Amazigh

This is basically the exact reasoning I had in my head for why shields do nothing for collisions. And on the subject of collisions: As demonsangels69 said, 100m/s is more or less 223MPH, and 100m/s is SLOW in avorion terms. So yeah, when you stop and think about the speeds ships are travelling at, you get a much better appreciation for why collisions do so much damage.

Maybe rather than a new block type, give integrity field generators an "overcharge" option Takes a few seconds to start up, during which time any shields you have are disabled. Maybe startup time could scale based on proportion of integrity field blocks compared to ship size? So just having some tiny ones scattered around to protect your ships skin would lead to a LONG startup. While active shields are kept offline. Provides a damage reduction on covered blocks, (exact value could scale with material used in the integrity field?) but say 90% or so as the maximum, any higher and it starts being *too* good. Gradually increasing energy drain when active, if you run out of energy it shuts down and can't be reactivated until you regenerate a portion of your battery, like how afterburners are limited when your battery runs out. This would save from adding a new block type, and would in theory give this option to all ships. But to have a quick startup (something necessary as the power drain stops you from keeping it up always) would take a notable amount of blocks assigned. Just an idea.

You do realise that a majority of the power of a nuke is caused by the shockwave? In space they're really anemic. There's no atmosphere to carry the shockwave, so all that hits your ship on a proximity detonation is the flash of light, which loses power over distance very rapidly. Sure they are still deadly on contact explosions, but that requires a direct hit. Fighters are a bad idea, true. you'd not want to sit inside something with so little armour, But Drones? those are definitely viable. As they don't need a pilot, they can be smaller than a fighter would need to be, and as such even harder to hit. So if they have a comparably accurate weapon to a larger ship the drone can score reliable hits from much further away. Not to mention that a drone can manoeuvre at obscene G-forces and have no worries about pulping the pilot.

I'm pretty sure that if you have a commander in a second ship and it's set to escort you, it will try and jump with you assuming it has sufficient jump range. But a way to have small ships carried with you would be neat.

This would be really nice. I completely approve of this suggestion.

From what i've seen in This Thread the plan is to have larger turrets have longer range, but otherwise unchanged stats.

Another reason why torpedoes are balanced in that game? The artificial limitations of visibility, destroyers are "stealthy" and can't be seen from as far away as battleships, so they can sneak up and fire torpedoes without having to run through a barrage of fire continuously. In avorion there's nothing stopping a battleship firing it's main guns at a fighter from 8km+ away and making it extremely hard to get into the close range needed to score hits with their torpedoes. It'd be really nice if each weapon class had it's own niche, like plasmas being hands down the best anti-shield weapon, teslas the best all-around weapon in exhange for really short range, bolters very good against hull, rails better against hull than bolters, but only un-armoured hull, and so on for all the other weapon types. I'm hoping that the dev intends to rebalance weapons at some point, because currently railguns are The best weapon type hands down, they're one of the longer range weapons, have good base damage, and the penetration mechanic makes them insane against hull. Not to mention that they are hitscan and have high accuracy.

This is a really neat suggestion, really like the idea. Could be implemented as blocks or as modules As modules there would have to be some sort of restriction to how many turrets it can effect, maybe it could have reduced effect when you go over the limit, to make it less of a hard cap. Tier could influence power drain, number of turrets, and the potency. As blocks it'd just be a flat boost, maybe you'd have to mount the turrets on the heatsink/capacitor blocks in order to get the bonus, or even just have the boost be scaled with the number of turrets it effects, so with 2* as many turrets you'd get half the effect from the same sized block, etc.

if this is something that can happen, its already a fatal problem for game balance. So, you're saying that having a best weapon is fatal to game balance? Or are you saying that being able to mass-produce this best weapon is fatal to balance? A thing to remember about the game, i'm pretty sure it's built around co-op PvE rather than PvP. To quote Koonschi: To put it into this context: if you don't want to oneshot all the enemies there's nothing forcing you to use the as many of the best guns as you can, you could use less guns, or guns that aren't as good, it's all up to what you want.

So you're telling me that the ENTIRE ship is made from chobham? even the screen that clearly had a round go straight through it? Most of my perceptions of "realistic" space combat are based on Children of a Dead Earth just so you know.

