Jump to content

Welcome to the Forum!

The best place to exchange builds and ideas! Vote for the best ideas and suggestions here.

Join the Avorion Discord!

Connect with other passionate players and talk about the latest news.
Discord

DLC Avorion Into the Rift Out Now!

Now available on Steam!
Steam
  • 0

Fatal gamedesign mistake: Clash of three concepts! -> Back to Alpha!


Meharis
 Share

Suggestion

Hi folks,

 

first of all I have to tell you all that i absolutly love some of Avorion`s features.

 

But here is the issue:

 

It is not possible to build a spacesim with fleetcommand, economy and diablo like "Hack n Slay" mechanics.

 

The combat against the AI feels odd. range > everything. Most of the enemies i met till now are so slow you could moan. (yes i m a noob and all i found was naonite)

 

The AI only appears dangerous at the beginning, when you don t have weapons to outrange them. After that you can autofire with long range bolters auto-afk-aim.

 

Compared to their slow speed the player is way to fast!

 

2000m/s with boost vs. 10m/s from the AI?

Its even possible to build a ship that is faster then any torpedo!

 

Boost and Afterburners are something for really small ships! Not the big ass planetery capital ships you can build.

 

 

Yeah, Avorion did that to attract attention from action hungry shooter gamers and the public.

But now they start to work on features for the economy.

 

There are several issues i`d like to adress:

 

1) Building ships is awesome, but 2 types of materials is dumb. Sure, it would be horrible to get 50.000 metal plates to create the hull or armorpieces but on the other hand its too easy to progress at the moment.

Jump forward, Farm a little bit of the higher materials, build a way to strong Diablo ship and kill everything.

 

2) The illusion of difficulty through overpowered KI weapons that either 1 shot you, or you 1 shot them is insane!

 

3) There is no reason to build a fleet or implement fleet control if all you need is a good weapon drop. I already spoke about the slow AI. The AI for your fleet is slow too.

 

Boxelware has to decide what their game has to be or it will flop!

 

Do they want an nearly realistic space sim with fleet control and economy or do they want a hack`n slay egoshooter in space?

 

I`d like your opinion in this case, because i put many hous of thought into it and want avorion to be the perfect multiplayer fleet space sim with great economy!

 

 

@Boxelware

 

1) The ship building is great! But don`t let it happen ingame.

Give us players the possibility to create ships and order them at a shipyard for a resonable price so that we have to make use of the economy big time!

 

2) Balance the hack`n slay in a more realistic way. Drop the idea of finding non stackable itemweapons that kill every balancing.

 

3) AI improvements more and more

 

4) Beta 16.2: Torpedos behave more like rokets. Player ships feel more like small fighters instead of being realistic.

Big balancing issue on that part! Big ships should move slower then small fighters but the opposit is the case. Drop afterburners, lower max speed in general for bigger ships or give bigger sectors.

 

Hypergates are useless once the ship "grows" all you do is using the drive.

 

This game is a mixed mess of Diablo, X-series and Startrek.

 

Choose one and you will be the King of development!

(please don t let it be diablo and startrek  ???)

 

Or you should stop developing fleet features and start a new project.

 

Diablo kills economy and fleets.

Startrek kills sector space and sector system.

X-series kills overpowered ships

 

Diablo + X-series doesn t go well -> Economy useless

 

Startrek + X-series is better, but big balancing ahead -> sector based for a vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up? WTF?

 

Diablo + Startrek is maybe possible, but doesn`t need economy and/or fleets -> Why the hell should you waste all the effort you put into this?

 

Diablo solo: Drop the fleetsystem and economy and release this mess and loose your reputation.

Startrek solo: Drop the fleetsystem and economy and release this mess and loose your reputation.

 

X-Series solo: Change economy, drop the Itemsystem and make me happy again.

 

Oh and before you release it... improve the AI. ^^

 

 

I suggest you take X Serie solo with custom ships, change the economy to Material based ressource mines. Iron Titan Naonite .... Avorion can stay inside but have to be mined from a mining station so that the player can build more advanced factories

 

 

Maybe you can make use of the "Metal"-types and increase the HP, speed, shield, Weapon damage and range, cargosize per block,... by some %/ressource-tier.

 

Its still hard to solve the puzzl to make use of economy, fleetcommanding and sector systems.

 

There has to happen a really big development setback in the near future or the players find out about the reason why the enemies move so slow and the fleet commanding doesn't work well.

 

 

- The player has to get to the galaxy center and find out whats Avorium and why the Xotan are there, check.

- There has to be something in the individual sectors, or it feels like a vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up, check.

- So we know that economy is a must. But economy has to have a reason, check.

