PVE is broken, it ruins PVP and makes all combat boring - here's why:

[DAGMARthePIRATE]

Just to start, I have about 700 hours of gameplay, which I'd  say gives me a rather experienced perspective on the game.  If your initial thought is, how can the game be broken, yet I've played for 700 hours - Parts of the game are really fun, but in the end, all the gameplay generally ends up in disappointment for me (especially since I play on a pvp server - Rusty's).  Most of what I'm discussing is late game, and can be achieved within hours / a day of a server wipe/new galaxy.

 

PVE Combat is broken - here's the issue:  Most PVE action involves you one shotting(2 shots if they have shields) - most enemies.  The only other longer fight is the wormhole guardian, which on vanilla you can even take out in just a few hits as well.  In addition, you generally have a big shield 200Mil-2Bil is easily done (my server has a volume restriction that makes it hard to have more than 1-200Mil), so you can tank just about anything any PVE element in the game is throwing at you.  Furthermore, all you really need to do is outrange the enemy, which is in most cases extremely easy.  Rails and lightning with a 30km range easily outrange almost anything.  If you need to you can use launchers with a 40km range, but with launchers all you need to do is just move fast and your range goes up to like 100KM range, which means you can kill anything in the sector from very far away.  And ultimately, all combat is just stripping some shields, and firing a shot or two to destroy the ship.  The problem with all of this is two fold - one for PVE - it is boring.  You can intentionally make yourself weaker, for a somewhat better fight - but why?  And Two, in PVP, there's basically no way to defend yourself  (and i've tried tons of tesla platforms with millions of omicron with hundreds of fighters supporting them, and rail platforms outside of that).  Once anyone gets themselves free in your sector, they can just use the pve combat to destroy all your stuff (if you are offline)- with little ease and little risk - hundreds of millions of avorion are destroyed quickly.

 

On point one, the PVE action - there's basically Zero skill involved.  Just outrange , ultra shield, and ultra dps yourself, and the game is a cakewalk.  There's no in your face combat that makes real use of maneuverability or targeting specific systems or anything of the sort.  Its just adding numbers to yourself, and clicking in the general direction of what you want to kill - that our easily outraninging or running away with boosts that the ai doesn't use.  The only time in the game that you get anything sort of like that is at the beginning when you're all using chainguns - that part of the PVE in the game i actually find somewhat fun, as limited as it is.  How can pve be more fun, realistic, and challenging - something that pushes you to develop skill and tactics?  That's a good question, and I would like to see some good comments about it, I'll comment later myself about my ideas.  I did hear that at one time, the range on most/all weapons was limited to something real close - like 5km?  I think that might have added some more dynamic combat, but is not a solution in itself.

 

In regards to the PVP - I play on a core pvp only server.  the player interaction gives me some reason to continue to play the game.  I put in 100 hours of single player and got bored immediately after destroying the Wormhole guardian, so I started playing online and joined a pvp server.  The pvp element gives combat some engaging elemenets - as other players potentially are a worthwhile foe.  However, a lot of those fights are easily determined on what types of weapons you have, how many shields, and how you outrange someone (all the same with the pve, actually).  The only difference is the player can use engine boosts to at least try to get in range.  Furthermore, there's always the near impossible to defend against trick of using missiles while flying at high speeds to destroy your enemy, that can't dodge Launcher missiles going 15km/s .... And basically, any defense you build to protect yourself with AI ships is easily overrun by anyone who can survive the first 5 secodns of spawning into a sector and meeting its initial defenses.  Not very fun, and your hundreds of hours and millions of avorion spent building defenses goes to waste very quickly.

 

What can be done to make it better - and is this most people's experience?

[Mister-E]

yeah, just go ahead and write a python tensorflow RNN model to pilot the AI ships, and then get it to work with .lua

[SivCorp]

I second this notion.  The most balanced feeling strategic time of the game is early game.  once you can outrage the slow, unmaneuverable AI ships... they are not a threat. 

