Endgame, artifacts and other complaints

[Czaele]

In my opinion, there's a lot of things that need work in this game. I know the game's still a beta, but I still want to get some opinions out:

1. The artifact hunt is no fun: half of them are goofy easy, like Boss Swoks, who most players avoid early on, then come back to one-shot later, or irritating, like the Smuggler quest which involves a lot of sector hopping to try to find all those random rare bits to make the beam, plus the mission REQUIRES that you're using a ship with cargo space.
Possible solution: increase the number of artifacts to, maybe, ten or so, but keep the requirement at 6 or 7. Thicken + move in the rings for boss spawns so they're not so narrow. New artifact concepts: Survival fight: defend [thing] for X amount of time, if you leave or [thing] gets destroyed, you have to start over- ships don't leave wreckages (to prevent lag and giant hordes of salvage). Mining: Find obnoxiously huge asteroid, dig your way to the center for an artifact. Race: Yellow-dot sector in the middle of nowhere, ships lined up for a big race; ref says go and you all go, fly through big glowing circles placed in a race track pattern with nothing but each other to crash into, winner gets an artifact, weapons or killing the ref disqualifies.

2. Nowhere to put a completed ship: Maybe dock your ship at a casino or residential station, maybe a new station orbiting a planet; a shore leave option, basically? Looking for a way to leave a ship somewhere without having to worry about crew payments while I mess around with another ship.

3. I have complaints about the combat, fighters and shields, but I'll withhold those until after the combat update.

4. Not sure if it's a complaint or not, but I find it pretty weird that you can ask a player online for 10 Avorion or so, then use that to make a microscopic warpdrive somewhere on your ship and skip the entire galaxy wall.

5. Bolters are 10000% worthless. Hoping that'll be fixed in the combat update. Maybe they can be inaccurate metal spikes that puncture into crew quarters or hull to vent atmosphere, causing life support to use more energy per hit or maybe just straight damage over time? The main reasons I don't like bolters is because 1. They don't do much more damage per hit than chainguns, but fire slower AND have a goofy, long cooldown 2. You get better stuff almost immediately and chainguns are better anyway 3. Even going to the end of the game and making 100% bolters, they're still no good 4.Their bonus to hull damage is not good enough to make any kind of difference.

6. Anything above a thrust of 50 m/s is pretty worthless, since nothing goes higher than 300 and you can usually just boost to 1000+ anyway. Nerf boosting? Make boosting cost more, based on your ship's weight? My main way to fight the MAD research guys when I don't want to put stone on the front of my ship is actually to pick a direction with no asteroids and just fly backwards with the dampeners off and just kite it to death while staying out of their range.

7. Mining is still worthless. The only time it's even sorta worth anything is if you make a cheap mining ship, but you spend so long mining that crew costs take a chunk out of any money you possibly make. I know that salvaging is supposed to be fast and dangerous, and mining is supposed to be slow and safe, but in one short battle, you can salvage tens/hundreds of thousands of materials + turrets and upgrades, and mining a whole sector takes ten times as long and you don't get nearly as much materials and cost you money through crew costs. I was thinking all asteroids should have more materials for their size but take a little longer to mine. Something like 5x the materials, but 2-3x the durability and maybe 50% bigger, so you're not hopping sectors, shredding tiny rocks all the time for pocket change materials.

8. Fix weapon crafting, some weapons can be made to do 10x the damage of their peers with no drawbacks. Example: Lasers near the galaxy wall do 1000 damage per second on average, with a noticeable draw on energy, but you can make lasers in a factory nearby that do 10000 dps for like 10 energy per second.

9. Force turrets are fun as toys, but they're so inconsistant, since their push/pull values vary much more than anything else in the game an there's no way to choose what kind you get when you make them or research them. 5 push turrets should definitely give a push turret in response when researching.

10. Fighter groups would be nice, but I could always stick to the mod for that.

11. Proper autotargeting for repair turrets when I'm piloting the ship. Should be able to set them to autofire and have them repair friendlies in range.

12. Nothing to say to NPCs, outside of asking for their home sector or getting some info on artifacts. Maybe have some with sidequests, like cargo ships asking for protection and you having to warp alongside their long short-warp journey.

