J4H3AD

I'd recommend a nimble scouting shop with viii and i, Flagship armed to the teeth with ii, iii and v, a large dedicated carrier with vi and v if you can spare it, (use a couple squadrons of Salvage fighters for scooping up all that delicious Avorion inside the Core), and I do like your idea of a repair ship with ii, might go nicely with vii as well since those beams can get power hungry. Otherwise build a pure energy ship for breaking shields, using vii to keep those weapons firing.

Relatively simple concept. Just a block that can eject a fixed number (scaling with block) or % of crew when your ship is destroyed. I don't know about others, but hunting down skilled crew, like Commanders, Generals, etc. is one of the toughest (or at least the most tedious) parts of managing large scale ships. While money and resources are rather easy to come by, crew are not, and getting them trained to rank 2 or 3 takes a significant amount of time. That and the fact that filling up a ship with high level, professional crew only to crater it on an asteroid is... painful to say the least. Bottom line, allowing crew to be picked up in a drop, as skilled fighter pilots are currently, would be a tremendous boon. Also it would help me personally with the strict rules I've made for myself on ship building. ;D

Simple addition to make high ranking Captains worthwhile. A well ordered and organized crew works well under a good leader. I'd suggest the crew bonuses instead of stopping at 130%, add a ranked commander and allow those bonuses to go up to 140% at rank 2, and 150% at rank 3. It would take the crew to actually make something of that, but it would give a bonus, rather than nothing at the moment.

Not sure if anyone else is having this bug, but there seems to be an issue with muzzle locations on coaxial weapons. I've designed a custom coaxial turret, and every time I exit the build menu and re enter it, the 'ghost' outline of the weapon is set 90 degrees up from the direction I placed it. (Being a coaxial weapon, I mount them to the bow of the ship, and the design sticking out the dorsal side, through some blocks) When I place a weapon on the design it updates and faces correctly, but when I go to fire the weapon, the projectiles/beams come from again 90 degrees from the turret, although it seems to be based on the direction the "Facing" block on the green outline when placing the weapon. No updating the turret design, exiting build mode, or exiting the galaxy seems to be fixing the issue. Any thoughts? Anyone else have these issues?

Make sure you are using the new control scheme for firing torpedoes. I panicked at first too, but firing torpedoes is now bound to right click instead of left.

It's meaning PvP is disabled in that sector.

Have your first ship follow you, your second ship follow the first, third follow the second, and so forth. That should clear up your issue. Never personally used a fleet of bigger than 3, so I don't know for certain, but I've heard that system works.

I'd suggest instead of mandating the size, allow it to be editable, either with some kind of consumable, or at a turret factory. Although I do think capital class weapons (like cannons, maybe railguns and lightning turrets) should have a minimum size of 2. By the patch notes, the only things changes by slot size are range, single shot damage, and weapon handling (turn rate and such). Therefore, say, you buy a consumable at an equipment dock, use it, and it brings up a UI to change the size +/- 1 slot for example, for a flat cost. That way if you've got a really good cannon that doesn't fit in with your main battery on your warship, you can fix that. Or find a great chaingun you want to fit on a smaller ship, then you can. Help remove the randomness from the game for a slight cost to the player.

As mentioned, coaxial weapons seem to be coming. Although perhaps a block that applies a damage boost to attached weapons, but perhaps having very high power drain, and possibly eat up processing power, something like the reverse of a computer core. Could make for a way to balance it. As for superlasers, that could be interesting. Although diminishing returns like hyperspace cores could be a way to balance it, so massive sized block weapons deal more damage linearly, but take exponentially more power.

A small one that bugs me. You can command allied, captained ships in RTS mode, but you can't control your own ship, even if it has a captain. The command "works" and it shows a line that it's moving, but it doesn't. Another feature I'd like to see is WASD or arrow key controls to move the strategy view, instead of having to mouse to the edge of the screen to move. And of course as the OP mentioned, standard RTS commands: move, attack/mine/salvage selected target, patrol, escort target, etc. I'd love to play this as a space strategy game instead of your normal first/third person sim, but it lacks the infrastructure to do that.

Dedicated interceptors would be AMAZING! Instead of relying on an escort ship or myriads of point defenses or flak cannons, it would be awesome to deploy a fighter screen to intercept. Actual dogfights would be really fun, and add a layer of complexity to combat. I think this would require changing how fighters are targeted, that way you could scramble a squadron to intercept a squadron, targeting the whole group rather than having to pick them off one by one. Might be useful if you wanted to prioritize one group over another, especially if there was a group of bombers attacking a capital ship from range while screened by a swarm of cheaper fighters to overwhelm point defenses. Furthermore, I think there should be a few different... classes of fighter, for lack of a better word. Maybe three to begin with. Interceptors: fast, low durability, good for chasing down enemy ships and fighter squadrons. Armed with chainguns, bolters, pulse cannons, plasma, lasers, and point defense chainguns or lasers. Heavy fighters: slower, but tougher, good all around fighters, perhaps how fighters are now: any weapon type, no real specialization. Maybe buff standard fighter durability by a %, and have other classes modify that %. Bomber: bigger, slower, tougher, but with dedicated anti capital ship weaponry. Perhaps a % damage increase, but depending on the power increase, a required size. Say, +50% damage has a size multiplier of 4, that way you can't have a monstrous bomber group flying from a tiny ship. A simple way of handling these different fighter types could be simply using the new sizes of weapon. Multi-slot weapons keeping their powerful stats, but requiring a bigger fighter to fit, or a much higher cost to keep such a weapon in a small package. Interceptors simply use the new PDC/L and AFC weapons to be built, coming with a % speed boost and % health decrease. All other fighters remain unchanged. Anyway. I love the idea of dogfights, and expanding tactical options, and having more options for customization is always fun.

