So I'm still relatively new to this game -- at least in regards to how play time is considered in such a game (I'm over 115 hours at this point and there are many games you put in like 30 and are done so 50+ would be considered quite a lot, so we definitely look at play time differently in a game like this versus many others.) I've already mentioned the top 3 things I'd want to see change in the top 3 thread stickied here so won't go into detail on them, but there are a lot of things I really feel this game could benefit from in comparison to SE in no small part by learning from it (both what it does right and its mistakes) and just plain some things the game itself could benefit from on its own. These aren't really in a particular order other than the top three. I didn't really want to make separate threads for each but wanted to at least get these thoughts off my chest, but I'm hoping a bit of constructive feedback would actually be helpful potentially. As already mentioned in the top 3 we really would benefit from batteries. Both as "capacitors" for sudden demand applications and just generally a way to handle the fact we're constantly feeding generators to give us a bit of a buffer to make it less frantic (especially since you have to process fuels to put into those generators...) Plus just plain as an emergency backup. Also as already mentioned, solar power is, while not useless, definitely not where it should be (especially the 15 panel limit) and it should be usable on capital vessels too. It should be completely feasible to entirely power a fully advanced base via solar -- albeit not necessarily easy to do so. Actual batteries that could be stacked would help a lot with this. Tool/weapon degradation is -- at least for me -- not a fun feature. I'd honestly rather see it abolished, but I assume others do enjoy it. As I mentioned in the thread, a bit of change to it in that things wouldn't just simply be limited to a few repairs then gone but instead would allow infinite maintenance just makes more sense IMO. Oh and I do realize you can turn off degradation in the difficulty settings, but I'm speaking more as a general play I just don't think it's good or truly makes sense. As I said in the other thread, I think it makes more sense to have very low repair on full break limitations but infinite maintenance such that if you let them break too many times they'll be beyond repair but if you keep maintaining them frequently they'll last essentially indefinitely (or at least should be considered beyond the scope of this game) with field maintenance kits that would take time to fully use (after all, it does take time to pull things apart and clean them.) Actually, I should have made this top 3: please give us a way to "feed" fuel supplies automatically. I suppose there could be benefits to protecting some fuel components (for example, leaving an emergency reserve so a base you come back to later can be powered back up without gathering first.) It's insane to me that if you don't keep manually adding to fuel tanks then even if you have tons of power components just sitting in storage the power just dies. Perhaps something just as simple as the fuel tank management screen letting you select a container (like the way other menus do) and then ignoring other containers. I realize this changes the balance of using larger fuel tanks. On a base it probably doesn't even matter, but for everything else it could potentially. I really feel like it's bad balance to have them just die with plenty of fuel though, so some alternative to make larger tanks still useful and viable might make sense. For example, if automatic loading of fuel cells would burn some extra energy as waste in the process (which could make logical sense anyway.) Coming from Space Engineers, every single power system (except solar) can be automatically fed and it really gives me a feeling of anxiety having to run around manually topping things off so I can be sure if I have to leave them a bit everything won't just die. It especially made me paranoid at the beginning of the game since I had minimal base defenses to rely on, knowing if I stayed out too long I could come back to a dead base with a hole in the middle just due to letting the fuel run out or something but biofuel production was really slow. On that subject, biofuel production is indeed insanely slow and low production. I'm not sure if this is meant as a balancing thing or what, but it made the beginning of the game very frustrating for me since initial starting game loop was me spending an insane amount of time just rushing around harvesting trees and plants as fast as I could to feed to the slow biofuel production followed by rushing to get the biofuel into the tanks before they ran out. I didn't even dare turn off the constructor (which was the only high power usage device I had at the time) while out because it was the fastest producer of the biofuel I needed to keep things going. The start of the game ended up being a lot of painful micromanagement solely because of this with me constantly filling the queue with biofuel as I rush out to grab more, then manually clearing the queue and filling it with things I need, then having to clear it and put biofuel back on and rushing back out, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. I know this is mostly to encourage finding and using promethium as soon as possible, but it's a little too frustrating as it stands right now. Since biofuel already adds considerably less PUh versus promethium sources and requires potentially several steps even to produce (since trees are really the most viable source of enough to be worthwhile anyway,) I just don't see why it should be so painful. I really feel like it should be either a lot faster or produce a lot more or a bit of each. It could make sense if the constructor version of the biofuel production could take in more input for each but output a lot more too since it's a much larger machine with more capacity anyway. Toolbar customizing. Another that is also top 3 (can I have two top threes???) Currently the toolbars are automatically generated as one creates a vehicle which makes sense as a default starter, but then can end up with really annoying things like weapons in the wrong order, detectors in the middle of them, etc etc. You shouldn't have to carefully plan ship design solely to force the generated toolbar to come out a certain way. But also you should be able to add devices to your toolbar -- which is another of the things Space Engineers actually gets right. For example, in SE I can set a high power device to power on/off if I press a specific shortcut number on the toolbar (and it shows an on/off indicator so you can actually tell.) It's definitely not fun when an enemy you didn't realize was headed towards you suddenly