A Mostly Complete Playthrough of Avorion - Full Game Commentary (+unhinged ranting)
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- In this odyssey of a game commentary, I attempt to describe my time playing Avorion. It's a space game with loads of procedural generation, and it surprised me with how many mechanical ways it managed to do things a little better than other, more famous space games attempting similar things. And building your own ships proved delightful, contrary to my expectations. There were various issues I ran into along the way, especially towards the end, but overall I found this game I had previously never heard of, or seen anyone mention, has raised my standards for the genre considerably.
So get ready for a selection of relatively positive comments, laced with my attempts to a) find things to complain about, b) try not to compare it to similar games while constantly jabbing at said games in a both vindictive and vindicated fashion, c) 'recover' from sleep deprivation and stress by going on out-of-control, barely relevant rants about gaming topics.
I told myself I would make more gameplay focused commentaries but the rant virus has taken over my body. I started making a TW Pharaoh commentary thinking 'this one will be normal' but I unleashed at least twenty minutes of rants in the first thirty minutes. Well, better just keep going... My dream of commentating on tactics and strategies, which is what I wanted this channel to be, has been supplanted by my new quest for finding the formulae for the perfect game design. Inside me, there are two wolves...
More medium-quality, perhaps-worth-watching-while-doing-something-else-tier gaming content is on the way!
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#avorion #4x #spacesim
In the building menu, it is possible to build inside the ship without taking it completely apart. That eye icon in the build menu will let you disable collision and vision for certain parts and materials. It isn't perfect, but it is way better than taking apart and putting your ship back together.
I discovered this later (I think it's in the video somewhere), it was indeed a much better solution!
@@OffyDGG Ah makes sense, I'm only 2 hours in.
@@OffyDGG Yup, at 3:31:00
yup, you can include frames or lightblocks or something similar as a placeholder first and later decide to take a look at these specific blocks once the ship itself is finished and then replace them with e.g. shield generators once you reach the naonite region
love this game (and X series)... my fave design I've made is in the shape of a "pirate sailing ship" with sails made from engine blocks, turrets designed to look like old cannons... complete with skull & crossbones flag... thinking of uploading to the workshop maybe ;)
Please note that there are 3 types of "engine" - the main engine type which gives you acceleration to the direction you want move and 2 thruster types. For the main engine. The rules are this for Avorion 2.0: You can and *should* put over every engine block an armor plate. As noted in the video the engines do not have to exposed to "free space". Second: the main engine blocks can be put everywhere and it does not matter they are put as one big block or as parted small ones - every block will be count and added. BUT the main engines have an exhaust direction - which is then the back of your ship. The other 2 thruster blocks are a bit more tricky - not only it does matter how they are rotated but also their position related to the mass center of your ship. In short: Put in the edges related to the mass center will give max thrust. The roation means to which of the x,y or z direction the thruster will add force.
To tweak in the end the right amount of thrusters and engine for max stats can be tricky and parts good ship designs from bad ones. And why even ships which are both the same cube or block design can perform pretty different. Also, a bad engine/thruster layout will need more blocks/space for them as for a min/max design which usually will give you the edge in fight because you can fill more space with shields. The ship design is mainly about the layout and numbers of the functional blocks (aka shields, generators, etc) as the geometrical form. That and the fact that armor plates durability is counted by size makes cubes or brick designs so superior. It gives you the mininum of armor plates possible with the maximal size. Why is that important? Because an armor plate will eat up the damage. Functional blocks are very squishy and also can explode, invoking internal explosion cascades. A good cube/brick ship which does not lose an armor plate can tank damage controlled down. The armor plates will not get destroyed, they just used up. You can fight safely until 10% health or so, sprint away, use repair fighters to recover and repeat. Wtih a ship design like a star destroyer or enterprise or other "fancy" looking ships you have to much curved or small armor plates which will get destroyed to easily and expose your functional blocks. At that point every good damage you get can trigger internal explosions and that will result then in "my ship exploded" because that damage will count against your hull even when all other armor plates are undamaged and you was not bad damaged previous. A good cube/brick usually does not explode until their hull (armor) points reach zero. There is alot more about ship designs. Sadly, most ships in the workshop do not follow that rules and most cube designs are more a template as usuable and usually comes with a bad thruster layout. Also is the block layout somewhat different when you unlock the ore tiers. I have like 20-30 variants of my brick saved for the different game stages and for what that ships is mainly used. Remember: A ship can have for every ore unlocked a max size and block stats are counted not by numbers but by SIZE. So, a size 8 ship with 3000 cargo space will have significant lower stats as the same ship where you removed that cargo block (which will decrease the size) but then get resized to level 8. The count for every functional block is still the same but they are now bigger and thats what counts. a final note: There are a few funtional block which will get a heavy bonus when they are merged to one big block. Thats cargo, torpedo storage and hangars for example. So read the block infos when building. Also. Try out things. The ship designer comes with an undo/redo function which is essential to find the right layout.
