I haven't played extensively yet, but I feel the variations of tech level of the sectors is a bit off putting. I understand it to be randomly generated from the location and a min and max without other parameters?

I'm not against higher and lower tech level the same distance from the core, but the variation from one square to another feels weird. Why wouldn't these level 14 pirates raid the level 5 economic sector two jumps away weird.

Maybe if the levels of nearby sectors could influence the level of the next generated sector or something? Maybe linking tech level to the presence of stations (again, not sure if that's not already a parameter).

That may be too much or unsolvable, but something to create a little order would be nice. Randomly generated cluster of higher and lower level region at the same distance from the core sounds more appealing to me than randomness from one square to the other.

Still enjoying my playtest though!

Originally posted by Lasgalen88:

...

I agree with you completely on that. It's a technical limitation.

These levels are not completely random, it's kind of a jumpy "noise", especially at the edges of galaxy. Probably as close as I could get to noise function without using a noise function.

I've spent some time looking for other solutions, but it all turned game performance to unplayable level.

Well one thing that bugged me with the (base) game is that there no real scalings.

I found a mod quite interesting that increased in power the heavier a ship was.
i Found the Modification ,,decreased hull for additonal storage,, M ythought was about making this upgrade somehow scalable or making scaling upgrade group which are only effective for the heaby ones (which brings its own disadvantages)

Originally posted by Saya:

...

Yeah, I really liked the idea of more advanced upgrades. Alpha mod version relied much more on those.
That one for cargo was really meant for small ships, other Framework Replacements scale with your ship by regular %s

Thanks for suggestion, I'll gather ideas and wait for Boxelware to release an update.
It would be fun to rework upgrades again, but we'll see how it goes.

I wish I had taken down notes throughout my whole playthrough for you, because my memory isn't fantastic and I don't have time to do another full playthrough now, as much as I'd like to. In any case, here were the big topics I remember:

First off, the main workshop page really needs a brief description of all the major features and what they do. This is the key information that anyone looking at your mod needs to determine whether they want to play it. I see that you have made efforts to update it to include new information, but I still think it could be better organized so that the main features of your mod are clear to a reader as early as possible. I chose it because I wanted a total conversion, and honestly I think yours is the only completely functional option. But if I'd had a better idea of what I was getting into, I may have enjoyed it more. I'm happy to help writing this content if you like, but it will be a couple weeks before I'm available.

The main issue my group experienced early on was that even inner faction sectors would fill with pirates, who quickly overwhelm the factions's defenses, as we cruised along in our starter ships. It was difficult to mine anywhere, as staying more than 5 minutes was basically ensuring the sector was lost to pirates. I did a quick restart yesterday, and I believe this is no longer the case. You seem to have fixed this and it is very much appreciated! Definitely something to keep an eye on though, because it makes the beginning a little frustrating.

The new randomized sector levels/materials/economies system is interesting, and it definitely adds some needed spice. I think the level range is probably a little bit too large - it's too easy to accidentally do a much harder fight than you intended simply because you weren't paying attention to the galaxy map. It's also a bit too easy to find a very high tier zone for turret manufacturing in a relatively low tier area.

The new stations and equipment buying system is nice. It feels easier to search for exactly the subsystems you want, without it being too easy. We did notice that your new stations will show up as vanilla station names on the galaxy map after being explored with an operation, only to show the new station name once you warp in for the first time.

My friend who enjoys mining found manual mining to be very challenging at the beginning, due to competition from NPC ships with significantly higher DPS mining lasers in nearly every sector (this is before we can survive non-faction territory). Sure, he can just run them on operations, but that's not as fun for him. The early R-mining lasers that have a rocket or gatling gun animation for firing feel kind of immersion-breaking as well. The starter mining laser turret looked much cooler.

The new delivery missions are a great way to break into trading, and definitely smooth out the early game. But it is frustrating to see them dissappear immediately after clicking on them - I assume that's NPC trader behavior removing them? Trading is definitely more difficult with the additional of the local supply/demand changes and the fact that prices rarely match what you see on the galaxy map. We did enough to get our salvaging operations going (to sell) and that was enough for us. I'm sure there were some big trades out there, but it didn't feel worth the headache for us to investigate. Maybe we're just not much for trading.

