Cairo1’s Feedback

[SneakyTacts]

This is good feedback from new member Cairo1 in the ‘Suggestions’ section. I’m putting their message here since it is more feedback than suggestions.

 

https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,6222.0.html

Hello, this is my first post here, I found this game recently and in the last week have ended up dumping all of my free time into it. My friends and myself quickly hosted a server and began playing, Now that we have reached the middle and possess end game equipment I would like to post some thoughts and suggestions in hopes the Development team will take them to heart.

 

First I would like to say I am dazzled by the game over-all the polishing is great, and most systems are intuitive and straight forward. The building system leaves little to be desired with un-restricted shapes and sizes which is liberating when coming from a game like FTD or Space Engineers. Weapons are diverse and for the most part remain valid until game end, the auto generated turrets look good, and what little more could be wanted those too can be customized.  Though power creep can become an issue enemies in the core still provide a good ass whooping now and again just to remind you don't be complacent. Thank you for making such a great game, the 5 of us are well pleased with our purchase, and frankly at a bargain less then 20$ well worth every penny, and realistically we think a deal more.

 

Now I will issue some short comings we have all had. Frankly the Tutorials are weak, though they do get the job done for the most part any of them can be explained in a few seconds in person. Many features then lack Tutorials or tool tips that help you understand the builder and various functions. after 2 weeks we have only just found what the view key dose, and again we were impressed with such a convenient tool If only we had known a week earlier while still outside the barrier.  There are a number of Glitches and exploits that still need cleaning up the worst of which are duping of ships, and duping of weapons. Though we still haven't figured out how ships get duplicated the event gives addition materials and weapons that are acquired dishonestly, we have found that if you repeatedly delete a turret during a lag spike the game will acknowledge all those delete actions as an additional turret going into the inventory. To be honest we have done this on purpose to duplicate Point defense turrets from before the recent update. (a 32 dps PD chain gun, and a 8.2 dps PD laser) Frankly even with the difficulty turned all the way up the Combat AI is still rather unsophisticated Both Friendly and Enemy combat ai seem to charge violently yet have difficulty with using weapons intended to fire forward, Likewise Broad sides are not something we see from ships that seem to be oriented in such a manner, and most defiantly not from our own that are given orders to patrol, or attack enemies.

 

As  for block critiques The Turret lock block dose not also function as a custom turret platform, which would be nice. I feel the Computer core is under powered to a degree, and the System upgrades and small ships suffer for it. Perhaps the system upgrade mechanism could be modified from limited card slots to Processing power, and differing cards taking both reactor power, and processing power, then a computer core could increase processing power as it dose now, but also draw Generator power. Thus a small ship could hold a low power object detector Radar upgrade, and scanner making for a better Survey ship.

 

Finally on to General Suggestions:

As stated above It would be nice to have Turret Lock blocks also work for custom turrets.

Again as stated above I believe the system upgrades and computer core mechanism could use a rework as it makes small ships inflexible and have diminished non combat potential.

Custom Turret Depth, When i learned that custom turrets were an option i was most pleased, then that i could change shot color i was ecstatic as that's pretty awesome but after a time i though you know what, can we have a custom sound option? like you choose a color from the color pallet there could be a small number of Shot sounds that could be unique to each weapon.

Turret Conversions at a turret factory Any given weapons save point defense can be converted to coaxial with damage and range modifiers based on base size. [Damage/range X (1+Base Size)] Fore example a 200 DPS laser range 8 size .5 would be 200x1.5 8x1.5 for a 300 dps range 12 laser.

 

And weapon balance suggestions:

Smaller Coaxial Weapons would be nice

Launchers I believe could do with an overhaul My reasoning being most ships are faster then the shot itself making them easily avoidable

Perhaps Launchers could be split into Burst fire mid range (8-14) high shot speed pursuit weapons, and standard fire long range (18-28) high damage bombardment weapons.

Fighters Likewise are too slow to keep up with many enemies or the ship carrying them. Having speeds centered around build material with an over all general buff may make them more viable as for now they seem to be best for mining or scrapping.

 

Thank you for reading this long Block of text, It was my intent to not read any other posts so that my opinion may come as fresh perspective on the current state of the game.

[koonschi]

Thanks for the extensive feedback. While it's very helpful already, I could use a few more details:

 

- Can you tell us exactly where the tutorial is lacking? Since we know the menus by heart, we're having a hard time figuring out what exactly players think is missing from the UI and what feels intuitive and what doesn't.

- If you find a glitch, you must post steps to reproduce for us, because otherwise we can't fix them. We know about several issues, but the main reason why they're not fixed yet is that we can't reproduce them. Also: Use the bug report tool ingame, we read every report.

- What exactly is it that you think the combat AI should do differently? What happened that you think shouldn't? How exactly did you equip your ships and how would you have liked them to operate? I can see that you wanted some ships to do broad sides, but I can't really follow as to what the exact problem was. The ship AI does try to rotate most of its weaponry towards the enemy.

[Cairo1]

Things I feel are Lacking Tutorial wise are: explanation of the View menu while building, Explanation of the trade overview in terms of the hot cold system. If it is possible we haven't found out yet to cancel the last action of chain commands, such as purchasing goods from the map view.  It would also be nice to be told that hiring a captain will allow a ship to perform AI actions.

 

Dose Reporting the glitch send server info from the time it was recorded? if so i will report it next time we replicate it. other wise I only have the following explanation to offer how to reproduce this glitch.

 

Having a ship with a turret equipped, during heavy server lag (possibly near crashing of server) quickly entering the build menu and selecting the said turret and attempting to delete it, If the turret is not removed immediately then selecting the turret again and again attempting to delete it  will cause 2 of the turret to enter the player inventory after server has stopped lagging (Survives crashing).

 

In terms of combat AI one thing that would be well received though I imagine would require a deal of work is being able to set combat parameters. for example to be able to select the behavior ships will prefer for combat, Ie. maintain x distance, or close to x distance, enter broad side at range x, retreat if enemy comes within range x, to be able to intend strafing attacks, at range X begin attack run, at range x begin new attack run, If health is at X% retreat to x distance from nearest enemy things of that nature. perhaps differing abilities of different tanked captains or some kind of training skill for development of a ships captain could be neat gimmicks to these functions.

 

Also to be able to instruct your ships to focus on this or that target, rather then attack nearest enemy.

 

I am not a programmer nor do i have any realistic knowledge of how much effort it would take to accomplish features such as these but i believe it is within the small realm of LUA i do know so i think it is not an unreasonable idea.

 

I hope you entertain my suggestion of sound effect options for weapons, I though it was a pretty nifty idea.

 

Edit: The ability to tell AI ships to use Gates, or wormholes would be nice. or If it exists already an explanation how to make them do so.

 

Edit 2 A popup that the F key moves the point of focus in the builder. We did not figure that out for a solid 5 days playing.