SageThe13th
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Posts posted by SageThe13th
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The dev has some hide-function planned. He wants you to be able to hide based on material or type of block. I guess that would solve your issues :)
Yes. That would be very workable.
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Cube meta?
I believe that is why shield appears in this game. Basically I rush to get shield materials unlock right away. Because after I get shield, I don't need to worry about too much about shape. However the collision damage to rocks or other ships are still very high.
But I don't do PVP. So it is another story.
Shields are not a perfect defense. But, you're right the majority of the time your ship is safe behind it's shields. My argument is aimed more at people who want weaker shields, no IFGs, and for local damage to matter more because it adds depth in their opinion. I just feel like these people are making their suggestions without realizing that it causes the cube meta that most people also claim to be boring an uninteresting.
This only comes into play in PvP, and PvP isn't the focus of Avorion anyways.
How does the op intent to stop players from feeling the need to win in PvP?
It's normal to use everything that can provide you an advantage in PVP, some asshats even cheat or use exploits just to win even harder.
You can't stop them from wanting to win. That's why I said there will always be a cube meta. Cubes will also always have some advantages and will always be a viable option. However, you can still avoid the dominance of a cube meta if other viable alternatives are presented. I'll use Starmade as an example. In Starmade cube ships are good. And not just good, supremely powerful. I built a ship that looked like a jet once. Then, I built a cube ship that had roughly the same block count and roughly the same mass. The cube ship turned faster, had double the shields, and three times the firepower as the jet ship. That's a solid cube meta.
Also, if someone is using cheat or exploits the devs attempt to fix them. You can fix the cube meta the same way. Avorion doesn't really have this problem. Yet. These kind of build games always seem to trend towards making ship design more and more a focus of the game. This in turn leads to the cube meta. I'm just warning people about it now.
The current successful system for designing PvP games it to continuously change and re-balance them and trying to attain a good "current meta" that the players from pro to wood league all like. PvP sucks resources out of a game. This happens IRL too, most major sports have seasonal rule changes, responding to changes in technology and tactics by players and teams.
I would hope that PvP will remain a sideline in Avorion as all the above is a huge development sink.
PvP shouldn't be a focus of the game. Though, it shouldn't be ignored either. And if the solutions to balancing PvP help everyone then that's a win win.
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So as Thundercraft said it's really too late to change the name at this point. I will agree that Avorion isn't a very good name. But, I did check out the game because the name stuck out to me.
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If I understand correctly, integrity field blocks used to promote aesthetics by tying the block HP to the ship's total HP, thus making it so that only the total HP is important irrespective
even with integrity field, after receiving continous enemy fire my ship lose a few blocks
They used to work that way. They don't currently. They just provide a flat 10 times bonus to block Hp.
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So, before I get into this I have to say a few things. One is that if you support the cube meta I want to hear from you. The whole crux of my argument is that people always seem to be complaining about the cube meta. And really, I've never seen anyone step up to defend it. It might be interesting to hear what they have to say. Also, as you read this you might get the idea that I dislike engineering games since I'm going to be speaking against a lot of engineering game mechanics. This is not true. I love engineering games. I love From the Depths, one of the most detailed vehicle design games ever made. It's just that if you want an engineering game you have lots of options. This is just my opinion, but I would like to see Avorion go in a different direction.
Well, lets talk about the cube meta then. I'm going to say(write) this point blank. You can't avoid the cube meta. To understand this you have understand what causes the cube meta in the first place. It has to do with human nature and geometry. In a general sense people, the player base, like it when things are easy. This isn't everybody mind you, but the average player wants to achieve as much power as possible as easily as possible. If this weren't the case the answer to every game imbalance would be to tell the player not to do things that make the game boring. But players can't help themselves. If there's an easy way to win most of them are going to use it. Thus, the cube meta is a result of this behavior and the fact that cubes and rectangular cuboids are very powerful easy to build shapes. If you don't know what I mean by a powerful shape the rest of my talking points should make this more clear. But basically, this means there will always be a cube meta.