 

 

You really want to give us the possibillity to land on planets?

Add Mass effect on top of a non working design? WTF... drop that!

 

 

 

From the Avorion WIKI...

 

Planned Features

 

These are features that are planned to be implemented some day. Only because a feature is listed here, does not mean it will always find its way into the game. For some features, it may take a long time until they will be implemented. Some features may not get implemented at all if the gameplay should develop in a direction where they would no longer fit in.

 

I LIKE <3

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 answers to this suggestion

Recommended Posts

  • 0

For something supposedly produced by putting many hours of thought, this post is evidently all over the place and with little essence to be found.

 

Please re-dedicate some of that time you've spending thinking into writing a better thesis. This will help you think better as well, now and in the future.

 

This is Suggestions section. Start with your general experience and positive feedback. Follow by specific problems in order of importance. Then offer some suggestions or ideas for solving these problems. End with short summary.

 

Right now your post completely lacks structure and hard to read and reply to. Thank you in advance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

1) Weapon Damage and stupid/slow AI -> Diablo III infernal mode pre patch

 

My general expierience:

Combat against AI is no fun, enemies are to slow.

Its quite easy to outrange every Enemy and simply fly backwards.

 

Problem:

AI ships have in one and the same start sektor weapon powers between 30 and 1500 omnicron. 30 would be easy going when they would move as fast as the player. but 1500? Try to imagin some of those behind you when you have startet the game.

 

Possible reasons:

This is du to the massive imbalance in weapon range and weapon damage. Those ships where created randomly by the system and equipped by the system.

 

My thoughts:

AI improvements right now would ruin the fun playing this.

 

Suggestion:

Tune down the ridiculos damage weapons can deal. Players will not feel overpowered or growing anymore. Many will leave cause of this. But you have to do it once you try to improve the combat AI and make this game a challange on harder difficulties.

Fleet commands and captain AI face the same problem.

 

 

So this goes from a "hack'n slay" towards a more realistic feeling.

Better? @DivineEvil

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

2) No reason to turn back -> vertical scrolling shoot em up

 

My thoughts:

Yes this game is designed around the idea to reach the galaxy center and the best material but it is a waste of potential. Once you find titan you don t bother about iron anymore, except those "breakblocks" till you get to Avorion. This goes on and on though the whole game.

95% of the galaxymap are for nothing. Possible points of interests in Multiplayergames will and have to be be located around the center.

 

Possible reason:

You find an asteroid/wreckage, you mine/salvage it and build a bigger ship right in the middle of nowhere. You even can instant repair all the damage once you fly for 5 seconds out of combat range.

 

Suggestion:

Give the economy in peaceful sectors more meaning. No one cares about weapon factories on the galaxy edge cause they can t produce the biggest and best op weapons (which ruin the AI improvements as explained in my previous post).

 

Edit:

Yes it would be logical to have peaseful civilisations at the edge and war all the time in the center.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

3) The problems with economy

 

The universe doesn't feel alive. Ships don't switch sectors cause this would require enourmus amounts of calculating all the time. No server on our planet would be big enough for a whole simulated galaxymap.

 

Suggestion:

Make the map smaller. Only load sectors with civilisations.

 

-> This would cause another problem. Game will be to small for multiplayer. But i stop right here with my suggestions.

 

Have a nice day with star citizen op mode

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

As a respond to the combat related stuff: we dont need to become less powerfull, the ai has to become more powerfull: ships in a sector should be average, but if you go to an hostile faction, attack them and they call backup, then the backup should be either a big fleet of medium ships, some big ships and escorts. How big and powerfull these ships would be would depend on how big and powerfull you are. This would however leave huge wreckages to scrap, so maybe the wreckage should only get 10% from all blocks in it if it is huge. It should also have a max so you dont spawn in a fleet of hundreds if you attack an iron zone sector.

 

Yes, please make ai faster, totally agree with that!

 

And for the wreck only contains 10%: yes its not logical, but if everything is logical this game would be impossible. See it this way: you just shot the ship with hundreds of damaging shots...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

As a respond to the combat related stuff: [...] ships in a sector should be average [...]

And for the wreck only contains 10%: yes its not logical, but if everything is logical this game would be impossible. See it this way: you just shot the ship with hundreds of damaging shots...

 

It was in the first sector with unknown mass detected. Pirates, no Backup. 4 Torpedoships 120 omn., 5 Bandits 30 omn. and ONE 1500 omnicron bandit.

 

No Boss,

no special sector,

just 2 Asteroid claims

...and the fact that i realised, that i could play this game through with 1 Point defense wepon, a small 3 block iron ship, 1 mechanic, 1 gunner and much patience!

