Avorion Without Ship Designing

[mxmissile]

I just cant get into the ship designing aspect of this game, I know its a big part of it, but its just not for me. I'm not criticizing Avorion's ship designing tool or anything, its just not my cup of tea. I'd rather be spending my time flying, mining, trading etc.

I'd love a Avorion minus that aspect, any recommends?

[DiamondDuty]

Originally posted by mxmissile:

I just cant get into the ship designing aspect of this game, I know its a big part of it, but its just not for me. I'm not criticizing Avorion's ship designing tool or anything, its just not my cup of tea. I'd rather be spending my time flying, mining, trading etc.

I'd love a Avorion minus that aspect, any recommends?

You can buy ships from shipyards, and randomize their designs. You can also download from the workshop instead.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

Get ships from the workshop to skip that part, I haven't looked but seems to me two collections, one of good hand-fly-only designs and one of designs the AI can do well with would be valuable.

If flying and mining is your thing and Avorion's flying and mining is too simplified, . . . well there's this game that everybody seems to love to hate for being wide and shallow, but I say at that level it's far from it. Flight-assist-off piloting in E:D is a challenge and a joy. The stations in that game were *clearly* designed to provide interesting piloting challenges. here's a "beginner proficiency" exercise in a series of 5 that gives a taste. This is #4 in the series. Pay attention to what he says at the start of that clip: HUD color xml(?) tweak aside, that's a stock Sidewinder. That's the ship you start with. Go through that entire series *and actually do the exercises*. Git At Least Beginner Gud before rendering judgement.

Even getting good with cargo pickup and SRV mining gets fun when you try to get good at it, careening around the surface with a buddy in the turret and trying to hoover up goodies at top speed turns in to this dangerous and exciting little dance.

If you want to give trade some consequence, I'd say get away from the high-traffic areas out in the edges of the bubble and start picking factions and making allies of them. You can start your own little kingdom and goose its economy and your standing within it. That's another small game hiding in the big universe: find a home.

[umop-apisdn]

Alternatively, don't design. Big, ugly, functional bricks are often just as fun to fly around as the beautiful masterworks you find on the workshop... and often better, from a performance standpoint (both for "usability and flight characteristics" and for "not burning your computer to the ground with a fleet of billion-block ships").

My first ship bore more resemblance to a paving stone than a spacefaring vessel, but it was fast and agile. In all likelihood, that's how ships will look when humanity actually goes to the stars; there's no atmosphere in space, so all those aerodynamic wings and foils are purely aesthetic choices. Plop a big block of whatever onto the end or side of your big block of other whatevers, and fly!

Some general ship-building newbie tips:

• Turn on the "show all ship stats" so you can see what each block is doing when you add it.
  
• Match your acceleration and deceleration, leaning toward having more deceleration.
  
• For control, iron "Inertial Dampeners" are great, and so are gyros (make sure to rotate your gyros to cover all 3 axes). Throw thruster blocks as far from the middle of the ship as you can, and put engines absolutely wherever.
  
• Integrity field generators are an absolute must; they quadruple the strength of any block they cover.
  
• Shield generators (once you find the glowing green goodies) are an excellent way to prevent getting shot to pieces, although they don't do anything at all for running into rocks (or other ships, or stations...) so make sure you have at least as much shield HP as you do hull HP. Double or triple the health is even better, for most combat situations.
  
• Don't forget power! Adding subsystems costs power, so make sure you have plenty to spare. A good rule of thumb is to have double the "required" power (after accounting for the additional costs of installed subsystems), and ten times that in storage capacity. I've found that having quadruple the "required" power means I can boost almost continuously, so aiming for that mark may make things easier.
  
• Don't discount Solar Panels. Make them thin, and stack them together; they don't actually need to be able to "see" the light to produce power, and they're actually much more resource-efficient than generators, for the power produced. They're a bit larger, and slightly more expensive in credits, but you can build them when you're not in a sector with a shipyard... at some point, that fact will save you from being stranded and watching your crew suffocate.
  
• For armor, you can often "get away with" scaling down to a 0.1x0.1x0.1 block, then holding shift and clicking all over your ugly blocky ship to give it an ugly (but thin) armor coating that does the job nicely without adding a billion tons of weight (and thus skewing all your flight control stats).
  
• And finally, keep in mind that weapons made of higher-tier materials are generally more effective than those made of lower-tier materials; those "turret base" blocks exist for a reason.

Don't feel like you need to make your ships "pretty"; function is much more important than form. Look at the original Model T; Ugly, noisy, and just downright disgusting in comparison to the vehicles on the road today... but it was still a car.

[mxmissile]

Thanks all! Convinced me to stick with it!

[Xerxes86]

Originally posted by mxmissile:

Thanks all! Convinced me to stick with it!

The ship is awful, and buying ships is also awful. Unless you like ship that look good but that is basically all they good for (looking good.)

[Weaver]

I felt the same way, OP, and for a loooooooong time. Turns out I just didn't have enough confidence to try. I dabbled a bit, found out I wasn't that great, but also found out it was an interesting challenge. My brain doesn't like to work that way. Maybe it's time for a re-write then.

I'm working on my fourth build now (if you don't count rebuilds) and things are much more intuitive to me now than they were before. Try to experiment with creating basic shapes, learn how to break down larger blocks into smaller, multiblock structures with the same size and general shape, etc, etc. Create exercises for yourself. You can also download Workshop ships, templates, etc, and study those to figure out how they were pieced together.

