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Concerns: Update 2.0(.6) - Fleet Management, Ship Direct Control, Building Knowledge, Hidden Mass Sectors, Event Probability and Delays with Event Flagging


revolver
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Hey folks,

I've been really fed up with not having direct control over ships in recency, with the update 2.0. I appreciate the new missions, but everything else about it has, in my opinion, gotten less playable. I wanted to discuss with anyone willing to listen about the new updates and how I feel about them, and maybe even get a dev to listen.

TLDR is at the bottom. 

I know this is a strong opinion to have, so hear me out: I love loops. Mining loops are fun. Freighting loops are fun. Knowing exactly where every ship is going so I can assign patrols to sectors lets me micromanage everything to vent my control freak needs. When I need a military ship on call, I can pull it from a particular sector and call it to a nearby sector. 

I can no longer do that as of update 2.0. Recalling an escorting ship takes time. If it shows up in the wrong part of the map during a faction war, I can't call it fast enough to defend my or an allied faction's territory. This has happened a number of times.

Sometimes, I light up a pirate territory, or even engage an entire faction, leaving a trail of destruction across a few sectors before I need to park up and repair. 

I can't call salvagers to each specific sector and run them on salvage-refine loops to clean up the little mess I've created and net me a lot of resources in the process. The salvagers in my fleet are ""somewhere"" near where I've assigned them. 

I do not have Trinium, so I can't create hangars and create a salvaging fighter squadron. I cannot acquire Trinium for reasons I'll list further below.

In the pursuit of fleet management, the development team has lost their way for those who *actually* managed their fleets. Ships now work on vagueries and polychronic time, finishing at some number of hours in the future, never truly available, and not controllable in a sector. This causes people like me to create large god-slayers that handle every single task at once, and then some, and leave remaining smaller ships to sector-wide tasks, like patrols. Or, I would, if it weren't for Building Knowledge, something I'll get to.

Return to form with direct ship management, not this thing where I can't play a little game of budget Factorio in space, with 70 commands assigned to every ship, excepting the sector patrols. I like the choice of mining in a sector, if you need ships to gather resources and don't want to really hunt for a bunch of hidden mass sectors to go mine in. Scouting is nice for that reason, and I've used it a lot to map out parts of the galaxy I intend to set up shop in with my new savegame. I just don't like that these two things are somehow incompatible, and to gain sector-wide mining without having to go to refineries I must lose the ability to know where my support, help, and firepower is. 

Fleet management becomes a game of "either have three ships or a million" and I honestly don't like either option. Having your hands full of captains you can barely remember with ships you vaguely recall the armament and purpose of is a suboptimal gaming experience. 

Alright, next thing.

Pace. Halting. Mechanics. It's an industry term, some total jargon, but I'll explain it to you (badly). When you want something to take longer or to be more difficult, you can cause it to take more time.

I hate this. I hate tedious things. COVID has destroyed what little exists of my attention span. I don't want to go out and make friends and run errands to gain a shipyard's trust. I can't find pirate sectors worth a damn (more on that below).

The thing I'm fed up with specifically, because I can't seem to write stuff in order, is Building Knowledge. It's tedious to earn. It's hard to find. And if I do it out of order, it's a goddamn curse. 

I showed up in a Trinium-space Faction that already liked me, and moored next to a repair dock (a wise choice, since I had merely Titanium building knowledge), to lean back in my chair and finish my food, when suddenly, the fire nation attacked - or, well, we had faction war. 

I wisely chose to support the controlling faction, and instantly gained Excellent trust, and bought Trinium building knowledge off of them. 

Something in the game's code flagged that I had Trinium knowledge and won't let me buy Naonite knowledge off of one of the many shipyards from factions I'm allied with. I've cleared pirate after pirate with zero luck.

