Avorion Ep5 : Costs over 200 Million per gun

May have over done it slightly on the weapons front but what can I say the game gets it's hooks into you.
Each missile launcher on our ship was worth about 10 ships.
Would play it very differently a second time round but barring some of the tedious building stuff, great game.
Credit Song : Spider Juice - Silent Partner
/ francisjohn
/ discord

[@suborbitalprocess]

25:50 "Let's just grab this ship over here!" _The tortured, inhuman screams of all the headphone users' souls being wrenched from their bodies_ "Sorry about that."

[@FrancisJohnYT]

I dropped the volume hard in editing to try and save ear drums. May have needed to drop it a few more dB.

[@alecguth2200]

Avorion such a simple looking game on the surface then 500 hours later... 😂

[@hquest]

The finesse employed by Francis on the design of his murderous flying asteroids is un-copiable.

[@Squirrelex]

Asteroids? Those are a way more complicated shape than a cube!

[@MrOssyan]

This was Avorion : The Borg edition by Francis John

[@danfr]

I started playing about when you started and didn't skip ahead and try to break the game, so here are some tips I have from playing the game "normally" i guess. I found the wanted missions offer a fair bit of reputation. Of course that only works if you play normally and tier up incrementally giving yourself time to arm yourself enough to fight the local boss pirates at each tier. You don't need to individually select ships like that to give commands. You can rectangle select a group of ships by dragging in strategic view or the galaxy map. In the galaxy map you can also ctrl click on ships to select a group. After you have selected a group you can also use ctrl+# to bind them to a number. After you do that with a fleet like your salvagers you'll be able to just hit that number and then give them all the salvage, move, or attack orders. It makes for very quick switching between types of ships. For dealing with crew, it can be a bit annoying but if you've gotten far enough that the Hire Crew at stations doesn't give you enough crew, then there's an easy way to produce more. Make one ship or station have the role of producing things for your new ships. Stick a large crew quarters, large cloning block, and large academy block on that ship. Annoyingly, cloning and academies are more expensive than just hiring crew. But cloning and academy capacity scale with block size. So if you're overflowing with income you can clone a massive group of crew, wait a bit, then put them all in the academy and wait a bit for them to become specialists. It'll be less work than going around hiring crew. You are right about running long captain orders and leaving the game running. I asked and that does seem semi-intentional. The thing is that Avorion is actually sort of a multiplayer game and these orders only require the server to be running. So you can play Avorion on a multiplayer server, queue up an 8h order, quit the game and go to sleep, and it'll be done in the morning as the servers stay running and the orders run in realtime. I'll admit the turret blocks breaking is annoying. But I should note you can kind of mitigate that a bit by having multiple smaller turret blocks instead. And you only need to do this once on the first ship of that size. It seems you can increase the available subsystem slots. Haven't tried it yet, but I have seen the systems for it. Once you get the full 15 slots of building knowledge you can use a stype of subsystem that apparently gives you more subsystem slots. It seems things get even stronger than this when you get into the DLC. I don't have the DLC but I took a look at the Rift Research Stations. They have some really strong stuff you can only get by going into the rift, which apparently has even stronger enemies than that guardian. By strong stuff I mean stuff like a single subsystem that combines the functionality of multiple subsystems.

[@NixHarpinger]