 

I think ranges need dropped substantially.  Max range should be no more than 20km.  And damage scaling needs dropped for some weapons, and increased for others.  Lighting, tesla, railgun are all too strong.  Plasma, lasers, bolters, are too weak.  Pulse cannons are laughably weak, and should not be block by any shield modification in my opinion.  Their range is low, their damage low, so they should be able to pass through shields, always.  Else boost their range and damage massively.    Launchers are in an odd place.  In any PVP situation, they are the only option in dueling an agile player.  The damage isn't as bad, but with the high range, and ability to boost the speed of the projectile with your own speed just makes them 100km seeking death shots. 

Another noticeable weakness, are repair turrets.  With all the damage scaling up, repair turrets should also scale up.  They are laughably weak.  You need 4x's the amount of turret slots in repair turrets to even dent the damage of 1 weapon.

 

Also, Force guns do not handle physics in the expected fashion they should.  A pull turret should pull the ship in as a tracter beam would.  instead it just spins the target ship.  Same for push guns... it doesn't repel the ship, just spins it.  Perhaps this will be fixed when boarding is introduced, but they seem pointless at this stage of development. 

 

Well, that's my 2 pennies rubbed together... Hope it helps.  Love the game, and the work the Dev's put into it.  Balance is busted though. 

 

[Kamo]

Force guns are way too weak: they only spin enemy ships... if they have any kind of Inertial Dampener (which is actually quite rare), unless you use a massive amount of them, or hit stations, and you have to use them with Turret Lock Blocks to not make them spin a lot. Their strength need to be multiplied by the Tech Level, then by at least 5, then by a multiplier depending on mass of the block (so a good Iron gun will probably be better than a good Titanium one because Iron ships are heavier and need more strength to push/pull).

Repair Turrets are also way too weak: at the Xanion Loop you're supposed to have at least a Light Destroyer as a main fighting ship, with around 1 million hull, and Xanion repair turrets are between 250-500 repair per second, actually worse than 130% base hull regeneration.

 

The very premise of the game is anti-PvP by definition: players have the freedom of making the ships they want at the scale they want, only limited by the resources they can find. So PvP naturally tends to "make the biggest ship with as much TCS and weapons you can with and hope the other player does not have a bigger one with more weapons", especially as resources aren't given back by insurance and TCS are dropped and taken, so the player with the biggest ship gets the best TCS and weapons and is basically immortal unless some form of teamplay occurs. And station building quickly becomes a waste of resources, as said big ships plow through stations with ease, and xsotan and pirates becomes a non-issue.

Avorion is mostly about the roleplay and the rules players make for themselves. It's a big sandbox, and not much competition can happen when everything is made of sand.

Three options are needed to make a form of PvP balanced: the ability for the admin(s) to see and modify players' inventories and resources (like, to empty them), a way to limit construction (like, to impose a temporary volume/mass limit) and a way to turn off their other ships, then the admins can decide to do limited time mining and building competitions : mine how you can and build a ship, then compare and fight ? Or limited resource building competitions.

 

Multiplayer PvE needs a lot of balance since an alliance of players is much stronger than the sum of its parts, but the PvE will either be way too difficult, or a complete joke, because of the variety of playstyles. Some like to make stations and fleets and build turrets, which'd be huge in the long run, while other like to make huge ships with all their eggs in the same basket, some of them being very strong or weak in the short run due to the random nature of loot.

So multiplayer PvE also needs to be player-managed, with invincible admin-observers playing with an exponential balance slider (to match the scale of the players' ships), and the ability to spawn ships of a particular NPC faction and strength (multiplied by the previous slider of couse) and order them to jump to a sector to cause mayhem, "special events" and actually challenging fights 8) !

Singleplayer PvE may also benefit from a similar balance slider, which'd progressively apply with the total volume/cred value of players' ships (to allow the player to prepare her/himself to the actual balance), or maybe a set of them, who knows.