And now, with all the eco stuff out of the way, I can focus on my favorite part - combat.

In general, I love the rework of torpedos. It's a very logical and easy to follow system. That said, I almost never used them - pirates evade or shoot them down easily, and by the time you're fighting big Xsotan you have tons of better options like fighters and long-range turrets. They were an interesting thing to fight against though, because the standard PD had a terrible time shooting them down. I switched to using standard laser turrets on Defensive mode and never looked back - they probably intercepted 99% of all torpedos. I would consider increasing their speed, tracking, and damage (I know they are already faster than vanilla), reducing pirate PD damage, and giving Xsotan a bit of PD.

Regarding turrets, I think their accuracy and optimal range could really use some tweaks. We ended up using nothing but high-tracking lasers for PD and for killing small pirate ships, high range and accuracy railguns for mid-range engagement, and fighters for max range. Everything else was just too inaccurate to be useful, even against larger ships. Plasma would have been OK due to its range and nearly acceptable accuracy, but the fact that was was almost always the EMP variant turned us off. Cannons couldn't hit the broad side of the death star. Missiles were so range-limited that they were outclassed by everything else. Damage was never a problem - we were comfortable with tier 30 lasers when fighting ships near the barrier.

I think one of the key problems is that low accuracy is necessary to make multiple ship sizes/classes make sense, as the only real advantage is that smaller ships are more agile. As we previously discussed, the unfortunate downside is the significant amount of logistical overhead for each ship - getting a captain, crew, subsystems, turrets, etc for each ship is a bit of a nightmare if you're trying to actually have a balanced navy. And the cost of losing a ship is much larger than just its materials. TBH I don't know how you solve this problem. I like what you're trying to do, but without some difficult-to-implement UI and gameplay changes here I don't think it will make sense from a metagamming perspective to do anything other than large, beefy, survivable ships.

Fighters are still the end-game unstoppable weapon that they were in vanilla. We can make them out of coaxial "deathray" lasers and give them millions of DPS, they have perfect tracking, infinite range, and there are no effective anti-fighter weapons out there. If we could have anti-fighter fighters.... that would be amazing. I know it's probably difficult/impossible, but man that would be cool. Barring that, probably some flak-type weapons that deal damage in a large cloud and don't have to perfectly track their target to fire would help. And it would be nice to see fighters used against players much more frequently, from pirates and xsotan.

I'm sure I missed a ton, this is all off the top of my head, and the detail is probably lacking. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for everything you've done here - this is easily the best Avorion mod out there to date.

For a start, I'd like to thank you and your group for massive effort and time you've put into this.
This is the best example of feedback anyone could ever get.

P1. Workshop page,
I'd hate to take more of your time. The only thing I'd like to ask you is, from your own perspective,
which features had most impact, and should be clearly highligthed in description?
( At this point, it's blurry for me. Its mostly about amount of code instead of actual gameplay experience )

P2. Pirate invasions,
This is interesting, since tweaks are still in progress and not released. A clear indication that sector generator does what I wanted,
(which is, unpredictable amount of variation) and that idea itself is a frustrating experience for early game.
I'd like to keep that variety, so some kind of tweaks and "protection" are required to smooth out beginnings.

P3. Levels,
Agreed, though anything smoother than what's already there is a hard technical limit for me.
The solution I'm going for now are more adaptive spawns, and tweaks to turret crafting costs. ( I think that was your suggestion btw )
Hopefully that will be enough. I'd really like to do something more cloudy/noisey, but still no reasonable solution after months of trying.

P4. Stations,
Ah, yeah - technically Equipment Docks are rolled into one of the specialised equipment markets.
It's a scouting gamble by mistake, seems like Commander Missions use different code for same thing.

P5.a Mining,
This is very, very interesting.
Personally, I don't like mining expedition system, so shooting rocks was supposed to get a little more fun and depth.
A little bit like trading now, some exploration for mining was meant to be required on average - outcome really depends on generator.
NPCs for both miners and traders were meant to compete, and sometimes annoy depending on sector.