However, the cube meta has some drawbacks. The biggest one seems to be that people don't like the way these flying battle boxes look. So the best way to counter the cube meta is to design systems that promote aesthetic building or at the very least don't punish aesthetic designs.
Point 1: The need to win causes the cube meta
Players like to win and players like to look cool. Preferably, while winning. Though given a choice of one or the other more players will choose to win rather than choosing to look cool. As I stated before the average player likes it easy. Building a cube ship is easy. But, so is downloading a ship from the forums and using it. However, the ease of using someone else's design doesn't counter the ease of building a battle box if the downloaded ship is quantifiably weaker than a cube ship the player could make in fifteen minutes. So what makes aesthetic ships worse than cube ships? Well, lots of things.
Point 2: Real world design principals enforce the cube meta
Real world design principals promote utilitarian designs and the most utilitarian design for a spaceship is a cuboid, a spheroid, or a pyramid. You get the cube meta because cuboids are the easiest to build. Taking it a step further Avorion has mechanics that make cubes even more desirable.
Cubes, spheres, and pyramids are good because they have a lot of internal volume for their surface area. Since more internal volume means bigger components and bigger components = more power these shapes have a good power to surface area ratio making them powerful shapes. Ships with bad volume to surface area ratios are weaker because the extra surface area forces you to thin out your defenses. In Avorion large singular armor plates are better than a bunch of little ones and it's easiest to build a cube out of large armor plates so...
This cube is better...
Than this sphere...
This pyramid...
And this ship.
Point 3: Ship Hp, shields, and integrity fields counter the cube meta
Local damage promotes a cube meta. Look at the blue parts of my ship picture. Those blue armor blocks weight the ship down the same as the red armor blocks. Yet, they are less likely to get hit by enemy fire and so they aren't as useful as the red armor blocks. The cube doesn't have these inefficiencies and is thus more desirable. Also the more complex the shape of a ship the more complex it's local damage model becomes. Rather than worrying about where the armor should made thicker and where it should be made thinner a player can avoid all that hassle by making a cube. Then the local damage model is reduced to simply being front, back, top, bottom, right side, and left side armor and those armor plates are going to hold up better than more complex shapes make out of smaller blocks.
Ship Hp, shields, and IFGs make the local damage model of a ship matter less. If we could turn a ship into just an Hp bar the way we used to with the old IFGs then aesthetic ships would be on nearly even footing with cube ships. Now, I'm not saying all ships should work like this by default. My proposed solution, which you can read in more detail here, was to have it so that the old IFG block or some other block that worked like the old IFGs would be unlocked at a high material tier.
So there you have it. The typical engineering mechanics you find in a lot of these games leads to the cube meta. Is this a bad thing? No. It's just human nature and geometry at work. However, I feel Avorion can find a different niche. One that promotes aesthetics. If the devs decide to ease up on some of the ship design aspects.
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Koonschi is working on some way to scale turrets. The plan seems to be for scaled up turrets to have increased range, but otherwise remain the same. This seems easier to balance to me.
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?
More crew requirement might be a good way to deter people from just making the biggest guns possible all the time. Which, could be a problem even all you out of it is more range.
As far as hitting ships at maximum range goes I have learned a trick. Don't lock on to the target. You have much better sense than the AI does when it comes to long range fighting. You're better off dumb firing you cannons and rails until you pull into about 4 km of the target.
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1: Colouring
Make it so the light grey portions on turrets change colour with paint.
Sorts out issues people have with turrets not looking like they fit on their ships.
Might require changes to how textures on turrets are handled, but no major changes.
This would be a nice quick fix. Eventually, we need a way to "reskin" turrets changing both their design and color. Especially when we get the ability to scale them up.
2: Duplication
Give turret factories a "blueprint" option, where you insert an existing turret and the factory will then allow you to build more of that turret, given an appropriate quantity of components and a credit fee.
Expansion of idea:
Factories can only build turrets of their material or below, maybe the same restriction on tech level as well? (maybe exotics and/or legendaries would not be able to be duplicated to make them feel more special?)