Also, the game may benefit with custom difficulty options (making the current difficulties presets?), with at least multipliers to player and NPC damage. A 25% player/100% NPC game would get very fleet-centered as the player's fleet would do the damage instead of the player her/himself :D.

 

I second this notion.  The most balanced feeling strategic time of the game is early game.  once you can outrage the slow' date=' unmaneuverable AI ships... they are not a threat.[/quote']

Rear-firing ships will become more and more useful with the next update, where...

Pathfinding + Flying

We're improving the pathfinding and flying AI, which means that ships will fly their full speed when they can, and they will also maneuver asteroid fields a lot smarter. This will also make the game a little harder, because you won't be able to fly away from enemies as easy as before.

...the outranging is going to be much harder, going in reverse won't just cut it anymore :P.

[Alanthier]

you forgot about the laser turrets SivCorp, they're even more laughably weak than Pulse cannons due to their limited range, and INSANE energy consumption 99% of the time.  Most of the time i'll see any Tech level factory with a turret with MAYBE 5k dps for a laser turret, with an energy consumption of like 450k per sec, with an increase of 900k per sec on top of that.  It's stupid.    And that energy consumption portion, is also 99% of the time in terms of being some outrageous figure.

[DivineEvil]

1.) Main problem with combat currently is the leisure function of the engine Boosters. They essentially allow any ship, big and small, to destroy as many NPC ships as desired given the time necessary. Ability to boost away at any moment prevents any risk in commitment to fighting, unless the player allows the depletion of his shields and sustained hull damage deliberately. As been said, it also ruins any expectations for PvP for the same reason. As it is now, its an overpowered ability that every ship has by default, but only players can use, and it has no in-combat limitations.

 

- Engine Boosters should be a separate block. Having more boosters should give you more boost power and acceleration for greater power drain.

- Engine Boosters should have a charge-up mechanic, which requires holding the key for several seconds to engage the boost. Larger boosters require longer charge up. Maneuvering elements are disabled during the charge-up.

- Being affected by forces (explosive weapons, force turrets or collisions) drains the charge and can cause the booster to be temporarily disabled if completely disrupted. Larger boosters takes more effort to disrupt, but are disabled for longer.

 

All of that should be more than enough to dedicate the engine Boosters to general sector exploration and movement towards and between stations, rather than keeping it as a Go-Free card, that is only countered by itself or an overwhelming instant-kill firepower.

 

Other than that, ship's Maximum Velocity is increasing with the size of ship given the same volume proportion of Engines. This has to be the opposite to promote the use of smaller ships. The fact, that a 12-slot battleship can have greater base velocity, than a small 2-slot Gunboat is nonsensical.

 

2.)Current DPS rating of weapons seem to scale around the turret size and doesn't care much for the range, accuracy and other important factors (or at least it seem to leave that impression). Range in general is one of the most difficult stats to balance around because it multiplies the value of DPS in a exponential fashion. As it is now, there's no point in using any short-range weapons because they do not introduce any feasible benefits.

 

Range is a massive advantage, not just a feature. Long-range weapons should either be weaker than short-range ones, or they should introduce demands so high, that you'd need a ship specifically designed to use long-range weapons and not being good at anything else. If there's no reason to use anything apart from two instant-hit long-range weapons, there's no balance worth to be talking about.

 

3.) Energy drain for most weapons is absolutely irrelevant - it is so small, that its not even a consideration in selection of weapons, not even speaking about introducing additional power generation or storage on a ship to support heavier weapons. On the other hand, energy weapons utilize over-time increase in energy drain, which for all intents and purposes is completely ridiculous. That mechanic makes weapons unpredictable in their upkeep, which makes them unreliable, which in turn makes them useless.

