Quality of life/balance suggestions

[storm6436]

  I'd made some extensive notes on my playthrough and now can't seem to find them =\  So off the top of my head:

 

1.  Salvaging --  Tiny pieces force performance issues past a certain point.

Potential fixes:

A. "Wide beam" salvage beams.  As far as I can tell, the salvage beam is either resolved as a singular point or a very, very narrow beam and its damage applied every so many time ticks.  Making the beam wider, even if it's only a relatively small amount,  would help with this, especially if you're using autonomous salvaging turrets who seem to frequently get stuck trying to snarf the tiny pieces... speaking of which,  This could be a separate type of salvage beam or integrated into an existing line... like, say, a feature of the "Uses X energy per second" salvage beams which already have a visually wider beam?

 

B. Time-out and target validation for self-aiming turrets.  I can't reasonably count the number of times I've seen my autofiring salvage turrets get stuck trying to beam a tiny piece of debris but  they can't quite hit them... so they sit there until I reorient the ship accomplishing nothing but poking a red beam out into space.  After a short period, wouldn't it make sense to move on to a different target if you can't hit it?  Or do a size/radial distance comparison to beam width and realize that you're not likely to be able to hit it and just not target it at all unless that's all that's left?

 

C. Bulk clean-up tractor beams.    Any wreckage under a certain size and within a certain distance gets auto-scooped.  You'd have to tinker with the size definitions, and I have no idea how this data is stored back-end or how easy it is to manipulate or access.    You'd want all the tiny needle/antenna  stuff you can't easily hit to get sucked up, but not the bigger stuff.  If the wreckage actually has a calculated volume or stored linear dimensions, you could probably do this by boolean logic.  "If debris_volume<=X" or  a more complicated "If 2 axis lengths < X and the other < Y" or some such.  The idea being small sheets of negligible thickness would get picked up, but say, measurably thick  actual blocks wouldn't.    At any rate, one could tie this into the improved tractor beam upgrade seeing as upgrade slots are at a premium.  The tiny bits tractored in would count torwards loot/mineral recovery, figure every X amount of pieces (since they're small) would be 1 mineral and a roll on random loot discovery.  Also being able to attach this feature to a fighter would be very nice.  Maybe a specific kind of cargo shuttle, so people are encouraged to do things like have 11 salvagers in a squadron and 1 "garbage truck" that will snarf a certain amount of free floating tiny bits before needing a place to return those bits to?

 

Actually a somewhat larger fan of the tractor beam solution than wide beam salvagers, but I'm not sure how the backend performance hit would look.  From a player perspective, B certainly makes things easier, but A accomplishes the same goal just needs more time.

 

 

2.  Long distance Aiming -- It's kind of a pain in the ass to aim at particularly distance enemies.  I don't really have a solution in mind.  I'm not looking for easy mode to allow me to snipe people at 30km with my 50k per punch railguns, but at the same time I'd like to have an idea of "Oh, it looks like I'm aiming high but because of the perspective bias I'm actually under the target not over it.  Squinting at the screen trying to figure out if that's a green circle or not makes for a lot of eye strain after a certain point.

 

3. Mining -- Rewarding in the early game, utility drops off as a function of story progression.    By the time I hit the core I didn't mount mining lasers because per unit time I could get far more oog/avorion per unit time salvaging than I could mining.  Still, made a few squadrons of mining fighters simply so I could strip mine systems while my salvaging fighters ate everything else.  Potential solutions are all problematic in terms of game balance.  Making avorion mining beams do more damage trivializes/unbalances them when applied to earlier minerals.  Lowering the HP of later tier asteroids kinda trivializes them as well, and upping the amount of minerals pulled per asteroid doesn't really address the 'per unit time' problem, which is the heart of the matter.  Similarly, nerfing salvaging is unhelpful and unsatisfying.  Best solution might be a very careful combination of all of the above (but not the nerfing part :P).

