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?

That's called "level scaling" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LevelScaling for some more details if you'd like) and it's one of the worst ways to handle difficulty in games. Firstly, you already have control over the difficulty of enemies through two mechanisms: The galaxy generation setting for difficulty (which appears to handle how the scaling of enemies work, https://steamcommunity.com/app/445220/discussions/0/135507403155179996/#c135507403155348457) and your distance to the galactic core. If things aren't difficult enough you likely picked a galaxy difficulty that was too low, or you are not close enough to the core. Secondly, using a ship's mass (and as such the mass-based class) would mean that a relatively small but extremely over-turreted gunboat would be getting underpowered enemies, whereas massive freighters for trade masters are getting ultra-powerful dreadnoughts. Is that the type of balance you're looking to see? Alternatively, any sort of level scaling will have issues with how the variable or variables used will likely not be effective enough to avoid issues similar to the above. If you scale based upon firepower you end up having no challenge differences from the start to the end of the game, as another common example of a possible form of level scaling. Instead of trying to generally control the difficulty of enemies, a better solution will end up being more complicated AI that handles more powerful players in a more dynamic fashion. But that's a different topic entirely.

Don't belong to a faction of people that are going to "scold" you for playing the game the way you want to play it? That aside, so long as you put on integrity field generator blocks to cover your ship, your "pretty"/breakable design should be fairly robust. As stated above, integrity field generator blocks help here in keeping blocks from breaking. Are you finding that you are often taking enough hull damage to actually need to replace blocks? If so, are you making sure to completely cover your ship with full integrity field generator coverage? Additionally, you'll likely want to consider increasing your shielding as shielding keeps any and all hull damage at bay (minus weapons that have the rare trait of shield penetration).

