Since I've been back I've found myself spending the majority of my playtime building ships, even though I'm itching to actually play, heh. And most recently the building challenge has been for a very small CV. Preferably with a Shield, and a ... "and the beat goes on.." So for laughs and tickles, here's my recent efforts. Foreground is a cute little guy with a bit of carbon fiber armor, sm construc, sm thrust, 2 sm gens, wireless, kitchen&fridge, clone, no air. Far right has mostly Steel and a Shield, so a T1 genie, but only sm thrusters, so not much lift, but all the comforts like a lrg construc, etc. Middle has a Shield and Med thrusters, 2e down so decent hauler. Center corridor to access back HV Shutter dock. Left has Shield & Warp & 2e Med Thrusters in all directions w room to add another 2 lifters. Kind of like it's lines even though it's a box, heh. Hovering in top middle was my first go at building a small ship that had both Shield & Warp. Wound up frustrated so stepped away from it. No hangers in any of these of course, so that's a pain, but that Shutter HV dock trick that @dpburke2 & @Kassonnade helped me with keep that from being a deal breaker Anyway, that and annoying Hummel are what I've been up to
New POIs done. That's the last of the Rados ones for the snow planet... probably. Polaris is next. The new Adv Oxygen Depot. And the new Artillery Base. It has a big gun. Excluding the Rados Drone base, the Artillery Base is probably the hardest POI to take on in a ship. Coming to an Experimental 10.5 build near you!
@Vermillion , congrats & well done! These look amazing, and I really like the use of Truss blocks for the turrets base at the Oxy Depot. Question, and this is coming from a guy whos idea for capturing POIs is "Hulk Smash!", are there 'weak' spots designed into your POIs? Not asking for spoilers, heh, came to mind looking at the Oxy Depot; that front gate ramp looks like you could almost be in the walls shadows. So might be able to rush in under fire but then be in cover while blowing the gate. That kind of thing. After building and flying around in a teenie tiny hoverbike (so cheap, so fun! ) been thinking of trying one as an assault bike; not so much as a gun platform but as a semi suicidal 'closing' thing.
The opposite tends to be true for me. I've got hundreds of blueprints and design elements stocked up and when I do end up releasing something (which is rare) I kind of just abandon it and move on to the next thing. Up until a few weeks ago I still had this beastly old ship from pre-alpha still on the workshop and finally decided to remove it since it's so old the majority of the block conversion commands don't even work anymore. It's kind of a bad habit that I'm trying to break.
By weak points do you mean ways to get in without fighting the turrets or do you mean blind spots on approach? Because the older zirax POIs treat the zirax like incompenent clowns when they're meant to be the dominant military force in the galaxy... for now. With no design sense and the worst placement of turrets imaginable (e.g. recessed into walls so they can only fire forwards 90 degrees). These are proper militarized installations designed like a player's base to protect themselves from an attacker. The turrets cover a full 360 degrees. They are however designed primarily against SV combat and an HV can get nice and close while avoiding most of the turrets provided you can drive well. The exterior gates will open to any vehicle, whether it's player or AI and are set up so that if you're on the ground inside the base, troops will start appearing and not necessarily on the ground. The oxygen depot has snipers that spawn on the catwalks, walls and on top of the tanks, while minigunners and laser zirax spawn on the ground. These guys don't respawn when killed. Note: the zirax turrets are all vastly inferior to the player BA turrets. They do less than half the damage and have a fraction of the health; they're actually weaker than HV turrets.
Yes this needs to be corrected, alien turrets are so nerfed they don't pose much of a threat, any player with a minimum flying skill using a small SV with a shield can take most POIs with minimum damage, at lest the alien rocket turrets should be what they used to so we can have proper no fly zones and some real challenge And they all still have issues firing straight up as well The snipers on the catwalks is a nice touch....