After two days of in-game searching (yes, I've clocked 48 hours literally singlemindedly mapping the galaxy to find shipyards to talk to) I think I'm going to have to simply destroy the new Building Knowledge and see if it unflags the knowledge so I can get Naonite, or I'm going to have to get hacky with the ~dev library to give it to me. This is one of those aforementioned pace halting mechanics, and I can see why they did it, especially in multiplayer when an endgame user can gift a new player a little too powerful of resources, but it's poorly implemented and hinders the sandbox experience, and has overall just been grinding my gears. I am aware this option can be disabled when I start the game, but I was not aware of this and also am not the server host, meaning nobody could and nobody can change this at this point, as far as I am aware. 

Next. The probability changes. 

Do you remember back when Smuggler's markets were every couple hidden mass sectors? Yeah, I liked it like that. I have a cargo "license" for everything, as the new smuggler captains put it, and so I'd much like to be able to hop in, do some unbranding, and hop out, ready to sell the goods I ""bought"". I'd visit a new market just about every time, sure, but they'd be there if I made the trek back towards titanium space. 

I can't find a smuggler's market, *ever* anymore. I have to use my Mining/Smuggling captain to find them, and they're relatively common, but I guarentee that if the game were to roll the dice on what sector that hidden mass sector would be if I personally hopped in, it would never pick Smuggler's outpost. 

This has been particularly annoying when I have been looking for pirate shipyards to destroy to acquire my god-forsaken Naonite building knowledge. The ambient text chatter on ships says that people get killed going after yellow blips, and that used to be very true, but after the update I've yet to meet a killer among the loads of empty asteroid fields that my object detectors see nothing in, and I see no pirates in. 

I see that most people here play on tougher difficulties, veteran, hardcore, even some Insane players. These players seem to prefer combat, and not 2000-2500 asteroids giving meaning to an otherwise empty and worthless sector. Even the mystery of a bunch of wreckages strewn across a sector would be more appealing to these people, at least they could hit F to interact with everything before bringing out the salvaging team.

This plus some random container fields seems to be the norm (container fields being even more common with the BM DLC). Let's change that, throw some suggestions in for more interesting hidden sectors.

Last thing, vaguely related to probability.

Coinciding events. The one time I actually had the manpower to save a Pirate Traitor in a hidden mass sector, I was interrupted by a fleet of Xsotan. When I was investigating missing freighters, Boss Swoks appeared and the dialog options glitched out, even more so when the particular Corvette traitor attempting to initiate the dialogue was killed. I had to jump back out and back into the sector numerous times before contact was made and I took on the pirates... Which didn't spawn until I left and returned to the marked sector. The AI has spawned while doing this mission as well - good thing I make the conscious decision to provide extreme amounts of generator overhead so I can boost for a long time and charge my hyperspace drive no matter the situation.

In regards to the aforementioned probability, that is the only time either of the players on this server have run into a Pirate Traitor. I haven't discovered what happens if you save the traitor, and current predictions suggest I never will. 

Make flags for missions. I know you already do, because my jump time is halved when doing the freighters mission, the Bounty Hunts, and the Investigation mission, so I can get on with it and enjoy the fights, instead of sitting there watching my 2 minute (one minute in empty space) jump timer wind down. Now make those flags work with each other and delay each other based on priority, so that I don't get rudely interrupted by pirates and Xsotan attacking at the same time for the thirtieth time. 


TLDR: I am a neurotic, rambly control freak with ADD-like symptoms (diagnosis legally retracted). So that I don't inflict my controllyness upon the world, I play Avorion. My long thoughts boil down to that I don't like not knowing exactly where every ship is, and not having full control over it. I do not like building knowledge, because it slows your roll and complicates things in a sandbox game where you can explore out of order. I do not like the retweaked probably that turns every gamble on a hidden mass sector an uninteresting experience with no fights, ever. I do not like that events happening concurrently are breaking each other. All of this strongly opinionated feedback is said because I care deeply about this game's success and desire to enjoy playing it and having good experiences in it, instead of sitting here with bitterness in my mouth and fire in my heart. 