Credit fee should be notably greater than building the equivalent turret normally in a factory, making duplication a "luxury" feature.
Component costs might be difficult to figure out, but could just go with them being at (or over) the maximum required for that turrets rarity level, this further adds to the "luxury" feel. (factories aren't tooled to make these one-off turrets, so material waste is to be expected?)
This feels reasonably balanced to me, would just have to get the costs right to make using turret factories normally appealing.
It's been suggested before and I fully agree.
3: Scale
At turret factories you can scale your turrets up or down, for a fee.
Damage and crew requirements would scale with turret size.
Possibly add more levels to turret size beyond the 0.3/0.5/1 that we currently have, higher sizes could just be scaled up versions of the 1 scale turrets to save devs from having to model more turret variants. (Suggesting additional turret sizes, as a common complaint I see is "turrets are too small" and this would allow you to have turrets that look right for some of the larger ships people make.)
The efficiency of scaling up turrets as far as crew cost/damage ratios is something to consider when you start going bigger than current maximum turret size, As such: Maybe make it so that a 0.3 scale turret only takes up 0.3 turret slots and so on for other sizes. Would likely require a change of how many turret slots you get per upgrade/etc. but could be interesting.
Koonschi is working on some way to scale turrets. The plan seems to be for scaled up turrets to have increased range, but otherwise remain the same. This seems easier to balance to me.
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oh, wasnt intent to start discussing about Cloaking in particular, but of approaches Small Ships could use against Big Ships, like mentioned Role Warfare or Swarm Tactics... like you said speed alone wont help small ones to survive, i thought Targeting could help here? Sry for derailing tho :-X, back2topic
Actually, you bring up a good point here. Making it so that it's easier to cloak smaller ships makes a certain amount of sense and can give player controlled small ships an edge they need.
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I agree that some gamification ideas are needed to create some unique challenges or designs - and stealth mechanisms are planned according to dev (I am sooo gonna build d´Deridex... :D)
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oh, hopefully nothing like full-cloak-"all invinsible", i'd prefer to see some kind of Jamming Equipment or such...
Maybe which makes you not to pop up on other player's HUDs until in Range X (could give smaller, more nimble Ships a way to Hit & Run, but me not very expierienced in PvP, just a thought...) and makes enemy NPC's ignore you until in Range X OR firing a weapon (..."at them" to exclude mining/salvage?).
This could be a chance to give modules like Sensor Booster (just as an example, i barely see it on screenshots) a little love, like if it would give you +90% Radar Range you can detect a "Radar Jamming" Enemy at Range X+90%...
Please stay on topic. We aren't here to talk about cloaking mechanics.
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-3.1415920
Negative pi to the zeroth power? Is this a really confusing way to say +1?
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We have been talking about one giant ship versus a fleet though. And while the fleet will be losing ships and thus firepower over time I think I've proven that the fleet would start the fight with a lot more fire power on their side.
Another thing I'd like to point out is that everybody's go to for making small ships better is to make them faster. But, would this work? Think about this. No matter how fast you make a ship can it dodge an electron bombardment or light? Because in this game we can totally shoot lightning and beams of deadly light at each other.
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I would be fine even with simple ability to hide/unhide blocks. I use that function much more often in 3Ds MAX, that layers, and it should be easier to implement.
I will point out that, as a 3D modeler myself, while I also use the hide option more than layers I'm not trying to hide dozens maybe even hundreds of objects all at once as the case might be in Avorion.
Layers would be a very cool feature. Especially if it came with some other functions like a convert blocks in layer to material option.
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Man this physics discussion is hilarious to watch.
However, here's another flaw with your idea. Game performance is related to how many calculations a game has to do at any given second and how quickly the game can run those calculations. If every turret were treated like a ship with it's own center of mass and inertia how many more calculations would the game have to be doing? 5 times as many? 10 times as many? Keep in mind this is per ship. In Kerbal Space Program every part of the ship has it's own mass and physics calculations. This causes the game to start lagging when you get a few hundred parts on screen. Maybe a high end machine could handle a thousand. In From the Depths each turret is a sub construct with it's own mass and again this causes the games performance to plummet once you get more than a dozens ships going at any one time. Also, the bigger the ships you have the few you can have active on screen. In Avorion you can have a ship that is armed with 50+ turrets and fly it in a sector with dozens of other ships each carrying 6 to 12 turrets of their own. Add to that fighters if a battle gets going. Implementing turret inertia would easily double maybe even triple the load on the game meaning battles would have to be scaled down.
