2.0 gutted the game. These features are gone now:

[Shib]

The 2.0 changes needed to stay in beta. The QoL changes are overshadowed by removing features from the game that removes lots of the ways to play.

The changes of 2.0 don't affect you, if...

• ...you only pilot one ship and only fight.
  
• ...mining was a nuisance to you.
  
• ...you never built an economic empire.
  
• ...you never installed a red trading upgrade before deciding which sector is gonna get 20 factories.
  
• ...you want to cheese through the game.
  
• ...you never had more than 6 mining ships.
  
• ...you're easily impressed and have no soul but suddenly found your calling trying to discredit everybody who dislikes the forced changes onto Avorion, especially Multiplayer (there's currently not a single 1.3.8 server).

These things, however, are completely gone from the game, which really removes alot of the things to do:

• Creating full production chains doesn't work anymore. Ambient Shuttles are too slow. Placement of factories doesn't really matter anymore.
  
• Using your own ships for logistics. For example Steel Factories and Solar Power Plants produce more than they can move. You needed to use your own ships to fill your factories in the same sector. Since buy and sell orders are f**ked, that's gone.
  
• Using your own ships to sell produced products in multiple sectors. Example: Ten Water Collectors in a single sector supplying an entire agricultural region of a faction. (Multiplayer friendly due to only 2 alive sectors)
  
• Permanent passive mining income. It was quite tricky on multiplayer with fighter limits per sector and alive sector limits, but it was a fun problem to solve. The new system just keeps getting in your way. Avorion was always a slow paced game, now you have to keep re-starting orders / micromanage. There are (used to be) many things to do, You don't want to have to micromanage your miners
  
• Analyzing ship performance, for example it made no sense to put mining turrets on a ship with mining fighters, as the ship would never get into range before the fighters mined the asteroid. Another example is stacking mining upgrades on a ship so it actually empties sectors from asteroids so they instantly respawn on leaving the sector. Allowing good mining results in multiplayer with just 2 sectors.
  
• Making many low-tech ships in the starting area to stay longer in the starting area.
  
• Making large low-tech ships to stay in the starting area longer and build a small empire there.
  
• Farming resources with automated R-Salvaging (I guess non-R salvaging can still be done with in-sector orders). So that while you build multiple factories, the pirates in your sector are converted into upgrades.
  
• Building mining fleets in multiplayer for core sectors that had escorts to defend against raids (when players joined the sector) or players themselves.
  
• All your previous ship designs are dysfunctional now. Especially the optimized early game designs.
  
• In insane difficulty you would build a business empire before moving. This is now made annoying by the lack of mining automation. If you focus on business / missions you'll still have to micromanage even a small amount of mining ships for no reason. If you don't build a business empire you still can't build many ships due to the artificial limits.
  
• Showing turret material levels as colors. Finding the right mining/salvaging turrets is a mess now.
  
• Making ships move by chaining orders. While chaining them is still possible, my ship with multiple hyperspace upgrades and 10s cooldown spends minutes within a sector for no reason.
  
• Going out and back into sector overview resets the scrollbar on the right. So if you are in a sector of >20 stations and you want to do something with your ships, you'll go insane from the scrolling.
  
• Building that multi billion business empire to have the funds to not only craft good turrets, but turrets with Independent Targeting without the damage debuff.
  
• Building just that perfect fighter for mining and taking the price of replicating it. Now you can make a minimal fighter. It's speed does not matter, only it's dps/effectiveness are taken into consideration. It won't be actually mining. Not that it would matter much, since you are mostly held back by carrier upgrades and the max 72 useful mining fighter "limit" (?) in the expedition code.

In general:

• The artificial limits on ship amount and ship size make harder difficulties less challenging. There are less ways to complete it. You don't feel like playing in a simulated world anymore. Your mining ships will break, but at the same time you are stopped from haivng many ships, thus you can't have a large fleet, you can't build an early business empire due to lack of resources, you're forced to rush to the center JUST TO GET MORE SHIPS. (Reminder: Ship founding requires build knowledge when the founding fee includes said resource. Why?)
  
• As long as your play style contains more than 6 ships + alliance ships, youll start to hate to stupidly micromanage.

Inb4:

• tHeRe iS cLasSiC. All the above points still stand. Logistics are crippled. Automation is crippled.
  
• tHeRe iS mOdS. The mods only inlude mining/salvaging orders. Station building, empire building and logistics are still broken.
  