 

4. Aesthetics of the core region -- Honestly given the storyline up until that point, I expected to find the core was nothing but an immense stretch of bug-controlled wasteland with maybe a station or three hidden here and there filled with the last survivors pleading you save them.  I wasn't expecting large portions of the core to be basically business as normal.  This isn't a huge complaint, per se, just an observation that it doesn't feel quite right having a huge number of empires that look/act just like everyone outside the barrier.  Sure, you need some turret/fighter factories that still work to up your tech to make beating the bug boss reasonable... current implementation doesn't feel quite right. 

 

5. AI faction depth/control -- I get that this system isn't fully developed and it's only a placeholder to some extent.  However:

 

Constant faction wars -- while these are good from a salvager's perspective, given no sane person is going to turn down 400k-500k free avorion every 10 minutes or so, they get very, very tiring.  Especially when you're "friends" with both sides.  The AI is really, really bad at killing each other off in any semblance of quick and when you're friends with both sides you can't really help :P  It's also particularly bad when both sides have really good turret factories to the point you do business with both.... only to have both sides raiding the systems those factories are in.  Your only choice is to either tank your rep with one side to save a factory over the other (or both sides) ... or to simply not go to those systems unless you need more turrets in order to keep the battle suspended....

 

  When diplomacy gets implemented,  can we have a feature where we can kinda prevent this from happening as frequently?    I'm not picky.  "Do X quests for both sides, get peace for Y amount of time" is a decent start but longer term solutions should exist.  "Must be this liked by both sides" is valid too.  It'd be nice to not have just a singular solution that depends on only one factor (ie. money or reputation)

 

Also, when things get better implemented, are there plans to functionally simulate the various factions in terms of economy and strategy?  ie. they have X number of ships and with Y amount of shipyards they can build Z amount of ships provided they get Q amount of minerals which they're obtaining from their resource stations, etc etc etc?  And have the current number of ships dictate or play into how aggressively they attack/defend systems?  Again, not sure of performance hits or how exactly one would tie that reasonably into the simulation without it being a bunch of back-end navel gazing.

 

6. Trading interface -- Current implementation is actually fairly decent.  Would like some sliders or some sort of other option where I don't have to type in specific numbers.  A "Sell all" button would work. 

 

Similarly, in terms of data visualization the current trader module is great, but it would be really nice to  have a list of "You ave X, you can sell it to Y"    Specifically, sometimes when you're in the middle of a faction war and you're scooping cargo, or perhaps you're cleaning out a scrapyard and you get a variety of things, it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out where you can sell much of any of it because the map search feature will only get you specific stations by type and the current module only  gives you valid trade routes.  Given you can't see what a trading station actually sells without either being in the system itself or it showing up in your trade routes bit, some sort of visualization on the map where I can select a given cargo and have it highlight systems I can sell it in would be nice.  Maybe link that to the current trading module?

 

Edited to add: 

 

Concerning faction wars and turret factories -- If the factions boarded/took over the stations this would be less of an issue.  I know that's not implemented yet, just trying to provide better feedback.  Would also point out that if a faction takes a turret factory, wouldn't that adjust the random seed for that factory?  It would make sense logically, but from a gameplay perspective that'd be problematic if the factory were particularly good at a specific turret the player wanted/needed.

[Kamo]

• Bulk clean-up tractor beams are cool. Easily gets rid of the salvaging beam targeting issue on tiny things (especially those due to custom turrets).
  
• Long distance Aiming: A zoom is needed, like in Mechwarrior 3 and up. Also, now that's became fairly important, pointing anywhere with a ship targeted should focus the turrets according to target distance (right now it only happens when the mouse is on the ship, which forces the player to either wait for the ship movement to align to the front or back, or fire haphazardly with unfocused turrets, hopefully hitting the enemy.
  
• Mining: Resource asteroid size needs to increase according to core distance, relative to ship size increase. Having Titanium/Naonite get rare when making more and more huge ships to invade the Inner Sphere is silly.
  
• Constant faction wars: Diplomacy missions, or paying for peace. It's very bad to have trading and stations in both factions engaged in a war, as I have to build back the stations as they get destroyed to restore the economies I assisted :(. Not only that but something as innocuous as a pirate/xsotan attack ending in collateral damage against a war fleet may cause horrible mayhem and sudden war against one of the factions.
  Also, Faction Wars need to have objectives that need to be done to finish them.
  