Fly in close to that beacon. You should find a ship wreckage and a "traveler's stash" that contains some credits, resources, and a turret or module.

After posting I realized there is a lot more variety as you get deeper into the galaxy. One torpedo I found was a Kinetic Osprey class with velocity of 9000. And a little more digging I found there are a lot more warheads and presumably classes. I might do some work and find as many basic torpedoes as possible and catalogue their stats and such. Anything above common gets a lot of randomization, so it would be hard to get hard numbers from all that. Anyway, tangent aside. I'm not actually building torpedoes on my own, just finding common stats between classes and warheads. But that does make an interesting point. What if you could find warheads and bodies separately as cargo, and take them in to a factory to put them together? The more likely option is a factory much like turret or fighter factories, where you combine different trade goods to build a torpedo randomly determined by sector and an algorithm.

Be sure it doesn't have the Independent Targeting trait. "Independent Targeting but deals less damage." It drops the damage by a hefty amount just for being able to target enemies on its own. Most of the time, damage on that kind of weapon drops down to 1 or so per shot instead of anywhere from 8-10. It also depends on the roll. Sometimes you get great stats, sometimes garbage. I'd recommend getting a few before calling any one weapon type bad. With a cluster of them on an appropriately equipped ship, I managed to pick apart the AI boss relatively easily by bypassing its shields.

Agreed. Being forced to dedicate bare minimum of two slots to effectively ward off torpedoes (my standard is 4 currently) AND the bigger slot demands of some weapon types, namely cannons, it does seem a bit punishing. You either have to pay high dollar for decent modules at equipment dock, get extraordinarily lucky, or hunt artifacts and bosses. Just hypothetical here, but what if you gained an additional general weapon slot for every system slot you have in your ship? It would open up flexibility for small to medium ships, and allow big capital ships to bring massive batteries to bear, fitting naturally with their size. At least allowing for adequate coverage of point defenses on such ships. I know nothing of coding for this... call this a +1 on the request.

Just got a bit deeper into the beta today and started messing around with torpedoes in creative mode. Absolute blast to use (pun intended). Difficulty isn't high enough to really experiment with the different types yet, being on the outer edge of the galaxy still. Most enemies take one shot to kill. That being said, I'm seriously enjoying the new depth added, and basically forcing you to either outmaneuver torpedoes or sacrifice weapon slots to shoot them down. On the flip side, it's interesting messing around with the different types and warheads, figuring out which is best for a given situation, when to use one, when to hold off and use something else to fight. One thing I think would be cool is more than just three classes of torpedo, and more than just three (that I've seen) types of warhead. A shield piercing one for a high price and low yield might be interesting for example. Or low yield, fast and extreme range (like 60km stock), or slow, sluggish but tough and high-yield, or something generally bad in all areas, but dirt cheap and super common, on top of the relatively balanced types we have already. Love the system, but as with anything, I love variety and customization. Anyone out there have other thoughts? Particular experiences with torps so far? I for one have been having entirely too much fun, and look forward to seeing it all after its on stable branch.

Anyone else have a graphical glitch with shield generator blocks having flat textures? The glowing green/blue/yellow/red of the parts functions fine, but the grey (or painted) hull part of the texture was completely flat. Don't have access to screenshots or anything currently, but wondering if anyone else has had this issue. My best guess is adding torpedo launchers and storage somehow shuffled textures, causing the issue.

A suggestion I was gonna make a week ago then immediately forgot what I was going to do. "Hide specific blocks" list. Instead of showing ONE type or ONE material, have a check box next to each one to show multiple block types. For example, editing the innards of a ship and fiddling with armor, generators and energy containers, seeing one at a time and not being able to tell why the block I want to place won't work because there are three different kinds of blocks in the way is bothersome.

Maybe one way to help with that is make divergent efficiency curves on mining/salvaging lasers. Say, starting efficiency at tech 1 is 10% across the board. Make mining lasers efficiency go up steeply, say to 20-30% quickly, while salvaging lasers have lower efficiency, in the same tech range getting only to 15-20%. Although now that I think of it, deeper in Naonite and Trinium territory, ships get progressively bigger, while asteroids remain the same. It's far more effort to get 10,000 Trinium from mining than it is to get 10,000 trinium from salvaging, sometimes getting many times that in a single broken shield or generator block. A better suggestion for this I think would be change the concentration of resources in asteroids the deeper in you go. For example, say a single iron asteroid has 5000 iron, while an equivalent sized Naonite asteroid has 7-10,000, and Trinium 10-15,000, etc. Alternatively, just increase the size of asteroids as you get closer to the core. The solution of making resources cargo based versus, for lack of a better word, "Cloud" based, it would make a significant change to how the game works, particularly ship building. But I can see that working fairly well in all honesty. Make shipyards a requirement for opening the build menu (since nearly every starter sector has one, and making them more useful), forcing players to be sure they have the capacity to gather enough resources, the infrastructure to get them from place to place, and be sure the shipyard has the resources to build what they need. This would give resource gathering and management meaning and importance, but however could get difficult for new players. In any case it might be worth looking into.

Building ships as much as I do, I can't tell you how useful any one of those features would be, let alone all of them. This would be amazing! Devs, please!

I think that's a good idea: cloaked ship can't be shielded too. Make it a risk/reward, so you have a distinct disadvantage to being cloaked, but of course the advantage. Imagine a ship with powerful long range cannons or torpedoes firing from stealth. Before you realize, what's happening, you're dead. That's... scary frankly.