Thank you. That's really all that I care about as I LIKE my cube/cuboid/cubic shape/box-filled-with-goodies design. The problem I had was that it appeared that everyone wanted to burn cubes at the stake and "nerf" them to a point of making them unusable. I agree with the rest of your post, so I won't directly reply to it as there isn't much else to say. ~~~ Ah, understood. For a while I tried to go about carefully aiming my laser death array at my enemies' weapons, shields, and whatnot before I gave up trying to fight against the overflowing damage numbers and finicky aiming cursors and just aim for the center of mass. I don't think I understand how there is a worst possible case as they're directly trading off. It'd be a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none-cube, which wouldn't be hard enough to hit to make a difference, but also not large enough to pack on enough armor to make a difference. You could make a case for the perfect balance being an even more massive cube that is also even more manuverable than a small cube while being just as armored or even more armored compared to a large cube, but I'm not even sure that is possible. I'd assume that there are diminishing returns in place that help to keep this in check, but if that isn't the case then that surely should be something to resolve. I'll keep this in mind in my future designs, thank you! Ah, that makes sense! Yeah, if I recall correctly you can import ships in Space Engineers fairly easily (via the Steam game workshop if nothing else). I actually had to build my first station last night as laser heads were something that my galaxy had evidently forgotten how to produce (or in other words I spent around four hours jumping around like a crazed cube searching for a trade station, factory, or smuggler's den of evil that stocked them). Of course, right after I built my laser head factory, I found a trade station I must have missed that had a hundred of the buggers! The process was fairly simple, and I did pretty much that (smallest design with a station founding addition, etc). It would certainly be interesting trying to play the game using only shipyard-crafted ships which you then edit minimally. Understood. Understood. In my case I find I spend far too much time trying to design something, and then re-designing it when I find flaws with my design (such as finding I that my turning speed isn't as high as I'd like after I've added armor) or when the universe changes to make my design no longer effective (such as when you get the ability to use shields). I am certainly far lazy enough to not spend the hours needed to optimize a design that I can bolt together into a cube and call it a day. To each their own! I've looked it over and it certainly looks like an interesting design. When I have some further free time and feel creative enough to consider it I'll look up some videos on it and see how it functions and if it is something I can adapt to fit my needs. ~~~ I had not read that topic, but all of the examples given show an extremely limited and early range of images. Avorion.net and Avorion's steam page both have a wealth of non-cube shaped ships (as well as some cube shaped ones, especially stations) in both pictures and video. I doubt it was ever actually an issue, but more likely it was just that the game's early days had some cubic ships made by koonschi and/or designed by the game's algorithm (which certainly ends up not being as nice looking as what most players make). While I completely disagree with your usage of "forced" given that the game allows you to completely control the difficulty (both during creation and during your movement through the galaxy) as well as never made cubic shapes more than only somewhat better in the early game (after which shields make it fairly much a non-issue), I just want to make it clear that cube ships are something that shouldn't be forcefully made unplayable (as it seemed to be the way people were suggesting). It makes sense if there was a pre-existing "cube-meta" issue with other games that has helped breed such hatred (to note, when I've played Space Engineers I found it fairly difficult to make cube ships that would also be highly functional, so I believe it may be a bit overblown there as well. I've never played Starmade (or if I have I don't recall anything about it)) and makes sense why people want to try and avoid it in Avorion. Good to know! I've submitted my reply and I'll be interested to see how the results turn out. Make sure to also keep in mind the amount of people that are actively playing the game (http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Avorion is a good enough resource for that) as well as the total number of owners of the game (https://steamspy.com/search.php?s=Avorion is a good enough resource for that). Your data will have to account for your sample size (which will likely be well under a single percent of the Avorion userbase) as well as additionally account for the difference between users that use the forums and don't use the forums. But it'll be better than nothing, that is for sure! ~~~ Had xanion repulsive dashwoods Avorion suspicioN sincerity but advantage nOw him railgun. Remark easily garret nor nay. Civil those mrs enjoy shy fat merry. You greatest xanion jointure saw horrible. He private he on be imagine suppose. Fertile beloved evident through no service railguns elderly is Avorion. 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You may have missed these quotes from koonschi, so just in case: The blocks added are not designed to replace thrusters and directional thrusters. They work fairly differently and allow two (and more, when you mix and match, along with play around with your flight assistance mode) styles of flying. The majority of the jump calculation time appears to actually be calculations Avorion is making to populate the sector. I've "tested" (tried to hunt down the exodus beacons lateish game, only to get stopped by a space-rift blockade, which turned out to be a fort of impassibility) by jumping around thirty sectors into completely empty space (calculation times were only a bit slower than jumping to a nearby empty sector), green dots (depends on the contents of the sector, but usually they weren't high enough to take more than a minute which was my hyperdrive spool up time), yellow dots (usually quicker than green dots, although I didn't hit very many yellow dots), and onto already explored systems (almost always about as quick as nearby empty space or nearby already explored space). Now, I've got a decent computer, so it may very well be an issue of the amount of raw processing power required. I'm certain that koonschi will try and optimize the game, but that shouldn't stop him from adding new and interesting blocks that allow people to play how they want to play.

I noticed this as well, but given that you automatically pay your crew every three hours, and the amount you pay is three times the amount you see in the ship overview, I assumed the problem was that the ship overview was showing the per-hour cost of your crew and thus why it's three times the cost for three hours of pay. It'd make sense to change the automatically pay time to one hour, and possibly also change the crew pay field to have a "/hr" or something to denote that it means the hourly cost of your crew.

Ah, awesome! Thank you for going through the effort of testing and getting that out in the open! Phew, I did not understand the vastness of the brokeness of railguns.

