(If this can be moved to the Feedback forum, I'll appreciate it.) PROS: 1) I'm loving the bigger planets. They feel far more ... planetary. 2) Tougher patrols are welcome. 3) Some of the new models and other visuals are a step forward. 4) Reworking the food and medicine recipes with generic ingredients, for the most part, is an improvement. 5) I'm mostly enjoying the new disease/condition system. CONS: Jesus, where to start.... 1) Barren playfields. One negative side effect of the otherwise nice big planets, I suppose. I'm assuming more content will appear in future updates, so I'm not too concerned about this yet. 2) Rapid freezing in space. Yeah, it's a game, and you can work around the problem by finding an EVA upgrade (I'm level 22 and have yet to find one) or standing in an enclosed ship, but come on. Two insulation upgrades on a pressurized, armored hard suit ... and it's not good enough? Why? In space, astronauts actually have more problems with overheating than freezing, because you lose heat only through radiation (i.e. slowly). 3) Can no longer spawn personal drone in a hostile POI, meaning no backpack recovery in many cases. Why? What magical force prevents the drone from launching? I suppose this does make the game harder, if by "harder" you mean "pointlessly frustrating." 4) Speaking of which.... Why are there goofy, cartoon-style trap doors in military bases and factories? They make no sense, they aren't fun, and they're all the more irritating due to #3 even though they're technically avoidable. 5) Combat remains ... awful. There's no "tactile" feedback when firing weapons—i.e. everything feels like a bb gun. No melee, not even a bash or bayonet, but enemies can melee you from ridiculous ranges. Robots, Zirax troops and turrets still attack through walls. As such, fighting on-foot is more a matter of necessity than fun. I had hoped the FPS elements would be brought into the 21st Century eventually, but little has changed in years. 6) Mining is still a slog, made even worse by huge distances between deposits. It's no longer economical to take what you need and come back later, but slow drills make the collection process literally painful (holding down LMB for that long). If it must be, then at least make drills toggle on/off, instead of requiring me to hold down a button. 7) Vehicles desperately need autopilot. You can fake it in space by turning off the auto-brake, but atmospheric flight on the bigger A8 planets induces carpal tunnel syndrome. Auto-walk would be welcome as well. IMO, these are just basic quality of life features when you expect players to travel long distances in real time. 8) The PDA stuff and backstory are so amateurish. Please hire a good writer to do story content. I love Empyrion, but I also hate it. Right now it's a bunch of individual systems, which are conceptually epic, while in practice no single thing rises above the level of mediocrity. Many things (combat and exploration especially) are quite underwhelming. Thanks for reading.
-We've always frozen quickly in space. It's true that a cooling unit would make more sense than insulation, but that isn't an alpha 8 issue. Insulation upgrades are for hot planets, not space. -I just spawned a drone in a hostile PoI yesterday. -Re: Trap Doors: git gud. I agree they're rage inducing when you fall for them. Don't fall for them, bring along a multitool to scan obvious places for them. I agree with everything else, although I don't think the problems are so despair-inducingly bad as you make them sound.
Many of us have been raising this point since the temperature system was first introduced, but the devs don't seem to want to listen. Not much we can do besides continue to complain about it, unfortunately. Yep, we desperately need a throttle control (and some additional input control schemes in general).
It's still a feature in A8, so it's effectively an A8 issue even if it's always been that way (which it hasn't, because boosts weren't introduced until A6). Current stats for the Insulation Boost are Armor: -30, Heat Protection 5, Cold Protection 5. I think you misunderstand the criticism. Well, that's interesting, because I haven't been able to spawn in a hostile POI since A8 dropped, and that's across three different saves. Has nothing to do with being "gud" or bad. My criticism was that being unable to spawn the drone sucks any potential fun out of the challenge, and that cartoon trap doors in factories and military bases are goofy absurdities. The Zirax love their slapstick, I suppose. Eleon could randomly spawn a CV-sized chicken that falls out of the sky, shoots plasma from its eyes, and roflstomps player bases. Don't like it? Git gud. *cue laugh track* Maybe "despair" is a strong term (yours, not mine). Frustration, more like. ------------------------------- I hate to accuse Eleon of not listening, because they really seem to be one of the better indie devs in that regard, but you're right on this. I'd toss mining in there as well. They keep changing things for the sake of change, but actual progress has been a rare and questionable thing.
Well, with regards to bigger planets, while they LOOK great (hasn't the terrain progressed really well over the last few Alphas), the bigger planets are one of my main grips with A8. They're just TOO big for the amount of content on them. Also, I think the very shallow depth of the loot table is becoming a major concern. Before I've dispatched more than a few POI's on my starter planet, I've got all the weapons and armours I'll ever need.
I agree, but my hope is that Eleon will be adding content now that the new planet system is in place.
If you want an autopilot you can dl a free KB macro utility like AutoHotkey and record a quick macro to toggle the W key. Assign it to a key that's not used in EGS and you're in business. If you have a gaming KB your software will include the ability. It's a usable workaround for something that really should be in the game already.
