Yeedo

So I entered the central sector for the first time today, expecting to find a massive Xsotan Wormhole Guardian boss plus swarms of normal Xsotan, and I planned to just come and get an idea of how powerful the boss was. But instead the boss was nowhere to be found, there were no Xsotan at all, just some normal asteroid fields (including one claimable asteroid) and loads of pirates (who killed me with their torps when my PDCs eventually let one through :'(). Does the boss only appear after I've researched the thing you make with Xsotan technology fragments or after convincing factions to join you in the fight? I would also have assumed that these parts were optional. Or did I just get the wrong sector? ;D

Gonna bump this with my own thoughts, as I think torps desperately need rebalancing rn. As I see it torps suffer from the following problems: 1) Despite being 'super-nuke' weapons they are widely available and very spammable 2) NPC ships seem to have unlimited supplies 3) PDCs are unreliable at best 4) PDCs take up precious turret slots Atroika's solution fixes 1 by limiting salvo size, but on top of that I suggest the following: Tie the torp cooldown time to the size of the launcher, but add modules to reduce this. As I understand it, currently all launchers have a fixed cooldown of 4s and there seems to be no benefit to making bigger launchers other than keeping more torps ready to be fired. This means that even a tiny fighter can still fire torps at the same rate as a capital ship, even if it can't store nearly as many. This also presents an opportunity to in general reduce the fire rate of all torps (1 every 4 seconds is way too fast imo) 2) Simple: give NPC ships each a randomised limit to the torps they can fire before they run out 3) I think this has been fixed in the beta branch 4) imho there should be some free turret slots given to bigger ships simply based on volume, as currently the amount of turrets you can have is limited by the crazy diminishing returns in terms of the number of slots you have. Hopefully we can get this discussion going again because as I said, balancing here is essential and poorly-balanced torps can and do ruin the game for many people.

Barlgura added

Like the title says, blocks such as 'Avorion Glow' say 'Low durability' in their tooltip, and yet have just as much health per unit volume as hull blocks (at 1/3 of the mass!). This is currently fairly balance-breaking as this makes Avorion Glow blocks have the best health per unit mass of any block in the game. I don't know about you but I don't want to encourage people to build eye-cancer ships out of mainly glow blocks ;). I'm not sure what the health value is supposed to be, but it needs to be at most 33% of its current value or else they will still be superior to hull blocks. To my knowledge, reflector blocks don't have this problem. This doesn't feel like a bug in the usual sense, but I put this thread here since it doesn't really belong in 'Suggestions'

I'd certainly like to see some way of making torpedoes added, preferably a factory and maybe using goods rather than just credits. I'm not sure about making it a part of your ship though, as torpedoes are designed around only having limited amounts. That said, at present you can just build huge torpedo storages and have essentially unlimited torpedoes (if you can afford it), so it might not be that bad. But so far in this game it seems that most manufacturing is meant to be done by stations. Also, (it's not clear whether you are suggesting this in particular) I don't think that if we get a 'torpedo conveyor' or similar it should have to be connected to the producing and the consuming blocks. I personally like Avorion's current system where you just stick blocks in free space in your ship rather than positioning them relative to each other, as this is much more kind towards aesthetic ships, and in particular suits the process of building a hollow pretty hull and then making it functional rather than building a hull around the internals. This seems like a nice idea for player-made stations (and being limited to only them like docking stations), but as for putting it on your ships this comes down to whether the game should encourage a nomadic lifestyle where you carry all your production facilities with you or whether it should encourage you to settle down in a sector. I prefer the latter as it encourages managing your relationships with nearby factions rather than wandering around the galaxy trashing anyone you meet ;D.

I don't think we need it that badly since one of the main things Avorion's dynamic scaling allows is making a lot of inverted corners and corners look like a curved surface.

nvm I've played singleplayer a bit now and I found the 'use as a reconstruction site' option. Pretty expensive, but balanced at least. ;)

Hooray for the update! :) Did we ever get a kind of '/sethome' feature? I thought I remembered seeing it in the patch notes for one of the beta branch updates, but I didn't spot it here.