Hello, Avorion veteran here (1,500 hrs+), Good tips, but I would argue running missions for reputation gain is a waste of time. You should be running Trader captain missions from relatively early on, which will give you hundreds of Millions of spare income. With that you can just: 1) Buy rss from a depot, 2) Buy and build a ship at a Shipyard, 3) Buy a trading license and goods* *Buying goods if you either need them or there's a nearby system where you can sell them for profit. 4) Sell goods. In that order (rep gain from buying rss caps out quickly, but buying ships will give you rep even when you're in good standing), you should maxx out rep to the threshold for Excellent and then it's just a matter of leaving a captained ship in a system and set it to "Patrol Sector." You should have max rep like that in no-time. The last server I played on I was allied with all the factions within the barrier pretty easily. Unless there was a very recent change, the game *does not* complete orders when you are offline. I played in MP almost exclusively and the tasks are paused while you're offline. It is a good way to hide your ships from other players while offline tho'. Online afk'ing is the only way to get these done. Turret blocks breaking is infuriating. Especially cos you can only get armored turret bases in Trinium and Ogonite. The only way to completely bypass is with impenetrable shields module. And the only good one (which doesn't reduce your overall shields by a large percentage) you can buy from Rift Research Centers after doing rifts (preferably with a Xstn Hunter cap). After you have that you're completely safe as long as you have shields. (I even started changing armor for blank hull on my ships that have the aforementioned module.) And as far as the crew goes: cloning vats and academy are pretty useless (even on large stations) because they only produce *untrained* crew. Once you're running multiple hulking flagships that each require 1000+ crew, trained specialists are the only way to go. I often train them on my stations so that I make a giant generator block, which drastically raises the number of mechanics required. Your own stations will provide specialist crew for hire after a short time, so you can hire them directly on the station (or another docked station). I wait till the station is near 0% hp and then I hire mechanics who will gain rank pretty fast when repairing the station. Once they're trained, I delete the giant generator block, leave only the few mechanics needed to keep the station from deteriorating and transfer the rest onto my fleet ships. With towing now available, you get your crew back even when your ship gets wrecked, so after the initial micromanaging, you shouldn't be having issues with crew-hiring. When the game came out you lost your entire crew if you destroyed your ship... that was really painful with large warships. ps. if you haven't tried T3 Trader captains you're in for a treat: I was running 3-5 of those traders at all times and I funded several players on our server, giving away excess of 300M credits to them, I donated 200M to my alliance and I still had well over a Billion credits at the end of my two months run on that server.

[@JohnSmith-ud9ex]

"You gotta spend so much time building a ship..." as I look upon the wondrous paving slab of doom.... ; )

[@user-bf9en3tg1w]

"We fight, we win, we eat what's left" (Colin in "He Who Fight With Monsters", chapter 791)

[@waveclaw]

The "Blinding Unicorn." A flying slab class ship. From the amazing mind that produced such famous designs as the Block and Cube. At this point it isn't irony but an actual aesthetic choice. I love how the missiles just fountain off the side of the slab in a single line. It's like someone slamming down the spacebar on a typewriter.

[@Vherok]

very addictive loading screen simulator

[@littleolelonk4759]

There is a bunch of secret bosses if you look around such as the “stick of doom”

[@NixHarpinger]

I was really happy when they added those in, but sadly some of those bosses are utterly annoying...

[@sumdud2129]

22:35 So basically down to the ship design and MO of devouring enemies and using their ship corpses as upgrades and fuel for further conquest.... You just made the Borg collective from star trek

[@danielduncan6806]

The drone has no life support. And the other ship stats never take the player into account. Additionally, the player's consciousness can travel between ships, even across the entire galaxy. If you ask me, which nobody ever does, I say the player is a Xsotan consciousness that got separated from the Xsotan collective, and then forgot what it was. And realizing this, the galaxy decided to help the player. As long as the player doesn't war, everyone just gets out of the way. And some, if you work really hard to earn their trust, will aid you. Everyone constantly pushing the player toward the center, hoping they can get the player to help them.

[@Anomynous]

Press and hold middle mouse button (might be alt or ctrl or something other) to move your camera in front/above the blinding engines @26:39, A block will never be destroyed on it's own if it's within the ( i think it's called?) integrety field blocks. That is if you correctly applied it to all of your ship. It makes it so blocks will only pop if a certain (settings) amount of damage has been done to the total hull. What I don't know is if AI can shoot your guns off. I know YOU can shoot the guns off of enemies. On top of that, since you got these insane vertical mounted homing black hole spitters you could box them in with only an opening to the top... Some of the grind can be avoided; if you make an HQ like ship or station with fighter production and clone bays.

[@EnlonWhite]

But dont put all you eggs in one basket (make multiple turret platforms, less thin). Seperate turret spots makes the sheild pen damage less risky. Into the rift DLC also give good anti shield pent subsystems.