• Trading interface: Yay, Buy/Sell all button to give the 9 button some rest ::) !
  

[SneakyTacts]

I agree with most of what you two are saying. Just remember that we should have some patience since we all bought an early-access game :)

 

About mining, I think the solution is not to make it as powerful as salvaging through modifications. Instead, mining should become fun. I’m not sure what could make it fun, but that’d be best.

 

This is actually someone else’s idea and that person suggested stuff such as finding a certain laser frequency or acid combination to gain more material or gain material quickly. They weren’t sure, either, but those are helpful starts of suggestions.

[Sir Charles]

Little bit of crying here, skip to the end for the actual suggestion ^^

 

I agree with most of what you two are saying. Just remember that we should have some patience since we all bought an early-access game :)

 

That point makes me a little nervous tho. I like Avorion. A lot.

I do understand that game developement takes its time, that the Boxelware team is small and that they problably have other things in life that matter more than a game ( some of them are still studying if I remember correctly)...

And of course I want the game to become much better than it is atm (as always, see my signature threads for concrete points :D)

 

BUT:

The game release was announce to be in Q3 2017. when the devs saw that this was not possible, the moved it to Q3 2018...

Now we are in 2019 and the game still is far from being finished...

 

As I said, I want this game to be finished. And polished. But I don’t want it to be another ‚forever beta‘ title...

 

_________________________________________________________

 

About mining: why not make it some kind of minigame? Let’s say you can mine as usual, but if you got a mining upgrade equipped, asteroids show glowing dots, which will be very fast to mine and give you a bonus to the gained material, also if you mined some amount of dots, the whole asteroid would explode, giving you all of its resources instantly...

 

Like that, mining fleets would still work but if you are mining „by hand“, you actually get something to do and can receive a bonus as well... mabye your accuracy while addressing the points would affect your bonus, so (for example) perfect accuracy on dots would reward you with 100% mining efficiency.  This would also make mining faster when done by the player himself... the number of dots you need to get the whole asteroid would obviously depend on its size, mabye with 3 for the smallest ones and something like 15 or so for these big 200k asteroids.

 

What do you think?

 

[SneakyTacts]

About mining: why not make it some kind of minigame? Let’s say you can mine as usual, but if you got a mining upgrade equipped, asteroids show glowing dots, which will be very fast to mine and give you a bonus to the gained material, also if you mined some amount of dots, the whole asteroid would explode, giving you all of its resources instantly...

 

Like that, mining fleets would still work but if you are mining „by hand“, you actually get something to do and can receive a bonus as well... mabye your accuracy while addressing the points would affect your bonus, so (for example) perfect accuracy on dots would reward you with 100% mining efficiency.  This would also make mining faster when done by the player himself... the number of dots you need to get the whole asteroid would obviously depend on its size, mabye with 3 for the smallest ones and something like 15 or so for these big 200k asteroids.

 

What do you think?

Still sounds a bit tedious to have to (possibly) maneuver a ship to aim, but such accuracy bonuses are nice.

 

That accuracy thing you came up with sounds like it would fit nicer on another part of the game. Perhaps something to do with general combat or boss fights? Not sure.

 

We’re on the right track, though. I think that same dude that I read the suggestion from showed more examples from other games. One included blowing up asteroids for epic explosions. If that were possible in Avorion, it might be fun for a while. Maybe it’d be good for late-game mining to speed up the process.

[storm6436]

Well aware it's an early access game.  I'm no stranger to them.  Hell, I've got a copy of 7Days2Die, which also seems to be stuck in permanent EA....

 

The point of the suggestions was simply to highlight potential fixes or ways to address issues I've come across.  I don't have the ability to read the devs brains nor do I sit through any meetings with them so I don't know what they consider problematic nor am I aware of any solutions they might be talking about... so, seeing as I tend to see EA gaming as an opportunity to engage in a kinda/sorta partnership with game devs to help their game be better on release, I figured they might find it helpful if I highlighted some of the issues I saw as issues and offered a few potential fixes with a little highlighting of the dev-logic behind them...  basically just trying to be productive towards making the game as a whole better.

