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DLC Avorion Into the Rift Out Now!

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Yet another progression idea: advancement == new feature use


Nyrin
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What's the problem? 2.0 changes have done a great job of making material progression feel like a "thing." A lingering issue is that we still aren't encouraged to care about the materials we're progressing through; when it comes to optimal advancement, replacing a few key blocks with the higher efficiency upgrades is all a new tier typically means, with a few rebuilds corresponding to significant processing cap changes.

This has a few degenerate things that emerge:

  • There's no good reason to ever build more than a block of two or iron unless you're adding in an early dampener. Titanium is effectively immediately available and better than iron (dramatically better) in every way (except that dampener). Iron doesn't truly exist as a tier.
  • Titanium's the effective real starting tier; nothing that's new (like generators) feels new, given it's the true initial baseline.
  • Naonite is (optimally should be) almost completely ignored: without more processing and more/better shield boosting subsystems, you get better survivability by just building and supporting more hull/armor -- essentially, "naonite is really just bigger titanium ships."
  • Trinium is a fantastic upgrade, but really just a piece-to-piece upgrade of titanium (with shields finally thrown in once you get the subsystems for it). 2.0.2 changes to fighters might make hangars feel more valuable, but you're still just fine doing a "replace all titanium with trinium" step and moving on with "bigger titanium ship (replaced with trinium)."
  • Xanion is just more efficient tech blocks--another in-place replacement. 
  • Ogonite... well, ogonite is what it is. You can replace any titanium-but-now-trinium armor with it if you want to deal with scaling replacement, but it's such a marginal upgrade to do so that you're likely best off just ignoring this material entirely outside of replacing what you put your turrets on.
  • Then with Avorion, you replace pretty much everything except for mass-optimization blocks like cargo bays -- which you can stick with trinum on.

 

Meanwhile, there's a lot of unique character and meaning to each of these materials that's overlooked and unintegrated into the progression system.

  • Titanium gives you generators! That's awesome!
  • Naonite gives you shields! Amazing!
  • With Trinium, you can use fighters! Whoa!
  • Xanion lets you use transporters and even clone people!
  • Ogonite... is... um... ogonite is DENSE!
  • Avorion lets you ignore the rifts!

 

Now the idea: what if we used the "cool new stuff" with each material tier as part of the progression system? Spit-balling: where you currently unlock an entire tier and new slot/processing cap, you instead just unlock a single or small subset of "cool new blocks" that you then need to use and interact with to "finish" your material tier advancement, unlocking all other blocks and new processing caps (as well as further progression).

E.g.:

  • Titanium first just unlocks the generator block, then you fully unlock the tier once you've used some amount of energy (10 GJ? not sure) that came from generators. This one would understandably be easy and a bit of a gimme, but you'd at least be forced to briefly appreciate how awful an all-iron ship would be.
  • Naonite first just unlocks the shield generator block, then you fully unlock the tier once you've absorbed some amount of damage (200K?) with shields.
  • Trinium just unlocks the hangar at first, then you fully unlock once you've filled half a squad of fighters.
  • Xanion just unlocks the transporter block and full unlock comes once you've done some number of (10?) unique transporter-supported interactions.
  • Ogonite is hard. As is, the best bet would be that it just unlocks armor and you take a certain amount of damage to that armor--but it could use love overall. Maybe move avorion's dampener upgrade to this tier and make that ogonite's "thing?"
  • Avorion would first just unlock its hyperdrive core and you'd get a full unlock after some number of jumps over subspace rifts.

The goal here would be that, for each material, you feel like you're actually interacting with that material and doing "the thing that it's all about" as part of the progression. There's plenty of lore-friendly explanation to go along with it, as it "makes sense" that experience with power/shield management, fleet logistics, etc. would translate into the ability to effectively build and manage bigger ships.

 

Potential pitfalls center around people feeling even more "speed-bumped" than they currently are. I don't know that this is any worse than it already is (haters gonna hate), but having yet another progression option ("classic, simple, full") could address that.

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