Nyrin

Problem statement: the game encourages you to juggle turret installations. Mining right now? Delete/replace all your salvaging lasers. Salvaging now? Reverse. Using some of your arbitrary slots on either of those and pirates attack? Remove your civil turrets so you have more armed ones available. Pirates dead? Go remove your armed turrets so you can mine again. Getting even sillier, since there's no combat/damage restriction on turret placement, you can have all your long-range weapons equipped for initial engagement, swap to a different set of turrets at medium range, then yet another set for close range--or alternate anti-shield/anti-hull weapons in the fight. This is weird from a "lore" perspective (guns instantly appearing/disappearing from the sides of a ship in the middle of combat is odd), but more importantly it's very tedious to manage and doesn't contribute to gameplay. Proposed solution: Allow players to place as many turrets on the ship as they'd like (or limit it to a large number to avoid people doing dumb things) Instead, just restrict based on the slot count of *active* turrets via their groups, and provide a salient error when trying to activate above slot count (including for the default group) Optionally, add a group activation delay (e.g. 10 seconds, perhaps less out of combat) while gunners move, power reroutes, or whatever--this would circumvent weapon group dancing (possible now, but would become much more convenient and accessible) being the optimal way to fight and introduce tactical choices around losing firepower for a bit to get a better situational fit with your weapons Optionally again, restrict turret placement during combat (just like block placement) since advance preparation is much more accessible Optionally once more, add some extra clarity to the UI about turret groups--maybe tabs/rows for each group with a summary slot count to quickly see what you're dealing with Intended result: players mess around with turrets in build mode much less and manage more with groupings in the ship menu. Swapping roles/specializations becomes much less tedious. Pausing (or moving very quickly without pause) to delete/add turrets in a frenzy stops carrying any advantage.

The galaxy map is only getting more important and making it streamlined to use goes right along with that. This is mockable using something like AutoHotkey, but having bindings for a few more of the common galaxy map things would be fantastic: Focus on search (like the bar was clicked) and clear the contents -- equivalent to Ctrl+E in a web browser (and that'd be a nice one to reuse) Show/hide toggle for stations/off-screen/operation ships (love that we have this breakdown now!) Maybe Ctrl+Shift+1/2/3? Enter coordinates to current mouseover position a la right click menu -- 'g' for 'go,' maybe? Tag current mouseover position's sector -- 't' would make sense Add a note to current mouseover sector -- 'n' makes sense here Attached is a (very) rudimentary .ahk script that simulates this, though it can't easily be smart about things changing order in the right click context menu. avorion.ahk

Edit: realized this likely doesn't belong on the beta board given it's longstanding, but don't see a way I can initiate a move! In any other genre of game, this would probably off the table to be a pedant about--but with a sci-fi theme, I feel like it's a bit more reasonable to be a stickler about science. "Power" and "energy" are distinct. Power is energy over time. Generators output power while batteries store energy. Reading "generated energy: 2.4 GW" likely makes a lot of people (passingly, but avoidably) groan internally. It'd be a small but meaningful string update: Power producers (generators, solar panels) could have their descriptions updated Anywhere a unit of power is used (MW, TW, GW), it could be called "power" and not "energy" As a bonus, "unlimited powah" jokes could start up in full force

It's not the highest priority, but it's also not the hardest thing: the verbiage used around turrets can be quite a bit clearer. Current word choices get the general idea across, but they're very "quirky:" "Turret slot" is a bit awkward. Turrets don't go "into" anything, they get attached to something. The normal aeronautical term for this is "hardpoint" and that's used in a lot of other games. If subsystems can add cargo space, it feels natural that they can add hardpoints, too, and it feels right that big guns could span multiple hardpoints. "Slot" may as well be "thingy," as it's not conveying anything physical or precise about what's going on. The words for describing kinds of turrets can be simplified: "Weapon:" instead of "armed," which is ambiguous (as armed can just mean "active" or "ready"), or "combat," which isn't bad but struggles in having a good comparison word ("non-combat turret" is wordy), describing what the turret is simplifies things. If a turret's main job is to blow things up, it's a weapon. "Tool:" we have both "unarmed" and "civil" in different places right now. Neither of these is ideal in conveying what's intended--"unarmed" can just mean "unavailable" or "inactive" while "civil" is outright unclear. Like before, describing what it is helps: if its main job is to harvest, fix, or move things, it's a tool. "Universal:" the word "arbitrary" carries some very specific connotation of something being random, capricious, and/or meaningless. That's not what we really want here semantically; the idea is that you can mount anything to this hardpoint and "universal" captures that well. "Flexible," "multi-purpose," and a lot of other things can work, too, though I prefer the simplicity of "universal." "Countermeasure:" I don't have a big beef with "defense," but this might be more precise. This could all feed into some very slick and elegant UI changes (like having a clearer demarcation of hardpoint types and availability in the ship menu), but the naming is a very quick way to tighten things up.

That'd be really cool! And as a tagalong idea, use the calculation time and other wait between map sector selection and jump as a low-thread-priority preload of the new sector (in a disposable temp cache in case nobody actually ends up jumping there). It'd be really slick if we could eventually get to the point that you just see a predictable few seconds in a warp tunnel every time you swapped and it'd REALLY boost the immersion aspect.

I believe that research just does gives you a reroll using the tech level for the sector where the research station is. 60-100% chance for a rarity upgrade for 3-5 base items with material randomly selected from the inputs, then all stats and properties rerolled within the range of the tech level. For any given tech level/rarity/material combination, there's a REALLY wide range of possible outcomes, so you're right that you very frequently end up with an output item that's worse than the inputs--especially if the tech level of stuff going in was already high. That's actually the intended design at the moment as far as I know, but it's an interesting idea to treat research as a "continuous improvement" thing; maybe adding a tiny bit of tech level to the base sector tech level based on the inputs, with some reasonable cap on it to avoid infinite growth.