• Even more: Almost all MP servers either have too many mods or are vanilla. So you play on vanilla servers. But vanila servers are now ♥♥♥♥. Including my current >100hr favorite server. My like 70 factories are all ♥♥♥♥. They don't produce anyways, because they can't deliver to each other fast enough like they used to.
  
• So, MP is ♥♥♥♥, see the above points to understand which mechanics are gone.

Empire building was always the endgame. Even if you took your time of playing a solo style for a thousand hours, you'd still learn to build an empire at some point. That's all gone now. If you never did it, count yourself lucky. It was a sandbox with freedom. Now there's only one play style left.

When you did everything you wanted to do you'd sit down and try to perfect everything. Make the "perfect turrets", "the perfect fighter", etc. That required billions. That's why you always ended up building business empires. Now with the new changes, your options are limited. It's become boring for no reason. Nobody asked for the changes. I can't even refund anymore.

EDIT:
Added further things that are gone.

[EvorsioLudaeorum]

Fully agree. Too many of the defenders of the changes to the default settings completely ignore that due to those changes being defaults, most if not all servers will use them, limiting anyone who doesn't like the changes to SP, or to wait until servers maybe eventually change off the defaults.

[Geronimo]

It was fun while it lasted, I was hoping to start a new game with the update since I haven't played in a while. RIP avorion

[Cy]

yeah, multiplayer servers are almost always vanilla version. It always has been this and it always will be this way. If servers are not upadted yet it is because the host had not time to do so till now.

to play 1.3.8 on multiplayer both the host and the user need to set everything up for that version. Not really difficult to do but for many users it is something that they would not now.

The main performance problem will still be present as well, which I described in the other thread already. Since their solution to fix problems is to remove the problematic feature itself I dont even want to these performance issue to be fixed by them. With hardware getting better in decreasingly shorter periods of time this problem will simply vanish by itself.

Also I know mods are a work around and not some kind of fix to make a game enjoyable. You should definitly take a look into the workshop mods. One of them is called something like 1.0 order. It restores the old commands for mine salvage and loop from galaxy map =)

[duncandestroyer]

I agree with pretty much everything you said.
I had every single ship I ever built effectively destroyed due to a ‘bug fix’.
There was a trick that allowed you to stack blocks in the same space that I used to make small powerful ships. Now I'm either going to have to modify the config or get a mod just so I can salvage the way I like to play.
They're so focused on making the game balanced that they have forgotten that the point is to make it fun.

[CaptRiker]

*thumbs up*

[Cemuvi]

I played before 2.0 but this sound`s not good. Played 65 Hours but hope for a Return patch from the Devs with Mining and other stuff. This is more a downgrade like Bethesda Games...

[Nyrin]

"Autistic white knight" (?) here. I misplaced my copy/paste reply, so I'll try to be brief but fail.

I've put a few hundred hours into 2.0 at this point and I find the changes overwhelmingly positive.

Leading thing I'll say: I'm not going to reach the people posting here, but if you're reading the vitriol on the discussions here and forming opinions without playing yourself, please remember that the other 2000+ concurrent players are busy *enjoying the game* and what you're seeing here is the distilled dissatisfaction. I'm only here because I'm supposed to be working.

There are fair criticisms in this post and elsewhere and I have no interest in pretending that nothing was given up moving to 2.0. "Empire building" is definitely out of whack at the moment in both its function and viability. If that was the main draw for you in 1.3.8, I can completely see why things would be frustrating. That may or may not (probably will) be improved soon, but if that was your cheese, your cheese was moved, and that's painful.

I'll skip my normal autistic white knight spiel about classic mode and mods since that was already covered, but remember that you can also still play and host 1.3.8. If there's not a server now and outrage and dissatisfaction is so self-evident and prevalent, then it shouldn't be long before you have a ton of choices.

That problem set acknowledged, *most* of what's here (and elsewhere in the complaint threads) is at best a distortion.

First: mining loops, as they were, were completely broken from both a technical and gameplay perspective. I'd encourage anyone with genuine curiosity to read the nice breakdown the developer did recently: https://forum.avorion.net/index.php?/topic/7704-some-background-on-the-new-map-commands/ -- essentially, they destroyed server performance, were more about understanding engine mechanics about keeping sectors from going to sleep than game mechanics, and trivialized resources almost immediately if you had any clue what you were doing. There are a lot of good reasons for the switches that happened.