attacks and you have stuff off so have to stop in battle and open the menu to toggle switches slowly with your mouse while they shoot you. It's worth noting, of course, that enemy drones don't have this particular disadvantage. Attack one that didn't know you were coming and it's already at full capabilities (or more accurately it never has to even power down to conserve energy in the first place, but I wouldn't expect that level of complexity to be added to this game.) Please please finer adjustments on RCS turning. I find it takes a bunch of RCS devices on a vehicle to give it decent turning properties -- which is reasonable I guess, though it feels like it takes more than it should -- but then some things (rotation in particular) are extremely hard to control. You can only set them in increments of 0.1 steps, but rotation when you have, say, three RCS devices then goes so fast that barely tapping the rotation keys still rotates the vehicle far too much. It may be in part that the roll movement isn't taking mass into account as much as pitch or yaw do though, so this may be a bug/oversight perhaps. Either way it may still benefit from a finer control. Increments of 0.01 would probably be just right. As I just mentioned, the RCS devices seem a bit too weak at times. In particular small vehicles don't have T2 RCS devices for some reason but definitely benefit. A really obvious example would even be some of the ships provided in the story mission like the Santa sled. I mean, I expect it to be wonky to control high mass vehicles without sufficient RCS devices and everything anyway, but I was rolling my mouse full tilt all the way across the pad over and over and over and barely moving. And this is with a mouse set to 1:1 instead of the usual smoothing and acceleration curves that most people use (meaning every inch of my mousepad is 1400 dots the mouse has moved thus making for a LOT of input producing almost no actual movement.) I'm guessing ship flight may have been tested largely only on joysticks or something, but for this sort of game I'm not breaking out the HOTAS. (Don't get me wrong, when I play something like Elite Dangerous I use it, but it's very inconvenient to setup and use in general and just doesn't make sense for a block building survival FPS game to me.) I did find a constant input (I have a mouse up/down/left/right control on my keyboard on a separate layer that I never intended to be particularly useful so is set very low speed -- it's intended really just for when dealing with certain legacy software situations) worked a bit better, but it was still painful and slow for even simple turning. Most people don't have mouse keys on their keyboards. A lot of the capital vessel limitations don't make sense to me. Why does a capital vessel teleporter have a range limit of only the current sector -- not even the current system? As it is CV teleporters are actually kind of worthless since you normally would just go ahead and at least be within jetpack or small ship range of most things you'd teleport to/from anyway if you're in the sector. I might add that by the time you can reasonably build a CV you can technically knock together a teleporter "base" with just a generator, fuel tank, sensor, and teleporter pretty easily and just toss it together in a few moments outside your ship (actually, I think you could probably even move a CV to enclose such a base so that it's inside even. It wouldn't move with the CV, but it would mean that it would be protected by the CV without even adding extra defenses,) so this basically does nothing for balance that I can see. There is a slight loss in that you probably can't get exactly 100% of the fuel back out when disassembling and the core salvages instead of retrieves, but all in all it's generally easy to knock one together at will with the resources you'd have at this point and just not much to really discourage it. Other limitations on CVs -- particularly what you can have on them make no sense to me. Why can't I have a deconstructor? And furnaces just make sense -- it just makes sense that a CV may be built largely to support a moving mining operation. And again, people can just knock together a temporary "base" to do such things pretty easily by the point they can build a CV capable of supporting such things, but I just don't see why they should have to. There are a few other things I don't really see why are base only like the ATM (it's not like the tech it uses to access banking systems is wired after all.) It's super weird to me that hover vessels can have things like mini-clone chambers, yet small vessels can't. If anything the hover vessels are more limited and lower level -- generally something one knocks together at the beginning of the game when one has few resources and unlocks or for quick harvesting. Beyond that the SVs are more advanced, not less. I don't know if the original intent was to make giant crazy hover vehicles, but at least from my point of view knowing I will eventually leave the planet I want to keep my hover vehicles simple and minimal without wasting a lot of resources on them just until I move up to a small vehicle. I see hover vehicles more as a minor step on the way and rely mostly on small vehicles in my gameplay. Some blocks are able to be installed in anything applicable -- for example, a core can be placed on anything -- but then some for no apparent reason are specifically one or the other. A really easy example would be CPU extenders, but there are several. The SV and HV versions of the SV and HV extenders are almost the same to make even. I feel like it would make things a lot better for players if they were just "small block" (eg both SV and HV) and "large block" (eg BA and CV) versions like with Space Engineers with, of course, the requirements for building the large block versions being higher. It would be a lot less confusing and make storage a lot less painful if each device could be simply installed on whatever is applicable. (For example, obviously hover drives would be specific to hover vehicles so not install on a SV -- though a convertible vehicle would actually be really cool, I assume this is due to engine limitations -- but something applicable to both like thrusters should be installable on both.) Since they do often have differences in build requirements it could be tricky deciding which requirements to go with (though in some cases maybe they could just be averaged) but probably it makes sense to just go ahead and use the higher requirements in most cases. Some of the music loops are just bad. There's a sort of bad jump at the end right before it loops again like it's having trouble loading or something and hitches (I'm on a SSD, but something as simple as the BGM looping the same track shouldn't hitch even on magnetic drives.) I don't know