Yes, I know. And I feel that process isn't a good use of time/resources. Perhaps some of the artwork wasn't good, or didn't fit with the rest of the game. But for a lot of it there was really nothing wrong with it. If you look at how much content the game really needs, I just don't see how it is a good use of their time. Everything from food icons to cargo boxes. I wish they'd just focus on making new stuff. And they have been making new stuff, to be sure, but it is mixed in with this constant cycling of artwork that just seems like not a good investment. Can't they write quests or design new creatures instead? Or add crouch/prone, or add new weapons/armors? I'm not even sure it is always replacing canned Unity assets with custom stuff. I mean, how many times have they replaced constructor models? I seem to recall like 3 times at least. Oxygen tanks are the same, I think they had multiple revisions. I happened to like the V8/9 ones and had several designs that don't look good with the new ones at all. Not that I don't like the new art, I do, especially on SV/HV. But why not keep old art as an option? Also, in some cases (like with creatures) they are not replacing Unity art with custom art, they're just replacing it with a more expensive asset which is still from the Unity store. And it is fine to add new stuff, but why get rid of old stuff? Most people really don't care where art comes from, they just want more stuff to do. The number of creatures in the game is low enough, I don't see why they'd remove anything.
Just throwing this out there, but the person/people that work on artwork are likely not the same people that work on coding new things. I'm just saying. One person working on artwork takes nothing away from new content being added to the game, most likely. Even if you don't like the artwork. All I'm saying is it's likely not slowing anything else down.
Well, yes, and no. Sure, people have different skill sets. There's not much overlap between 3D artists and programmers for example. But it is not so specialized that they have like one guy that can only draw cargo boxes, another one that can only draw food icons, etc. Working on one type of art subtracts from other types of art. (Unless they are getting it done by a volunteer which would be different, sure.) I'd feel differently if I thought that this art replacement project is some really easy thing that someone busts out in a few hours. But watching the pace of the overall new art and replacement art they're doing, plus just having some knowledge of what's involved myself, I think there's real investment there, and I just wish it was more about new stuff. Example - they changed a lot of the food back in 8.0 I think it was. I'd have rather seen them add new food and new plants. I think they've done a lot of great work (I have over 1000 hours into the game for a reason). I'm just not sure about their prioritization sometimes. And that's just my opinion, perhaps a lot of people hated some of the old art, I don't know. But I had no problem with any of the art, I want to see more stuff, rather than changing things up all the time. Can we get some new textures for blocks? More new windows and doors. More weapon types. More materials. More aliens. More monsters. More challenges.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And future technology might be better than what we have now, but not infinitely so. The amount of energy it takes an SV to get into orbit is currently a lot less than it takes to fly around the planet for example. That's not right at all. They don't need to make all that totally accurate to real life, no. But if they just made entering/leaving orbit have far stiffer energy and shielding requirements, it would naturally encourage smaller and more purpose-built drop ships and whatnot. And fixing the SV/HV power requirements to be more realistic would naturally make people use HV's a lot more because flying through the air takes a LOT more energy than a hovercraft would. If you fixed that you wouldn't even need silly requirements like "SV's can't have turrets" and "CV plasma can't fire in atmosphere", it would naturally fall out that people would prefer HV's for POI assault and would not use CV's planet side due to the energy requirements. You could but it would be very inefficient. As it is now, by the mid game power is almost free, there's so much to be found. Now the limit on building big ships is not adequate metal, or power to fuel them, but finding the right gizmos to make core extensions/upgrades? I know some people would squawk if the power requirement to get off world was increased by a lot, or if SV's became far more expensive to operate relative to HV's. But I think that is still a change that people could accept for the same reason people mostly came to accept mass/volume, it has a basis in reality and seems like it could add to gameplay. Leaving a planet becomes a bigger undertaking.
