Synaps3

I was looking at the map the other day and it occurred to me that 80% of the galactic map is useless. Most of the territory is far from the center and therefore super low difficulty. The way the game is designed ensures there is a ton of useless low level real estate and a tiny concentrated bit of high value real estate. Wouldnt it be more interesting if there was more to explore? It even makes me wonder if the game would be better flipped...put the newbie area in the center and make things harder further out. Make the barrier preventing you from escaping the core instead of entering it. Then the endgame would be full of endless possibility instead of a tiny concentrated area of a couple dozen sectors while everything else is ignored.

I had a thought for how to implement fleet formations and tie them into the captains system. Goals: 1. Allow ships to fly in formations 2. Add formation roles for certain ships - the flagship, the ships of the line, the support ships 3. Avoid collisions when formations intersect with asteroids 4. Do this without changing the current ship control and AI much so it's not a heavy lift for the dev team. Part 0 - Additions to the captain system Add a new captain, perhaps "admiral" who is the only captain capable of taking the new "form fleet" operation detailed below. A possible bonus for the admiral would be 1% shield strength for each ship added to a fleet, but that's up to you. So 10 ships would each get 10% higher shield maximum (or shield durability perhaps) while part of a fleet. For all other ships supporting the one with the admiral, they act using the existing sector orders, so just like ships set to "mine sector" will start mining, ships set to support a fleet will continue their fleet behaviors on jump-in. Part 1 - Fleet UI 1A Map UI: New UI should be added to the map screen along with the existing captain operations orders to "form fleet." The ship forming the fleet must have an admiral aboard or they cannot take the operation. Downside: implementing a fleet as an operation probably means fleets would disband if you sent them on a scouting or mining operation. There are other ways to define a fleet, for example as part of the control-groups (ctrl-# in the map screen) but that requires additional logic and development so it's more expensive for devs to build and I don't think it buys you very much. 1B Ship UI: A new single-select option (drop down menu for example) should be added to the ship information for all player ships, titled "fleet role" with two options: "Front Line" and "Support Line" This will determine where in the fleet formation they are placed. 1C Tactical UI: The tactical UI in sector will need a selection option to select a fleet existing in the sector, and new errors will need to be created for ships given commands when they are already in a fleet (they refuse all other orders.) Fleets are commanded in the tactical UI by selecting the flagship and giving it orders. The rest of the fleet follows the flagship by keeping to their location in the formation and taking the same target as the flagship. Ships acting as flagship also gain a new button in sector orders to disband the fleet. Part 1 - Formation implementation Ship formations can be implemented as an invisible voxel shape, with each ship at the center of one voxel block. The fleet voxel shape scaled using the existing ship-scaling logic to contain as many blocks as there are ships. The invisible voxel takes its number of boxes from the number of ships in the fleet, and its block scaling sets each block (all blocks are the same size) to the largest dimension of the largest ship designated to be in the fleet. If this is too hard you might use the dimensions of the ship which starts the fleet, but then a tiny ship founding a fleet of large ships will cause collisions when turning. Some 2d examples of fleet shapes you might implement are attached. Obviously the sphere one should be an actual sphere and this is just the middle layer. Part 2 - Defining voxel fleet shapes Fleet shapes will be defined as invisible voxel objects not intended to be edited by the player. I suggest a two-line, a sphere, and a wedge to start. In each voxel fleet shape the devs must indicate three types of blocks: One flagship block, at the front and center of the formation, and then a 50/50 split of front-line and back-line blocks. Ships always use the center of their designated fleet-shape block as their navigation target. Ships will either occupy front-line blocks or support line blocks in the fleet-shape according to their behavior selected in the ship UI drop down in part 1A. The exception to this is the ship which founded the fleet, which always takes the "flagship" block in the fleet shape. Part 3 - Ship behavior when using the "in fleet" sector behavior 3A Basic Navigation: When part of a fleet, ships jumping into a system will a) select a fleet-shape voxel as theirs and mark it as occupied. The occupied status of the fleet voxels can be maintained by the founding ship. Ships will then navigate to the center of their chosen voxel. As the Flagship moves and takes orders, the fleet shape moves, keeping the flagship at the center of the flagship block, and all other ships navigating continuously towards the center of their blocks. 3B Collision Avoidance: When the destination at the center of a fleet-shape is blocked by an object, ships will try to stop in place until their destination opens up again. 3C Targeting: All ships in the fleet select and attack the same targets that the flagship does. If they can't reach, too bad. Part 4 - Disbanding Fleets can be disbanded by either selecting the flagship and issuing it the "disband fleet" option in sector orders. The fleet is automatically disbanded if the flagship is destroyed in combat. Part 5 - Stretch goal - Repair targets Flying together in a fleet makes repair ships more viable since their targets for repairs will be nearby. I propose allowing repair turrets to be designated as auto turrets with the default behavior to auto-repair any nearby friendly. Might already work this way, I don't know. In addition, new UI should be added to allow repair fighters to act using the same auto-targeting behavior. Ships should prioritize launching combat fighters before repair fighters.

You can also stack transport software and use transport blocks to get materials between them... i think. I do this on my low level factory chains but I dont know how to see if it's working or not.

EDIT: Issue found! You can't open the trade console with a trade port while inside it the way you can with other stations. I'll open a minor bug for that. hello Avorion community. I'm wondering if I should make a bug for this. I am in a multiplayer server with three other friends. I built a trading post today in an allied capital system. The station design is absolutely unchanged from that I use for other stations successfully (I used it for a water station 20 minutes prior to this one and it worked fine) Crew were assigned, cargo holds empty, and i tried to open the station for business...and there is no trade goods menu item. The only things I can do at this station are buy cargo license and view the bulletin board, along with the usual transport mode and exit to drone etc. Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? Below is a screenshot of the station showing there is no menu option. The good news is that if this is indeed a bug I can easily get the server state sent to the DEV team for analysis.