One of the Avoirion 'Dumb things' is the resources in space. You touched on how they have coal mines and coal is decayed plants. Well they also have 'Carbon Extractors' and they take Potatoes, Rice, or Corn as inputs... but not Coal, which is basically all carbon.
I had to try a go on this game a few times before it clicked in. I find it a very good relaxed game to play and I can host my own dedicated server which is something I enjoy. Doing the stations and mining resources and building supply chains and getting into carriers and more advanced ship designs makes this game a "hidden gem".
I also really like afk mechanics in games and often wondered why they are so infrequently implemented, very interesting to listen to you explain the possible fun these can create and whittle down what’s good and bad about that.
I have very specific but modular ship designs.
At all times there's just one ship designed for flying it myself.
All the others are disected into cargo ships for trading/transporting stuff, industrial ships for mining and salvaging and different classes of combat ships from interceptors over dreadnaughts to carriers and some huge capital ships serving as a central control point for me in battles.
For self flying and industrial ships the weapons are all very close together in a frontal spot so all weapons fire at the same time and for every combat ship that I don't pilot myself I try to cover all directions pretty evenly so the AI of the autopilots can actually fight with it and doesn't stop firering half the time.
It´s pretty much just a ship building sandbox with some stuff to do ontop. I really like it, even tough my designs usually look like "This is totally not a cube, see, it has wedges!"
I've also settled for all my stations being huge cubes of stone (for millions of hit points) with functional blocks attached according to what they are
Salvaging is really good in my experience. Using multiple dual beam r salvagers rips ships apart very quickly. My salvage shop has four salvage turrets on it and rips through wrecks.
It now has 6 naonite salvagers and a bunch of points defense and several weapons. I love this game. Warp my two combat ships into a sector, kill rats, warp in salvager and miner/freighter. Harvest ore while the salvager does it's things. Transfer loot to freighter as needed. Rinse, wash, get loot.
So fun fact about your criticisms on travel; Yeah, as you say, you can put Hyperspace Cores in your ship to make it "better" at travelling, but you have to sacrifice space you could fill with shield generators...
...Into The Rift has hybrid subsystems that are kind of best of both worlds, but if you want a solution that you can do at any point and without a DLC; Build a Superlifter or "Tug Ship". Use it to tow your combat ship via Docking, and throw your scouting modules into that.
I do agree 100% that factions could use more fleshing out, and an actual economy (not the dummy economy they use) and a bit more of that 4X flavour that X4 does.
As far as finishing the game goes, you were already most of the way there, you were missing a handful of artifacts to combine into the great asteroid circle and finally sod off to the centre of the galaxy, upon which, a boss battle awaited.
Then after that there's a whole buncha optional bosses and the DLCs to consider, which don't so much as add to the game as they do iterate on some things, like the aforementioned hybrid subsystems that Into the Rift gives you, or the hackable containers in Black Market.
The mods though, add a lot of replayability, in particular there's an Additional Missions modpack by KnifeHeart, and Escalating Pirate Threats by him too, that add a fair bit more than pointless travel to the game's mission structure.
