Guswut

Mouse over the sector in map view and it should give you an overview of the current contents of the system, which will include a quantity of Xsotan ships. And I may be misremembering, but I recall that if a fleet of Xsotan or pirate ships warp into a sector and I leave that sector, they'll often be gone when I return (usually after not visiting for either a few hours, or having restarted the game, etc). It certainly seems like it'd make sense to have a "garbage collection" system set up to clean up the possibility of massive war fleets overloading a single sector.

No worries, glad to be able to make sure things get sorted!

The "trade route" tab of your trading system will give you almost all of the data (what the item is (hover over the icon on the left), and both where you can buy it and where you can sell it (sector and station)) you need to find trade routes. The only other data that you need is the quantities, which you'll find by first visiting the sell-to station to see how many they're willing to buy. In the current design of the game, more expensive items (such as all of the accelerators, or fusion reactors (my first trade (which I waited until money started to become a major issue) was selling around eight thousand of those puppies, and it landed me over one hundred and fifty million money units), etc) as you can often find them in decent amount of volume. Low-size high-volume low-value items don't really seem all that worth it, but then again they are also likely a whole lot more stable of a choice (as opposed to spending the majority of your time trying to find that multi-hundred-million-money-unit trade), but I'm not sure. Your purple trading system will likely give you a dozen or more systems that it'll remember, so make a bunch of jumps in nearby space (prioritize systems that have more things, and ideally ones that having trading posts, or factories with high-value things). When you enter a new system, open up the trade menu and first see if any new trade routes have appeared. They (at least for me) are sorted by net profit (actual profit you make from the trade) so new good trades will appear at the top. After that, take a look at the station-selling-to-you tab and see what things sell what. Try and get an idea as to what's expensive (such as all of the accelerators), and what types of places sell them (Accelerator factories, if I recall correctly). Then take a look at the station-buying-from-you tab and see what things stations want to buy. Science labs will often want accelerators (if I recall correctly), so you know if there is a science lab near an accelerator factory you've got a possible trade route. Finally, make sure to double check how many items a station wants to buy from you before you go and stock up on said item. Nothing is worse than filling up your cargo hold with an excellent buy, only to find out the station only wants two. You've then got a load of capital bound in an extremely dangerous place (a physical item as opposed to money units which are immortal and untouchable from what I've seen) and also have the additional headache of being forced to find a new route (or more than one). Good trading!

Are you sure about that? The obvious (at least to me) way to handle a shared energy pool would be to build relatively-massive generators and absurdly-massive energy-containers. And with shield blocks no longer being required to handle my shield strength (assumably at least, more on that below) I can focus more on having a crazy amount of power storage and power generation (I like laser weapons so I usually have overly-robust power generation anyway). How, exactly, would shield blocks even work in your suggested change? Would they function more like integrity field generator blocks, in that you just need to have one to cover your ship (or a few spread around if we take the integrity field generator block model further and make it so shield coverage requires spaced shield blocks)? The change to having boost/afterburners use a flat percentage of your battery could surely change the way the game was played in PvP, but I don't think I've ever needed more than two or so seconds of boosted-fleeing-for-my-life speed before I was well outside of range of my enemies. If the goal is to keep players from being able to flee as easily, wouldn't it make more sense to have more hyperspace inhibitor ships (I think they only show up with headhunters, not entirely sure on that but they certainly do show up) perhaps even by adding it as another block? When activated (via the energy menu, possibly a hotkey) the hyperspace inhibitor would work like a hyperspace core except in reverse. All ships within range (or possibly a scaling distance to scaling effect within range) would get a reduced jump distance, recharge speed, and possibly even an outright jump restriction when within some sort of critical range. Energy usage should likely increase over time until you drain your battery completely (thus making a dedicated hyperspace inhibitor ship useful), or possibly a set time limit before the effect can no longer be continued. For PvE, given that the only NPC I've found that will warp away was this would be relatively useless. But for PvP play this would give you a way to control the battlefield as far as disallowing warp jumps long enough to possibly finish off your enemies. Ideally, at some point in the future, NPC AI will start given them an option to try and jump away when they're being overpowered. To handle boosting/afterburning away, how about having force turrets be able to disable afterburners (at least the pull-other version, I'd assume). This would give a good reason to use force turrets (in PvP, and if NPCs get an AI redux that allows them the try and boost away), and possibly even have a dedicated no-boost-for-you ship to lock down your enemy. Imagine an NPC fleet having a few hyperspace inhibitor ships (which they cycle between to keep a state of total lockdown within range) as well as a few force turret ships designed to anchor fleeing prey. If you see them early enough you'd be able to outrange them, perhaps, but that could be handled by having them boost towards an enemy that is outranging them or by having a ship or two that is designed to handle ranged enemies. Of course we're talking about a couple of major changes to the game, and more importantly some much more complicated AI (which is far and away that hardest part of any possible solution), but something in that direction would likely be the way to go. You no longer would be able to always know that you could escape any fight, and actually scouting/observing your enemies would be more important. I'd also say it's less of a change to the game's current mechanics (we're adding one block, adding functionality to a turret, and giving NPCs the AI/fleet design to use these to handle enemies) then making a pooled energy system for shields, warp, and boost. This way we keep the importance of dedicated shield blocks, we also increase the importance of hyperspace cores (either disallowing warp inhibition, or reducing the time until the inhibition effect wears off) on fighting craft, and we add much greater possible complexity to battles which (with well done AI, or enough decent players on a server) can greatly increase the fun of combat. Now, that said, there are still some easy ways to "beat" the above system (for example, a force turret with push other (or even push self, or both) on it which you'd use to push away any ships that get close enough to you to lock onto your ship with a force pull other turret which was locking down your boost) which is how any system will end up until the complexity is so great that you can no longer attempt to plan for all (reasonable) possibilities.