 

i didn t loose a single word about wreckage contains. thats my last concern right now ^^

 

...

 

My new project will be building a fleet and play this as an imperium on my own... the leader does not have to fight! Cause if he does, no enemy would stand a chance.

 

So i have to build many stations to equip that fleet.

 

Designing and building many ships is the main part of this game, not collecting the biggest and best weapons as fast as possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Well, I wouldn't say that. The clash of three concepts is a wonderful idea, but it's also definitely difficult to execute.

The first problem of two is gameplay balance. The amount of damage dealt is effectively maybe a little too much, and the randomization makes very very unequal weapons. Since each faction have three weapons, you can trundle on factions with one or two weaksauce weapons reducing their collective DPS, or godroll weapons for the reverse. People are noticing it with torpedoes as the same seed is used for all "three" torpedoes, so someone can suddenly be blocked by a new hostile faction sporting ultrafast one-shot-one-kill shield-penetrating monster torpedoes.

The damage discrepancy is also enforced by the weapon triats:

Weapon Specialization

"We've revamped the strengths and weaknesses of many weapons so they're more specialized. We won't go into super-deep details, but here's the general overview of how we rebalanced them. Some remain mostly untouched, while others have undergone bigger changes."

  • Kinetic Weapons' main purpose is to do damage to hull
    • Ranges from low to high: Chaingun, Bolter, Railgun
    • General behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Disruptor Weapons' main purpose is to deal massive damage to shields

    • Ranges from low to high: Tesla, Plasma, Lightning
    • Range of Tesla Weapons has been increased
    • Range of Lightning guns has been massively increased and their accurancy improved

    [*]Artillery Weapons do mixed damage from very high range

    • Ranges from low to high: Cannon, Rocket Launcher
    • General behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Defensive Weapons are meant for defense against torpedoes and fighters

    • Anti-Fighter Cannon (see above)
    • Point Defense Chaingun (see above)

    [*]Special Weapons:

    • Laser: Mid Range, 100% accuracy
    • Pulse Cannon: Mid Range, shield penetration
    • The general behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Short ranged weapons have rather low damage and accuracy, but a high turning speed can fire for a long time

    [*]Mid ranged weapons have average damage, medium turning speed and can fire for some time

    [*]Long ranged weapons have high damage, slow turning speed and rate of fire and overheat more quickly

    [*]Civil weapons, such as mining lasers, salvaging lasers and force guns remain unchanged

Since, at the very core of the game, dodging is nigh-on impossible, the damage-range normalization will always make the most imbalanced non-equilibrium imaginable (more damage + more range = better), and torpedoes make this conundrum even more exaggerated !

Building ships is awesome' date=' but 2 types of materials is dumb[/quote']

It's another problem: since materials are different only by density and increase linearily in health, there is effectively 2 valid materials to build ships with: the current lightest one (Titanium then Trinium) and the current most resilient (the newest material in the sector).

 

The second problem is graphics-power balance.

Ships don't switch sectors cause this would require enourmus amounts of calculating all the time. No server on our planet would be big enough for a whole simulated galaxymap.

Making a galaxy-based (with a little less than one million sectors, of which 2000-3000 would be "economically active") 4X game with ship-by-ship creation, block-by-block damage physics and dynamic galactic economy is possible, but is extremely demanding in terms of processing power.

That's the reason why Toady One of Dwarf Fortress chose a minimal graphical interface (to begin with?): he actually reached the point where he has to optimize his game to add new features, and so with almost no power to graphics and turn-based gameplay, because the simulation is extremely detailed !

Notch, with Minecraft, was lucky at the beginning by striking the right balance, but had to increase minimal requirements of his game to add shaders.

Avorion is in a little less savory position where the limit has been hit, but the game can hopefully retract in many ways: less detailed (non-realtime, prediction-based) out-of-sector economy and combat for instance.

Avorion doesn't use much power in graphics (ships are made of a pretty limited amount of polys, as one block equals one poly, so few scenes have more than ten kilo-polygons), it most likely uses its power on script execution (and maybe collision calculation).

Right now the AI seems script-based, which needs a very small scripting tick, which then reflects onto all the other scripts, some of which should not be called as much and use a lot of processor power as a result. Separating the two kinds of scripts would suddenly and drastically decrease the necessary power.

(It may not actually be the case, but it's just an example to explain how quickly nowadays' computers gigantic processing power can be divided by factors of simulation complexity.)

 

Just getting rid of those two problems would make the game infinitely better and pave the way for more features like "making the Iron Wastes interesting".