Thank you for the info @Vermillion , and yes I was mostly wondering if there might be say a narrow, possibly with a zig, approach corridor where a tiny nimble HV stood a decent chance of making it to the 'walls', or someplace where the player would be out of sight of the large turrets. I'd been wondering about that @Kaeser , haven't used a Shield on an assault yet. Dang I need to quit building and just play some! And gotta say Vermillion, "man that's gonna take some doing!" Snipers on the catwalks indeed, lol. "Tell my wife I loved her..." Couple might be cool thoughts; Way down the line if ever, but would be cool if Turrets incorporated Spotlights, and they'd sweep their sectors. Would really bring the POIs alive. Evil thought might be doable now; turn -off- a turret here and there and then use logic gates to enable them when player reaches x. While I doubt that turrets on POIs can remember their orientation right now, would be neat if they could so designers like you, if inclined, could point a "disabled" turret up to the sky; so the players might begin associating some positioning with, "oh, that turrets down, maybe I can approach that way". Another, 'down the line, maybe'; if there were a disabled POI Turret model, so it could be repaired and would then start shooting. AI code to allow a nearby Enemy to effect the repairs. If model was different enough for players to discern at a distance then they could learn that they'd also need to keep it from being repaired. But unfortunately I forgot EGS doesn't have a "damaged, non-firing" state for turrets... oh well, hope that gets added at some point
Played some more with my brother and our friend in survival to test the scenario and his server. Found a lost colony ship in orbit: Beautiful view from the bridge: Did some mining on a copper rich barren moon. He loved the faster mining: Found a stunning ocean planet: Visited its crystalline moon: Watching the sunset on the ocean planet:
10.5 EXP Dead Planet Start - Game title: "And not to Yield" 3rd HV Built . small Bug, just for carrying stuff, no weapons or shields.
Very cool and epic pics @ravien_ff , and I think you got me beat on tiny CVs there Really nicely detailed & shaped ship there @Germanicus , and that sounds like a challenging game, good luck!
Strange occurrence today playing experimental. End game, exploring system in CV with SV docked. Travel to new planet, take SV to planet to explore. While flying across planet I experienced a sudden short power loss. These tend to be common in my neighborhood during the summer. Computer reset, gateway had to reset, finally got back fully online. Restarted Empyrion and loaded the current game. Found myself freefalling to the planets surface(suffered a broken leg) with no SV insight. Ents -all command showed no instance of the SV on the planet. Had to go into God Mode, fly into space and teleport to my CV. SV had totally disappeared, no trace anywhere. Guess I'll be traveling back to my home planet and building a new SV.
Bug Report worthy. Devs need all the help they can get trying to pinpoint where this long standing Bug Fugitive From Justice has been hiding in the Code... if there was any such thing as a Empyrion equivalent of a 'FBI Top 10 Most Wanted List', this Bug'd make that List.
Sorry to hear that @Steve K. , I know that feeling all to well when you can no longer pretend it didn't happen; your ship is -gone-! and all your stufs, and _what_ stufs did I have?? should I cheat it all back in...? gahhh! It was happening to me for a long time due to some graphic thing with the orbital trading station. The instant I looked in the wrong direction I'd crash to desktop and sometimes lose my ship. There seems to be times when the game engine is updating whats where, and if you crash during it then the ships it was working to update are gone. So something like either a cached Write (in the code, I know my disks -don't- cache Writes), or the file that holds all that info was Deleted -then- Written, instead of a Write-New-Confirm then Delete-Old. More recently if I'm around all the POIs of the Polaris when the sun rises or sets I can crash, but in all these cases I've never lost a ship. It usually winds up a couple hundred meters away while I typically find myself gang piled by spiders... Definately agree w Tyrax on it being bug-report worthy. ---- Found out last night that we can dock to the 'top' side of CV Shuttters... When the heck did that happen?? It's fer sure Awesome! I'd just been assuming it would have to be on the 'flat' face of the Shutters, otherwise the HV/SV is within the block space of the Shutter. Well apparently Eleon figured out how to make it work, and that's just super nice. Now I can flip the Shutter & stop having it collide with the ground and invisibly hover (like in pic a couple pages back). Thanks Eleon! --- @Germanicus ... err... might need some cream for that, or see an Auto-Doc like real soon... <>
Well, the cream is all over the Planet already...just got a 50 years cooking by full nuclear exchange so its more or less 20m of dust. Its now pretty...quiet down there and yes, you glow in the dark. 7.0 rad on sunny days and about -27° C in full daylight...if you can call this daylight Hence this conditions I chose the titles of my games: The Days after Ragnarok The Hour of the Wolf And not to Yield - my current game...
Started a nice and pleasant snow dwarf start. Went out to do a small bit of scouting while some items were assembling in the ole constructor. I came back and found: I had something I needed to finish so I did not kill them right away. Funny thing; as I was building, I heard footprint noises and figured yeah, alright, they saw me. But then this happened: Oh ****! They are climbing the constructor! Oh no! R.I.P. er.... me.
Wow Germanicus, that really looks & sounds like the aftermath of a nuclear war, well done (ba-dumpt ha!) Eeep! Run Fractalite! RUUNNNN! (and I'm just about to head out to a Snow world... <heads off to find the Heavy Armor and -lots- more bullets>)
Heavy Armor? What's that?..have only 3 light Armors...ok, yes, I have two useful boosts to keep my health intact..but hey! No Med or Heavy Armor on my Planet..