Another thing: There are 2 games out which are somewhat the same but also every different. Empyrion and Avorion. Both are this kind of "Lego" block games. They both have the same problem also: From game engine view a big object created out of alot smaller "real" objects is something which adds alot of load to the game engine, gfx card and cpu. Also, Avorion and Empyrion are not build by bigger game companies which had the money and time to create for this task optimized game engines. Avorion usually will degenerate quickly over a season in terms of performance. You NEED mid game (to enter the core area of the game) to build a small fleet of ships and stations. That will quickly add up to a BIG number of game objects. The single cube there at the video start is such an object. A bigger ship can be build of alot of that blocks. 4 numbers easily. I experienced player end game sectors which droped my fps to single digits. Also, to simulate a single "sector" or planet (when it comes to Empyrion) needs some GB of memory server sided. So a single server with like 20 active Avorion players will need significant more memory as an usual web server for example. In fact memory is perhaps the most expensive part when it comes to server costs today. Thats why a single player can have only like 3-4 active sectors (depends on server settings) on most servers.
I did also have problems right at the end, when taking my fleet into places with a load of stations, it got laggy. Must be a nightmare since all the blocks could need to start running their own physics at any time, the code must be full of things that can slow it down. I would be interested in seeing how much more an avorion-like in 2d could achieve when it comes to scale.
The 4X's are Explore, Exploit, Expand, Exterminate. They date back to the Civilization style games. The space genre adopted them too with games like Masters of Orion. (The original one, not the remake. Though it is also 4x)
For all those wanting to know if there's an easy way to duplicate subsystems, there is no DLC nor easy way to do this. I have however found a hack on creative mode involving a soft tip jackhammer massage gun and the mouse button which will allow you to spam the free blueprints button.
Downloading an autoclicker would be alot easier
Far point. I didn't know that was what an auto clicker was. Makes sense.
26:14 you could build framework blocks into the ship and use the view option to only see those and change them into other components. Also the ship you made kind of resembles a terran battlecruiser from StarCraft.
Liking the review, have you heard of Shadow Empire?
your mining lasers auto refine, r-mining lasers create ore you need storage for to then manually refine at a refinery station
Makes me want to make a giant Borg cube and dominate the quadrant. Curious, what do you think of From The Depths? I have about 1,000 hours in it and still haven't built my "perfect" ship.
A large map is useful when you play with friends. We often run a server with 3-5 people and it works out nicely.
that's a good point, didn't think about the multiplayer side of things at all
How is the sync nowadays? Last time we played multi was a few years ago and it was kinda funky. Also the server hoster had to be logged in in order for everyone else to play, is that still a thing?
@@DrTasty18There is a dedicated server option, if that’s what you mean instead of hosting from the game menu
Cosmoteer is a 2-D game similar to this one where you can build a mobile factory ship that produces anything. There's no infinite mines though.
and how do you always manage to miss so much of the "story" stuff early on (noticed that in your X4 video too)??
idk if u said in the video but wait until u get R-mining then u need a cargo to hold the ore which u have to take to a resource depot to refine.
edit: he does mention r-mining/r- salvage, the R-mining is better you get a lot more resource.
edit: if u have the trading subsystem in u can hold down left shift and click on the trading overview in the top right to get more numbers lol
You can't have infinite ships. Honestly you can't even have very many ships. There is a choke on the number of ships you can build unless you progress farther into the game. Every four ships, so it seems, the base Founding Cost goes up to the next material. I was trying to play a 'Noob Zone' tycoon and hit a wall because ship #8 wanted me to front them 500 Naonite and I didn't have it. This is in the Noob starting zone ship yard. That was really immersion breaking for me. There is no 'in game' kind of reason that a shipyard would ask you to provide them with a material that is not local, and not in your design. Why would they?
@@llywyllngryffyn8053 ah that's a shame, I had no idea. I think the only option would be to either raid the middle for resources briefly, or look for the rare occasions when the resource depots have small amounts of higher tier resources for sale. But yeah I think it should just let you make as many ships as you want, since the limitation of not being able to use higher tier ship parts is already enough.
@@OffyDGG Another player gave me a workaround. You have to create an Alliance of your own and then give your extra ships to the alliance. Then, as a player, when you build a new ship, it will only cost you Iron or Titanium, depending on how many you make. It's still a stupid concept.
what is the X3 and X4 you keep referencing? never heard of em.
cool game, i liked the longform video, your mention of AoE2 makes me long for more Devin gameplay of that.