With the ability to manufacture found turrets in bulk, this problem does not go away. Ultimately that's a balance issue, which turns out to be completely independent of how exactly turrets are obtained, contrary to the dev's claim (I am also a programmer/designer). You may be able to mass produce the best turret you have, but remember, you could find a better turret as a drop. and suddenly you have to mass produce your turrets again. Sure, eventually you'll have the best possible RNG on a turret and have the best possible stats, but that's really unlikely to happen, so it'll basically always be worth keeping an eye on all the new turrets you get, but can still mass produce any that you want to. They seem dead set on the idea, guess playing Starmade and From The Depths, really influenced them? It's a neat mechanic in those games I won't deny, but I don't think it quite fits in with how Avorion is designed.

There is an alternate flight mode, toggled with F2, where you have can ramp your thrust up/down using X/C/V (iirc) and your pitch/yaw is controlled with WASD, apparently it was the original control scheme for the game. You might want to give it a shot.

One thing that really irks me about that scene: Where's the spalling? Because unless the entire ship is made from some super space material that doesn't spall at all, then those rounds that just punched neat holes in the ship should have also caused a spray of fragments to scatter across the crew compartment, which would at least wound anyone even remotely near the impact point. Not to mention the ridiculously close range that the combat is taking place at. For a show that's trying to be realistic, having ships literally fly past each other is completely insane. Gun range is more like 8KM in a proper realistic setting. (making a guess on the size of the stealth ship, effecive range is based on target size and all) The ship in the expanse is 48m long, so that'd be a 4.8 block unit length ship, manoeuvrability is for sure, the least of your worries at that scale.

Then why bother spending hours designing your battleship if some schmuck in his tiny poverty bomber that took like 2 minutes to make can kill you with ease? Also consider the following: Torpedoes that are powerful enough to pose a threat to a battleship are small enough to fit on a bomber. A battleship is easily two orders of magnitude larger than a bomber, as such it can fit a good dozen torpedoes with room to spare for anti-bomber weaponry/fighter bays. So, how exactly is this bomber a viable ship again?

This is the main point i'd argue for the current style of turret/weapon systems. With the current system you have to work with what's on hand, meaning that every enemy/shop has a chance at giving you a better weapon that what you currently have. Only in the later-game can you (to some extent) pick specific weapons when you have access to turret factories and the requisite components, but even then you can't make exotic or legendary turrets in a factory. With "block based" turrets, as said above, you'll just build the best turret you can, and always use that exact same design because it's the most efficient. (just like how railguns are the go-to weapon at the moment) This is debatable, as the only "building" you have to do in order to beat the game is to place turrets on shipyard bought ships. If it was really a building game then you'd have no choice but to build your own ship(s), and not be able to get by with buying randomly generated ones.

Had an idea for a new weapon type, Torpedoes. Fixed mount weapon, no turret traverse. Larger size than a turret, say 1*1*3 for a "small" launcher. Fires a large missile that can be intercepted. Basically they fire a fighter that crashes into enemy ships and explodes. Long cycle time between shots, easily 10 seconds for the shortest reloading launchers, torpedoes are big and all. Drains a lot of energy to reload, as a balancing feature. While Torpedos are guided, they can't exactly turn very well and are not exactly the fastest thing out there, and as such they can be dodged if you have a decently agile ship. What i'd imagine their stat block to be: Damage - Obvious. Burst Size - Number of torpedoes that it'd fire, with a 0.1 second delay between each launch, recharge starts after last one is fired. Range - Torpedoes would have a lifetime, and this would be an approximation of their range based on that. Recharge Time - How long it takes to reload the launcher. Recharge Cost - The energy/second cost while the launcher is reloading. Speed - Top speed of the torpedo. Acceleration - Acceleration of the Torpedo. Maneuverability - How fast the torpedo can turn. Health - Health of the torpedo. Burst fire torpedoes would do less damage per shot, and have less health, comparing an equivalent 4 shot to a 1 shot: Both have the same total damage. The 4 shot has slightly higher overall health for its shots, but as the health is split 4 ways, as such it's a lot easier to take one or two out and cut down some of the damage, but harder to take them all out and prevent all the damage. And to make things more interesting, rather than there just being *normal* torpedoes, i'd imagine there being two distinct types instead. Thermal Torpedoes: Have a very high damage multiplier to hull, but low base damage. Ion Torpedoes: Have a very high damage multiplier to shields, but low base damage. This would make torpedoes an interesting weapon to use. As if you just packed on Thermal Torps, then you'd have a lot of trouble taking down shields, and the opposite for Ion Torps. As such this would encourage players having a mix of weapons on their ship, eg: Ion Torps to take down shields, And then Bolters to finish of their hull.