what is involved in fixing such a thing and I would assume it must be known by now, but I would suggest as a temporary, less jarring solution, you could add like one second of silence or so to the end of the tracks so that when it hitches you can't actually hear it. I'd like to see a melee weapon (a simple blade probably makes the most sense. Relatively easy to build with low tech and could double as a convenient thing for cutting foliage or something besides fighting. This would be a good fallback for when ammo runs out, but also things like spiders and scorpions would often be a lot less maddening to deal with with such a weapon (with the obvious trade that you have to let them get closer so are more at risk of being hit.) On the subject of the fighting, I do feel like some rebalancing would really make sense. A lot of enemies probably have way too much HP. If you think about it, many like the giant spiders would be completely wrecked by even a single one of the bullets some of the larger caliber weapons use (like the sniper rifles.) It shouldn't require a headshot to one-hit kill a lot of these enemies. I can see it making sense that abominations don't drop with a single shot to a shoulder, but if I hit a spider with a 15mm bullet from the epic sniper rifle it should pretty much rip it apart even if it's not a headshot. Most weapons aren't nearly as effective as they should be -- hence a lot of the complaints like the Ilmarinen mission. For example, I also had an epic assault rifle when I went in and found it to be nearly useless. I think maybe a lot of these are balanced primarily for the flamethrower which is just not a weapon many of us even would enjoy using anyway (and I guess maybe is less viable to keep up?) I get that they are supposed to be strong, but it takes way too many shots from very powerful weapons to take them down IMO. I feel like it should even be a little bit viable to use the many pistols the game gives you as something other than things to sell or disassemble too for that matter (albeit requiring mostly headshots to actually be useful against things other than spiders.) As an alternative, an even higher tier of weapons could make sense as that would mean you'd have to unlock them to make them. Though then the T3s would have to compete with the epic weapons. I do think the epics are way too far above the T2s anyway, so this can actually make sense. What makes the most sense in this respect is probably a balance of each. Give enemies lower HP so easier to kill within reason but only slightly lower. Add T3 weapons that are almost as good as the epic weapons but without their limitations (so the epic weapons are still nice since they would still be better, but manufactured weapons would also be good and useful again and end-game personal combat isn't just keeping a box of weapons raided from POIs.) With slightly lower enemy HP and better standard weapons, people could go in and stand a chance using their preferred combat style more often, making everyone happier I think. Though honestly I feel like epic weapons and tools don't necessarily make a lot of sense anyway. They should come with different drawbacks like slowing you down while wielding them or something. (I'm still playing relatively low difficulty and have degradation turned off, but they say no repairs which is just weird and insane since it means if you have a favorite you have to be afraid to even ever use it, thus defeating its purpose.) I already mentioned before I think maintenance should be a thing rather than repair limits and I can say it would make sense if epic weapons also took more time for maintenance. Reloading should either full abort when doing other things or, preferably just keep going. If you're reloading and open a menu or something it soft-aborts sometimes and not even all the time. You still see it doing the animation, but it doesn't actually reload. Either the animation should stop if it's intentionally aborting or it should actually keep going just like it shows. I honestly would rather it kept going, but if it has to be realistic it should at least show it stopping. It's annoying and anxiety inducing that I can't even be sure it actually reloaded if I actually did anything else and I start just spamming the reload button too much during missions (I admit I already OCD a bit too much as it is in regards to having a full clip at all times, so that much is on me, but the fact it has stopped reloading while still showing it is still not good.) If you're going for maximum realism an aborted reload should realistically also mean no bullets in the clip. Given the way enemies just spawn in randomly and without warning or even a sound sometimes this is actually more important than it sounds. The game should pause (in single player) in the escape menu. In particular you should be able to adjust settings any time you need to without having to worry about being attacked by wild animals or something. I especially found this to be troublesome during initial setup, but any time I want to change an option -- even something simple like BGM volume -- I find it ridiculous that I have to make sure I'm definitely in a safe place to do it. What makes the most sense is just to get rid of the pause menu entirely but have it pause when you hit escape for the menu. Alternately allow access to options while on the pause menu at least. In fact, I can see people particularly needing to adjust video settings depending on current conditions potentially (especially on lower end systems) as some will probably want things to look nice when looking around safely on a verdant planet, but then would want to reduce settings going into a mission area. Movement blocks. Space Engineers has hinges and rotors. They seem to play serious havoc with its physics due to how the engine handles them, but I think they'd possibly work better in this game. Even so, despite the issues they cause, they're still very nice to have for a lot of reasons. For example, a group of solar panels on a block connected to a rotor allows one to move them to track the Sun (normally not worth the effort, but some hard start areas really benefit at least at first.) Despite having to deal with wonkiness, we still find them useful and convenient enough to use a lot. (Of course, it shouldn't intentionally have any of the wonkiness that leads to things like rotor guns or whatever ideally.) I've seen rotors and hinges used for things you wouldn't even normally think of including one person actually implementing a full on VTOL thruster setup (lower mass and energy and more potential for maneuverability, but much more work to actually control. Plus just plain neat.) Water ice should always break down to H2 and O (or I guess 2x ice = 2x H2, 1x O2.) It makes absolutely no sense to me that constructors actually just