Spacefaring_Guy

I wouldn't mind a completely new mechanic for founding stations - you get a beacon from the shipyard to place where you like, and you choose the station type at the shipyard. When you place the beacon, crews arrive (in small 'not worth scrapping' ships) to build the station over time. Every new ship that shows up, you get billed a portion of the total. Your funds run out, or you cancel the contract... the station is decays to scrap. And you'd get billed extra for any losses due to building in a battle zone (so protect those crews!) and a premium for every sector of distance from the shipyard.

What if... upgrade modules were rare, instead of something you could purchase at a station or pick up at pretty much any battle. What if they couldn't be improved at a lab? What if they couldn't survive a ship exploding? And then what if the game had missions that would reward you with them as part of the story? 'Magic' boxes of Xsostan super-tech that inexplicably improve your ship. I think if you were looking to expand the game content, this would not be the worst way to go.

The simple way would be to ignore health entirely - they either exist or they don't. Then you decide on an algorithm for the odds an attacker or defender is subtracted from the total, with modifiers for the presence of security.

Shared Integrity: Right now I believe the 'join' function only works when the joined blocks have a final shape that matches that of a simple scaled up version of a single block. I wouldn't mind seeing that relabeled 'simplify' and have a new join function that welds blocks regardless of shape, volume, or type, into a single entity for the purposes of manipulation in the build menu, or for damage during combat... though given different types of blocks respond differently to different types of damage, I can see a lot of issues there for the devs. Any such function might have to be limited to blocks of the same type and material. Sloped Armour: You're talking about adding a lot more calculations to projectile impacts... ray tracing every particle instead of dropping it upon initial impact. It'd be nice (especially if you could have reflective blocks for lasers like we have insulating blocks for electrical attacks), but I wouldn't ask the devs to look at it until they've done a million other things first. AI Balance: First, I'd like to see pirates more willing to flee. They shouldn't generally have the backing of a large fleet (you're seeing random individual pirate groups, not sub-units of an umbrella organization), nor the culture of an organization that has members willing to die as cannon fodder for their leader. Xsotan, sure. Pirates, not so much. Factions should have scouts, exploratory expeditions, and strike forces. Mess with a powerful faction and you should have to flee across the galaxy to escape. But mostly, I see your suggestion as a way to exacerbate the issue with no safe building / log off places... no matter how close to the rim you get, after a while you're going to be plowed under by a tsunami of foes. Turret Factory: Turret factories are useless right now, because it's almost impossible to get all the components - even if you try to build your own supply chain you find you can't because the game is incomplete. It would be nice if you could control the appearance of your weapons (or even if the devs just reduced the varieties and let you choose the colour for beam weapons). I would certainly prefer more standard ranges, since I hate having different guns of the same class phase in and out of usefulness during battle.

The current system results in a lot of repetition - a set of parts for each material type - and you get an unwieldy interface as a result. It also mandates a divorce between function and shape. What I would like to see is three rows - material, function, and shape. If you select a lower-tier material that doesn't support a particular block type, that block type would be greyed out in the second row. And of course you'd expect any material you don't actually have to be greyed out as well. And by separating function and shape you'd have the option of, say, a slope or corner hyperspace core. Because why not? And while we're at it... I'd love to see a couple of new shapes - cylinder and sphere, and also 1/4 cylinders and 1/8th spheres for edging. And (really stretching the interface here...) hollow vs. solid if there is a way to separately adjust the wall thickness vs. the overall dimensions. And that's just standard blocks. A related change for turrets would be awesome - select turret type with one row, material on the second, a filter for special attributes on the third, and then a few filter sliders on the fourth for DPS, range, and energy drain. Unlike building blocks that merely require material resources, turrets are their own block, so this would still have to result in a collection of available turrets. And really, rather than have the turrets in the middle of the block menu, they should be split off onto their own build menu (though the two should be conveniently linked with a selector at the top so you can toggle between them instead of having to manage yet another floating window). My 2 cents, anyway.

There are a lot of balance issues involved, and right now pretty much all the content of the game is random battles anyway. Cutting things back too much might remove too much of what little content there is this early in development. I do think that once the game has more to offer, the scale of NPC factions, pirates, and Xsotan fleets ought to be scaled back. Ships are EXPENSIVE, and maybe one frigate and a couple of smaller ships ought to constitute a 'fleet' for any sector that is anything less than fabulously wealthy. Pirates should also be more skittish, preferring to rob the weak. And retreat ought to be a thing for more than just merchants. When you've invested that much in your hardware, you don't want to see it all blown away for nothing.

