Falkenherz

Ist das ein Neustart?

Any ETA for the beta to become the main game? I am looking forward to the changes, but don´t want to play pre-release beta branches.

Traveling to the outer rim should feel long and far. I can make this only bearable for me by taking my time and explore stuff on my way. A tip when on the final dialogue: Do NOT end it with ESC-key, or the artifact will not spawn. Took me some hours to figure that one out...

Ship got destroyed by enemy fire. After recovering turrets, also during combat, they had lost the trait of independent targeting.

Dickkopf! ;)

I disagree. At late game, I also run away because fights just take long and are boring. Imagine being stuck every five to ten minutes in a fight which takes five to ten minutes, when you want to do something completely different, like exploring or mining or trading. In my impression, the game tries to make you keep on your toes, by spawing enemies after a given time in an otherwise tranquil sector. This works fine, until shield and ship min-maxing takes the challenge away. There must be a way to feel powerful without trivialising said central challenge of the game.

Nice cartoon! :) In my first game on insanity difficulty, I have to be pretty dodgy from start on. I am hardly left alone in any sector for mining or salvaging, have to grab what I can get and run. Trying to fight back gets me quickly shot to pieces. In my opinion, this kind of tense play is also at later levels possible, if it were not for the rather simplistic shield mechanic. If they changed that, spawns closer to the galaxy core would keep being challenging. Scissor-rock-paper mechanics should make you keep on your toes. Got a shield tank? Damn, those corsairs which just warped in have shield-breaker weaponry!

You outdid yourself with the raven shipline, absolutely stunning! Very close to some favourite form of mine, but I can never make myself to all that fiddly design work around the base components; it really shows here. I hope I can take and adapt the Raven with external colume based thrusters (for realism sake and the upcoming thruster changes) and put in a Xanion shield element somewhere... Also, I will try to transform the central spine into a cargo hold (very efficient mass/hitpoints ratio).

Please no... thats what oblivion did, and it was no fun whatsoever (why upgrading your stats, when it doesn´t matter?) I agree, no fun if it is badly done. Elder Scrolls Online does it, too, but better. The enemy gets adapted to that what you should be able to do on your current level. You are still left with the challenge to actually be able to do all what is expected of a character at a given level. And you can "out-level" your current level with a good combination of skills and equipment. On top, you can challenge yourself more by going against a larger number of opponents. However, I am not sure the game needs more challenge but rather more depth in the endgame.

I am also very bored in the endgame (normal difficulty). Every 10 minutes latest, I get beset by 5 to 10 Xsoltans or bandids, the ensuing battle takes long but is never really dangerous for my high-end spacecraft. As such, combat degrades to an unwelcome interruption on my last phase of questing, namely finding the last high-end tech40+ weaponry, collecting xsoltan tech fragments and convincing all inner-core factions to help out in the final combat. On the sideline, I am bothered with having to weed out about 600 turrets and modules each other while. No, thanks. I started a new game on insane, and at least the beginning is quite challenging. I got my ship nearly shot to pieces several times, ran into resource bottlenecks, had even to abandon my damaged ship with a "dinghi" in quest for new resources and cash. But I fear the gameplay will degrade again in later stages, when you have already too much of everything and nothing can really challenge you or advance anymore. My suggestion would be to refine weapon and shield mechanics, to introduce a scissors-paper-rock-mechanic, so that you have to adapt your ship also in endgame environments, according to what challenge a given sector throws at you. There should be shield- and armor-breaker weapons, shield and integrity field mechanics should respond differently to cannons than lasers, etc. Logistics should be streamlined and condensed to those elements which pose a game challenge for the player. The ability to build fleets needs to be finalized. As of now, managing a fleet of ships, already making them follow you and fight properly, is a nightmare and no fun at all.

I am not particularily fond of having another block. It gets too complex like this. Koonschi wants thrusters to work even when covered. Well, this is absurdly unrealistic, so my only way currently to think this "realistic" is that said covered block parts "are" kind of the gyros/reaction wheels. No need for another block type, really.

I think the devs could have an open mind towards this debate. After all, they nerved integrity fields because they did not want them to make the ship a uniform damage block. The entire mechanic could be made more complex. For example, instead of being a "single-block-damage-field", they shield could just dampen incoming damage and they could become directional/locally limited. Fields would add hitpoints to blocks. The combination of the two would make ships more powerful, but still have varied damage effects on ships, which is a strong goal of the devs.

Very nice shiplines! I assume that you have to work with a plethora of hidden thrusters in order to achieve this kind of maneuverability compared to the mass of each ship?

"Leiter" is indeed conductor. Howver, due to the rng generation of each sector, it can indeed happen that you have to travel very long before you encounter a certain good. I am using a trade module to determine with one view if a given sector has one of the required goods. I select the sectors by looking at the kind of factories it has, or if it has a tradepost. After three games, my experience is that it takes between 2 and 8 hours to get all the mats together.

I assume this script does not correct this error for already created weapons?

You know, about 12 years of space-computer games, two generations of younger computer game players, and I finally can fulfill that dream of flying my own Comet in a computer game. Sigh. Gotta love Avorion just for that! =) As with my "Star Trek"-designed ships, the Comet here has also surprising synergy effects: The big heavy command orb in the front gets huge leverage by the thrusters on the extended end of the ship, making it surprisingly nimble for its mass. Whizzing around enemy ships is a joy with the Comet. I think this comes very close to the spirit of the movie-original.