And for all we'd be giving up, what benefit is this? I'm a dog fighter. When I point my ship's nose at something I want my turrets to maintain their orientation to the ship because I'm intending to shoot the target I'm pointing my ship at.
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Here's something people seem to have overlooked. Little ships unlock system slots faster than big ships. And more slots = more firepower.
Here's how many system slots ships get at what volumes.
2 - 51k m3
3 - 128k m3
4 - 320k m3
5 - 800k m3
6 - 2000k m3
7 – 5000k m3
8 - 12500k m3
9 - 19764k m3
10 - 31250k m3
11 - 43065k m3
12 - 59348k m3
13 - 78125k m3
14 - 107554k m3
15 - 148371k m3
For this example I'll compare three ship types, a 5000k m3 destroyer, a destroyer's worth of 800k m3 frigates, and a destroyer's worth of 128k m3 corvettes.
With one destroyer I get 7 slots.
5000k divided by 800k is 6.25 so I get 6 frigates. 6 frigates, 5 slots each, totals to 30 slots.
5000k divided by 128k is 39.0625 so I get 39 corvettes. 39 corvettes, 3 slots each is 117 slots.
Assuming all ships have to use at least 2 slots on something that isn't turrets I get this.
1 destroyer = 5 slots worth of turrets.
Fleet of frigates = 18 slots worth of turrets.
Fleet of corvettes = 39 slots worth of turrets.
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I like the current system. I'm against anything that replaces it.
Does it need to be modified? Yes. Are there things that could be added to it to make it better? Sure!
I can see adding a turret designer to the game. This wouldn't replace the system we have now. Think of this as different way to handle the current turret factories. DivineEvil put forward the idea of turret blueprints that are used in factories before. If we had a turret blueprints and a turret designer we could do all sorts of things.
Turret blueprints would be comprised of two elements, turret stats (including weapon type) and turret design (based on weapon type). Players could use the turret designer to make there own turrets. This would be an added function of the turret factories letting you mass produces turrets not just of a specific type, but also a uniform look. You can also reverse engineer looted turrets into a blueprint. Load the blueprint into the designer where you can change it's look, but not it's stats. Then use the modified blueprint to create copies of your favorite weapon that also now looks exactly the way you want it to.
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Avorion is also not an I win button. If one group were to take over the galactic core they could still possibly lose if the rest of the major player factions ganged up on them. Throw twice as many Xanion ships at Avorion ones and you are going to win.
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You must be new to space sims if you believe that bigger = better is the end-all, be-all of ship role design.
In EVE (using it as a convenient example), most types of battleships have serious trouble taking on frigates, which are the smallest player-operated ship class in the game. Destroyers specialize in killing frigates: they're somewhat larger and heavier than frigates, and are designed to fit a lot of small turrets that can easily track and hit frigates, among a few other technical factors.
Battleships on the other hand can be destroyed by a couple of frigates swooping in to inhibit its engines and jam its warp drive while their buddies flying a couple of battlecruisers with long-range weaponry pummel it from afar.
It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist of things.
This sort of rock-paper-scissors-style role balance may not be feasible for Avorion, but I assure you it's superior to and much more interesting than bigger = better. Bigger = better is easy, simple, and boring. That doesn't mean a game without complex ship roles is bad, but it does means it's missing the additional interest to be gained from nuanced ship roles.
Your example makes no sense. You say frigates can beat a battleship. But, they need battlecruisers to do it? It doesn't sound like these two forces are on equal footing at all. Also, Avorion is a building game. If fast tracking turrets are what's required to kill smaller ships and in a free building game there's nothing stopping me from putting those same turrets on my battleship. Why would I need a destroyer?