"Grind" does not enhance "gameplay". It's a game! There is another player I respect very much around here who is always trying to pull all aspects of the game on the "realism" side and he always fails to remember this simple fact : it's a game. I could spend the whole week showing examples how adding another layer of difficulties or restrictions will not enhance "gameplay", but I think I only have to mention "CPU" to get the point through. The developers can read all these discussions regarding "realism" and see how some players don't have a problem with it, even admitting that ships would normally require an entire industry to support their existence, let alone their capacity to get any cargo into space. Now if you're the developer, how do you see these same players now making all this drama because of CPU which grossly amounts to the same kind of "grind addition" ? Look at the very foundation of the CPU idea and ask yourself : how different is it from what the physics-realism-grindy players are always proposing. They don't even care about fantasy and aesthetics! And that's what we got, and still "it's not the good kind of very limiting and not aimed at fun" mechanic... Let me suggest that for a game like Empyrion where players have to travel between star systems, making fuel the "diamonds" of the game makes no sense. Making ships like wheelchair neither. Establishing such huge discrepancies between ultra-futuristic devices like player-made warp drives and stupid CPUs that require visiting alien fortresses to get components make absolutely no sense. It doesn't even make sense to have to debate this. This, to tie it with your first mention of a system that "works for everyone", is a perfect illustration of the outcome of trying to please everyone. Not only the community is divided in as many if not more groups as there are "gamemodes" even the "workshop" gets fractured. So now they would leave the CPU as is (you KNOW they would) and they would try to please players asking to make fuel very scarce... You get the picture ? "If I give you a candy will you let me take a penny from you ?"
You are again using something un-related to what I am posting. It does not matter if you are having issues finging what is needed to make Tear 3. That is a LOOT issue. A thing that can be fixed by suggesting, and convincing others to support the idea of making it easier to find what is needed to make Tear extensions. You are not doing a single thing to improve the game here. You only care that you personally are effected and only what what effects you fixed while shooting down ideas to fix what others need fixed. Instead of just dismissing everything, why did you NOT ADD to the idea by mentioning that hey, you also need the loot to make higher tears increased? Yeah. Great question. Expanding ideas to improve the game by adding what you need to it also so the game is made better for everyone. What a crazy community BUILDING idea.
You have a lot of good points, and on this one I don't disagree with you either, but I want to explain what I was trying to do here. The developer made a decision to do something to encourage specialization. They had their own reasons for it, perhaps it is just their vision of the game, and they always meant it to be that way. I personally do not see the need to encourage specialization and am not a proponent of it. I am actually in the camp of "single core allows every device" and killing all HV/SV and BA/CV boundaries. However, I am accepting of the developer's prerogative to move the game towards their own vision. I'm concerned they added a system that people hate and doesn't actually accomplish what they were trying to do anyway. By mentioning the fuel balance issue, I'm only trying to illustrate that there's ways of encouraging specialization that would feel more natural than introducing an artificial system like CPU. I don't advocate making Empyrion a realism simulator, and when I was talking about the space shuttle, I was just illustrating that the energy cost of going into orbit was significant. Not saying it should be the same. The ease of going in and out of orbit in Empyrion means there's no benefit to making smaller specialized ships to go to the surface. The fact that SV's don't use that much more power than HV's, and fuel is ultra-cheap, is why everyone uses SV's for things and they have to put silly restrictions like "no mining lasers on SV's" or "no combat steel on SV's" in order to try to make people use HV's. If they made relative fuel costs less unrealistic - note I did not say "realistic", only "somewhat more consistent with reality" - then specialization would naturally happen since players would derive benefit from it. Right now no one designs ships with fuel/energy costs as a concern. There's other ways to do it, like adding bonuses for specialization, which I suggested above and think would go over better with people. I agree completely. There's too many limiting systems. Agreed. It is a consistency problem. You can make a warp drive yourself from stuff you can dig out of the ground. But you cannot make a bigger ship without alien technology. I really think they need to go back and look at the entire progression of everything and sort it out in a way that makes sense.
When I first found Empyrion on Steam I was looking for a sandbox game. A sandbox game is defined as; A sandbox is a style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the gamer, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at will. Now on Steam, Empyrion's own description is; Empyrion - Galactic Survival is a 3D open world space sandbox survival adventure. Build powerful ships, mighty space stations and vast planetary settlements to explore, conquer or exploit a variety of different planets and discover the mysteries of Empyrion! The small part of that description that sold me on this game was “sandbox survival adventure.” With over 5600 hours in this game I have enjoyed playing this game as a sandbox survival adventure, in survival. Now suddenly the game has changed focus. The freedom of crafting what I needed if quickly fading. CPU has done this. Now I have to grind for hours to get enough funds to buy the most expensive items in the game just to build my bigger better bases and crafts. Or I have to raid tons of poi's and hope the RND is kind to me to drop the parts I need. I can no longer just go find the raw ingredients to craft what I need. I'm now being forced to raid or trade. This has now become work. My creativity is being stifled. I'm boxed in now. I have no problem with the new flight system. Is it working right? No, it still needs to be fixed. Flying in space feels like I'm driving a submarine in water. It needs work and can become a really good system. I asked what happen to our sand. I was told The CREATIVE mode is probably "the sandbox". Even here they are unsure if Creative is our sandbox. The Definition of sandbox is; A sandbox is a testing environment that isolates untested code changes and outright experimentation from the production environment or repository, in the context of software development including Web development and revision control. To me it's now sounding like they are trying to change where our sandbox is and making it a tool only. If they are changing to this then they need to change their description of the game to; Empyrion - Galactic Survival is a 3D open world space survival adventure. With a sandbox tool to help you create your own adventure. I have played a number of sandbox games. Yes they have limitations to stay true to the game. They take you on an adventure that you can shape along the way staying within those limitations. To me the sandbox feel this game had is fading fast. My biggest fear is the Dev's are now looking for investors and have been told the game needs x,y & z before we will give you our money. Why else would they have gone silent and pushing head strong with a system that doesn't work as presented.