[Czaele]

13. Even on the hardest difficulty, the only difficult part is the length of time it takes to get to Naonite + shields. (Hopefully fixed by the combat update, I'm personally hoping for directional shields, or shields that have to have generators to cover each bit, kinda like how integrity field generators work. Nothing feels better than to punch holes through someone's shield and try to take advantage of their new weakness.)

13a. Integrity field generators are too powerful. Once you get your ship covered, you're probably never going to lose a block ever, unless you're covered in little teeny-tiny blocks for decoration, but since you probably have shields- they're not hitting your blocks anyway. 10x is too high for something that can easily cover so much for so little energy. My vote is for the energy cost to go up, or reduce the effect to x5 or so.

13b. Armor's pretty useless, too. Best usage right now is for plating, covering your weak bits, but anyone with a lick of sense buries their valuable bits deep in their ship, or has a working shield, which railguns do chip damage to.

[Czaele]

Extra comment on the Bottan smuggler artifact mission: I can't find a couple of the materials to make the beam, even after scouring the galaxy for hours with a ship with no warp cooldown. Am I supposed to just give up and build the factory needed to make that part? Welp, time to grind for 50+ million credits.

[サマエル (Samael)]

2. Sounds interesting. But i personally do not have any problems with credits, even without trading one salvaged station can give millions of credits.

6. Personally i not use engine boost in fight on medium ships(9 modules) and bigger against any ship/boss, but without 2-5km/s is very long and boring travel from one station to another, when you need travel 40+ km.

7. I agree about size of asteroids, they should be bigger, because now easier and faster salvage more resouces than mine it.
But mining profitable, if you search only for big asteroids and if you mine by using fighters(better all of them - 120), then cost of pilots gonna be way less than costs of mined resource.

In my case my ship cost me 300k credits per 3 hours, my 48 fighters(damage 1.8, 60% efficiecy, trinium laser) can mine asteroid with 120k xanion in 30-45 minutes, after that you have more than 60k xanion which give more than 300k credits.
But those fighters not even close to good/great ones. In theory you can mine 200k resource asteroid in few minutes with all 120 fighters with their damage around 10+.

[サマエル (Samael)]

Originally posted by Xannthas:

13a. Integrity field generators are too powerful. Once you get your ship covered, you're probably never going to lose a block ever, unless you're covered in little teeny-tiny blocks for decoration, but since you probably have shields- they're not hitting your blocks anyway. 10x is too high for something that can easily cover so much for so little energy. My vote is for the energy cost to go up, or reduce the effect to x5 or so.

By ramming enemy ship you can lose internal parts of your ship even with integrity field and armor on ship.

Originally posted by Xannthas:

13b. Armor's pretty useless, too. Best usage right now is for plating, covering your weak bits, but anyone with a lick of sense buries their valuable bits deep in their ship, or has a working shield, which railguns do chip damage to.

Clearly someone who been lucky enough to not encounter enemy with railguns with ~10% of shield piercing :D

[サマエル (Samael)]

Originally posted by Xannthas:

Extra comment on the Bottan smuggler artifact mission: I can't find a couple of the materials to make the beam, even after scouring the galaxy for hours with a ship with no warp cooldown. Am I supposed to just give up and build the factory needed to make that part? Welp, time to grind for 50+ million credits.

https://avorion.gamepedia.com/Bottan_the_Smuggler
Nothing unusual, many materials except Energy Inverter you can find very fast, if search entire faction or two via gates route, better if in naonite-xanion sectors and by using trading module.

[Czaele]

I've literally never seen an energy inverter anywhere ever, and I've needed those for a weapon I wanted to make in several different galaxies, not just the ones where I'm trying to get to the center.

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by Xannthas:

Extra comment on the Bottan smuggler artifact mission: I can't find a couple of the materials to make the beam, even after scouring the galaxy for hours with a ship with no warp cooldown. Am I supposed to just give up and build the factory needed to make that part? Welp, time to grind for 50+ million credits.

Smash him with a giant rock on the front of your ship, thus skipping the entire fetch quest.

[ravien_ff]

Ai controlled mining ships are definitely worth it especially in the next update that let's you teleport to them.

Use a simple mining ship with a captain and 2 mining turrets for the early game. Crew cost will be less than 10,000 every 3 hours.

Use carriers with mining fighters for mid and end game.