But from there, it's a category-by-category thing of misrepresentation. Like:
- The biggest emphasis in 2.0 is around having *multiple* ships. You're gonna have a really bad time if you only pilot one ship, and if anything it's the opposite complaint that makes sense. Map/Captain commands are all about having a lot of ships and you get a *lot* more utility out of them now than you could without a LOT of work in 1.x.
- Mining, once you get it set up in ways that aren't perfect but make a lot more sense than optimizing for sector load, ends up involving a few seconds of starting a command every 8 hours of play time. If that's too much micromanagement or "nuisance," I don't know what to tell you.
- The (accomplished) goal of many of these changes was to *reduce* the ways the game gets cheesed. See the linked post above about how ridiculous mining loops got. There's still some holes (procure/sell in particular come to mind), but it's already better than it was in "cheesiness" and, given the rate that other things have been addressed, I'm pretty sure it's only going to get better.
- The map command system makes it much easier than it ever was to manage big groups of ships. I have no idea where this criticism comes from but it makes no sense. If you want 8 mining ships, start a command, choose all the ships, click start. Collect resources for the next 8 hours.

I could go on, but as an autistic white knight I'm not sure it matters.

Point of all of this? Don't trust any "evaluation" that's entirely one-sided.

[Ext3h]

Originally posted by Shib:

• Creating full production chains doesn't work anymore. Ambient Shuttles are too slow. Placement of factories doesn't really matter anymore.
  
• Using your own ships for logistics. For example Steel Factories and Solar Power Plants produce more than they can move. You needed to use your own ships to fill your factories in the same sector. Since buy and sell orders are f**ked, that's gone.
  
• Using your own ships to sell produced products in multiple sectors. Example: Ten Water Collectors in a single sector supplying an entire agricultural region of a faction. (Multiplayer friendly due to only 2 alive sectors).

What are you even talking about in these two points?

You literally got an "supply" command for your ships, which you can use to perform high-volume transports between stations. And it behaves essentially exactly the same as what the AI is doing for it's own stations, it's using Lifter ships for that exact purpose too.

That is an endless mission, and you got the option to hide ships on missions about everywhere in the UI where needed.

You just got to make sure your factories have sufficient storage space. And maybe you want to avoid low-tech sectors, as the size of AI spawned ships also scales.


So far there is no indicator that full production chains would be broken at all, and you don't need to keep the sectors active any more either for it to work flawlessly.

[Geronimo]

Thanks for the counter points, I really loved this game so I don't wan't to get rid of it so easily.
So you are telling me it got that easier to manage fleets in sector and performances got much better... I'm willing to come back even if fully automated mining got yanked. But the main reason I can stomach this is that (if I understood correctly) you can still set up galaxy wide fully automated trading? Can you confirm please?

[Ext3h]

Essentially, yes. Your factories even spawn AI faction controlled freighters themselves if configured to do so (the two "active" checkboxes) whenever their storage is risking to run full.

Even though that is maybe not what you want, as the AI faction ships will likely not sell in the same sector, but will maximize (their) profits.

And yes, I can confirm that this mechanic also works correctly without the sector being active.


Only thing you can't fully automate, is picking up your own produce and selling it to other factions for peak profit. For that you need to manually pickup (in sector), and then use sell mission command.

[Achievement Hunter]

yeah used to love this game but my review is soon going to turn negative. Too much changed, This isnt the game that left early access. If anything, they should make a Pre 2.0 permanently available.

[Nyrin]

Originally posted by ToothlessRaider:

yeah used to love this game but my review is soon going to turn negative. Too much changed, This isnt the game that left early access. If anything, they should make a Pre 2.0 permanently available.

It is. Right click the game in your library, Properties, Betas, then select 1.3.8 from the dropdown.

[TheDiaz]

Originally posted by Cemuvi:

I played before 2.0 but this sound`s not good. Played 65 Hours but hope for a Return patch from the Devs with Mining and other stuff. This is more a downgrade like Bethesda Games...

You should try it and see for yourself.

[Bobucles]

Interesting points. I never bothered with the factory building in Avorion. Figuring out how to produce any moderate product is a ton of wiki diving and resource investment. It seems much simpler to invest in ships. They're cheaper, they pay off WAY faster, and they can work closer to the core, which stations struggle with. The new trade missions also defeat some major benefits of stations, by giving excellent income and much more access to difficult resources.

The utility stations are still worth using, despite their high up front costs. Equipment docks and turret factories are extremely valuable near the core. Research labs, refineries and shipyards also provide good utility in difficult areas.

[Cactus-Cat]

I overall like the changes and I've played over 80 hours on 2.0 with the new progression system.
I prefer the new commands and don't care that the old command queues are gone, but I wish it would still be possible to give ships basic mining/salvaging commands from the galaxy map.

I can't say anything about the stations and production chains, because I never build more than some asteroid mining stations.