 

ALL weapons has to either have a static active power demand, or has to have a heat buildup and a cooldown period. When these are the only two options, then the player can make conscious considerations of what his ship can handle. He might want some additional power generation to maintain the stable function of flat-upkeep weapons, or he might consider larger batteries to provide enough juice for heavier weapons, that drain them dry before going on the long cooldown period.

 

Weapons and tools with ramping power drain are not fun to use by a player, a fatal choice for any AI-controlled ship and has no conceptual basis behind it - there's simply no reason why some weapons overheat and go on cooldown, while others can drain infinite amounts of energy to cool themselves and keep going until more than half of the ship's energy generation is going into keeping two mining beam turrets working.

 

The power demands in general deserve to be looked at and adjusted, because as of now there's little use for power aside from shield upkeep and booster fuel.

 

I can go on and on about all other issues with weapon balance, material scaling and randomness, but I've already expressed such concerns elsewhere. Problems that I've mentioned here is what keeps me from playing the game, and until any of them are addressed, I hold no interest in coming back.

[DAGMARthePIRATE]

I see a lot of people sort of linger outside of the core, in xanion space.  And a lot of people don't use turret factories.  Before you get into the core, or before you use turret factories, there's a good chance you're properly scaled with the AI.  I think a lot of people enjoy that.  On the server I play on, we have a 250M volume limit.  I wonder if a 100M limit, and a cap on turret factory damage multipliers, and a fix of rocket launcher range would help the game.  That way you could have a few mil shields, weapons better than  ones that drop for the most part, but you're not one shotting everything, and you're having to fight more toe to toe with the enemies.

 

I think something close to those things would fix quite a few things.

[DivineEvil]

I see a lot of people sort of linger outside of the core, in xanion space.  And a lot of people don't use turret factories.  Before you get into the core, or before you use turret factories, there's a good chance you're properly scaled with the AI.  I think a lot of people enjoy that.  On the server I play on, we have a 250M volume limit.  I wonder if a 100M limit, and a cap on turret factory damage multipliers, and a fix of rocket launcher range would help the game.  That way you could have a few mil shields, weapons better than  ones that drop for the most part, but you're not one shotting everything, and you're having to fight more toe to toe with the enemies.

 

I think something close to those things would fix quite a few things.

Primary reason why people linger around the barrier is the necessity of collecting Xsotan artifacts to cross it. Primary reason why people may not use the turret factories is because of the need to collect trade commodities and lower necessity in their use prior to reaching the barrier. The real problem here, yet again, comes back to the inability to replicate the turrets you've looted or researched and the fact, that turret production is attached to the commodity trading, even though ship/station building, fighters and modules are not.

 

Ideally players should acquire the turrets trough looting and researching and then using Turret Factories to reproduce them in mass to have a complete customization freedom and personal tech-base, instead of being stuck between dozens of completely different turrets gained from all over the place and working in individual fashion and Factory-produced turrets, that require enormous time and credit investments to gain overpowered weapons that work synchronously. Just like FIghters, Turrets should be reproduced with Credits and Resources without the attachment to ecomonic production chains. Turret Factories themselves should only offer Common-grade turrets in indefinite numbers, that players can use for research or as generic equipment for AI ships, compared to Equipment Docks, that can sell better turrets in limited amounts, and Researching, that provide best turrets as individual models. The player will be able to equip entire fleets with turrets of his choice, and those would be made from his blueprints, not from a particular NPC turret factory anyone can use. Player-owned Turret Factories could be used to generate turret blueprints free-of-charge.

 

Volume limits are only needed to prevent absurd values and visual bugs from excessively large ships made out of cheap blocks and materials. If there's a need to adjust the balance, that should be provided by the diminishing returns (thrust, maneuverability, shield strength etc.), not hard limits.

I see no connection between Missile ranges and the broken PvE. Missile launchers are broken by themselves and has to be transformed into a completely different weapon with a specific role.

[unbekannt1984]

Hi,

I think a few ideas around here are quite good, may I add a few ideas?

