After some solid play in Space Engineers, I must say that Empyrion is superior in so many ways. Sure there are some things I like but overall in comparison SE feels outdated and not really enjoyable. Likes: Conveyors and sorters. These are amazing. The ability to build complex inventory sorting systems in the coolest thing I have ever seen in a game. Inventory is always the most grindy of any game and this solves the issue. I love this idea. Docking is pretty awesome and combined with the conveyors I can dock my ship, walk away and everything is automatically moved to the correct container. It is very cool. To me docking is what space is all about. Interlocking rings, visual indicators and all that nonsense. I love the docking. Dislikes: Whew this could be a list but I will attempt to keep it short. Blueprints... Absolute game breaker for me. The blueprint implementation is hideous. The player uses a projector to beam an image of the ship. Then every block must be crafted separately with no idea of total resources needed. As you weld items in the projector stream they turn solid but the whole thing is super positional, temperamental and just terrible. It literally can take hours to do what Empyrion does in seconds (minus the actual factory build time). I spent four hours building a starter miner. Lot of cursing and walking away was involved but still four hours. I love to use BPs and fly other people's creations. It's about the coolest part of Empyrion. Crafting: Holy God this is horrendous. First the player picks an item in the assembler. That item's components are created which you must put in your inventory. Then you walk over to the desired area of placement, navigate another hideous menu and choosing your item again and placing it in your hotbar. Once that item is placed it's just a shell in which you must now weld the block to completion. Inevitably the components that were crafted are mysteriously not enough so now you must walk back over to the assembler and craft more items. After a while I got pretty quick at this process but it is tedious. Building: It is terrible. There is almost no variation in block shapes except a couple of triangles and that's about it. Coloring is tedious and I didn't find any way to add cool textures. This is the game killer for me. Enough said. Overall Information: The entire game gives almost no information or at least I couldn't find it. I never knew how much fuel I had, or how long it would last. No visual indication of oxygen supplies. There is a confusing battery, fuel thing going on but none if it well represented in the HUD. Also the you can't turn off a ship easily. It's a tedious task of grouping all the components that need to be turned off then selecting that group. No pretty graphics or easy way to manage a ship. I hated every bit of the menuing system. Tutorials... Nothing... I mean nothing. Links to YouTube and a user built wiki. Also the forum crowd is a bit rough. I noticed lots of.. Heavy sigh, "did you watch the YouTube video that is not linked anywhere or cannot be found in a Google Search... You need to watch this and at least 300 hours of boring monotone content before even gracing our presence with a question". Well it probably wasn't that bad but damn.. Not super friendly either. Lastly there is no room for error in flying. I took my brand new Starter Miner out for a test flight and barely.. and I mean barely, grazed an asteroid and boom.. Damn thing broke apart like a cheap set of Legos. I was like... Nope I am out. Turned off the game and walked away. Not sure if it gets better, but I really don't care. Nine bucks down the drain. Empyrion in Alpha is light years ahead. I can't wait to see this game progress.
Empyrion and Space Engineers are two very different games with different design goals in mind. Space Engineers is more about, well, engineering. I can't wait for Empyrion to get some basic automation (probably GUI based, so few or no physical conveyor blocks required).
Wow, thanks for writing this. I was tempted to try SE lately... Funny, your last point (ships that can be put apart by enemy fire) is what some ppl. brough up as an argument against merging blocks after you have build something. (which is absolute bollocks imo.) https://empyriononline.com/threads/...and-si-for-ships-but-not-like-you-think.9938/ I can only speak from my own experience but in general people here are very friendly(*) and helpful and i think you won't regret it becoming a part of this community. * well there are some exceptions here and there...
I would like a balance of both. Some hinges, lifters and hydraulics as well, and last but not least ladders, frameless/seamless window blocks and elevator blocks. I would love to build a cool carrier deck where the SV parking areas retreat into the CV after landing and blast doors close in their place.
There are some cool things in SE and I'm sure lots of people love the game but it wasn't for me. It seems the developer is trying to finish the game so they can move on to other things which is probably why it's 60% off. Needless to say their community is pissed. I would love to see some lifting blocks, hinges, seamless glass as well. Wheels would be cool too. I know there are very difficult to implement and probably impractical for water planets but man they look super cool.
Oh almost forgot. When docked all vessels charge and share the power. That way the player is not running around putting fuel in everything. This would be cool in empyrion. I leave my CV on to keep the plants alive but it's a pain managing different systems. Anyways looks like it's going to be a beautiful day here in Nashville so I'm headed outside. Have a great day.
Seriously there is some cool stuff to look at and the ability to build complex stuff is pretty cool. I really like the realistic nature of the automation and machines. It is definitely a different type game and probably not fair to base it on Empyrion. I loaded up a custom map called Mars Colony and it is one amazing build. The game continues to draw me in, but the frustration level doesn't keep me there long. If you have nine bucks burning a hole in your pocket, well you might like it. It's on sale until the 2nd of April. I rescind my comment about it being a waste of money, but it is not better than Empyrion for sure.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTlpO3Ief-8GnDyG_A6y7RTZNJDPUiS2M An interesting series from SE.
You are one of the few that do. Not attacking you, its just that medival engineers is what happens when you don't finish your overhyped techdemo (SE) and release another game instead. Both "games" could be cool if the people actually focus... and would actually have the wish to deliver a good game.