What's interesting is that, even though mining is optional, I always tend to have a single Captain controlled miner for passive income,
somewhere near starting sector. Through many restarts, this always worked even for populated sectors and starting turrets.

P5.b Mining Turrets, visuals,
I'm not sure now if that's an issue with mining, or terrible lack of explanation for mining changes.
Agreed on visuals, gatlings do have a stratight beam, but hit locations are off from that. ( Can be fixed though )

Refiners and Extractors have different shaped beams for more visual distinction, but barrel types have a functional difference.
It's kind of a micro-game for rock shooting, that does include angle of impact and actual part of rock you aim at. Mixing turret types
allows to boost manual mining speed compared to single type, or single beam.

It would be great to hear more about this topic from your friend.
Mining was something I found really boring and tedious, and really wanted to add more to that part.


P6. Deliveries/Trading
No idea why missions would dissapear after clicking - need to check this but I've never seen it happen (I've used them a lot)

For economy and trade, from your experience combined with feedback from others - It does seem trading works just as intended.
And what it means, It is still the best source of income(which was the case for vanilla AFAIK), with a balanced mix of challenge-reward.
I know for sure it is possible to earn a lot of money early on, so that difficulty you've experienced sounds exactly like a trading playstyle that's available, but optional.

P7. Torpedos,
Thanks a lot, they work at least partially as intended from your description.
A tweak will defenitely appear - torpedos were meant to be easy to use and dangerous.

P8.a Turrets, Accuracy
I agree, and have been waiting for actual feedback on how they perform in normal gameplay.
Seems like only Railguns and Lasers worked as intended for you. ( And those were meant to be a kind of special equipment )
Part of that is probably that it is hard to get close without dying, and some weapons were created for CQB.
A mistake I'll try to fix with adaptive spawns.
You also confirmed what i suspected about missiles and cannons.
EMPs probably deserve their own shop page, since only some of them are able to destroy ships.

P8.b Question regarding turrets
What would help me out here is how much your group have tried higher rarity turrets, or custom made ones at factories.
The issue of balancing I have here is that low rarities have terrible usability ( accuracy included ), scaling up at highest rarities to be too easy/accurate,
maybe even worth replacing many turrets for just one that's really good. So the question is, what rarities, on average, were used?

P9. Balance, ship sizes
It's true, also Avorion in it's current shape will not be fun for larger, mixed fleets.
I have some hope that next official update will have something cool about this part.

P10 Fighters
To tell you the truth, I don't have much experience with fighters/carries, so that part was left mostly to balance itself by vanilla code.
Similiar with PDs, with just lasers being the ultimate defense later in game. Balance is terribly off here. Tweaks will be made.

Funny thing, I've never expected an experimental weapon being turned into a fighter ;D
Also there are flak-type cannons in game, guess they dont perform well enough to use them.

(Btw. I did consinder an overhaul, where fighters were not made out of regular turrets, but had a separate system.
The only problem was, that's a large time investment.)

Originally posted by LM13:

Originally posted by Saya:

...

Yeah, I really liked the idea of more advanced upgrades. Alpha mod version relied much more on those.
That one for cargo was really meant for small ships, other Framework Replacements scale with your ship by regular %s

Thanks for suggestion, I'll gather ideas and wait for Boxelware to release an update.
It would be fun to rework upgrades again, but we'll see how it goes.

Tried it myself. was looking the API with some friends but coudnt finy anything usefull.

do you know where i can find refernces for scaling modules?
best would be based of weight

Originally posted by Saya:

do you know where i can find refernces for scaling modules?
best would be based of weight

I don't know how others have handled this, and I've never used weight except for Ship Class System scaling, but in 1.3.8 Xavorion there are engine upgrades that use fuel to limit jump range.

Files of interest are xbaseupgrade.lua and fuelmanager.lua, what it does in same way(that you want) is that an Upgrade has some value that does not affect a ship directly, instead a ship parameters(cargo bay in my case, weight in yours) are used and mixed with that upgrade to apply final changes.

It's not a simple way to do this, and maybe others have found a better solution. Not sure really, but AFAIK it's not possible to have scaled upgrades with just a single upgrade script.