I agree strongly with this and your post inspired me to share my own grievances with the game here: https://empyriononline.com/threads/...heavily-on-meta-knowledge-and-cheesing.38477/
I just bought it, good god this is so much better than Osiris. Think i backed the wrong horse there. I desire VR. please switch it on. no i umm, don't want to buy VorpX aside from that, outstanding. ty.
I have been complaining about the insulation boost since alpha 6, +5 is just way to small of a bonus, it is not possible to get enough armor insulation to work near the furnace for example, and even in heavy armor on lava planets i feel you can have heat problems with the tiny bonus from insulation. In comparison EVA gives -150 armor and cold resist of 190 with heat resist of -15 even accounting for the negative that is that 175 temp bonus for 150 armor or 1.1666 temp per point of armor lost. The insulation boost on the other hand gives a 10 temp boost counting both hot and cold for 30 armor or 0.3333 temp per point of armor lost. That doesn't seem even remotely balanced to me. It is possible right now to get well over 700 cold resist. For heat with heavy armor it boost heat resist by 40 then add 4 insulation boost and you are at 60 above your normal temp. I don't know if changing your temp display between C and F affects this as 5 degrees C is more than 5 degrees F. As for the drone spawning I have noticed the same thing I suspect it has to do with regenerative POI's preventing it and others who don't notice the drone block on a poi play on a server with the regen of POI's turned off. I have even noticed it after removing a core when trying to use the drone to disassemble a high object.
The whole booster system in general is really underused at this point. Not only are boosters hard to get (being rare random drops in POIs), but most of them aren't worth spending a slot for (the vast majority of the time, there's little need to run anything but multi-boosters, aside from an EVA booster on occasion). If boosters were craftable and had both more benefits and more drawbacks, and there was a suit power system, boosters could be a really interesting mechanic and allow players to better adapt their suits to specific environments.
+1 +2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9 I'm beating this horse to death. Those stats are laughable to the point where insulation boosters are worthless. If I'm going to commit a slot to a booster it must really do its' job. The protection should be more like 60, not 5. Yes, loot should be more spread out. I'd say you should have to leave the starter world before you really start to accumulate enhanced items.
@Undead Rufus re your OP, I'm in agreement with 95% of what you are saying there and the 5% is inconsequential. One thing I'm in a bit of disagreement with in the thread though is that the planets are "too big for the amount of content." Yes, there is a lot of open space; but not NEARLY as much as in reality. It literally takes minutes to get to the next plant to pick/rock to break when you crash land. More content MIGHT be good, but more content as a premise to "fill up" the planets is NOT a good idea. Yes, the game is a bit slower when you first start out because the planets are bigger and the stuff is more sparse. But as soon as you get a motobike, the game is made much smaller, an HV even smaller, and an SV even smaller. I do notice that there is quite a bit of variation in planet size, and some of the bigger ones I have spawned on (e.g., seed 8675309) WERE admittedly a bit of a slog to fully explore. But if you shop around the seeds you can find very nice compact planets too: try seed 1. ADDIT: one other point I quibble on, Yes mining "is a slog," but it sort of NEEDS to be! Once you get a T2 drill mining is much less of a slog; once you get a fine T1 HV Miner like Burrowing Betty (look on the workshop) mining is a breeze; once you get a fine T2 HV Miner like Iron Will, then mining is ridiculously easy, addictive even!
I love the larger planets. I feel no compulsion to entirely explore each world. The size of these worlds makes it feel much lonelier at the start, and the player feels smaller, more vulnerable. This is as it should be in a survival game. I'm not in a hurry when I begin a game, because it is those first few levels of the game that are the most fun. Find the shore of a lake, start picking plants and busting rocks - Poof! level 5. Make my HV, and the game is on!
Good points. The boosters certainly could be more of an asset to the game. I only pick up Multi or EVA ones and leave the others where I find them. I'm hoping that Eleon can put some attention on the boosters at some future point. If I was king, there would be craftable Tier 1 boosts for Mobility, Armor or Temperature and each would have a distinct drawback. No overlap or extras on T1 boosts. The tradeoff for craftable starter boosts is that boosts would not be removable once they were installed on a suit. They could be upgraded in place but never switched to another suit. I think those changes would open up a another avenue to play EGS your way without being tedious about it.
"...but not NEARLY as much as in reality." That's just it. Empyrion isn't a reality simulator, or a walking simulator. A little desolation is good for mood and immersion, but barren environments all the time seldom make for good gaming experiences without compelling, well-crafted story motivations to hold them up. Sure, HV mining addresses the slog if you can tolerate the handling of those abominations, but you're well beyond any "survival" stage the game can offer by that point. There's nothing to do then except grind for resources to build bigger stuff, to more violently explode the same old POIs on different planets. My complaint is mostly about the hand drills. The T2 drill is still way too slow. Right now, most of the early to mid-game is about mining with a T2 drill, and it takes forever. As noted in my OP, bigger planets have only made this worse. Low output + long transit times = dear god, make it stop. Maybe we just have different priorities. Thanks for the feedback.
In principle, vehicle-based mining should be the logical progression from handheld drills, though (you get where you're going faster and you mine faster). Of course, the HV flight model needs quite a bit of work still, but that's where the work should be done, not on making mining with handheld drills easier. In any case, you do always have the option of modifying the handheld drills with the config file.