[@moomanseven]

I really enjoyed this content, I wish the series had more episodes; maybe shared some more epic space battles

[@vexxer209]

Maybe on next playthrough have some ship like designs instead of a bunch of floating rectangles :p

[@JaRyCu]

The closing music you picked for this series really reminded me of the "Weekend At Bernies" movie from back in the 80s or 90s. I loved that movie as a kid and used to watch it every time it came on TV.

[@atematme1680]

looking forward to the 2nd playthrough

[@JohnSmith-ud9ex]

Happy hols matey ! And, more please ! (including the cool ska outro music !)

[@antares8826]

More Avorion? Yeeeessss!

[@pkassies]

YUp, one look into the exhaust of that ship and I'm blinded.

[@patrickhiett729]

Start over and go in doing what you know now

[@firecopscott]

I would dearly love to see a true playthrough of Avorion, instead of a "highlights" reel.

[@FussyPickles]

has more depth than Starfield

[@NixHarpinger]

No single resource is the best. It varies *A LOT* from sector to sector. When building stations I really recommend using a good trading module first (at least yellow, but go for orange if you have one). Once equipped you can open up a widow that shows you supply/demand of all the goods in the area. You can sort the list by the %difference and build the stations that will produce goods that have the +30% price. When setting up a station make sure to check "actively sell goods" and adjust the margin to sell them for a few percent cheaper (you don't have to do that if the specific goods are in very high demand). You should also have an excess of Teleporter mods at one point, which you can just chug into your stations, so you don't have to physically dock with them. I had station where I stashed all my turret-making components and then I positioned all my turret factories around that station. Slapped a bunch of teleporter mods and this way I could just "pilot" the station and craft all my turrets from it, since it was considered docked to any turret factory I interacted with.

[@danielduncan6806]

Yes. Welcome to the darkside. Seeker launchers are the most OP weapon in the game; always have been. Even mediocre seeker launchers are OP, due to the range. The enemy logic cannot handle that high of a range; it completely breaks their logic. At some range the enemy logic just gives up on pursuit. That is why you see them twitching like that in your preview window. They get hit and they target you for a moment; then they check the range and immediately give up.

[@matrixmeme482]

Yaaay just watched this series today

[@mattgrostick1499]

All shall fear our flying space brick!

[@NixHarpinger]

I recommend transforming one of those salvaging lasers into a fighter blueprint. You should easily fit a squadron of salvaging fighters on all of your salvaging ships. This will give them the ability of "simultaneous mining" which will boost the hourly gain for them substantially. Also uncheck iron, titanium and naonite, since you don't really use those, except maybe to build stations. It will increase the other types of rss they mine. To make new fighters I have a big assembly block on my main station. I make my first blueprint there (it destroys the fighter). I rarely do blueprints on the ships I use, since it gets lost if the ship is destroyed. Also, if you make your stations in a *neutral zone* they won't get attacked by pirates or Xstn. You will get a tiny penalty with the faction, because you will take over their system if you own more stations than they have, but that's trivial. Neutral zones almost always feature a Repair Dock and a Shipyard which you can make as your reconstruction point (you should have good standings with the factions inside the barrier anyway) and then you can tow and rebuild your destroyed ships for free and with unlimited range. [edit:] nevermind, I missed the part where you discovered how op salvaging/mining fighters are :D gonna leave the comment for others who may have missed this bit as well.

[@RisingDivinity]

I find it hilarious that the story is about how a bunch of robots started destroying and eating everything in civilised space... And Francis decided that the best thing to do was to kill the boss by destroying and eating everything in civilised space.

[@FrancisJohnYT]

The robots tactics seemed very efficient, why not learn from them and try and do it better :)

[@RisingDivinity]

@@FrancisJohnYT And so began the story of how Francis started galactic assimilation. Never change xD

[@matrixmeme482]

Also yeah next play through you need to use torpedoes in the early game and then fighters in the mid-late game

[@grandfremdling3841]

Great episode before and when killing the end boss. But after that, well...

[@keptinkaos6384]

If you turn up to the gate with wiener ships, well that's on you

[@brianhauptman]

Have a good holiday!