completely throw away one or the other and it somehow poofs out of existence given that many things actually benefit (particularly the fusion cells when combining promethium with hydrogen.) I get that it's not in super low supply, but losing one or the other makes it a lot more tedious and inconvenient sometimes. Oh, here's a minor but slightly annoying one. We should be able to, in some form, modify and remove waypoints and markers we've set (I suppose from the "registry" section.) I set one to mark where I had parked my capital vessel once and didn't set it to autoremove. I forgot to remove it when I left and now everywhere I go there's a marker on my HUD pointing to that system. Apparently the only solution is to fly back to that system (multiple jumps so irritating) and clear it manually from there. I probably even have to jump into whichever sector it's in. Putting aside the inconvenience, that's wasted pentaxid if nothing else. Travel to systems further than your jump limit should have some sort of route plotting. Even if it's really simplistic and can only plot a few jumps ahead it would still help a lot. Manual route plotting on a 3D map is... shall we say not fun. The story stuff alone sends you > 30 LY away several times, so this isn't just a general thing. As a bit of a side note, I originally thought I'd never want to use a thing like a HOTAS with this game, but now I changed my mind. For the normal gameplay loop I probably wouldn't bother. It has you really spending not all that much time actually doing stuff in your ship and you pick up so much from the story POIs and etc so frequently you don't have much incentive to particularly explore a lot on your own. However, now that I've finished all the story stuff and started to just explore for the fun of it I've changed my mind. Just flying around for exploration and resource gathering and such I actually would very much enjoy using a HOTAS. I started to plug mine in and use it, but then noticed to my extreme depression that it's not really very viable. If you select "enable controller" then it just basically has a fixed set of controls that I guess are intended for an Xbox gamepad and you can't reconfigure them at all. You definitely should allow joystick/gamepad configuration so users can use whatever they want, not just that one very specific setup that not everyone necessarily has with controls not necessarily everyone is even comfortable with. This is not even available on consoles yet, so let's not limit it as if it was (but then again, I still can't for the life of me understand why so many console games don't allow users to actually configure their controls. I can't see any reason any modern console -- including the Switch -- couldn't have as much configuration in that regard.) Flight over planets, space combat, etc would all be immensely more fun that way.
Welcome to the game! I think the solar panels are supposed to power mostly low-cost devices while you're away: fridges, glow lights, etc. Or, at least, they would, if not for the bug that breaks solar power calculation when player is not present. I personally don't think that solar power should be viable for powering, say, shields or constructors/furnaces. That seems somewhat realistic and I like it. There's no need for that. You can just build a number of fuel tanks, and load all your fuel there. You can also retrieve any amount of fuel. In a sense, that is also somewhat "survivaly" and somewhat realistic. Agreed, but probably not happening in the near future. It seems to me that, in it's current state, the toolbar is (code-wise) just another inventory with actual items, and not a list of shortcuts. Obviously, it makes such things as rearranging the ships' weapons, or binding logic signals impossible. I have no idea why the devs made it this way in the first place, but we have what we have. Last time I checked, it was displayed as if there were increments of 0.1, but, actually, the sliders were unlocked and smooth and you could, theoretically, set them to any value. Another bug-feature, eh? I think biofuel is meant to be a tool-ammo (chainsaw and the now absent mechanical drill) 99% of the time, and other 1% is to power an HV/SV for a minute in an emergency situation. I, too, have made the mistake of trying to power the base with biofuel, but it really seems to be an incorrect route. You and me both. Many of this game's design choices are enigmatic. That's probably because the devs thought of SV's as just "fighters" and HVs as "tanks or APCs", and, as such, it wouldn't make sense to respawn in a SV. Or a balance choice. Doesn't seem to make HVs any more attractive for me. You could also take the large HVs with you, docked to a CV, but, unfortunately, it doesn't make them any more useful. Small & large blocks wouldn't work, because then all the ""balancing"" of CV/BA and HV/SV goes straight to hell. Did you notice that visually indistinguishable weapons do vastly different damage? Well, that's that. I absolutely agree that it should be possible. But it is not the engine limitation. This is another bizarre design choice. Where instead of expanding the possibilities for the player designing the vessel, the devs try to enforce it on an almost class basis. Like in RPG's: we have the mage, the fighter, the thief – here we have CVs, SVs, HVs, and they will have the properties the devs decided. No, you can't have sathium armor on an SV. Why? Well, it's too heavy. No, even if you add additional thrusters, you can't. Because I said so. Same with weapons. With the current state of.. everything with infantry-combat-related, I would advice against it. No, no, we don't do that here. No balance. On a serious side, if combat responsiveness is such as it is, the only way is bullet sponge. Yes, the game definitely could use rebalancing. But only after some heavy optimization patches. For everything. For hit detection, draw distance, AI lag, NPC animation async.. etc. I sincerely hope that this is going to get fixed in an upcoming "player avatar" update. One of the broken things that seem to have been like that forever. Not happening with the current ship colliders. And ship colliders are, sadly, not happening anytime soon. If ever. As opposed to the frequency the "walk inside moving ships" feature is requested. Not possible with the current crafting system. As of now, there can be only one product in an act of crafting, only one recipe per product, and only the hard-coded constructors can exist within the game. No plans to change it, as far as I'm aware. Waypoins and the registry have always been semi-usable. Long-requested, always ignored, like many other small, simple, and easy-to-implement, and useful changes and/or bugfixes. But hey, now we have ~waves~ that clip through the shore! So, uh.. once again, welcome to the game! such as it is..