 

...and the fact that i realised' date=' that i could play this game through with 1 Point defense wepon, a small 3 block iron ship, 1 mechanic, 1 gunner and much patience![/quote']

Not really, because of the whole "boss fight at the core" and constant difficulty increase, but at least

(and I guess a lot of other people too) finished the game on Normal with one ship (most of the time, and that was back in 0.10 :)).

But it's also one of the game's points: the 4X aspect is optional and a cunning enough player would be able to make it without building stations or even fleets.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Building ships is awesome' date=' but 2 types of materials is dumb[/quote']

It's another problem: since materials are different only by density and increase linearily in health, there is effectively 2 valid materials to build ships with: the current lightest one (Titanium then Trinium) and the current most resilient (the newest material in the sector).

 

I'm sorry, thats my mistake, with 2 different kinds i mean "goods" and "ship building materials".

 

Goods at the moment only have a meaning in the weapon production and for earning credits which you need to build.

 

Why don't we need trading goods to build?

 

I know, this would get rid of the whole mining and salvaging aspect but something has to happen on that part.

 

Maybe we should need special goods to build special blocks and only can build those at shipyards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I dont think anything should be done about using goods to build, because economy in this game is 90% of the time for turrets and money. Dont think this game is intended as a trading game.

 

i didn t loose a single word about wreckage contains. thats my last concern right now ^^

 

Yes i know i can read, but if you make such a suggestion as i did, you should give arguments why and why it wouldnt be to benevicial for the  player.

 

Maybe your crew would need food and water? Thats something i could see fit in the game without effecting the orestuff but also creating more economie needs, but then foodfactorys should become as common as equipmentdocks...

 

Ps parently did something wrong with the quote...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Better? @DivineEvil

A bit of an overshoot, but we'll work with what we have. At very least it is clear.

 

1) Weapon Damage and stupid/slow AI -> Diablo III infernal mode pre patch

My general expierience:

Combat against AI is no fun, enemies are to slow.

Its quite easy to outrange every Enemy and simply fly backwards.

In my opinion, its mostly a problem of current ship generation algorithm, which is suited to generate ships with blocks and pretty much nothing over that. It doesn't produce the ships of varied roles and doesn't equip the weapons to suit these roles. If that would be the case, then there will be AIs with short-range weapons and high-speed and slow, armored enemies with long-range weapons. That, and the sequence doesn't produce any more complex shapes aside from "rings", but would make the game more appealing if it would introduce many more segment varieties with available shapes.

 

No reason to turn back -> vertical scrolling shoot em up

 

My thoughts:

Yes this game is designed around the idea to reach the galaxy center and the best material but it is a waste of potential. Once you find titan you don t bother about iron anymore, except those "breakblocks" till you get to Avorion. This goes on and on though the whole game.

95% of the galaxymap are for nothing. Possible points of interests in Multiplayergames will and have to be be located around the center.

I wouldn't say 95%, but about 50% is, not counting the empty sectors. The only alternative here is to have uniform or random distribution, and unfortunately it would disfigure the entire progression concept. There's little to no games, that have successfully circumvented that. If there's a localized goal to strive for, then the remaining game world is a stepping stone towards that goal. Otherwise, everything is available everywhere, and the player is only progress in an enclosed manner, like grinding to improve character skill for being capable to acquire better resources. This is inapplicable to Avorion, as players can acquire necessary mining tools just by looting a random AI ship without even fighting it.

 

3) The problems with economy

 

The universe doesn't feel alive. Ships don't switch sectors cause this would require enourmus amounts of calculating all the time. No server on our planet would be big enough for a whole simulated galaxymap.

 

Suggestion:

Make the map smaller. Only load sectors with civilisations.

 

-> This would cause another problem. Game will be to small for multiplayer. But i stop right here with my suggestions.

Ideally, from my understanding, Avorion needs an "arbiter algorithm", which manipulates few very general values for each faction periodically, that would affect the behavior within the sectors. I.e. if a player actively trades around a given faction, that should increase this faction's internal Technological, Industrial and Social counters, which diminish over time and with ship/station casualties, but grow when the end-user stations of corresponding type consume provided goods or otherwise recieves some assistance, like completed quests and protected trade convoys. Low counter values introduce more frequent pirate raids.

 

When these values increase significantly, the faction gets better protected/armed ships, get them in greater numbers or sizes or gets more and larger trader ships in its sectors and perhaps faster production on stations and mines, respectively. Counters are updated only few times in a hour and take effect only in active sectors.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I agree with you about what you are essentially saying which might be something like: 1) the game is fun and has potential for greatness. 2)The game is way too easy and the AI isn't great yet. 3) The ARPG and sandbox elements are at odds with each other because the enemies are too weak for a hardcore ARPG audience. I think these are good points.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...