Basically they are older games very similar to this one. AoE2 needs to be played on this channel, keep getting distracted by new shiny things but it's been sitting there installed the whole time. A true classic!
It doesn't look like x4 is any similar to this one. Are there politics, factions, economy? Not so far in but haven't seen in your video.
X4 tries to simulate a more real looking universe in some sense. Even though it has many issues as your other video pointed out. But it has the realistic ness going for it 😁
@@FreakStyler For sure, the factions in avorion are randomly generated and broadly speaking are all the same, which is the number 1 weakness. I would much prefer they kept the factions pre-made, even if their territory or buildings are randomly generated along with the map. I think that would be an ideal combination.
You actually got the whole thing about Auto mineing incorrect. Yes, there is a feature for "mine this general range" But that's not the core auto mine feature.
If your AI ship is already at a location you know has a lot of materials, you can just tell it to start mining and it won't leave that space until the whole place is barren of materials or the bot's cargo is full.
The problem is that I wanted to mine a selection of systems automatically, and that's what's missing. So say pick a list of coordinates and only mine there, and the ship would be doing it on autopilot, not the like the 'mine general range' thing. As it stands you can do this, but you need to manually intervene to do the refining commands and changing system commands.
You also seem to never realize that you have to blow up the scrapped ship in order to get its highest tier tech.
you need to pay attention to "random" npc comments (speech bubbles) that pop up giving you clues about much of the mechanics... like the research stations
camera controls in "game options" are very very helpful
Avorion is very cool. I am currently playing in a galaxy, have mods installed and use some star wars designs like the CR90, Arquintens and so on. Very cool.
Yes! I’ve done it! I’ve finally finished the video!
A hero of the modern age!
I'm barely two hours in... Pretty good
My problem with avorion is the lack of depth in combat system. Its all too simple, just place all the guns that do more damage and done.
Yeah pretty much. It's a case where the weapons have special effects, like doing more damage to shields or something, but you don't really need to use it. So dps ends up being the way to go. With the ability to disable ship components, something a little deeper feels possible but in practice it doesn't matter much.
I suppose the only defence is that most games like this have the same problem.
HOLY, omg. I didn't recognize your voice until the end, I always assumed kings and generals used an AI voice.
I know this might be controversial, but a lot of your gripes are solved with mods. The only one that I don't think that can be fixed with a mod is giving more info as you play as to what to do for the main quest line, but I think that is by design. You are ment to explore to figure the game out.
this is making me want to go back and work on my "Millennium Falcon" look-a-like ;)
lmfao the ship at the end was well worth the 4 hours of buildup
Bro why do you sound like heroes and generals? also love the video
Thanks! I am the kings and generals narrator, looks like you found me, well done!
It's a game I really want to love, but it ends up just being a grindy map clicker. That's probably got more to do with my play style than the game, but it also makes me frustrated, as I know there is a great game there, I just can't seem to find it..
New OffyD video just dropped, let's goooo!
I bet the comments have already hit you on the build menu, and how to look inside your ship to build/alter it without deleting blocks
God save the modders: Avorion Extended solves at least the not getting special turrets and so much more. Give it a try if you are still interested
"fighters" for salvaging your kills mid game ;)
I bought it, installed it but really hated the building mechanics and just requested a refund. I love Space Engineers, Minecraft, Valheim and a lot of similar games but just could not get into Avorion...
So to craft turrets easy you simply need a Large cargo ship and then a salvage fleet send them out let them get LOTS of turrets and stuff then take that junk to a scrapyard you will then salvage them into the components you need to Make turrets
Discovered this in my second playthrough, very useful. I did loads of salvaging on high difficulty and got an exotic subsystem layout before leaving the starting zone, felt pretty good 😁
Oi, Offy! Are you giving Terra Invicta a playthrough?
Got scared off to some extent but considering it. Sounds like I need to put work in which makes it a harder sell than all the other stuff waiting to be played.
@@OffyDGGI am here for OffyD to fix Global Warming, Capitalism and Thailand’s education system.
Oh and I am sure there are aliens somewhere.
That makes two of us,@@DrGuretOnizuka
Yay another opportunity to shit on Bannerlord! Like wow Avorion, the first game of a small team - almost certainly with a much smaller budget- can have decent RTS controls, but Taleworlds can't be bothered with it. Damn I wonder how they spent all the money&time developing a sequel for a decade.