Agreed on a lot of points, especially the absurd limitations on capital vessels, because all that does is make me crap out prefab bases all over the place to serve functions that a CV would serve. Hover Vehicles are just plain bad, they serve no real purpose. They are just as expensive to research and build as SVs but a huge pain to transport from planet to planet and not as mobile. The few unique modules they offer are their only reason to exist. And yea, tool degradation is annoying and honestly pointless. It's one of those things where the devs go "If we take people's stuff away they will just always want to get more stuff!" nope, that's not how it works, that's never how it works, that is bad design. Stop it.
Man I'd forgotten I even posted this it's been so long. Yes. I love Project Eden and Reforged does make a few hackish fixes like solar panels (very hacky!) but Reforged is also positively murder on anything but end game. For example, once I got caught in a deathloop where I was just trying to grab my stuff after sneaking into a small (not even well defended) facility and dying but it kept spawning me in range of another facilities's long ranged homing rockets so I'd spawn in and die instantly. It's way too easy to die or have horrible things like a leg shot off making it impossible to move. It goes too far and just isn't fun except I'm sure it adds a lot to the end game once you've built up a lot and have the best equipment. Reforged is unforgiving to the point that, for me at least, it's just not fun. I'm actually kind of sad because Project Eden legitimately adds a lot of really nice stuff, but there are basically no servers that are Project Eden without Reforged. And don't get me wrong, Reforged does have some nice things itself. It just -- for me -- ruins them by being too focused so hard on maiming and killing me horribly over and over and over. Solar panels are solar panels. Power is power. IRL giant 2x6 meter panels can power a significant amount even here on Earth with an atmosphere interfering (not to mention things building up on them and etc reducing their effectiveness even more.) They should provide whatever amount of power they provide with no silly "well I don't think they should be allowed to power this or that" because they're just power. Now, that said, it isn't realistic to power a whole facility entirely on solar panels generally I suppose unless you reach the point that you're basically carting around giant arrays (which could be easily broken in a fight, among other things, so there are disadvantages there anyway.) Generally, yes, it's to keep basic things going without burning fuel. But that isn't possible on a CV and for no real particular reason. It's worth noting that in Space Engineers you don't so much rely on the solar panels directly as batteries that they can help charge and the batteries charge via any power source without being discriminate (though the system does try to prefer solar first and not drain fuel sources if possible.) However, when I wrote that either it wasn't possible to place more than one solar controller or I just thought it wasn't, so I wasn't aware you could at least place more than one. I'd still rather see a true battery system though as there a lot of advantages (such as being able to run vehicles without fuel and just charge them on the base/mothership with its much larger power production facilities and batteries.) Solar panels should always produce what they produce and not be discriminate on how you're using them. It doesn't make sense for them to be somehow limited to non-moving surfaces -- that's just not how light works. I think, though, that it's very clear what the real problem is: the programming. It's harder to program them into the engine as it is obviously, but also they really are supposed to calculate the light actually landing on them and to what degree. Reforged's solar panels are really fun to use, but they just gave up outright on that and basically just produce power automatically. (If it makes you feel any better, it's not enough to be running a bunch of heavy things.) They don't really seem to care about the angle or distance to the star's light. That's fun, but unrealistic. Space Engineers does proper solar panels even on large block ships that care about angle of light and this is certainly a lot more work to program, but I think they specifically set out from early on in the game's making to make each of the power options work and be balanced certain ways with nuclear reactors being the most powerful but hard to get and refine the uranium, solar being the least powerful but most plentiful if done right, and hydrogen being extremely effective, but burning through hydrogen fuel relatively quickly so requiring tons of (plentiful, but you have to store and process it) ice to keep going. But, most importantly of all, SE has batteries that understand that electricity is electricity regardless of its source to glue it all together. I mean, by that argument, the game should just leave you stuck on an icy planet with no clothes and nothing but stones to strike together to make sharp edges. And there should be no space ships or guns, just cobbled together cabins of reeds and mud. Because that is the most "survivaly." This is Empyrion though. We don't play this game to have that experience. We have tools that can spawn two meter large solid steel blocks out of some sort of storage in our clothes/suits that can hold quite a large number of those and place them locked airtight together. We're not going for super realism. Now, I'll admit I largely said that coming from Space Engineers with the way one can basically connect everything together with devices drawing the specific things they need from any storage they can get to through the (much more realistic btw) conveyer system. It's not just power. For example, O2/H2 generators can pull ice out of storage, hydrogen thrusters can pull hydrogen from the tanks, etc etc. Actually, the conveyer system does make for interesting ship design because you must factor in building your stuff such that things can actually get from point A to point B without you manually carting them back and forth instead of the magic wifi we currently have in Empyrion. That said, it is a pain to have to build huge arrays of fuel storage tanks. Especially since they like to explode if you sneeze too near to one and of course like to chain react. I don't know how the military handles large gasoline stores IRL, but I'm betting it's not in thin, easily shot tanks and likely not placed right next to each other to chain react, yet this game makes us build so many that it's hard to truly stagger