Currently the only two which have any use in the endgame are Avorion (useful for pretty much everything) and Trinium (since it's light). But even then Avorion has better health for the same weight so in fact it's better to use thin Avorion plates than thicker Trinium for the same weight. There really isn't much we can do about one material being the best for armour at it will always be the one with the highest HP/mass ratio. However if they had armour values as well as HP, coupled with AP values on weapons, there could be some incentive to use other armours, based on what you're up against; against high-damage, low-AP weapons you might want Ogonite, which would still have lower health than Avorion but have a much higher armour value, while against something with a huge AP value you'd be better off with Avorion. Also, there could be an armour debuff for thinner armour to encourage the use of Trinium for lightweight ships. I'd like to see Xanion be useful for certain functional components, with possibly Naonite having a niche use as well, but I think it's fine if Titanium and Iron have no place in the end game, so long as we have at least 3 materials which are actually worth mining.

I think alliances should get all the benefits that AI factions have, like warp gates (which could be used to make money as well by setting a price for them) and also have auto-spawned ships desgined by the faction members to mine and fight (ie 3 and 6).

As it stands anyone posting stuff on the workshop writes some tags for it, whic may not correspond with the existing ones other people have used. All tags get shown on the sidebar, which is just about OK at the moment but as more people upload to the workshop it will get seriously out of hand. FTD had this problem and now has about 25 predefined tags which everyone has to use. I suggest you do this for Avorion (although I have no idea what the workshop controls look like for devs) before the sidebar is long enough to wrap around the planet twice.

1) This has been needed and requested for so long, I just can't understand why it's not in the game yet. 2) I fear this would make research stations rather obsolete if you can upgrade one of your turrets directly rather than needing to combine 3-5 to get a better one. 3) I don't really feel like this is needed, and Koonschi has stressed that this game meant to be more about exploring and combat than building and crafting, with random drops being preferred over crafted items as a mechanic. 4) We are getting player alliances soonTM, but I don't think it will be nearly as fleshed out as what you described. 5) It might be nice for alliances to perhaps have two separate territories in two parts of the galaxy connected by a wormhole, but I think a wormhole creator item would have to be single-use, with some particularly difficult task needing to be completed to get another one (eg farm wormhole guardian for a special drop which you can craft into wormhole creators).