That actually is a good idea but a bad implementation in my opinion. You actually have to hook up everything with tubes (like the cockpit with O2 tank) which bloats the size of the vessel. And for small vessels you can have everythink hooked up with small tunes because somethings "don't go" through them so you need the 3x3 tubes. It is actually all those physically calculations which causes the huge performance needs. And don't forget your beloved moving parts.... way to instabil and fragile, plus the hit on performance because of the totally unneeded physically correct calculations. I wish we would have moving parts in empyrion too, but ONLY if they actually do function (therefor ignore/cheat physics) and they don't hit performance. And for they conveyors.... only if the system does not bloat those builds.
Basicly this. It seems that EGS is a game more suited for you, but i'll leave a couple of pointers for you even so: Well, this is where SE's engineering part comes in - if you put some time, resources and thinking in to building a large 3D printer factory, you'll be able to build stuff in seconds; see the following video for an example. I've built two huge 3D printer arrays (one on earth, one on the moon) and they work great. Again, that's where the engineering part comes in - just like in reality, you must build yourself a bigger and better tool to do a bigger and better job. Your first goal should be to build a small work vehicle with a grinder, welder and more cargo space; here is my small work ship for instance which is basicly just an exoskeleton for building & grinding down smaller projects. For bigger projects like large stations, it pays off to build a large work ship which can then be loaded with a ton of resources and some welder/grinder arms (i've made separate exchangable modules so i don't need a separate ship for each function). Can't say much about this other than (again) SE's focus not being on a million different blocks but on the million different things you can build with the lesser number of blocks. If you take a look at this picture, the oxygen amount is indicated in the "O2" tag on the bottom left, along with energy, hydrogen and health. In the same picture, you can see the remaining ship energy indicator on the right side of the HUD being shown as none, since the player isn't sitting in a vehicle (it shows numbers when you do). You can turn off a ship easily by sitting in the command chair and pressing "Y", which is also shown on the HUD, up on the right side above the on/off symbol (the other two symbols are broadcasting and parking brake). Yep; there is a 4-level tutorial campaign called "The first jump" in the game (under campaigns), but it indeed leaves a lot to be desired on building ships and vehicles. As for the friendliness of the forums, most times there's some people around who give you a link to a relevant video or blueprint, but since us SE's players like to find solutions and build stuff ourselves, we also expect others to watch the manual/instruction, then try to build something similar in the game themselves. Designing new stuff by trial and error is considered fun for an engineer; if you don't find it fun, then SE obviously isn't the game for you. SE has a pretty realistic physics model, so everything behaves more or less like it would in reality; you didn't mention the speed at which you've hit the asteroid, but the higher the speed, the more damage any collision will do. If you'd slam a spaceship against an asteroid with 100km/h in reality, i can guarantee you that it would break apart like a cheap set of legos as well; see the 2009 sattelite collision for an instance of how such a debree field looks after a while. Anyway, I'm happy that you've found the better game for your taste, enjoy
It would depend on how solidly the spacecraft was constructed; modern cars survive 100 km/h impacts against solid objects without falling to pieces (though significant crumpling ensues, naturally). SE blocks ought to do a lot more crumpling and a lot less breaking apart, in my opinion.
So after another two days of YouTube videos and 20 hours of play I really like Space Engineers. I hate that this was even posted because in the end I believe both games have a place in my library. I find that Empyrion has limits and after a while I become bored. SE has so much going on but it's not super exciting for most people. I like to build custom scripts and the ability to program automation sequences with C# is super cool. Empyrion does amazing things to simplify gameplay and honestly l kinda wish the two merged.. In SE .. still not a fan of the super delicate nature of the vehicles. There should be balence between damage and fun to drive. Brand new rover barely hit a rock... lost two wheels and turned over I was like WTH. It's a different game but totally worth 9 bucks. The content is insane. Beware that your frustration will equal that in the beginning.
I agree with you completely. I prefer the way SE does a lot of things. It definitely feels like I have to be more careful in my designs and flying because of the physics that game uses. This last weekend I was in EGS and I took a CV into a planet without enough side thrusters. When my ship tilted I ended up loosing control and slamming into the ground hard... No damage at all to my ship. That same crash in SE would have cost me every piece of exposed equipment (thrusters, turrets...) on that side of the ship and a good percentage of my armor. I also prefer the blueprint system to the factory. It gives a personal feel to making ships, even if you are using someone elses design, it is still you who took the time and materials to build it. The Factory just feels so vanilla. Throw ingots in one side and after awhile a ship pops out the other. There is just no since of accomplishment at the end, its just "ooo, awww look at that... What shall i make next." All that being said, I stopped playing SE (after 1300+ hours) due to the lack of progressive challenge. Even on a planet start with inventory and refining speed set to lowest, I can be in space inside of 3 hours and once I'm mining asteroids in space their is no longer any challenge because the volume of ore up there makes it pathetically easy to get all you will ever need. Especially once you get a large grid ship with a single mining drill. I started playing ESG for the challenge. First you have to deal with the rarity of resources. Even meteors are only good for about 1000 ingots, and asteroids are not much better. Then you also have the leveling system that prevents a player from jumping to the high tier crafting/building without hours of leveling. Texturing is much better, but a color wheel and brightness slider would be better. ESG also has better solar systems and the AI (for the most part) is better. There are things it could do better (walking on moving ships, seamless Planet/space transitions, inventory management, block rotations, ...) but they are still in Alpha and i expect many of those things will change as development continues. I look forward to seeing how the game progresses through the updates into beta and eventually release.
My wife like the game too. We actually don't care what other people like to play as long as we enjoy a game, we play it.