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I don't know, I think if an aircraft carrier tried to pull the maneuvers of the jets that it launches, it would probably snap in two and kill everyone who wasn't within a few meters of its center of gravity.
Can we just assume that strong inertial dampening is only practical on smaller ships for the sake of this sheer rediculousness of 5km long battleships pulling a quick U turn because they have the thruster strength of 20 nuclear fucking warheads per second?
And there's another trap people fall into. Trying to compare aircraft to surface ships and thinking that means something. It's a total apples to oranges comparison.
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Have any of you bothered to look into the laws of physics as they exist in actual outer space? Much of the assumptions this argument is based upon are only valid within an earth like atmosphere, with the forces we live through daily.
Take away the Earth physics, and you get something quite different than most people would expect. The truth of the matter is that if you put enough maneuvering thrusters on a Ship the Size of the Sun and have the power supply and all the requirements to make it functional it can be made to maneuver like a ship the size of a human. That said it would of course be an incredible feet of engineering, and anyone inside that sun sized vessel when it chose to pull a 180 degree maneuver would be exposed to some fatal G forces without some kind of inertial dampening system.
My point is, The game actually does the simulation aspect Very Well. The fault comes in with the players who rather than accepting the weaknesses of the larger vessels chose to pour endless resources and mental energies into conquering those weaknesses.
The only Fault i can find with the simulation aspect of the game is that the Maneuvering Rads are Currently Capped at 2.00 Rad/s which with a smaller vessel would be easy to exceed. I suspect the designers did this to prevent players from accidentally creating a ship that was to difficult for them to control.
Now then someone mentioned taking away large ship Integrity Fields, Well believe it or not the Integrity Field is Actually very close to becoming a reality. A Great deal of research still remains to be done but the basics of it are already understood. If i Said it was as simple as polarizing the Hull would that be enough to explain it? probably not, Basically it involves connecting one end of a flowing charge to the hull and emitting the other end through some kind of a plasma field just outside of the hull which forms a repelling barrier against anything that carries a positive or negative charge, which basically means everything. Incase your thinking that the repelling force might allow something to slip through it, experiments have shown that the force it repels at is equal to the force exerted toward it, meaning the only way to get through the field is by breaking it down entirely.
The fields are also usually designed to deflect objects rather than absorb, something the game actually lacks, since this would be a percentage of damage reduction that is not in the game.
Here's a fun game. Look up what the fastest naval warships are or even the fastest aircraft. Here's a hint: They aren't the smallest ones.
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Stat changes at this stage would be putting the cart before the horse. As it stands now, any numerical advantage a fleet of ships would have vs a single larger ship would be wasted by the AI being dopey. Fleet controls need to be better as well.
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As it stands now the AI are complete push overs at all difficulty levels. A big reason for this is that they seem pretty indifferent when it comes to fighting. Always pulling into some nominal firing range and sitting there waiting to die or sluggishly chasing you with no hopes of catching up.
Koonschi stated that he wanted the players to have the option of running away to avoid the frustration being unable to escape battles you can't win. This reasoning works well until you play on harder modes where AI is basically no threat because they can't be bothered to try and fight at their most effective ranges or even try and keep pace with you if you break off. Victory is reduced to a simple matter of leaving when your shields get low and coming back once they've recharged. The AI ships need to get faster and smarter at higher difficulty levels to counter this.
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The name gen could do with some tweaking. There are many examples of sci-fi and fantasy name generators that will generally give you pronounceable results. Also, being able to seed a list with your own names would be cool.
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If one faction takes control of the whole center they win. It's not even a matter of what materials they have at that point. Having that many sectors on lock down means they already probably had a massive unbeatable army in the first place.
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Some of this confusion might be avoided if the wiki were actually updated to the correct information.
What music ya be listenin' pirate?
in General Off-Topic
Posted
Starest, they are a rock/electronica back that sings about love, despair, and space. They're one of those concept bands that has a storyline tied to the band sort of like the Gorillas.
Their song Into the Unknown seems really Avorion appropriate.