The history of Starbound is very telling. In its alpha stage, the linear goals were 'complete all the quests', 'beat all the bosses' and 'reach the highest-tier material and make armour from it'. However, it didn't really detract from the sandbox feel as the first objective could be completed within about 20 minutes of starting the game (as the questline wasn't nearly finished), the second was over quite quickly as there were only 4 bosses and they were fairly early on in the game, and the third could be rushed and cheesed to be done quickly. But most importantly completing those was not the end of the road. You could build a house or a city or decorate your ship or explore dungeons or meet alien races and learn about their lore and so on. As you rightly said, there needs to be more than just a linear storyline to follow in a sandbox game, or it stops being a sandbox at all. People didn't flock to Minecraft because they were drawn in by the idea of mining stone, then making a stone pickaxe to mine iron and eventually get diamonds, nor hitting back ghast fireballs and suchlike just to get all the achievements; for most players this was just a small part of the experience. More interesting is the more recent (although some of this goes back quite a while) stages of Starbound. The devs spent a very long time trying to squeeze it into a linear storyline. They added lots of non-procedurally generated structures, including some that were in the same place in every galaxy for every player. They replaced a lot of procedurally-generated monsters (one of Starbound's unique features) with premade ones. They extended the quest line right to the end and they made some sections impossible to break or place blocks in. They made it so that bosses were no longer spawned with crafted items, Terraria style, but rather you unlock a boss through quests and then teleport to their lair. They tacked on a crappy, generic storyline and gave it a definite end. However, they added new codex entries, many more dungeons, additional parkour and mazes to be found underground, more biomes and loads more unique items, along with a fossil hunting system, and probably most significantly a colony-building system, complete with colonists. Yet even with all this, it still felt less like a sandbox than its former self. Why? Simply because it wasn't designed with sandboxiness in mind. At every stage (until possibly after the final boss, idk since I couldn't beat it in my first couple of tries and I cba'd to try 50 more times like I did with one of the beta bosses), there is a direct instruction on the screen telling you exactly what to do. Some areas are designed to be 'non-sandbox' areas where you cannot interact with the environment apart from killing things and flipping switches. Also the new features like fossils turned out to be shallow and dull. Although you can take a break from the storyline at any point and play the sandbox, I (and I'm sure most other people) find it impossible to ignore, and after all until you complete it there will be planets you can't visit and so you won't have 'unlocked' the full sandbox. So where does this leave Avorion? As it stands, it follows the rough overarching type of Terraria, rather than Starbound; there is no quest book telling you to visit the Outpost and speak to the shady-looking penguin; there are no 'teleport to Dreadwing's lair' buttons, and you search out bosses yourself, with them being in random, rather than predefined locations. It has wonderful procedural generation on par with or even surpassing games like Starbound or Cube World (#neverforget). But I personally find that once I have reached the centre, built an Avorion ship and attempted to beat the bosses (and then give up after not finding them), there really isn't anything left to do. Alien civilisations, while they have procedurally generated names and ships and so are unique on the surface, start to look very similar in that they all have the same technology, use the same weapons, build the same factories making the same goods, and act identically with regards to reputation. And other than building more ships, mining more ore, salvaging more ore, fighting more pirates and Xsotan and building factories and turrets, all of which lead towards making more and better ships, there is no other objective apart from perhaps becoming a billionaire (which is pointless apart from using the credits to make more ships). So, by looking at the successes and failures of other sandbox games (only ones I've played): -Starbound. As above. -Terraria. Very much a success, as it weaves in something of a progression with a weak bit of lore and a whole lot of sandbox. -Cube World. Perhaps slightly lacking in the quest side since there aren't really any, there are plenty of procedurally generated dungeons and bosses and loot to keep you occupied for a while. But the lack of quests or any real progression due to the lack of a max level or any real milestones does make it feel a little aimless after a while. It's main problem is the lack of any building or breaking, making the world feel rather static. -Minecraft. Essentially a pure sandbox without any questing nonsense, it still contains plenty of stuff to do and kept me occupied for a very long time. -Reassembly. This game manages to feel very much alive with plants spreading their seeds around and factions spawning more little ships to expand their influence. The sandboxiness is great, although limited to shipbuilding like Avorion. -From the Depths. What little story there is is pretty lacklustre, but the shipbuilding is the best I've experienced in any game (although it lacks of course Reassembly's dynamically scalable blocks), and has kept me engaged for 1150 hours and counting. -Endless Sky. No building whatsoever and a rigid questline, yet the experience of visiting countless worlds each with their own bit of story, running around fighting everything from worthless pirates to godlike aliens to predatory nanobots, and capturing weapons and outfits from them, along with ferrying passengers and cargo for money is definitely still rewarding and it does feel like a sandbox somehow. -Spore (old, I know). The space stage in this game was actually quite interesting and enjoyable, with the basic trading to earn money, carrying out quests for aliens to improve relations, conquering planets, upgrading your ship, and most relevantly it had an difficult-to-access galactic centre controlled by a hostile faction. I liked the varied alien races and their unique characters, although after being told for the bazillionth time that X faction wants me to pay since I refuse to accept the glory of Spode, I got a little fed up. -Perpetuum. Quite different from the others as it's a little-known single-server multiplayer game (not unlike EVE or so I'm told). I mentioned it due to its somewhat sandbox-y, questless style and its fairly expansive lore and its artifacts system where you triangulate caches from an alien civilisation which contain useful items and blueprints. Also, despite me being hopeless at the PVP, I still managed to enjoy the game for about 250 hours just exploring and crafting robots and looking at the crappy-graphics alien plants and buildings and the beautiful binary-system sunsets, since from growing Noralgis to fighting NPCs to running repeatable missions to reading lore to crafting and trading, there is plenty of stuff to do at any point. 