The current turret system is going to have a rework, which will include the ability to customise the looks of your turrets. Also the ability to scale your turrets is planned to be implemented at some point. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that the Devs are not going to have weapons that you build block-by-block, there's more of a focus on the "diablo style" random loot that we currently have than being able to build ideal turrets as/when you want to.

I know i'm playing devils advocate here but: I think that any ship that has a currency cost to repair it's armour is a "victim" of aesthetics, with all those tiny detail blocks. Because you could quite easily make your ship have a giant block of armour mounted on the front protecting the entire ship, backed up by an integrity field, and (in theory) this one block could possibly have more health than the entire ship health bar, thus meaning that you'd die before that block broke under enemy fire. With such a design you'd never actually have to spend materials to repair, and could just wait for your mechanics to do their job. Now lets see on of my earlier posts: Now, how about some alternate ways of making shields less "OP" other than making them cost materials to upkeep: [*]As suggested earlier, increased energy usage while recharging/etc. [*]Bump them up to trinium as the first material that gets them, making them closer to being an end-game thing. [*]Simply cut their regen rate notably, this would put them more on par with mechanic armour repair. Also, why is it a problem that shields have no cost?

This is in the game currently. And to note, i literally just opened up the game to be 100% sure i'm telling it exactly how it is. [*]Open the Player menu, default binding: I [*]Select the Inventory tab [*]Make sure you have the chat entry box Closed. [*]Ctrl-Click on the turret/module. [*]Job done.

One issue with this that immediately comes to mind: having "infinite" range on your weapons means that your projectile will keep travelling forever if it misses. As such, you could easily clog up a sector with hundreds upon hundreds of projectiles if you use say, massed chainguns as your weapons and this could cause severe lag. Sure you could have projectiles delete themselves once you have too many, but this could cause issues if you have several ships armed with chainguns. Maybe damage drop-off could be added to some energy weapons to make them more interesting in their usage, but otherwise I feel that weapon range mechanics work fine as they are. A game that has weapons function as you described is Children of a Dead Earth, which is a highly realistic spaceship combat simulation game, where this level of realism in weapon behaviour fits. While Avorion, which does have some realistic elements, is more of an "arcadey" game in how it is designed.

Because... that's basically the whole point of shields in every sci-fi setting ever? A layer of defenses that can take damage and be "repaired" with no real cost to the user. Ok, here's some ideas, multiplier values are just placeholders to give an idea: [*]Shields have double the energy consumption when recharging. This represents the shield having to do "work" to recharge itself. [*]If a shield has to "restart" after being dropped, then energy consumption is tripled for a few seconds before it starts recharging. This would represent something like shields having to go through a degaussing cycle before they can start up again. Also, if you lack the energy capacity to fully supply this "degauss cycle" then it would be lengthened in proportion to the energy deficit. [*]Shield upgrade modules add a multiplier to the energy shields consume. Maybe merge the two shield module types as well?

You have to pay the engineers/mechanics to keep the generators functioning, would you not consider that an "upkeep" cost?

As far as I can tell martin, you seem to have a misconception about how turrets themselves work. You seem to think that turrets are purely sat on an effectively friction-less mounting, so they can with no effort maintain aim angles while the vehicle they are mounted on turns. (this raises a question with how the turret turns when it is only attached with a friction-less mount) I'm pretty sure that yes, most turrets are mounted on a bearing ring or similar structure that cuts friction down, but this is not to allow them to maintain facing while the turret turns, but to reduce friction so that the gears/etc that drive the turret don't have to deal with friction of the base of the turret against the hull of the vehicle. So in effect the turret is "fixed" to the hull by the gear/etc system, which is what allows the turret to turn when you want to aim at something. And you saying that turrets should never stop moving and constantly sway back and forth as this would be "realistic", this is just.... no? Why would you want a turret that can't keep itself pointed steadily at a stationary target? At the ranges we're dealing with in avorion (easily 4km+) even the slightest movement of a turret will result in your shot going tens or hundreds of meters off target. As such you're basically suggesting that turrets should be incapable of aiming at long range.

I'd imagine something like each turret type gets a specific bonus could be neat, eg: +range on lasers +RoF on chainguns Not necessarily those exact changes, but something along those lines.

Hadn't thought of it changing range, and that seems a whole load easier to balance. Maybe if there's some minor downside to larger turrets, slower traverse? more crew? then that'd actually be really nice. But longer ranges does bring up another issue i've found, it can be hard to target enemies unless you're right on top of them, especially with the skinny "stickships" that you sometimes get. Possibly a "zoom window" Ala mechwarrior could help with that?