them and they explode way too easily (should be thicker materials since we're working with something even more volatile...) No, the sliders are locked to 0.1 ranges still even today. I don't think I've seen any unlocked and smooth anyway, but even if they were I'd be willing to bet with you that if you close and reopen the interface you'll find they've jumped to the value they actually set rather than staying where you left them at smaller intervals. I make a lot of lighter vehicles and a disadvantage with them is the roll is always super sensitive. With some even 0.1 is too sensitive, but the real problem is for many 0.1 isn't enough and 0.2 is too much so I really need something more like 0.15. A little bit makes a huge difference on these vehicles and it can be a real struggle sometimes. But also sometimes it's just nicer for those of us who OCD on things to be able to set the values we want on things by typing it in instead of having to get out the magnifier and setting the mouse DPI to 1 to try to precision the thing. Unfortunately this is something devs never think of and it's hard to actually describe the discomfort one feels when trying to get a slider just right because a value in something has to be certain specific values. (If you don't know, then I don't think I can even explain it. Try holding your breath whenever you drag a slider and work at it until it's just right and you'll get some idea. It's a real problem particularly on smartphone apps which do this a lot.) I admit I wrote that earlier in my experience with this game, but that actually makes it valid on its own. The world I had started on didn't have promethium at all at that time. It was actually the tutorial scenario if I recall, but I forget which. They didn't expect us to have direct access to mining promethium until building a SV and leaving that planet to fly to another to actually get it. Now, to be clear, if you're following the tutorial exactly to the letter you won't really need to power a base for long since they basically hand you stuff, but I was playing the game more as a survival starting out thing and just using the tutorial to learn the process as I went. Still, this is speaking in terms of official built-in scenarios. Obviously survival scenarios offered via the workshop can differ even further with some making promethium truly a rare thing to find as you start. Once you can travel to other systems, eventually you'll be getting promethium in large quantities, but in a number of cases it can be very hard to start out with the way the game is tuned so heavily towards making promethium practically your only way to power things. Unfortunately, the only solution to such scenarios I've found feels more like a cheat than anything. I process biofuel in the survival constructors (several) running constantly rather than a proper constructor on the base. The constructor essentially uses too close to 100% of the power it ultimately would produce out of the result to actually produce fuel that way, but the survival constructors do not (albeit at the cost of being insanely slow, but in SP one can just sleep.) Biofuel absolutely is not meant to be a long term or full power solution, but I do think it should do a bit more than it does. Not a lot -- I'm not proposing anything balance-breaking in that regard -- just more. Biofuel should never be viable as a replacement for promethium or anything, just it should at least yield enough that it doesn't require almost as much to produce as it ultimately yields. (I guess, in particular, processing it should be significantly faster on powerful base constructors relative to the dinky survival constructors. It is faster, of course but not by as much as it should be.) I admit I said that more as an aside, just that there are some nice and interesting things that can be done with that methodology (for example, large arrays of small block guns on a large ship. Individually they don't do a lot of damage, but you can fit a ton of small ones in a single large block's area, so it adds up fast and they can really rip into things. Though Space Engineers now has a few more fun weapons like a railgun that actually works -- unlike the awful railguns in Empyrion that are tuned wrong or something. This actually might make more sense with Empyrion's better small vs large balancing as the smaller guns probably wouldn't be nearly as destructive in such an array but still would be powerful and fun.) I don't really see how that screws up balancing as you imply though. In fact, your statement pretty much says that it won't... I might add that you don't go from small to large, you go from large to small. Even Space Engineers basically wouldn't let you go from small to large. (It doesn't even have the means to do so, but if you try to be sneaky and go backwards it thinks the large block should be the vehicle and the small block one can't actually control it directly and, in essence can't really move. I guess you could move it manually by using manual overrides of wheels/thrusters, but this is... not realistic and not worth it. The only way it would be semi useful would be basically like building a small block tank with tons of dials and controls which is interesting on its own perhaps but also would be big and inconvenient and a CV is probably still more efficient.) So no, you can't mount large block rocket launchers on a small ship or something if that's what you thought I meant. It's really only the other way around. Small block components on a large block device. Actually, on that subject, there have been a few times I really wished there were some sorts of manual overrides on propulsion systems. In Space Engineers you can manually set a thruster to be on by x amount for instance. It's rare that this is useful, but, for example, if you lose your control seat, you could at least manually set the thrusters for rear propulsion and hope that you don't slam into anything while you try to regain control of your ship. That said, this obviously isn't viable when you can't move around on a moving ship, so that's in the pile of wishful thinking things not currently applicable (and perhaps not ever.) Well, to be clear, the point of a melee attack isn't for it to be strong. Now, firstly I wrote that before I realized they meant for you to use the survival tool in defensive mode as the emergency "you have nothing else" thing. Heck, most of us don't even keep a survival tool once we have multitools and weapons. It takes quite some time to make a new one, so you can't do it if you're out of ammo and being attacked. A melee attack still would be worthless against anything shooting at you (just as IRL