1) Anomalies. Aside from creating a data resource and using SCIENCE to unlock the secrets of the universe, researching anomalies should also extend to alien archeology. When arriving in sp00ky sectors with yellow blips, aside from being irradiated by X-rays or sucked into a black hole, you may occasionally find alien structures not unlike the ring of asteroids for getting into the centre, which may have been vacated millions of years ago by a long-lost civilisation, these would be anything from a bit of ship debris lying around to a rock with unintelligible alien carvings on it to a message about how the civilisation tore itself apart in a civil war to a simple puzzle doing the space equivalent of flicking levers to earn an upgrade or a turret. They simply need to inject a little story or something to do, so as to engage the player for a bit and give them a reason to stay in that sector a little longer. In particular they'd need to be: 1.1) Unique. It completely spoils the immersion if you are just seeing a repeat of the same message in every sector you visit. There would need to be an awful lot of different ones, which the community could help out with writing. 1.2) Varied. As you can tell, my imagination isn't up to coming up with more than a few ideas, but this could be a community project like how FTD's built-in blueprints are all made by the community. 1.3) Fairly rare. If every yellow blip has an alien artifact with a message from the past, it would lose its novelty and you'd see a lot of repetition. Maybe 1 out of however many anomaly types is an alien structure, with most sectors having no anomaly at all, and most anomalies being natural phenomena. 1.4) Simple in terms of blocks, but less so in terms of lore. It could just be shaped like the beacons, but bring up a window with a couple hundred words of alien story, or the teachings of Spode, or a propechy of doom. There's no need for it to spawn an alien Atlantis big enough for ships to move about in, as that would be way too much work for the devs and you can achieve a lot of immersion and engagement from a simpler, lower effort structure. 1.5) Linked. Perhaps you could piece together little bits of information about a great calamity many moons ago, or work out the location of buried treasure or have to activate objects in multiple sectors to get your reward. This also reduces the amount of writing there needs to be since you can spread it out. Also, linked anomalies should be close together and form a complete set for the puzzles (although you could still be left on a cliffhanger with the lore ones). 2) A more lively universe. At present factions fight each other in endless stalemates in the same few sectors, and occupy static territory. Instead: 2.1) Dynamic territory. Factions should vie for the control of sectors, and they should change hands as the result of battles. When the player is away the outcome should be determined via RNG without simulating any ships, with both factions having some 'strength' value depending on their technology and the amount of sectors and factories and people and capital they have at their disposal which will give them a better chance of winning. 2.2) Dynamic reputation. Factions should have a reputation value for the factions around them, even if it is invisible to the player. Factions should become more friendly as they fight a common enemy, or steadily become more hostile if one attacks the other's pals. 2.3) Random events. Maybe an assassination causes two previously neutral factions to go to war, or maybe two warring factions come to a peace agreement. These could affect the relative reputations of the factions or perhaps the sectors they control. 3) Varied technology. The devices you came up with are the right idea with regards to more varied ships. There should be some unique weapons and upgrades which only certain factions have access to and you can only acquire through particular methods. 3.1) Varied between players. There could be a vague 'tech-tree' even if there is no UI for it and you could have to unlock certain turrets before you can craft them, or learn recipes before you can make factories for a particular good like laser modulators. 3.2) Varied between factions. It makes little sense to me that every faction in the galaxy has exactly the same understanding of technology and use the same types of weapons, even if some are weaker than others. This would be reflected in what factories spawn in their sectors, what turrets and upgrades they use and what you can craft at their turret factories. These could possibly change over time, and obviously factions nearer the centre would in general tend to be more knowledgable. 3.3) Varied between alliances. 'Data' could be perhaps processed into blueprints which can be consumed to learn how to make new stuff, and these blueprints could be tradable between players. Within alliances tech could be shared so you can collaborate on building things. 3.4) Linked to anomalies. Perhaps if you scan enough magnetic anomalies you can work out how to craft force turrets, or maybe an alien treasure trove allows you to craft Gauss Rails. So yeah, this went kind of off-topic but you get the point. More stuff to do other than just mining/salvaging Trinium and Avorion and building ships out of them.

I'm OK with some materials being flat out better than others, but when you reach the endgame pretty much the two materials everyone uses are Trinium and Avorion, so I'd like to see at least one more material be relevant at that point. I think Ogonite should make very high power/volume shield generators, hyperdrives etc., but still be weaker than the same mass of Avorion, so Ogonite becomes the material of choice to squeeze extra power out of a small space, while Avorion is better for bigger ships. Something like this would be nice so it's not just two materials that are actually useful for the best ships.

I really like this idea, I've seen similar things in a couple other space games (FTL, GalCiv II), and it definitely spiced things up a bit. I have a couple of criticisms though: -A few of the effects sound decidedly pseudoscience-y eg 'methyl nebula'. Ignites? In space!? -I totally disagree with getting rid of editing/repairing ships on the fly, this would be a major pain in the ass and not make the game any more fun at all. Imagine having to limp around tens of sectors in a damaged ship looking for a dockyard owned by someone who doesn't hate you...