So long as it's a properly-described version (doubling your "size" (volume) will octuple your mass) and not the version you described in this thread: https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2243.msg13607.html#msg13607 Although that aside, I cannot remember a single loading screen tip, which I assume means that they're all relatively basic enough that they were covered in the tutorial. Oh, and speaking of the tutorial, THAT would be the place to handle these types of issues. Perhaps, if not in the basic tutorial, as an "extra"/optional tutorial dealing with "advanced" elements of ship design.

If your point was that it isn't an exact doubling-of-size-octupling-of-mass because of how you handle armor I certainly understand that is a variable to account for (and it certainly isn't possible, as in your spherical-cow example you'd still be multiplying the armor in two dimensions, but I'd assume you would keep it at the same thickness so the armor would only be quadrupled, not octupled) but not one that I accounted for as normally when people "double" their ship they just copy it and paste it at twice the scale (thus also "doubling" your armor). In the case of my tests I had no armor (just the standard hull block that you start out with as your root part) as I was just verifying that Avorion properly dealt with mass (which it does, of course). If your point was something else entirely, I did not understand your remark, sorry! That certainly doesn't make sense, so I may be misreading your statement. But if you double your mass (not the size, volume, deliciousness, or any other such thing. Mass) then you should need to double your thrust (engines, as well as directional thrusters/gyroscopes/etc) to retain the same movement profile. Twice the mass means twice the energy to move it at the same speed. If we had to account for other variables such as drag, fuel, or whatnot, then your point would make sense. I did a verification as follows: Size Mass Thrust Max V. 2³ 0.48 504.2 259 4³ 3.81 504.2 526 8³ 30.46 504.2 831 This was done with a cube of crew quarters and a cube of engine of equal size (the size of each stated under the "Size" column), with exactly the amount of crew as required. Each step I added seven more cubes of the same size for each part ("doubling" the ship's size), and made sure I had enough crew to operate the ship effectively. As I stated in my last table, and thus I did not duplicate here, the ratio between the current and previous mass is pretty much eight (as it should be). The thrust, as noted, stayed the same because I'm producing exactly the same amount of thrust per mass. Interestingly the top speed increased, which is why I decided to record it. Of course, there is no actual "top speed" when you deal with a situation where you have an engine that can run constantly without changing the mass of your ship (especially so in that it doesn't require a fuel source). I'd assume the top speed may have more to do with the size of the engine (or amount of engine mass in total for the ship) but that's another duck for another pond. And as stated above, this isn't accounting for the possibility of doubling a ship but then adjusting the armor to retain the same thickness (while still increasing the other two dimensions). Doing so isn't exactly "doubling", although if you want I can run a quick idealistic test similar to the last two.