Thank you for reading. Please validate my feelings about this because I have literally zero self-confidence but also simultaneously have strong feelings on things I shouldn't need to.

Or bring my stupid thoughts crashing to the ground with well-thought-out counterpoints. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think I have a better acceptance opinion with this new update, I do love loop commands back to older version yes, but I do know it is a huge performance issue related with these command scripts running background. Compared to a roll back version of loop command I rather like an implemented fleet formation command. 

Hates my ships wraping in a sector and begin to engage enemies like Somalian pirates swarm upside-down all the time  like these[🙃🙂🤣🙃🤪] and when using escorts they still do friendly attacks with each other sometimes, or say friendly targeting.Buggy.🙃

Oh, pirates do have a formation I guess.🙃🤣

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1 hour ago, AikawaKizuna said:

I think I have a better acceptance opinion with this new update, I do love loop commands back to older version yes, but I do know it is a huge performance issue related with these command scripts running background. Compared to a roll back version of loop command I rather like an implemented fleet formation command. 

I was not aware of the performance issues they caused, I understand that the choice to basically unload the ship from existence saves data. I would like to be given the option to enable direct fleet command though - 32GB of DDR4-3200 with another 32 I plan to slot in by the end of the year, I should have the headroom to background run those commands.

I guess in essence what I'm saying is Avorion used to be a game of options. I suppose many more options exist now such as disabling the materials knowledge and choice to disable the story for a creative-mode experience, but I'm not so sure the devs have thought it through here on applying this to every command apart from the jump command. If I know where a refinery is I should have a mining rig unloaded and ready for its next operation in 5 minutes, not the 10 minutes it takes to get one of my littlest miners cleaned and cleared.

Loads of little things have built up to grind my gears as I initially detailed, so it's not really one thing that disappoints me.

1 hour ago, AikawaKizuna said:

Hates my ships wraping in a sector and begin to engage enemies like Somalian pirates swarm upside-down all the time  like these[🙃🙂🤣🙃🤪] and when using escorts they still do friendly attacks with each other sometimes, or say friendly targeting.Buggy.🙃

Oh, pirates do have a formation I guess.🙃🤣

Absolutely. I like big battles with loads of ships like the ones two warring factions can field, but occasionally when you try to have an epic battle like they do, your experience turns out a lot less... cohesive.

However, I can't field big fleets without direct control of those ships, now, can I?

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On 9/25/2021 at 5:00 PM, revolver said:

I was not aware of the performance issues they caused, I understand that the choice to basically unload the ship from existence saves data. I would like to be given the option to enable direct fleet command though - 32GB of DDR4-3200 with another 32 I plan to slot in by the end of the year, I should have the headroom to background run those commands.

I guess in essence what I'm saying is Avorion used to be a game of options. I suppose many more options exist now such as disabling the materials knowledge and choice to disable the story for a creative-mode experience, but I'm not so sure the devs have thought it through here on applying this to every command apart from the jump command. If I know where a refinery is I should have a mining rig unloaded and ready for its next operation in 5 minutes, not the 10 minutes it takes to get one of my littlest miners cleaned and cleared.

Loads of little things have built up to grind my gears as I initially detailed, so it's not really one thing that disappoints me.

ur right about singleplayer server although, in dedicated servers just about more than 6 people (I used to play on) do have a serious performance problem. Even the ai ships command attack the enemy is freezed.

I think the dev is trying to make it a larger server?

Anyway, here's the dev said on wiki roadmap page:

Last update: November 2020.

Developer Note: "For the future, we want to make sure to not spread our efforts too thin, since we're a small team. We've added so many systems where we're only scratching the surface, and that makes the game feel unfinished. We want to implement our own vision of the game, and to do that, we'll have to stick to what we're good at. That means fleshing out some systems that work really well in the game, but at the same time, it means reducing, maybe even removing some systems that we think don't work well. In general, we want to go towards less micro-management intensive, finicky gameplay and more towards macro decisions & commands."

Loop commands must be the one that dev already reduced.Sad.

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