Some thoughts on Aetherspace.

Aetherholds suck. 25k for the hold, 150k for the room...50 tons of space. Can this please be...y'know...increased a bit? To something more viable? I'm not saying go crazy, but even 100 tons would be alright.

Fuse - Congratulations! You took a mediocre skill, and made it a bad one. Who's idea was to put a range limit in it? The whole -point- of the skill was to zap across the universe in the blink of an eye. Of course, this wouldn't be so bad if you could have more than 3 Flashpoints (plus your Berth), and those Flashpoints didn't get lost if you died (which is remarkably easy now, given how much harder things hit).

Ram - Still kinda useless. 5 Power to try and puncture a ship that has to be half dead before you have a chance of success? By the time you're ready to do this, you don't -need- to...and if you estimate wrong on how dead they are, it's 5 power gone. Complete waste. Lower the power cost (0 - 1 sounds good for something this unhelpful), or make it easier to do in the first place.


In general, it's now even less useful than it was before to have a big ship. The critters hit so hard that the only way to survive is by never getting near the monsters in the first place - The Aether Wyrm used to be able to take a few hits from Tendrils, now two shots and it's dead. I get that they had to be made tougher in order to balance for the vastly improved experience (which I love you for), but still...it means having an expensive ship is actually -detrimental- now. This could be compensated for by changing Shields to work like Shields in other spacey games (Basically giving extra "Hull"), and alowing you to install more than one Shield Orb on a ship based on its size (Every 10 rooms allows one orb, for example). You could still juice it up and drain it with Distribute, scaling the max and current shields available by the appropriate amount.

On that same note, larger ships should also get to have more Turrets. If you're going to be so slow that you can't outrun the things that smite you in just a couple attacks, then you should at least have the firepower to have a chance of blasting them before they can destroy you. Again, make it scale based on room numbers...every five to ten rooms past 20, you can have an extra turret.

And yes, I -do- think it's balanced that if someone wants to spend 1.5 million gold on adding rooms to their ship, that they get a little extra firepower and shielding to compensate...especially since the benefits of hull are vastly outweighted by the penalties of speed.


There really needs to be more Gnome Merchant ships, too. Maybe in the other planes, or something. But, as it stands, it's -way- too easy to empty the ships of reasonably priced cargo (forcing you either to buy the stuff that's so expensive it's not really worth it, or wait around letting dust decay in your holds). Perhaps give them a chance to have some -really- rare items, which are super expensive, but also very profitable (or, perhaps, very expensive, but also the only means to buy certain upgrades for ships...Maybe for 100 tons of dust, you can buy armour plating which can be installed in any room, giving a hull boost. Or for 500, you can buy little "repair droids" for your ship which greatly improve passive healing, go crazy!)


Finally, just a spam issue. Aetherspace is -super- spammy, especially in places like Astral. One thing that would help a lot is the ability to turn off "direction markers." I don't always -care- where a dock, or ship is...especially up on Astral where I can fly 20 rooms in any direction and find a dock, but it's seven extra lines of crap my computer has to process (not to mention, my eyes), every time I move. The ability in Config to remove that would be -super- awesome, and I'd love you all forever and ever and ever. This is mostly a concern because of things like Glide...in the right conditions, I can glide so fast, that I can't -stop- until I crash into a wall (which you'd think is bad, but apparently, isn't). I'm not on a bad computer, either.



PS: I really do love Aetherspace...just a couple things really, really bug me.

Do consider, Ixchilgal, that your ship is uniquely equipped to take abuse from other PC ships, which is arguably far more important in the grand scheme of things. Speed isn't as important while bombarding an enemy structure, while being able to tank aetherblasts is vital. Speed is important if you constantly mount hit and run attacks, like against aetherbeasts: by contrast, tanking is irreplacable if you want to fight other players instead. Bear in mind that being able to take two hits from a tendril before expiring is one more hit than most ships in the Basin can afford to take, speedy or not. And unless a dozen are trying to kill you at once- that's crucial.

Maybe things will be rebalanced in aether combat soon. I like many of your other ideas, especially about aetherholds and Gnome Merchant ships.

Except, I -can't- take two hits. I can survive one...and if I'm lucky, that doesn't knock my chair into being so damaged, that I can't get away, and immediately die anyways.

And my ship isn't small (admittedly, not huge, but not tiny either). I'm not suggesting that it should be able to sit there and not have to worry about ever dying...but I shouldn't die to one or two critters just because I lagged for a second.

Oh, didn't mean to double post, but...forgot something in my first. Namely, getting targetting fixed. Seems you can't target some creatures at a range. Not sure if it's meant to be like that or not, but you always used to be able to, so I'm assuming not...

