Avorion Galaxy Generation

[NITROtbomb]

I had a thought...

 

with Exploring there is many sections of space that are empty boring parts of the Galaxy that are just a waste of time jumping into, and there is a lot of them which has really turned me off exploring in general...

which made me think perhaps the entire way the galaxy is generated could be updated to make exploration super fun and engaging..

 

so a few ideas:

A) could be set up in a way similar to Stellaris  and the game generates galaxies, set up in a spiral pattern

 

or the other shapes that are used (big blob or circle) to make Avorions galaxies feel alive rather than a big grid of space. this would also be a great way to see how the interstellar politics work within the game. 

a cool thing Stellaris also does is let you choose how many Star systems are in the game, to choose if you want a big game or a small one.

 

B) To liven up the Systems themselves, perhaps have it set up in a way that there is more going on in the system, rather than just one or two Asteroid fields. Possibly similar to the way that Rebel Galaxy creates systems, where there is stations and other important locations that you have to use a sublight warpdrive to move quickly over too. Would be a cool to have the main factions bases in the center then on the outskirts in an asteroid field a Pirate base, hidden, spawning ships and sending them in to attack the faction and you could be paid to get rid of them by the faction.  Creating more action for the player to engage with inside a system.

ps. the way that Rebel Galaxy does the size issues of planets and the sun is really effective.

 

C)  it would also be cool, to help with finding all the factions buildings is, if you go to their main system go to the capital building and you can buy a map of their faction? would be cool just another idea.

 

 

so yeah Just some ideas I have been thinking on for a while, after playing other games that I think have really cool and applicable ideas for Avorion cause man there is improvement for sure but I'll be damned if this isn't the best Spaceship building system I have ever used!

[tz7yo3g]

I know what you mean about some of the emptiness being boring but I wonder that a lot of what is in the game sometimes is there for balance for mutiplayer with a certain average number of people there. Empty sectors both for spacing out factions, players, limiting jump drive effectiveness, limiting travel times and having lots of space for players to make bases I guess. Since there are no hyperdrive lanes though it makes me think your idea could be helpful by making more sectors into blocked (unjumpable space-time disrupted type) space, so there would be more of a terrain to space, more than only rings toward the center. I dont know if servers can edit this yet but it would be cool to think also that sectors could become even temporarily disrupted space, and then change back. I guess then you'd need some calculation to make sure player owned sectors can't be blocked off from everything, so players still have at least one line of sectors to have a path out. Maybe though the game could slow down jump travel through any sector by any amount.  That would simulate and be better than jump lanes or only worm holes. So then your jump circle would become odd-shaped for certain areas possibly at certain times only.

 

At first when I started I wanted maps, but then I thought it would hurt exploring more by allowing them. Otherwise traders get a huge immediate advantage and don't have to invest hiring a scout player or doing it themselves in order for the payout of knowing good trading and mission spots. Though I guess you can get data from an alliance fast, the idea seems a little unbalancing if not cheatyish, depending on how much data is given. For alternatives I wonder about making it so that you can sell map data on a per-sector basis to other players individually, and or only allow trading it based on some other things that make sense to trade in return.

[DivineEvil]

A) could be set up in a way similar to Stellaris  and the game generates galaxies, set up in a spiral pattern

Stellaris generates the galaxy with a prerequisite, that star systems as a whole are important for the player. For Avorion Players, they aren't. Avorion uses sectors, and sectors simply represent a place where something is or isn't located. Multiple faction-populated sectors can be named the same, just with different postfixes, meaning they belong to the same star system.

 

In the early months of Stellaris, there were three interstellar travel methods possible - warp drives, hyperspace lanes and wormholes. Warp Drives were basically super-powered boosters, that allowed to travel slowly, but anywhere if the engine capacity allowed it. Hyperspace lanes were predefined synchronicity connections between the stars, with very fast travel across limited routes. Wormholes allowed long-range travel between any systems, but required special stations to be built, that would open wormholes between two points in range, so that you'd have to build those anywhere you want to depart from and come back to.  Warp Drives have been removed from the game relatively recently, as they were impossible to defend against, while Wormholes were rededicated to the rare find allowing for travel across the galaxy otherwise limited to hyperlane network alone.

 

Thus, in the Avorion game world, ship jump drives essentially operate like the warp drives, allowing for jumps in specific range, and Warp Gates operate like artificial Hyperspace links, but connecting specific orbits and areas, not the entire star systems. So, when you explore the Avorion galaxy extensively, it appears quite like the Stellaris galaxy and offer almost the same travel options. The only difference is that you spend time recharging the drive instead of waiting idly during the flight, and you need time to move between Warp Gates instead of the time stabilizing them. Space rifts operate much like the unlinked systems, and you only can cross them trough the wormholes, warp gates or trough the top-notch Avorion-based jump drive.

 

In conclusion, there's no clear difference in what you're proposing and what we already have in-game. I can agree, that perhaps we do not need the grid lines at all, as they spoil the perception of space, and we might need better navigation icons, that differentiate between empty sectors, sectors with asteroids, sectors with Smuggler Hideouts, faction capitals, mining and farming sectors and faction territory boundaries that distinguish between them regardless of your relations with either. These are two pieces of suggestion that I can see feasible, but otherwise the paragraph is based on the wrong understanding of sectors. Every sector can have a planet, a parent star and a nebulae, its just that some have interesting features and structures on those orbits, and some don't.

 

B) To liven up the Systems themselves, perhaps have it set up in a way that there is more going on in the system, rather than just one or two Asteroid fields. Possibly similar to the way that Rebel Galaxy creates systems, where there is stations and other important locations that you have to use a sublight warpdrive to move quickly over too. Would be a cool to have the main factions bases in the center then on the outskirts in an asteroid field a Pirate base, hidden, spawning ships and sending them in to attack the faction and you could be paid to get rid of them by the faction.  Creating more action for the player to engage with inside a system.

Again, everything you've just wrote is pretty much how Avorion operates. It's just that the primary method of travel is jump drives, and that cells on the map are sectors, not systems. If you place additional clusters of object inside the sector, there's a problem of finding those with player's limited radar range, and if you connect them via the booster gates, that you can use to travel between such clusters, it doesn't really offer much of an improvement over the warp gate networks we already have.

 

C)  it would also be cool, to help with finding all the factions buildings is, if you go to their main system go to the capital building and you can buy a map of their faction? would be cool just another idea.

Unexplored sectors have no prescribed content. They're classified as part of the network and as part of the faction territory, but until you actually visit them, there's virtually nothing there.