage its waste heat. As your ship grows larger you'll gain the cube of your size in heat to manage but only the square of your size in heat you can get rid of.

 

So say we take the ship "Tiny Terry" and scale it up by a factor of a thousand to get "Big Bertha", Bertha would have to get rid of 1000^3 (aka a billion) more heat but only has the capacity to get rid of 1000^2 (aka a million) more heat. This means that Bertha is now 1000^3/1000^2 = 1000 times more prone to overheating. In order to manage this she'd need to install a buttload of blocks that get rid of this heat or risk overheating. Overheating in this case means that your ship's efficiency drops when you get too hot, after that your ship simply stops functioning (think like in Mechwarrior). Overheating should be a function of power used. So that when you are in combat, zipping around, firing lasers, you overheat faster and you can cool off by turning off systems.

 

Currently, the only thing perhaps preventing one from flying a ship as big as they can is the trade-off in how easy it is to fly. The ship gets a higher top speed but sucks at (de)accelerating and turning. But as I said, this is sort of a moot point when both mining and combat require very little of this due to turrets turning independently (not to mention fighters make it even less required).

 

This proposed new system however will soft-cap the effectiveness of larger ships, eventually requiring you to replace systems with heat management blocks at a greater rate than the other systems grow in size. I say soft-cap because it'll still take a while for your ship to heat up and some people might still make insanely large ships that don't overheat as long as they don't fire and turn at the same time for example.

 

Really nice idea, i hope it's gonna be in the game one day. If this is implemented, you are going to need dedicated systems or up your surface area by adding a lot of very thin plates wich are easy to destroy. Overall it's a nice solution and it's quite logical!