[@julthefool150]

what works really good for improving relations even on maximum difficulty is the mission "wanted: dead not alive" or something like that. one to three missions of those depending on your previous standing and relations are maxed out. you even get to use those scrapping fleets because usually in the final step of the mission you kill a pirate boss similar to swoks and there are a few sub systems to be earned. quest bonus is 700k of the mineral in the area you are in (in your case that would be ogonite or avorion) for reference: what difficulty setting is this on? regarding your comment @26:44 : you are far better off building a base of avorion per weapon and not a whole strip and surround it with a wall of ogonite if you are using coaxials. that way you minimize the incoming damage from all but one direction (unless its AOE damage from explosions maybe) and even if you lose a single avorion base it only disables / destroys one weapon and not the entire weapons array. on the highest difficulty setting you lose weapons permanently if they get disabled/destroyed. if you lose the entire ship, its gone. no restoring. not sure if that applies to the weapons station too though. regarding what you said dragging it to the center and restoring it. i believe it is just gone then and cant be restored but im not sure... hasnt happened to me (YET).

[@EnlonWhite]

Mods, there are mods that make the game more challenging. Pirates at Trinium have 1 million hull....yeah.

[@jkep6643]

Clone bays and academy's for crew

[@NixHarpinger]

They only make generic crewmen. You really want trained specialists in the long-run.

[@MazeMan91]

We have a whole design system to make the ships of your dreams. Let's go with murderous face-melting planks. Next go around, they all must be 1x4x9

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Some people are born to make the universe a better place. Others are there to invent the mini.

[@MazeMan91]

@@FrancisJohnYTI fly around in a wedge...So I really can't complain.

[@gus.smedstad]

Platinum mines are actually kind of mediocre. If you want to stick to stations with no inputs, Hydrogen / Nitrogen / Oxygen gas collectors cost less and generate 40% more profit. Mid to high-end stations are better than any no-input station. For example, a Fusion Generator station will generate as much income as 14 platinum mines, and costs 7x as much as a platinum mine. That includes defensive materials and the assembly blocks (high end stations need assembly blocks for maximum efficiency). There's also the problem that multiple stations of the same type depress local prices. Single, expensive stations don't have that problem. You can boost the profit of high end stations by building supply chains. If factory A produces product X that factory B consumes, this boosts the sales price at factory A and lowers the purchase price at factory B. That's just how the price modifiers work, as long as you have NPC traders buying and selling at both stations. You do NOT want to ship products from factory A to factory B, since you don't get the market benefit. This can easily stack another 50% on the profit of a factory. Finally, if you're going to build a mega-industrial zone, you might as well put it out in the Iron regions, where the pirates are armed with popguns.

[@NixHarpinger]

I usually make steel factories. You always need steel for yourself and even with the new docking system, it's not hard to dock the coal and scrap-metal to make a mini-complex. Steel is often in high demand as well and it's super easy to make. I had many factories on my last server before the wipe, but I have to say nothing comes close to T3 trader captains running trading missions. They just bring in insane amount of money.

[@FrancisJohnYT]

I tried making steel factories 30% demand, they pulled in less than half the money of plat mines with 19% demand. Bearing in mind the steel factories were getting all their resources supplied for free by my other factories.

[@gus.smedstad]

Steel factories are pretty bad, actually. They only return about 0.6 million / hour, base, in a +20% demand sector. The main reason to build one is if you've got a high-end factory that produces scrap metal as a byproduct and NPC traders aren't buying all of it. Good factories are higher-end ones like Drones, Ammunition, Fusion Generators, and Anti-grav. My guide I mentioned before breaks down what's good and what's not. Also, don't ship products between factories if you can avoid it. "Free" sounds good, but you make a profit selling intermediate products to NPC traders and then buying them at the other factory. First, NPC traders pay 20% over local market price. That's right there in the tooltips in the station dialog. Second, the first factory gets about a +10% boost to sales price because the client boosts demand. Third, the client factory pays about 10% less than normal because the source increases local supply. Yeah, I know, that sounds nuts, but that's how the local market effect of factories work. Factories affect local prices for other factories, but not for themselves. This is why multiple factories of the same type are bad, they reduce each other's sales prices.