Deutsches Kultfilmraumschiff. Bin ich der Einzige? :D http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=864572814 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=864572744 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=864269345 Edit: Attached an XML, but could not check if its the correct one... Comet6.xml

Very nice! Have to load it and observe which design tricks you employed! :)

Braking thrusters with 60m/s??? That´s huge! Usually, my nimble ships have thrust around 25m/s and half of it as braking thrust. I never needed more to dance around NPC ships and gleefully dissect them with my lasers...

tl;dr The current game system incentives you to go out of your way to make gameplay boring for yourself. A pitfall which many good games did not close and I hope Avorion will still master this aspect. I have finished my third game and finally reached the core and fought the endboss. I don´t want to know how many hours I sunk into Avorion the last weeks, just building and refining my ships and trying to "do everything", which frankly is near impossible. And repetitive. Which brings me to my topic: A good game should captivate player base beyond the initial grasp of the mechanics and offer an engaging revolving incentivising factors. That´s why I´d like to point out some things which could be improved. Apparently, the most efficient design is a "borg cube", with about half a million to a million shield power and firepower anywhere in the region of 16k-100k. Having arrived at the endboss yesterday, I can see this making an annoying eternal fight at least half worth your while. I hate scripted combat. I´d take a fleet of 100 Xsoltan ships instead any day. In the meanwhile I also think that crafted weapons are too strong. In fact the whole dps-equipment system could use an overhaul. The balance between number of turrets versus a turrets firepower versus possible shield strength and regeneraten needs to be more closely aligned. I also do not want a too high difference between iron and xanion areas, because it would not really make sense from a roleplaying perspective. Otoh, I would like to have more incentives to stay in the lower tier areas, because on my third and fourth game, I just make a beeline for a mixed Trinium/Xanion area, just stopping by enough to get appropriate salvage lasers. Concerning the systems and faction, I think that they are a tad bit too repetitive in view of the large galaxy we can explore. Elite: dangerous players know what I am talking of! Basically, each "inhabited" system is a bathtub with about a dozen toys floating in it. I have read with pleasure that the devs want to add interactive planets. Everything which makes a system feel more alive and individual! I order to keep the game engaging for me, I will meta-restrain myself next time with the following rules: - explore each area in depth and just move on when you´ve done/explored at least 50% of space around at least two factions; try to identify what makes each system special and recognisable - realistic space ship construction and repairs: Only at shipyards and repair docks. No turret swapping on the fly. - separate into career phases and imagine a roleplay background: miner -> mission runner -> trader -> freelancer (i.e. paramilitary rescue missions for distress calls) -> faction war -> the greater Xsoltan war/rift issue - no ship min-maxing, each ship type has a purpose, trying to build a fleet in the end; or, go with one mothership which grows over your career with some small specialized "recon ships" and "fighters" - no turret crafting, to still use the feature, don´t maximize the sliders but use 5 produced ones to craft exotic turrets and use those In the end, I hope that the game systems will be adapted that this kind of gameplay flows naturally, without the player constraining himself too much. I don´t want to be incentivised to "cheese the game". Besides this awesome spacecraft building, Avorion managed for a long time to surprise me anew after every hyperjump. If only this "wow" effect could continue forever. =)

Concerning Omicron firepower, I found it misleading. I had crafted 10 railguns and they yielded me 99k Omicrons, but they performed very poorly due to overheating after every third shot (that´s what you get with the "burst fire" trait...). Also, lags in multiplayer did not register more than half of their hits. On the other hand, 10 crafted laserbeams yielded me 9k Omicons, and they blow enemies to pieces before they can deal serious damage. In Xanion area, I thus can go with those 9k Omicrons and a rather smallish shield of 100k and not break a sweat in combat in the Xanion areas at all. Many ppl in multiplayer went totally overboard, though. Apparently, the most efficient design is a "borg cube", so I see many of them with about half a million to a million shield power and firepower anywhere in the region of 16k-100k. Having arrived at the endboss yesterday, I can see this making an annoying eternal fight at least half worth your while. I hate scripted combat. I´d take a fleet of 100 Xsoltan ships instead any day. In the meanwhile I also think that crafted weapons are too strong. In fact the whole dps-equipment system could use an overhaul. The balance between number of turrets versus a turrets firepower versus possible shield strength and regeneraten needs to be more closely aligned. I also do not want a too high difference between iron and xanion areas, because it would not really make sense from a roleplaying perspective. Otoh, I would like to have more incentives to stay in the lower tier areas, because on my third and fourth game, I just make a beeline for Trinium areas, just stopping by enough to get appropriate salvage lasers. In short, the current game system incentives you to go out of your way to make gameplay boring for yourself. A pitfall which many good games did not close.

I think the calculation time should be visible as a cooldown timer. And I think that computercores should help minimize it.

I am pretty certain that hyperjump cooldown is not an issue. I tested this with a fast jumping ship around 30 seconds, followed by a captained behemoth with >60 secons. The latter follows with no problems. Just sometimes, it does not, whether the jump is initiated under or after 60 seconds does not seem to matter.

No issues is relative, in that those issues have nothing to do with server power but the beta nature of the game, e.g. bad hit detection esp. for railguns, occasional lags (i.e. jumpy enemy ship movement, spinning ships).

I have found this issue, too. The server is a pretty voluminous and responsive one, but especially railguns´ hits register only every third or fourth time. In view of their low fire rate and strong overheating, this totally cripples this weaponry.