That would certainly be an exploit (and one resolved with the 'null space' option). The usual player desire is to have a way to log off without risking having their ship destroyed before the server unloads the sector, or to leisurely build a ship in peace... not a place to build indestructible infrastructure.

Why twice the loading screens? Just add another option so it's 'spacebar to continue' or 'N for nullspace'. After all, the safe/editing space could be entirely on the client machine and have effectively no load time anyway. I haven't been adversely affected yet, but my understanding is current safe zones are safe against PvP only, not NPC attack. And you have to find the damn things first.

This is part of the progression mechanic, altering it would be risking a major imbalance in the difficulty gradient. Perhaps the galactic model could be less random and more aligned with the mass distribution of a spiral arm galaxy - so players could spawn in an iron-containing system between arms and near the rim, but once within an arm the material distribution would be more even. Oh, and Avorion already does have a special property. You may enjoy it once you discover it!

Hyperspace. It solves two problems and works for both normal and creative modes. Just shunt the player to some kind of private 'null space' between leaving one sector and arriving in another. A place to go where you don't get exposed when you log off, a place to go when you want to build unmolested. No stars, no asteroids, no debris of any kind. Just a soft, ambient white glow.

Let me break down the interesting (in my opinion, anyway) ideas in your post: 1) Materials should have different attributes other than just mass and toughness 2) Alloys mix and match those values (presumably in fixed process, not an RTG-powered one... please!) 3) Only player-owned entities can create alloys 4) The trading system would allow NPC factions to acquire alloys So the devs would need to (yes, another list!): 1) Come up with additional material attributes 2) Give them an effect on the game 3) Create a system to calculate alloy names and attributes 4) Create a new factory type for generating alloys from standard materials 5) Build a cross-sector trading system to allow NPC factions to utilize them 6) Modify the build menus so you don't need to wade through 2000 copies of the parts list, one for each possible alloy. Tall orders, but in the long run I think worth it. With a creation system that uses 2-6 different input materials and is order-sensitive, you'd have almost 2,000 unique alloys! Give source materials attributes like density (obviously!), hardness, conductivity, machinability (higher rating = easier to work with = more blocks / unit of material), rarity, colour... maybe some other game-specific attributes that affect integrity fields, shields, and hyperspace jumps, and you end up with reasons to look for that 'perfect' alloy for your ships... and maybe a reason to make your integrity field generators out of one alloy, your shield generators out of another, and your armour out of a third. I think the alloy generation algorithm should be randomized at galaxy creation, so every game is different and you can't optimize without doing the research every time. Knowledge from one server should not transfer to another in this case.

I don't hate the stick, I hate the physics. In a universe with shields and integrity fields the spinning isn't so much impossible as improbable and stupid looking. There's too much kinetic energy being transferred to the stick - by orders of magnitude.

Ha! I was totally focused on the server-side and totally overlooked the server-client communication aspect. I believe the average sector is about 1MB, so getting that down to ~100K would be a massive improvement over my sad 6 meg DSL link.

I'm surprised you didn't get at least 90% compression given it's all highly repetitive text with a limited character set. Cool, though. Given how easy it is to compress/decompress text, for a lot of people this should actually speed the system up as they'll have more CPU throughput than disk... if you've ensured the data is decompressed to memory (and doesn't get cached back to disk!) and the files are larger than your disk cluster size. Where this might really shine is if the server engine allocated memory and stored recently active sectors there in compressed format for quick decompression instead of going back to disk. Who knows? Maybe it already does that.

Two notes: 1) 'Rank' should be ship value, so you always have the option to build a low-rank ship. Rising through the ranks would be limited by resource acquisition. Handling turrets on such a ship as you're building is difficult though - what do you do when a 'level 4' ship crosses over to 'level 5' and has a bunch of the previous level of turrets already placed? 2) No artificial hard limit on movement. Rather, have a physics limitation - your ship takes hull damage if you move it beyond its limits (keep it simple, based on total mass). So yeah, you can build a Death Star that could rotate through 360 degrees in under a second, but as it does so so it will tear itself into a nice expanding ring of debris.

For me, it was an enthusiastic co-worker who just wouldn't shut the *&@k up until I tried it. :)

I haven't played Elite since the original on what was probably a PC/AT. I think I get the idea, though. A content team turning out a script update every week (or month) that causes an event on servers applying the update might be interesting. It would probably be difficult to repeatedly come up with something that affects between 1 and 1 million sectors, meshes with the current game state, and is interesting to the players. And the game engine might not have the required underlying support for such scripting yet.