[@gus.smedstad]

Here's an example. Suppose you've got an AnitGrav Unit factory and an AntiGrav Generator factory. Let's assume a base level of 0% price adjustment before you build the factories. If you ship them, you've "sold" the Units to the Generator factory for 25,000 each, and "bought" them for 25,000 at the Generator factory. Net profit zero. If you let NPC traders buy and sell the Units instead, the Unit factory sells for 110% x 120% x 25,000 = 33,000 credits each. The Generator factory buys for 90% of normal, or 22,500 each. You get an extra10,500 credit profit on each Unit sold. The Unit factory normally makes a net profit of 12,000 per item in a 0% sector, or 18,000 in a +20% sector. You've boosted that to 22,500 to 25,600 credits, or a 40%-85% gain, depending on local prices. On an XL (5 production track) factory, profit goes from 22 million / hour to 31 million / hour in a +20% sector. Cost to build is 144 million, including 27 million to found, 14 million in inventory costs, 5 million in defenses, 19 million in assembly blocks, and 79 million in upgrade costs.

[@NixHarpinger]

@@FrancisJohnYT I see. It is possible that I didn't had such luck with the plat mines because I started playing when the server was running for at least a month and there were probably tons from other players. And it's not like you were pressed for credits in the end. I just really like having at least one steel factory cos many other factories need it as well.

[@sunshaker01]

Depending on the resources you have it is often best to build the fighters one level below what you are making your ships out of and/or mining/salvaging. They are still combat effective, they can mine/salvage 1 level higher than they are and they will not be competing for potentially limited resources. Be aware that there is/was a integer overflow with really expensive fighters allowing for an infinite money exploit (they may have patched it); basically you can make a fighter so expensive it flips to a negative value and every time you build it the game subtracts a negative value from your money (double negative = addition). But you need a stupidly expensive fighter to do it, you might be able to do it by building a fighter out of your level 52 rocket launcher and buying all the extras for it. I'm both curious and terrified as to what 5 wings of level 52 rocket fighters would look like in combat. For the turret blocks it is not uncommon for people to build 2 or 3 or more turret strips so that one unlucky shot takes out all the guns and cripples the ship. Another good way to get components if you own your own weapon factory is to get a Smuggler Captain and have him run a procure mission. Unlike Merchant Captain procure missions the Smuggler can get ANYTHING, and he can get it CHEAP, but it is all stolen goods and you can't use it at NPC factories.

[@EnlonWhite]

I have found on making turrets you can grind to make Turrets of different materials same stats, its rng alot though.

[@NixHarpinger]

The turret bases are mostly there so you can save and copy your own turret designs on them. Even on a block ship like yours they might look badass, but when you have a really mean-looking ship, having some really cool turret designs (a ton of great schematics are available on the Steam workshop) makes your ships look absolutely amazing and badass. (which, needless to say is really important on a MP server 😄) But yea, you do need the Rift dlc if you're using turret bases, so you can get your hands on that really good impenetrable shields mod and then even a 0.1 thick turret base won't get blown off as long as you have the min. needed percentage of shields (the mod makes your shields impenetrable for as long as they are above like 20% (depends on mod quality)). By the time I start exploring around the core I would normally make several escorts for my main ship. The carrier and the main support ship I fit with a few repair cannons and they help me sustain my shields even in long engagements (I played on almost max difficulty servers and i never lost my main ship to pirates or Xstn).

[@vonshroom2068]

I just hide my missile turrets(rear facing) or Balistic/laser/plasma (front facing between the engines and call it a day. The DLC is fine but not really needed to keep your turret bases alive as the AI will aim for what is in front of it anyways.