Just as a quick note: Every time you "double the size" (make it twice as long, tall, and thick), you actually octuple (by eight) your mass, not by three/tripling. That's because you are "doubling" the ship in each direction (all three of them), and each time it doubles the mass of the ship. So three doubling-s equals an octupling. And just to be sure that Avorion followed the proper laws of physics, I popped in and made sure that doubling a ship (in this case a simple starting block) would octuple, and it does (see below for my notes): Size Mass Delta 2³ 0.41 N/a 4³ 3.26 7.95121_ 8³ 26.11 8.00920... Both delta values (mass divided by previous mass) are within the assumed rounding-error range of eight that I'd say it is safe to safe Avorion follows the square-cube law.

You can right click items to place them into the research slots (as well as empty systems slots, and right clicking a filled system slot removes that upgrade).

A relatively simple "solution" would be to implement some basic collision warning systems. When it detects you are on course to bash into something you get an on-screen alert saying as much. This could either be something included in the basic-most elements of the ship (such as how your basic ship comes equipped with a docking port that evidently is able to move to any and all sides of your ship) or something that you need to install via a system upgrade or possibly as a dedicated block you add to the ship. It would be rather nice to have a block that adds more information such as your current speed (yes, you can select yourself to see your current speed, but that is not a great choice) as well as your current acceleration (meters a second per second for the last second as it were) and your current stopping distance based upon your current orientation and braking thrust, and perhaps also some data about enemy transversal velocity, etc.

And then more common for people to bash into stations as they build ships optimized for higher speeds, and end up overshooting more often.

I haven't seen this happening for me, so it is likely an issue with staying in a single system for way too long and also not killing incoming waves of pirates and Xsotan quickly enough to avoid them stacking. It certainly would make sense to have the dedicated pirate/bandit factions be unable to gain positive faction reputation with the more-reputable factions. There are certainly more complicated ways to solve this, but at this point in time a simple solution to this likely makes the most sense. Sometime in the future it would certainly be interesting to have a more complex dynamic handling faction reputation, which could lead to interesting alliances of two or more factions.

I don't see (and by see, I mean I looked over the thread quickly before recalling that we lived in the wonderful age of technology that allows me to summon forth my control-f to do the looking for me) anyone specifically saying "wasteful", but if I had to categorize it I'd call it "unreliable". Having a 20% chance to produce an upgrade of the same quality level instead of upgrading it means I'd then have to collect another three before I'd get to try again. I'd rather spend a slight bit more time getting a fifth upgrade and not having a chance I'll have to restart my progress. Good luck with your gambling!

I've modified the script by changing two parts of line one (the one and only line, the one line to rule them all and in the darkness automatically research them (so long as it's more than or equal to five)) as follows: https://www.diffchecker.com/QWCPZwJs Specifically, change "if#L>=3" to "if#L>=5", and "if#P>=3" to "if#P>=5". I tested on (a copy of) my current game and it worked perfectly well. This, of course, isn't adjustable in-game, but I don't think that's much of an issue until Cypher has a chance to update the mod. Yeah, when I first opened autoresearch.lua I was overwhelmed by the uhhh, let's call it lack of whitespace. Thankfully I understood the concept of what the script was doing (find three of the same item) and knew to search for the number three. I tried to read through what, exactly, the script was doing at those parts but I quickly gave up and just changed it to a five, and all was well. Good luck, and thanks Cypher for the awesome mod!

So the issue is that you've got a weapon (or collection of weapons, if you've found a turret factory and mass produced those railguns) that are extremely overpowered (partially because they are currently bugged in how they handle damage piercing which makes them do WAY more damage than they should), which makes the game boring, correct? Perhaps you should try removing the extremely overpowered weapon to see if that helps the game feel more difficult?

So does that mean you are playing on "Insane" difficulty mode with "Full" collision damage, and have gotten to the very center of the galaxy where things are the most dangerous?