In this version, class system already has stats scaling so I've opted out of more complex upgrades. At least for now.

Originally posted by LM13:

Originally posted by Saya:

do you know where i can find refernces for scaling modules?
best would be based of weight

I don't know how others have handled this, and I've never used weight except for Ship Class System scaling, but in 1.3.8 Xavorion there are engine upgrades that use fuel to limit jump range.

Files of interest are xbaseupgrade.lua and fuelmanager.lua, what it does in same way(that you want) is that an Upgrade has some value that does not affect a ship directly, instead a ship parameters(cargo bay in my case, weight in yours) are used and mixed with that upgrade to apply final changes.

It's not a simple way to do this, and maybe others have found a better solution. Not sure really, but AFAIK it's not possible to have scaled upgrades with just a single upgrade script.

In this version, class system already has stats scaling so I've opted out of more complex upgrades. At least for now.

ah ok thanks for the detailed reply

Hi @LM13! Sorry for the delay.

P1. Workshop page - Biggest impact for me would be a tie between the reworked weapons and the sector generation. Both are basically complete replacements of the existing systems.

P2. Pirate invasions - Hah, in that case yes there's a pretty high amount of variability here. It was nothing but smooth sailing for me for my first few hours this time (maybe 1 pirate invasion with just a few ships that were easily dispatched) vs the previous time where pirates were taking over whole core sectors.

P3. Levels - Ah interesting, it's unfortunate this amount of variance is hard coded, those sound like smart workarounds.

P5 Mining - You can definitely find sectors with less mining competition, but finding ones that have the resources you need AND where you can survive at the beginning is a real challenge, at least on Insane. You really can't approach outer faction / no man's areas safely without ~5M shields at the start. And getting to that point requires mining. I think maybe the damage differential between the NPC ships and his ship is what really annoyed my buddy - he'd be working on an asteroid for over a minute and an NPC ship would come up and one-shot the next one. Probably the ships in a sector should have mining lasers roughly of the tier that is available for sale in that sector. I will ask him to share his feedback in here with you.

P6. Deliveries/Trading - Can NPCs take missions out from under you? If not, this was definitely a bug.

P8.a Turrets, Accuracy - Regarding CQB, how close would that be? The closest I ever generally come to a ship is when pirate ships swarm them, and they're usually about 2km away. At that range, which feels pretty close, the standard ballistic gatling cannons still can't hit them. Against anything other than pirates (basically Xsotan), you kill them before they're within 20km or you're dead. I believe their lightning cannons did massive shield damage within that range, and without shields you're toast (scales much better than HP due to having subsystems that stack their bonuses, you need 150M+ shield within the core).

P8.b Question regarding turrets - In our experience, including this playthrough, looted turrets are pretty much always worse than factory-produced turrets for a given tier. So we exclusively used factory-produced turrets. I think our first run came off a T38ish, and the subsequent run was off a T52 (but we only produce 50s so we can blueprint them).

P10 Fighters - It's really hard for me to say what's effective against them, because I never fought against them, but I'm sure the fast-tracking lasers would do fairly well (and literally nothing else would). As I recall, the range on the flak turrets is so poor it's basically useless, I believe they are usually around 2km while fighters stay at their max range of 3.5km. I never lost a single fighter to AI pd in this playthrough, including to core Xsotan. Regarding turning super powerful statically-positioned weapons into fighters, yeah I always thought that was weird with the base game as well. It's a relatively half-baked system from a balance perspective. I could see fixing this being a huge amount of work.

Thanks again. I will come back to your mod on my next playthrough, I am sure!

Hey, so is running the Sector mod supposed to remove the available stations you can found? Whenever I run in my options for stations is reduced to the first and misc tabs

Originally posted by Dukey Nukey:

Hey, so is running the Sector mod supposed to remove the available stations you can found? Whenever I run in my options for stations is reduced to the first and misc tabs

( Copied from Comments section for future reference )

Economic stations are tied to natural resources and local economy types.
Only functional stations can be built anywhere, economy has some rules to follow.
More information on that is in encyclopedia, and comes from Sectors module.