Morbo513

As a returning player I've yet to build a decent ship, but one of my main criticisms of the game was how building your ship for speed and maneuverability was far less rewarding (mechanically) than a slow, hulking borg cube. It was certainly a lot more fun to play with a nimble ship and run circles around your targets, but incredibly frustrating when your damage output was negligible compared to your opponents' shields and hull, just because of the size differential. If the ability to avoid getting hit through maneuvering and agility is practically nullified by the game's mechanics then it becomes a soulless stats game. I don't know exactly how the recently-changed mechanics affect the viability of evasive action or building ships for speed, alpha-strikes and not getting hit but I digress - having ships be slow and lumbering by necessity undermines the creativity afforded to the player in designing their ships.

I agree that changes to turret mechanics would be nice. You're already plenty limited by how many crew you can accommodate imo.

I think a first-person view and tighter flight controls would be necessary to fully take advantage of it though. With turret locked weapons it's difficult to tell where your exact point of aim actually is.

Yo I'm stoked

Is auto-aim its own distinct thing from independent targeting? Regardless, if fixed forward, a turret is no longer a turret. I'm sure I made a similar suggestion before, but something I'd really like to see is a block that you "imbue" with a turret, the number you can depending on volume vs turret size. Larger X/Y scale would add more barrels in the same fashion as thruster ports, but Z would let you have multiple weapons firing out the same "cluster". This is what I've been doing I'm not sure if you're referring to the suggestion, or the current state of things

I'd like for the system to stay as it is, but for the swapping to take time. It'd be cool to have "sets" of upgrades that you can quickly toggle between, but takes time to reconfigure. Imo ideally it'd be based on presence of enemy ships to determine if it does take time, because it might be tedious if you're in an empty sector and just mining.

Simply enough, I suggest that placing a turret on a rotation lock reduce the number of gunners required to man it by one. Logic: Presumably, the gunnery crew of each turret has one person aiming, the other(s) monitoring/maintaining/loading etc. With the turret fixed in place, the aiming part is up to whoever's flying, because wherever the ship's pointing, the turret is. That's by no means the most compelling reason I make this suggestion though: Fixed forwards weapons are a disadvantage, especially if they have the independent targeting trait. For one, it means you're almost always going to be facing front and travelling directly towards the enemy when engaging, which results in a more linear damage pattern and guaranteed windows of opportunity to get accurate shots off (due to not having to lead). Generally, the game design as it currently stands discourages small, fast and nimble ships, where fixed-forwards weapons make the most sense. Due to crew constraints, it can often be difficult to achieve reasonable firepower against the sacrifices to other systems and stats you need for speed and maneuverability. This would put it on the level in my opinion.

Thanks. It's also pretty frustrating that build mode doesn't save whether you had mirror toggled - Had it a few times now where I've gone to build up or modify parts of my ship, but only done one half cause of this.

This is a quick suggestion to print the dimensions of the block you're about to place, probably included with the tooltip indicating cost. Helps keep things consistent when using small scale-steps.

I'm disappointed that this is still the case. The extreme cost-effectiveness of shields, and how they're practically necessary instead of a choice with drawbacks, is my single biggest complaint with the game's mechanics. I made a (very obnoxiously worded) series of posts addressing how the combat could be made more interesting by varying the weapons' properties, and how they interact with shields, with some being able to bust them down efficiently, some being able to penetrate depending on distance, that sort of stuff. Shields being a universal barrier against all damage except collision is simply a bad design choice in my opinion, and the degree to which you can inflate their stats, as OP says, makes combat trivial and uninteresting.

+1, projectile weapons are difficult to consistently aim and hit with if there's relative motion between you and your target, especially considering lag in MP.

Bump. I've not played Avorion since around the time I made this thread, and it's between this, shield dynamics (or the lack thereof) and AI as to whether that changes. I'd like a straight answer from the devs on how they feel about this or the many other wastes of time I wrote up on this forum back then; yes or no to specialised weapon/damage types instead of just delivery, yes or no to making shields a compelling choice over foregone conclusion or necessity, yes or no to having the AI be challenging in their behaviour in addition to firepower, shield strength and numbers. These are questions the answer to which will determine whether your game is exciting, compelling and supportive of diverse design philosophy, or whether success in combat revolves around "More of everything", ie whether a ship's stats surpass a certain threshold rather than their design and player skill playing a significant role. Apart from AI, one way to achieve those things is right there in the OP. Forgive me for sounding entitled - this game's potential is vast and I'm worried it won't be fulfilled.

On point

That's a good question, the answer depends on AI development, which I imagine would follow rather than precede establishing how they perform in gameplay.

That's the idea. Nothing would stop someone from equipping multiple turret types to be the jack-of-all-trades type though.