 

As to the rest of the subsequent commentary... well, having played games that tried to make minigames out of every other task, they're not very engaging and they reward people for jumping through arbitrary hoops for no other reason than hoop jumping... granted it's a game and everything is hoop jumping to a degree but this is more arbitrary than most of the other arbitrariness, if that makes any sense?

 

I mean, specifically against mining, my only point of aggravation was that salvaging gives you minerals much faster than mining past a point.  Specifically, your average avorion capital ship wreck that you just killed in a faction war rolls out about 150k avorion and we'll say it harvests for A% of that in X number of seconds.  Your average avorion asteroid clocks in at 1/20th of that and takes just as long if not longer to harvest.  God help you if you find a 150k asteroid.  You're going to be there a *long* time.  Similarly, hunting down avorion station wrecks in the core itself?  Sure, that beast might have 1M avorion sitting in it, but since all the tasty bits are long gone, the harvest time to eat that whole station makes harvesting a 150k asteroid look like a short task. 

 

Having to compare salvaging a fresh kill vs an old kill (crappy scrapyard wreck or long-dead core station) to a given asteroid of a given size... and then carefully comparing those three values for the average efficiency/DPS of a given salvager and a given mining turret... that's not something that's easily done since there's a lot of variability there.  It's a complex problem whose solution will also be complex.  I mean, simply making the asteroids bigger won't fix the problem that it feels like it takes forever in the first place, which is also aggrivated by the constant warping in of pirates, bugs, and faction wars.

[Nachtu]

Similarly, in terms of data visualization the current trader module is great, but it would be really nice to  have a list of "You ave X, you can sell it to Y"    Specifically, sometimes when you're in the middle of a faction war and you're scooping cargo, or perhaps you're cleaning out a scrapyard and you get a variety of things, it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out where you can sell much of any of it because the map search feature will only get you specific stations by type and the current module only  gives you valid trade routes.  Given you can't see what a trading station actually sells without either being in the system itself or it showing up in your trade routes bit, some sort of visualization on the map where I can select a given cargo and have it highlight systems I can sell it in would be nice. Maybe link that to the current trading module?

 

Would be nice if you could buy all that trading data from the faction concerned (price gradually reaching zero when relations improve) without being in the sector. Or maybe you could drop a trading satellite into a sector and gain the data that way (maybe usable much like the Energy signature suppressors).

 

Concerning faction wars and turret factories -- If the factions boarded/took over the stations this would be less of an issue.  I know that's not implemented yet, just trying to provide better feedback.  Would also point out that if a faction takes a turret factory, wouldn't that adjust the random seed for that factory?  It would make sense logically, but from a gameplay perspective that'd be problematic if the factory were particularly good at a specific turret the player wanted/needed.

 

If I was taking over a factory where they made awesome turrets, I might just spare the personnel, tech and infrastructure that makes those turrets possible.

[Kamo]

Would also point out that if a faction takes a turret factory' date=' wouldn't that adjust the random seed for that factory? [/quote']

Actually, not even that. The turrets at turret factories have no relation to the factions turrets, because when a faction has several turret factories, they have different seeds so no reason to change turret seed upon boarding :).

[Sir Charles]

I hope that when they implement boarding, the general faction and territory system will become more dynamic in the same update, the galaxy feels pretty dead atm, but we‘ve been talking about that in other threads anyways...

 

 

I don’t know whether I made my mining suggestion clear enough tho, yes you would have to manouver to hit the points, that’s the whole point about it, when you shoot them, it is like 5 seconds and then they are gone... imagine mining a 100k asteroid with 70% efficiency, that is 70k of material, sure that is good already, but if you would hit all the points with assumed perfect accuracy, it would take you (when we stay with the 15 dots I suggested) only 75 seconds plus your manouvering time to get 100k materials of it.

Honestly there is no point against salvaging being better in „end game“, but up to then mining and salvaging should be more equal...

 

Blowing up asteroids is also a nice idea, how about alternatives to the normal mining, like „mining torpedoes“ which will instantly blow up the asteroid ( or a set amount of its material) but have very limited efficiency and the abillity to „board“ an asteroid and get resources after some time with very high efficiency...