I was fiddling with a base I built in Survival to set it up as an upgradeable outpost and thought it would be nice to switch the blocks to concrete to make gathering the materials easier, only to find that when I switched them, it cranked the CPU usage up by over 12000 points and would cause the base to go from tier 1 to tier 2 as a result. Is there a reason why concrete blocks cost more CPU than steel blocks on a base?
No reason why CPU applies to structural blocks, even less reasons why concrete should need more than steel.
Its all the lazy useless non functional nanites... I have a base somewhere that should be a tier 1 (functionally) but is actually a tier 3 and is only really usable at a tier 4 just because of a sizable concrete landing area.
I believe the devs gave the reasoning of transporting air from the O2 tanks to the vents, electrical wiring and ammunition transfers between weapons and ammo boxes. Concrete is more dense than sheet metal, after all. In SE, you actually must build such pathways, but in EGS, you do not. There is this way, or you could up the cpu costs for the other devices so that you can just explain the whole thing away as teleportation technology, or just plain magic. What’s the best choice?
It's for balance so that you can't make a huge, heavily armored base or battleship that has a low CPU tier. However, I personally don't like regular blocks needing CPU.
From an engineering perspective, I prefer the SE way, but what I dont like with the SE way is that all of these occupy a cube, which can make for very ugly small ships. If construction blocks were free and instead you had to place conduits, I would prefer that, but I would also want those conduits to be embedded within existing construction blocks (to avoid SE ugliness) which neither SE nor this can currently support. I guess RG took the approach of massively cranking up CPU costs of functional blocks and making construction blocks 0. In theory a great approach, in practice I utterly hate what he did with CPU in RG - vastly more than the screw up that is vanilla CPU. But to be fair, I guess he was trying to put a band aid over a broken flight model . Unfortunately it still remains broken and I think beyond fixing in config files. The real problem with CPU is it has become the fix all (hacky) crutch instead of trying to actually do it properly and balance properly.
So basically aside from the usual "why do inert blocks have CPU" responses, there's no particular reason why concrete uses more CPU than steel despite costing less to produce?
You've identified the nonsense that motivated me to add a CPUIn value of zero to every simple hull block to override the hidden unspecified values, which are just nuts. Left device blocks alone, only targeted hull blocks. It has more hitpoints. Consider it a form of artificial scarcity. This game has quite a lot of it, for instance CV weapons that can't fire planetside simply because it would render HVs and SVs rather superfluous.
even with this restriction HVs and SVs are superfluous. I only build them for use in the first hours or for specialty purposes never as a primary fighting ship.
Balance has nothing to do here : a simple slab of material can be chipped away by any tier attacker, it will just take more time if the chunk of blocks is bigger. There is no logic to make a huge cube of material with no guns to be of a higher tier than a small cube of the same material with some guns : it's just two very different concepts. While the 1 000 000 CPU points huge "gunless" cube may be "higher tier" than a 1 block base with a gun, they are just not the same, and as such CPU has nothing to do with "balance" here. The "real purpose" of CPU for material blocks was to try to keep all builds small to avoid server performance problems with lots of huge builds. As for the "game logic" of armored concrete being stronger than steel it should be the contrary, and it is easily proved when dealing with small samples of each material. If a 1 inch thick piece of steel is far stronger than a 1 inch thick piece of armored concrete then I hardly see why this would not be true on a larger scale. Make that 1 foot thick armored concrete vs 1 foot thick steel and the difference is even more obvious. Since blocks have almost the same mass (combat types) we can infer that concrete blocks have more material in them than steel blocks ( "sheets on a frame" ) but not enough to compensate for the density difference.
I despise that word "balance" and how it's routinely misused as a stand-in for what the underlying activity it describes really is: creation of artificial scarcity of one form or another. When a game's world model is inconsistent with itself and allows "exploits", the "balancing" act doesn't fix the underlying inconsistency. It's like piling lies on top of lies and expecting a better outcome.
There is nothing to ponder about simple complaints. Give some substance, suggestions, based on Empyrion and not some other game. Just for your info, playing some other games will quickly show you that "creation of artificial scarcity of one form or another" is all what games do, not just Empyrion, with the main difference that other games force it onto players because they are not allowed to make suggestions during development. Reforged Eden shows one way to adjust values, and obviously if you read @Khazul 's post (and other players elsewhere saying the same) you can see that even RE did not succeed in pleasing everyone, and even went the other way for some players. But at least, RE gives a "proof of concept" of some values and "attempt at balance", while you are just - once again - stomping the "complaint" button expecting something to change. But let me ask you bluntly : who do you think you are to believe that Eleon has any interest in your constant unproductive rants ? You want to show you're smart ? Then give some substance, examples, numbers, proof that you worked a bit on the matter and that you know what you're talking about. .
Do you make any intentional effort to conceal your contempt for other persons whose statements you find disagreeable? If so, you consistently fail in the attempt. Contempt warrants being ignored.
You sow the seeds of conflict, then that is what you will get. Respect is a two-way road, and you show very little to "persons" who made the game which allowed some modders to earn your "hugs". Your flattery and your rants stink.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with simply stating that one doesn't like a thing or thinks it's bad. I think his previous post comparing to weapon limits on planet is enough to make the point that regardless of which direction it (being the overall game balance) goes in the future, it would be better to approach the idea of balance from a completely different angle. I don't think a perfect solution needs to be provided to simply say a particular approach isn't a good one. An arbitrary number on something often does merely provide cover for an underlying problem. Example: a boss in an action game is too easy so rather than tune attack patterns to complement and challenge player combat options, they just increase the health pool and damage output. Now, you imply he does little more than continually complain without providing solutions. I'm not going to go through post history or get involved on that front. But I can say I've seen more than a fair share of users acting as apologists or downshouting almost any complaint leveled at the game. With that in mind, I'd say one user with less than 50 posts couldn't be enough of a plague to warrant that point even being relevant. However, the actual reason I came to post was regarding your mention of this. I'd more believe that if there weren't things like the advanced core (you can't get that on the official servers, right?) And also, there's already size class and triangle count. Those have more to do with performance as it's totally possible to make a giant box that maxes out CPU but has minimal performance impact because it's just a box. Unless of course there's a quote where they specifically state that as a reason, in which case there's no point even discussing it. Honestly, if they just renamed "CPU" to "Limit" then I swear a ton of people wouldn't even make the connection of it having to do with the vessel's CPU. If it's gonna be an arbitrary number, then just let it be arbitrary instead of spending time giving it some sort of in-lore logic or whatever. As it is, CPU upgrades exist for the purpose of balancing progression, no? Why bother with that if it's for game performance reasons? I suppose regardless of stated intent, CPU limitations are for combat balancing. A stronger defensive block is considered more effective armor and needs to be balanced against damage output in some sense. Personally, I much prefer the approach of Reforged. I can't say as it's balanced perfectly, and it really doesn't matter. It's the approach. The approach is that more weight, whether offensive or defensive, means more thrust/power generation/fuel to be able to move effectively so you end up making sacrifices to one aspect or another in order to get the desired result. It's not realistic, but it's more based on real world behavior and physics than videogame numbers. I'm sure of course this has all been said a million times. But I don't think it'll hurt if I'm one more person pointing it out and saying "Reforged is a better approach. You can balance the numbers however you like, but that angle is better because it promotes more varied vessel design in terms of functionality, which is playing to one of the game's best strengths. It restricts through functionality, not just numbers, so you're encouraged to build for specific purposes in order to maximize a particular function. In vanilla, I can pretty much just slap everything I need on one thing. So why build any more?