 

1.) Main problem with combat currently is the leisure function of the engine Boosters.

Would you prefer a system like in Star Trek Online? There you can utilize an ability called Evasive Maneuvers, it boosts your turnrate and speed for 15 seconds (or something like that) and then goes on a 90 second cooldown (well, I don't really remember the numbers).

Full-Impulse (an ability that works almost like our Boosters in Avorion), can be used just while not in combat.

 

On the other side, Star Trek Online has got a different approach of energy-systems, too. You can choose the energy-levels for different subsystems (Engines - also increases turnrate, Shields - recharge and a little damage-resistance, Weapons - damage of energy-weapons - and Auxilary-Systems - many healing-abilities, hangar-recharge and science-stuff), normal presetting for each system is 50, but you can use sliders to set the system up to 100 or down to 25 (it drains/boosts the energy of other Subsystems).

With a system like the one of STO, you can boost your engine-power to twice the normal to fly faster (well, not twice as fast as normal, throw a little diminishing returns on top).

 

Another system that I liked was the one of the old Star Wars games (X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance). You were able to set Shields-, Weapons- and Tractor-Powerlevels, each of those Systems had its' own buffer, the left-over energy was your engine-power... If you were in trouble, you were able to transfer energy from the weapons or tractor to your shields, or the other way around, if you needed firepower.

With this system you were also able to adjust the top-speed of your fighter/ship.

 

2.)Current DPS rating of weapons seem to scale around the turret size and doesn't care much for the range, accuracy and other important factors...

Like energy-setting (or energy-level like in the X-Wing games) for an energy-weapon? Both systems would make things a little more interesting...

 

On the other side: You'd need to sacrifice speed, shield-strength or anything else, if you want to increase your firepower.

If you chose to run away from your enemies, you wouldn't mind firepower that much.

 

3.) Energy drain for most weapons is absolutely irrelevant - it is so small, that its not even a consideration in selection of weapons, not even speaking about introducing additional power generation or storage on a ship to support heavier weapons. On the other hand, energy weapons utilize over-time increase in energy drain, which for all intents and purposes is completely ridiculous. That mechanic makes weapons unpredictable in their upkeep, which makes them unreliable, which in turn makes them useless.

Yes, power-consumption is mostly a joke, except you get a mining-/salvaging-turret with massive power-consumption. I got one of those and made a salvaging-fighter out of it... No need to worry about the power-drain anymore and at least not completely useless.

 

The power demands in general deserve to be looked at and adjusted, because as of now there's little use for power aside from shield upkeep and booster fuel.

There is little use for batteries at the moment - especially if you think about stations that usually don't move (and don't use boosters). If we were able to transfer energy for example from the battery to the shields (for a quick recharge), this might help to promote different styles of playing the game.

Some more dynamic energy-options would help you to escape (if you need to), tank enemies or increase your firepower (well, at least for energy-weapons).

 

Weapons are another point. Especially Coaxial Weapons are not as useful as they should, anything except a Coaxial Seeker-Rocket Launcher fires in a straight line forward.

Well, that works in games like X-Wing, but in Avorion the ship doesn't point exactly where you want to shoot at and you can have difficulties to hit a Station with your Coaxial Railguns from 20 or 30km away (yes, such strong weapons should have lower range). Give those weapons a little targeting-angle, something like 45° (22.5° to each side) to the surface they are mounted at (so usually a 45° cone in the front).

This would make small and maneuverable attack-ships (should I name those Escorts?) useful (well, at least to a certain degree). But those Escorts need to be able to escape, too... They need to be faster then bigger ships - that's another point DivineEvil pointed out:

Volume limits are only needed to prevent absurd values and visual bugs from excessively large ships made out of cheap blocks and materials. If there's a need to adjust the balance, that should be provided by the diminishing returns (thrust, maneuverability, shield strength etc.), not hard limits.

But currently we have buffs to bigger ships (scale a ship up and it is faster then the original).