Anyway, Avorion seems cool, not really my type of game but it certainly deserves more attention.
It was a joy to listen to this :)
Is there a video on this channel without unhinged ranting?
Why would there be, that's the whole charm of it.
Strange i thought ramming enemy ships was quite powerful ive a really heavy ship at high Speed and halfed a lot of ships
It might be only bad against stations, which is how I was trying to use it. But yea lots of the ai generated ship designs have small sections in the middle, perfect for snapping the whole thing apart 😁
1:10:1, it's okay man I actually know exactly which video you're talking about, I watched it recently as well😅
and you can send your captains to a particular sector and mine just that sector btw :)
How?
1:50 damn, I was seriously looking for a tedious logistics game so I'm instantly unsold on this game
also i now realize how much of a saint my mother was all those years, listening to me rant, and opine about things. lmao karma has found me at last lol
OffyD's actually quite hinged commentary.
What a fantastic game. Who would have thunk a game that looks so bad is so darn good.
Graphics is the main weakness for sure, x4 looks much better, but there is just less to do. Some kind of wild combo with the lore and graphics of x4 with the depth, scale, and non-jank of avorion with be the perfect game.
Somthing major you neglected to mention (i bought the game cause of your vid watched almost all of it) that there is NO flipping throttle. You have top HOLD the W key to move forward in a game your expected to Play for 200+ hours. Idiot devs of this game could not make it a simple throttle where you control the percentage, and negative percentage for backwards. I refunded it almost immediately after learning this. Space sims that do this do not give a damn about your hands are evil. You also forgot to mention there is no way to move the SAVEFILE, without making a symbolic link and saves in this game grow to be up to 25+ GB destroying QLC SSD's rapidly by saving every 10 or so min. SO if you don't know this and Don't know how to make a symbolic link to move the savefolder to a hard drive, this game is a SSD ruiner and should have -10stars just for that. Worse I found a thread where one of the devs said for this game when looking up where its savefiles were, that it was imposible for them to code one of the most BASIC things a coder can do, point where things go and allow you to put the savefolder anywhere yourself. They want the game to destroy SSD's. Just stay away from this game and its lazy devs. You also don't mention the UI in game has to be constantly controlled using SHIFT and you have to hold it down the whole time you want to shift modes. Another finger hurting mechanic that doesn't need to exist. Just avoid this game.
Both good points. For me I didn't really mind pressing W, probably because I actually had the autopilot on a lot. But a throttle seems like an obvious feature to add.
With the saves, mine got to about 700 mb in this playthrough. I guess it depends how much of the galaxy you visit. I believe the way it works is that it's updating the file continuously as you play, as its running the game a bit like an MMO with your PC as the serve. That means in practice is writes the data slowly over the course of the campaign, rather than overwriting the save each time you stop. Hopefully that means the SSD activity generated is a lot less than it looks. But again, you are right in that they should provide options for that, especially since a full galaxy or a multiplayer save would be enormous, as you said.
Oh and the shift thing is true, it is a bit annoying. I was using hotkeys for a lot of the menus, which allows you to not need the shift+mouse approach a lot of the time, but having the option for permanent UI buttons you can click whenever would be nice.
how about we solve your problem by modding the game with transparent armour?
science fiction allows that.
That would be a great addition!
turret factories & blueprints allow you to have as many copies of a piece of equipment as you want... enabling your "mining fleets" etc (and well equipped fleets in general)... I like your "ranting"... but much of it seems to stem from your own lack of knowledge about the games you're commenting on from what I've seen so far (just thought I'd rant about that for no particular reason) :P
I did talk about those things in the video, but admittedly it's probably hard to find. I mean technically what you say is true, but the limitations from needing to provide diverse goods to the factory mean that it isn't in practice, so I am pretty sure my turret ranting is sound. I wanted to literally buy the turrets, or have the production require the regular bankable resources only, similar to fighters.
@@OffyDGG to be fair, I didn't watch the full 4½ hours... that I lasted almost 3 was quite miraculous :P
That is already heroic enough, excellent job :D
I love you sir Devin, no homo