Ramming has indeed been made easier, as explained in the most recent announcement on the topic in-game (1116). Are you suggesting it should be made even easier?

I've added a config option for seeing these map spots that will be loaded in the near future. Thanks for the idea! Crashing into barriers, now there is an interesting idea...

As of the posting of this, I had forgotten to read the news.

Anyways! And I love you are paying attention to space...I do! Honest!

And I'm totally down with the crashing into barriers thing (make my crew hate me even more), but then we'd need an airbags upgrade to the ship. Because seriously....you get gliding, and it can be impossible to stop.

Latest announce post confirms that Morgfyre is awesome.

The map spots thing sounds good, but how about the dots on the map showing aetherdust, please, please please, please please please? (And aethership power logs too.) And thanks for all the cool stuff you've done so far! (I <3 my anchor.)

It just occurred to me on my previous Gnome Merchants idea, about randomly having nifty stuff at obscene prices...for things like ship upgrades that you can only get in space, the price would be better in Particles, rather than Dust.

You can hold unlimited particles (or so it seems) with just one Aetherhold, where with Dust, it's 50 tons per. If something costs 500 tons of Dust to buy, that somewhat penalizes smaller ships who worked just as hard to earn the stuff. Where, you can buy particles off Gnome Merchants, and save up for these Uber Items of Obscene Rarity and Exspensitude.

But that'd only be a concern if such an idea was implemented. *Nudge, nudge*

MAP MARKERS FOR DUST PLEASE

Also, lower the chance for Empath grids to fail. Seriously, seriously annoying.

Also!

If you're not going to put markers for dust, here's another (better) idea. Have energy collectors be able to gather both dust and power from vortexes. Saves having to scavenge around in a grid for the dust and has people locked into the collectors actually doing something.

Hey! Shut up your face! It's hard work being in a collector. You have no idea the difficulty it is in spotting vortexes and making sure you siphon vortex in time! NO IDEA! IT TAKES A GOOD CREW TO DO IT!

yeah... ok... ummm can collectors collect dust too? Makes more sense.

I've added a map icon for aether dust and particles.

<3 Morgfyre (and coders)

If you weren't an evil undead soulless abomination*, I'd want to have your babies! Thank you thank you thank you!

*Nothing personal.

Awesome!! I've also noticed some of the changes with the latest announce. I've got no problem with them personally, I'm glad I brought up the wall thing now it doesn't matter to me because there are markers. I've always personally enjoyed it more when the pilot flies around constantly. It keeps the crew alive and active.

My next concern is with accuracy. It's really hard to confirm by ourselves, especially now that we are no longer able to shoot through voids in space, but I'm under the impression that flying around while shooting actually lowers accuracy a fair bit. I'm hoping that you can look into this because it sounds like you buffed up health of some creatures and properly reset the experience gain on them. I hear the dust drop lowered as well.

But the important thing is whether or not this accuracy variable is true. Because you don't miss when you bash normally. And for the warriors who want to cry about the 5% of the time they do miss, the balance cost is halved unlike for turrets, you lose the full module equilibrium.

Seems like an easy thing to test out of the docks against the beasts that are tankable by large ships. Just do 10-20 static and 10-20 while moving and record the percentages.

It might be an intended trade off though. With a large ship you are slow so you sit and take damage but you hit more so the fight ends faster, small sip you run around and never get hit but the fight takes longer.

Of course even very large ships can not tank the big bads out there so you end up always needing to fly around a lot so I could see how this could end up being annoying.

After this weekends power leveling though I for one think any changes need to be modeled heavily first before we have some more 1 day demis.

10-20 seems like a very small amount to judge hard data. I personally don't own a large enough ship to do it and the ones I can think of are in Seren an Celest, both opposing orgs at the moment.

Plus it doesn't make sense to me how this would be true so I'd rather ask the coders who see it. Because at the moment a turret fires, the ship is in one room. So what would define 'moving'?

From my experience, both moving, and range affect accuracy.

Back when you could shoot through walls, you got much better hit rates if it was a thin wall, rather than a point where you were at maximum range. And we hit so rarely while moving, kiting the monsters over -to- the hookup spot, that we didn't even bother attacking - it just created extra spam to lag me and get everyone killed.

Without knowing what the code looks like, I'd have to guess that it keeps track of how many moves you've made in the last X number of seconds, and the greater that number, the less accurate you are.

That would make sense.

It would also explain why the rate of experience gain was so crazy, the system was balanced around the reduced accuracy but by using a wall you were able to gain all the benefits of tanking while not actually taking any damage. So your kill rate (even with needing to kite around the wall) was probably significantly higher than if you had to kite around normally.

A classic example of how players can come up with things designers never thought of.