So 1k sectors / GB? You're talking a single terabyte... which used to be a big deal, but not so much these days. Hell, I have a couple of terabytes primary storage on my workstation, and another four in secondary. For better performance on a busy server, you'd probably want that in a nice striped array. Still, if you're the kind of person who likes running their own gaming server, having a RAID controller and a few drives isn't exactly unexpected. You've probably already paid more than what that would cost just for the video card and monitor on your workstation!

'Easy' enough to implement as a new turret type. I think you're looking at a 'station killer', something where you sit several km away from a large target and fire off a shot. If any of you are old enough to have played the first few editions of Wing Commander, you'll be familiar with a good mechanic for these types of weapons. Essentially, the weapon only charges while locked on target. That means you have a nice, nasty weapon that can knock even a decent sized station or capital ship down by 30-50% per shot... but you have to sit there, steady, waiting for the full lock before you can fire; a sitting duck for defensive fighters. And the fact that you're locking on should be detectable by the target (probably not so easy to implement since as far as I know there's no such mechanic in the game currently). It's all about balance. Anything that moves or has a decent escort should be immune to it, but it should be able to pass through shields and be fairly difficult to shoot down. If you were given a new turret with advantages that massively outweigh the disadvantages, you'd be getting a game-killer, not a ship-killer. My 2c, anyway.

What if you had to physically construct hangars, block by block, and the hangar space was defined as the largest possible cube of space enclosed on 5 sides by ship blocks? Then you could identify the cavity to the game as a hanger by putting a docking block in the interior. I agree that the Time Lord module needs to go. Tis a silly thing. As for turrets... what if they were manual fire only (as in, crew is keep the turret operational, not aim/fire it) unless you mounted them on turret blocks that added the 'independent targeting' capability?

If there were a low-resource ship type you could build, a simple freighter that's mostly cargo space, and a captain - and give it orders to haul goods back to a selected base even across multiple sectors that would solve the issue. The AI would need to plan a route, but sectors wouldn't have to actually load unless already loaded. And presumably the AI would have a default of 'run from everyone until you can jump out of there' flight plan. You'd also need to be able to give orders to that ship while it's enroute - I say hijack the player mail system for that. You could request it haul back anything you need and meet up with you at a target sector, or have it turn around mid-trip.

Avorion has a 1000x1000 grid. That's 1,000,000 sectors. Give the average faction 10 sectors and you have 100,000 factions. So why not have fan contests for designing faction ship styles? Build a scout, a miner, a salvager, a cargo hauler, a cruiser, a frigate, and perhaps a large command vessel, submit the collection for voting. There are opportunities for 100K distinct collections.

My problem with the progression mechanic is that you can't explain why the outer rim isn't more or less immediately taken over by someone from the interior with a relatively unbeatable ship. I think that limiting hyperdrives by quite a bit and making rim systems more rare, you'd slow down the game and have a reason why people who have moved on to tougher areas don't bother to come back. And then, you up the difficulty curve as you simultaneously increase the resource availability - sure, there's more titanium than iron, but there are also a lot more people fighting over territory, with nastier weapons. Game balance is an art, and it's likely we'll see a lot of swing back and forth in this game before it's anywhere near 'right' according to the devs (and hopefully a majority of players).

I am not a developer (of the type required to make a game, anyway), but I'd think you'd go with a system where any volume enclosed on 5 of 6 sides that can completely enclose another ship, and with a docking block on the interior, could be considered a hangar. If you were to fly within such a space, you could get the choice to dock, or move the player perspective if both ships belong to the player (exactly like you do now without hangars). But you could ALSO have an idle ship within a hanger become part of the main ship for the game physics. And for simplicity, it would have to turn off all systems like hyperdrive, shields, integrity fields, turrets, etc. Dead blocks while docked. The difficult part might come with primary blocks - when you've decided to deal with both ships as one, so what happens if a ship in the hangar is destroyed? Should the parts drift free? Should they be free salvage to the mother ship? Should the destruction cause secondary damage?

Oooooooh. Want. I don't care if it takes 10 minutes to charge up and it drains all ship power except minimal shield and life support during that period. I want something that will blow a big hole through everything in the sector that's in the line of fire, with one shot, if I actually managed to get it fully charged before someone tore my ship apart. I wonder if you could sort of fake that now with a deep pit in your ship's bow and a bunch of rotation-locked max-tech lasers? You wouldn't get the distance, of course, but for short range you could get the look and a good hunk of the damage.