anyway) but against, say, a spider it might be useful (especially spiders actually since they tend to retreat when hurt.) A slight pushback or split second stagger however would be sufficient to make it useful as a thing to use when things get too close (basically slam the butt of your weapon against enemies that are too close kind of thing.) But I realize now that part of it is they just want us to run around using flamethrowers on all these groups (I don't know, an Alien fantasy? I'm not sure what the deal is exactly.) I think too much of the combat is balanced hard towards that sort of style and that just isn't fun to those of us who don't like playing that way. I run around with a sniper rifle and can generally headshot most of my enemies (at least the ones with clear heads -- some like scorpions I just don't even know as their face doesn't seem to count as a headshot) and generally have a lot of fun doing this (something much better than in Space Engineers where even the "precision rifle" weapon just feels like an assault rifle meant for rapid fire tuned slightly to be slower and single fire but more accurate and still not at all snipery) but too much of the game is balanced too far towards expecting you to be running around with much more extreme weaponry like rockets and flamethrowers and such. I really wish they'd balance things a little better so you can pretty much play any way you want to. Of course, still, more than anything, I'm sick of enemies just suddenly EXISTING right behind me. Not even spawning in which would imply there might be some delay, maybe some noise, etc. They just suddenly exist behind me as if they were always there even though they weren't. That's still one of the worst mechanics I've seen in any game ever. If you go into an area clearing it thoroughly as you go, there shouldn't just suddenly be things behind you that did not even exist moments ago. If it at least teleported them in with a noise and a slight delay as they get their bearings or something I could accept it as being less horrible (though it's still a terrible mechanic regardless) or used spawner devices you can destroy (which are very annoying and frankly don't make a lot of sense in the case of living beings but at least are a thing you can see and deal with which does indeed make noise even) but instead you're just walking along and all of a sudden have alien parasites and a concussion from an attack from behind you by something that didn't exist 0.1 seconds ago. Maybe not, but the point was I was saying "these are the things the game really kind of needs" and proper ship colliders are definitely in the list of things the game needs. Honestly the "ship becomes a ghost once moving and can only be affected by other ghosts" thing is ridiculous. Maybe, but again, the point is "these are the things the game really kind of needs." It's stupid that something that has multiple components must completely discard one of those components to get the other. It's not a sensible or fun mechanic and it's definitely something I'd like to see change. You saw the title of this thread when you clicked on it. To be more specific, I found with no small annoyance that a point I had left on my hud in a previous system was stuck on my hud as I left it. Many jumps later I realized it wasn't going away and I was going to have to fly back to that system to remove it. I think it may be possible to remove it via the menus now (or maybe I just didn't know how to then) but either way I'm making sure to clear such points when leaving a system now. Same. I usually jump into a system and while in the safe zone there just toss up a huge solar array connected to a generator (that basically doesn't even get used, lol, this game's power system is just so weird) and a ton of constructors/deconstructors/furnaces/whatever to handle whatever, but it's a bit of a pain because I have to build up the things to be deconstructed or whatever piling up in my storage for a while until it's worth going to all the trouble. Their choice to limit my ability to do things like furnaces on my CV hasn't truly stopped me from essentially having the same thing as if I did, it just makes it far more inconvenient. In fact, if I could have them on my CV I'd be using my main fuel stores instead of running them for free, which is probably more in line with what they really wanted anyway. Well, someone said something that made me think that's actually what the devs wanted. Basically it seems like the devs just really find the idea of a huge "hover tank" to just be really fun. So HVs may pretty much ultimately exist only for that. I don't think the devs have tried the possibilities of wheeled vehicles though. In Space Engineers I once built a huge rolling base (like the kind of thing that would crush those giant monster trucks and just feel a minor bump) due to resource limits of the area and I have to say it was... interesting. (Well, going up steep hills was still a problem, but normal hills were just bumps in the road anyway, lol.) But, more realistically, the limitations of carting heavy resources around with a normal non-crazy vehicle -- particularly up and down hills -- makes them a much better balance. (SE basically does volume limits and mass considerations by definition, but it handles them far far better.) Even the smaller wheeled vehicles can be more fun to drive yet more balancing when doing things like carting cargo. Honestly, the best game would be something sort of in between the two with better all around optimization and balancing. If some AAA company ever were to take up the reigns we could have something truly incredible. As I've been playing this all this time and come to learn this game more and more, I can definitely see that Empyrion will never truly excel the ways I want it to. There are too many things that just will always be unrefined. My favorite example being an enemy area designed where without any warning or anything as you walk into a room there's just a massive explosion, killing you automatically (even in heavy armor with boosts.) That just isn't the kind of balancing that goes into a AAA game. And the combat filled with giant spiders, scorpions, mutants, and etc makes it impossible for me to recommend this game to all the people I want to. Especially since back then they had an almost 100% chance of giving you deadly status effects with every single attack (even now it seems to be considerably reduced but is still all too frequent.) This game has the potential, but it would take a lot of reworking that I know now will never happen. It's sad though. There is so much potential if a game like this could go more mainstream.