[@NixHarpinger]

@@vonshroom2068 Yes, there are ways to go around, but I had turrets on several parts of the ship and they still got shot off many times. And I don't have them anywhere close to the bow of the ship. I played on servers with very high difficulty and until I got that dlc module it was a pain to deal with. I also put a lot of weight into my ships looking really good, so having visible turrets is important to me. Tho it's also very important they don't get shot off all the freaking time 😂 So yea, you can still play without the Rift dlc, but honestly I don't know why you would want to :)

[@umbralreaver]

I want to play it so badly but I'm holding off until the next DLC (soon, but no date given) so I don't burn out before then.

[@gus.smedstad]

I wouldn't hold my breath. The two existing DLCs aren't very good, so I wouldn't assume another DLC would significantly improve the game. I have Black Market, and honestly, I mostly skip the content from it because it's not worth the time.

[@atematme1680]

have a look @ the steam workshop for finished ship designs or mods wich make the game harder for youre next playthrough

[@gothicpando]

looks like it needs some quality of life mods

[@spirit_miku]

This game reminds me of StarMade a very old but fun game

[@gus.smedstad]

Scrapping turrets isn't really all that good, economically. The game looks at the turret's sale price and then gives you random parts that add up to 50% of the sale price. Ergo if you have places to buy parts at reasonable rates (i.e. NOT turret factories or the support stations that charge a 200%-300% premium), you're better of financially selling the turrets and buying the parts you want. The main advantage of scrapping turrets is that you get a lot more parts than you can easily find for sale. If you're looking to build a bunch of mining turrets, for example, you may have to do a lot of hunting for the parts, or build several parts factories.

[@FrancisJohnYT]

I learned to sell turrets in the end. The money made allowed me to buy all the turret parts with tons of money to spare.

[@alecguth2200]

Also tip about turrets. Rocket launchers with seeking missiles. Do I need to say more? They by far the most op weapon in the game

[@NixHarpinger]

When I played in pre-release you could craft seeking missiles that have shield-pen (not as much as a pulse cannon, but still decent). The wormhole guardian had a ridiculous amount of shields (was almost unbeatable on max difficulty), so I just build a few juggernaut ships equipped solely with those launchers. The bastard still had like 70% shields left when it died 😄

[@alecguth2200]

@NixHarpinger If you keep building turret factories until you roll a high level coaxial rocket launcher they can do crazy damage it pretty much breaks the game haha 😄

[@NixHarpinger]

@@alecguth2200 Last time I played was on a heavily modded server and I think they had the coax missile launchers disabled. Because I spent hundreds of Mil just on re-rolling my 12+ turret factories and I didn't get one. But even on almost max difficulty, the normal launchers are still good enough I didn't had much issues exploring the core and farming TWG.

[@KainYusanagi]

Please... Francis... Remove the lower tier materials when doing salvaging missions to increase the better tier materials! Click the grey squares beside the names!

[@FrancisJohnYT]

I started doing that in the end. Once you get really close to the core it seemed pointless not to.

[@KainYusanagi]

@@FrancisJohnYT In the video you were complaining about how salvaging wasn't bringing in much of the higher tier materials, which is why I posted this; people have been saying it since the first scavenging-focused video, so not seeing you do it when complaining about it was poking a sore point XD

[@lonelyPorterCH]

200h in that short time, oh wow^^ Guess you got hooked ;P Edit: ah, okay, lots of afk grinding

[@FrancisJohnYT]

It's 270 hours according to steam but I cut off 70 hours to account for afk.

[@hanskristianknudsen9485]

Hi i watch all your episodes and i liket all. I do play my sellf and im strugeling whit cash flow. I have 5 mining ships 1 salvager 2 gun ship 1 whit 9k damg 1 whit 14 k damage. I just got inside the ring and well, i only have like 40 milj , sure i spent some on upgrading and geting some turrets, but you are just owning in geting cash and i dont know how you got that mutch that fast? I dont have any mines yet becuse i cant protect them and then it seams pointles. whould bee nice to get some pointers.

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Doing Salvage missions with 15 ships at a time while I was afk was how I made my money in Avorion. Mines are also good, I moved them to core sectors so they were safe. If you want you can set them up on the edge of the galaxy where all the enemies have pop guns.

[@Metaz]

:D

[@TheyCallMeSharkface]

gaming console wars