Enter your ship menu (press "p" or click on the spaceship icon in the top-right), go to the energy tab (the second to last, looks like a stylized lightning bolt), and then click on the grey squares on the right hand side. See below:

Very true, and although smaller ships would innately have smaller resources to pull from (energy specifically) you can handle that by using weapons that don't require energy. That could easily mean you have a smallish ship with two or so system slots rocking nearly a dozen chainguns. And that ship could be one of many, a part of a small (not in quantity of ships, but in their size) fleet. That sounds like a terrifying enemy to have to try and fight, especially given how hard aiming can be on small targets. Having avoided railguns thus far (mostly as I really like lasers) I don't really know enough to comment regarding that, but something needs to be done to keep railguns from being as overpowered as it has been claimed (damaging all blocks for all of the damage it does until it reaches the maximum pierce distance or is stopped by a block with more health than it can damage). Both of those factors would make sense as small ships (as I stated above) already wouldn't be able to as easily field high-energy-usage turrets. For non-energy based weapons, having larger/more powerful turrets have much greater recoil would likely be a good way to properly counter that. Of course we are still left with the possibility of small ships that have well balanced weapon loads, and shouldn't be overwhelmed with exceedingly overpowered tiny ships with mega-guns being able to utterly destroy anything in their path.

That's a good point, and one I hadn't considered as I took this thread at face-value as opposed to considering the general usage of "cube-meta". Agreed (disregarding the currently bugged railguns) regarding the simple fact that a ship's integrity field generator system negates pretty much all needs to design hard-to-hit areas (and we aren't even discussing shielding, which unless you specifically obtain shield penetrating weapons, is another "layer" beyond making that a problem). Very true, although if we're accounting for larger profile we then have to account for a larger amount of armor in that one section. But given shielding and integrity field generators, this really is only important when dealing with the bugged railguns (although technically unbugged railguns would still be the biggest issue here) being able to pierce weaker armor plates. A larger armor plate on the front would forgo the railgun's ability to do that. But, again, this is pretty much a non-issue as we have shields, and integrity field generators. I certainly haven't seen anywhere near the same level of "doomcube" ship issues that have appeared to cause the spew of vitriol regarding these rectangular monstrosities, and looking through the Creations forum appears doesn't appear to show it either, so maybe it's all just a backlash from previous games having issues because of their mechanics? Edit: I just found https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2175.0.html which is as close as I could find to something that was a "cube", and that is an awesome build! Maybe I should start a "For The Love Of The Cube" thread in there or something? Or not. To be fair, though, it's likely a basic rule that if you have more than one person together, they'll find something to disagree about. Maybe more than zero people if you get the right person who talks to themselves. Disagreements are certainly not a "bad" thing, and one that drives us to think differently. I don't agree with your argument that easy-to-build is irrelevant because you can load a save file as that's a different thing from building your own ship. Yes, you could also go to the in-game shipyard and have them make a ship for you. Although given that I've never done it (I looked at the interface, nodded twice, and closed it never to open it again (unless I ever get around to making my own stations)) it might be that it only makes horrible ships, I don't think that is a proper way to counter it being difficult to make something that looks good. That said, those people are either lazy (assume this to be connotation neutral, as normally being called "lazy" is a "bad" thing, whereas I don't think that is the case as this is a specific type of required opposite-of-being-lazy-ness for this part of the game) or uncreative (again, connotation neutral as we're dealing with a very specific form of creativity here) is a decent way to describe the reason that cubic builds are attractive. I, personally, don't really like making spaceships look like fictionally-accurate spaceships as they don't look anywhere near as realistic for the situation. And I also don't really have the creativity to come up with something that wouldn't either be an rough copy of an existing ship, or wouldn't just be a collection of functional elements with some sloped blocks to try and make it not-a-cubic-design. I fully embrace the fact that I'm a utilitarian, and that I'm playing Avorion not to make beautiful ships, but to make ships the way I want to make them and then use them.

That is a good counter, and one that (when we are discussing the possible change from the perspective of optimizing the game's player base) is one I certainly cannot refute, and thus concede. I may have been overthinking it, but I am certainly not looking ways to "punish" uncreative/utilitarian players as I am both of those (or at least, I am not creative in a way that works to make spaceships that look like conventional fictional spaceships). I certainly agree with that in part, and I'd suggest you take a look at SageThe13th's Suggestion topic about it (http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1066.msg4805.html#msg4805).