No doubt it does, but there's not much I can add about Reforged that would be very useful since we're talking some fundamental changes to its entire direction. It's done the way it is on purpose and I totally get it. It's more about end-game than anything else and I've no doubt that the results of its design make the end game far far better than it is with Project Eden (which in turn already makes end game a lot better than vanilla.) They're not going to remove stuff like it being so easy to get your leg blown off by a single shot of an enemy shotgun because it's there by the very design of how they want it to work to make combat far more difficult and dangerous. I just wish there were more servers that had only Project Eden is all. It may have a much more leisurely gameplay in general, but it's more my style.
Believe it or not, the NPCs in Reforged are actually easier now than they are in vanilla (Project Eden doesn't change the vanilla configs for NPCs). They have less damage, health, speed, attack range, accuracy on average, depending on the NPC.
I'll admit I wonder very much about that. I've found combat with normal soldiers to be a lot more difficult on Reforged/Reforged Eden servers one way or another. In vanilla I didn't even have to worry or care about ordinary Zirax soldiers since I'm generally more accurate and more deadly even with the base sniper rifle, but in Reforged I find myself having to retreat, hide around corners more, etc etc. Which I get is a much more realistic design for the most part and don't entirely hate, but of course, as I said, there are other things too like extra side effects (like the leg blown off thing -- as far as I know vanilla doesn't even have a concept of permanent mutilation, much less implement it to such a degree. But I've seen a number of other much more serious effects as well.) So to some extent it is a combination of things. I'm seriously surprised if their damage and range and all is actually lower though. That doesn't seem to be consistent with what I saw in actual gameplay, but I'll admit I just can't be 100% sure since the other things also factor in significantly. And yeah, I know Project Eden doesn't particularly mess with NPCs. For me Project Eden has been overall the most fun. About the only thing I liked from Reforged was CV solar panels (or is that even in base Reforged or was it something hacked in on a specific server? Not even sure at this point.) That's personal preference of course. I have nothing against Reforged on its own, I just personally found it a lot harder to get started on and it's harder to recommend a new person to start on any server running it versus, say, Project Eden which doesn't really mess with starting too much (beyond just adding more starting scenarios, some of which are admittedly a lot harder and not ideal for a new person -- though I'll admit I sure did get a kick out of the rogue planet starter.) Anyway, regardless, I meant this more to be a feedback about the base game and elements in how it handles versus the workshop mods. Project Eden and Reforged are both very good and valid in their own ways and I am very glad they exist.
HVs are fun to build and use, they just aren't good at anything. In terms of firepower they can carry some things that an SV can't carry, but because the weapons are all turrets and the HV can only carry turrets on the top you need to construct a much larger vehicle with an absurd triple or quadruple superfiring layout to get the same firepower out of one as you can an SV. It can carry a clone chamber and a small med station, but those are basically useless because you can always just respawn at the location, no need for a clone chamber to be present. If the clone chamber was more like an emergency teleporter that saved your equipment when you go down this would be much more desirable. Also if you really want this capability on an SV you can just attach an HV medical pod to it and deploy it on site. Cargo capacity, this is where you would think ground vehicles would beat the snot out of flying vehicles, but this is actually where the HV performs the worst out of all of them. With a cargo carrying SV if you can get airborn at all you can get to your destination no problem. With the HV you have to contend with mountains, water, forest, and other terrain. Your vehicle isn't even really more fuel or resource efficient than an SV, because since HVs have no traction your side thrusters need to generate enough lift to actually push you up an incline and keep you there. Unlike an SV with inertial dampeners turned on this doesn't happen automatically either, and just because an HV can move doesn't mean it can get to its destination. And of course even just a tiny CV will utterly beat the snot out of any HV or SV for cargo transport.