In the end, it has to be you who decides whether building is "worth it" or not. Some players spend literally months on one ship before it comes out just right. I'm not one of those players.

And, in the end, if you decide you don't want to build, you don't have to! The Workshop is just absolutely jammed with great-looking ships to experiment with. I typically rip out the internals, first thing, and replace them with my own arrangement. In fact that was what led me to try building in the first place; I got curious.

People play the same games in different ways, and with different goals in mind. If you don't enjoy building...don't. There are a ton of other things to do in Avorion besides designing ships.

[Xerxes86]

Originally posted by Weaver:

I felt the same way, OP, and for a loooooooong time. Turns out I just didn't have enough confidence to try. I dabbled a bit, found out I wasn't that great, but also found out it was an interesting challenge. My brain doesn't like to work that way. Maybe it's time for a re-write then.

I'm working on my fourth build now (if you don't count rebuilds) and things are much more intuitive to me now than they were before. Try to experiment with creating basic shapes, learn how to break down larger blocks into smaller, multiblock structures with the same size and general shape, etc, etc. Create exercises for yourself. You can also download Workshop ships, templates, etc, and study those to figure out how they were pieced together.

In the end, it has to be you who decides whether building is "worth it" or not. Some players spend literally months on one ship before it comes out just right. I'm not one of those players.

And, in the end, if you decide you don't want to build, you don't have to! The Workshop is just absolutely jammed with great-looking ships to experiment with. I typically rip out the internals, first thing, and replace them with my own arrangement. In fact that was what led me to try building in the first place; I got curious.

People play the same games in different ways, and with different goals in mind. If you don't enjoy building...don't. There are a ton of other things to do in Avorion besides designing ships.

I always build my own ships. If you have redo ships you buy, or get from the Workshop, why do it. The workshop is just like buying ships. You get ships that are basically nonfunctional, but look good.

[Weaver]

I do not find that to be the case. I do find one, on occasion, that just doesn't work. It was a lot more commonplace when Boxelware first made the decision to disable block stacking by default in server settings; players were convinced they could get away with using stacked ships by resorting to the Workshop...but it didn't work. Stacked blocks were deleted or converted to hull instead, which led a lot of players to think that a ship was nonfunctional just because it was posted to the Workshop. I understand how the confusion started.

There are a ton of super talented ship designers out there. You just have to be patient enough to find something you like. Drazhill just posted a new collection I thought was pretty neat-looking, though I haven't messed with them yet. SivCorp is another talented maker, though he does love his stacked blocks the last time I checked.

Not surprisingly, this then becomes one more example in the long list of reasons why blanket statements don't work. I have been impressed by a good number of Workshop ships that I fully believed just wouldn't perform. I have been similarly disappointed by those I thought would work. Every now and then I get one that just works for me, so I use that for the entire run.

Personally, I'd advocate that everyone just leave their hulls empty, or post a duplicate ship with no internals, so that the people who are overly picky (like myself) can have their way with it. If I ever get good enough to post anything, I plan to do that myself.

[🦊 Hermit]

Originally posted by Xerxes86:

I always build my own ships. If you have redo ships you buy, or get from the Workshop, why do it. The workshop is just like buying ships. You get ships that are basically nonfunctional, but look good.

I haven't tried a huge amount of ships from the WS, but all of the ones which I have tried worked pretty well in my experience, even ones built before 2.0. At most, I perhaps just had to scale them up or down a little to fit the new system limitations.

Most of them had plenty of framework inside of them too, so I could then take that base and build them to be even better. But that wasn't required to make them work, they functioned fine without any upgrades, and I used them like that for a good while before refitting them.

[KyuRizu]

I never build my own ships. I always buy them from the shipyard and modifie them. Game is very playable this way. Give it a try!

[Eagle_of_Fire]

From my experience from the workshop, at least 85% of all the ships I've downloaded work fine out of the box. And almost all of them have empty structure inside it that you can use to custom it like you want. The trick is to go into the editor and ask the game to show you only one type of block at a time.

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

Originally posted by Xerxes86:

Originally posted by mxmissile:

Thanks all! Convinced me to stick with it!

The ship is awful, and buying ships is also awful. Unless you like ship that look good but that is basically all they good for (looking good.)

Ship design matter little except for looking good. If the block exists on the ship the ship gets the functionality of it. A few exceptrions of course like hangars need clearence fo the fighters, and armor on the outside. But other than that it doesnt matter, the whole thing could look like a box.

[Weaver]

I could not disagree more. Hull design matters a ton to things like maneuverability. If the thruster pods aren't far enough out from the hull, the ship loses maneuverability for the volume used. If they're too far out, same thing!

Placement of internals matters just as much. If the builder put all the heavy stuff near the hull, maneuverability is going to take a huge hit. Keeping heavy things toward Center of Mass? Better!

Profile matters too. If the ship has a lot of protrusions in the way, then the turret mounts may not have the ability to overlap. Worse, the ship's protrusions may actually block the ship's own weapons fire. If the hull focuses too much on forward fire, defensive fire coverage suffers.

There are many areas in which general hull design matters.

[umop-apisdn]

Bah.

Make a brick. Put the thrusters on the corners. Stick some guns on it. Go blow stuff up.

[Weaver]

Heh. What we're seeing here is verification of my earlier assertion that different players have different goals and methodologies.

I flew bricks for ages. Then I went to cubes. I started eventually designing ships because I got bored. But you know what? I still fly cubes in early game. They're easy, they work, and they're cheap.

I guess just do what you enjoy. After all, that's the entire friggin' point, no? ^_^