1) Been there, done that. Feel free to look into my posting history. 2) Fundamentally, it's not my job to fix an app I have no financial interest in. It's nice when I (and everyone else) volunteer, but my primary obligation is to relate how the changes affect me. I do that too. I don't shoot down every idea, just incredibly dumb ones. Most pass unremarked because I am indifferent to the suggestions or only mildly for or against them. The really dumb ones do need to get called out though. And apparently you didn't actually read my complaint. Loot is useless to me if I can't survive to collect it -- and I can't in tier-1 craft.
Oh they explained it and people understood it BUT to most people who have been in this game for sometime didn't see the point in it. It really doesn't serve any real purpose but annoy a lot of gamers. This concept was a change from their original plan which was a plan a lot of gamers bought into and yes they have a right to change this game BUT you can't blame those who bought this game when the Devs had a completely different vision for it. Especially when that idea didn't original from the devs themselves but a FEW who kept complaining about big ships and how it disturbs their PVP games until they got what they want. If this idea really originated from the Elon I think would be a little more acceptable. Now I know they claim the CPU system has always been in place but nobody talked about using it until people kept complaining. The form is there where Hummel first mention using the CPU system to solve whatever issues they were complaining about. So that is proof to me that this wasn't ELONs original plan. There was a time where hummels and the DEVs were talking about a Grid increase which would have allowed us to build bigger ships and bases . If the Devs really wanted to place limits on ships then add real physics to the game and let fuel and energy consumption do the rest. This CPU idea in my opinion was not the way to go.
That is what we have been told in the 2nd Q&A video, which was a slight shift from what we heard in the 1st Q&A video. In this other thread you can read at what point players realized that "specialization" could not possibly be the primary intent of CPU and was clearly aimed at limiting size & complexity of builds : https://empyriononline.com/threads/alpha-11-cpu-points-and-tiers-how-does-it-work.90876/ I don't expect you to read all that, but everything is in there. I always thought the same, and many other players too. CPU is limiting builds and does exactly that, so it's working as intended. What is not working is the lame excuse that it was done to promote specialization. Again, all this was discussed in the CPU thread linked up here. Veteran players have been complaining regularly that once they have built their big multi-role CV there is nothing left to do in the game. To that, the answer was generally "wait and some more content will be made, like more missions and tasks", and CPU here is also acting as a way to stretch the actual "nothing more to do" by making parts harder to get. This is just thickening the Steel Door between players and the End Treasury, it is not "new content" like players expect. "Specialization" is just sugar coating, because "specialized" does not equate "small". Read what @Banksman wrote regarding what some players (like me) asked regarding the pre-CPU size limits : we expected they could actually allow for even larger builds, not to force us in the opposite direction ! I know and understand, but if specialization was not the real intent... Again that's because you took for granted that "specialization" was the objective. Nobody asked for that, by the way. Remember just a few paragraphs ago you mentioned this : "I am actually in the camp of "single core allows every device" and killing all HV/SV and BA/CV boundaries." Lots of players just skipped the HV completely and never enjoyed it, for a plethora of reasons. Eleon has been very consistent into trying to force players to build a HV, and that's not really related to CPU but more to slowing player progression in the game. Even on my very first playtrough in 5.5 I did not build a HV, as soon as I had enough materials I built a basic SV because I wanted to fly to space and see for myself if what that game advertised was true ! So why in hell would I build a HV ? It just never made sense to me, and still doesn't. It's like being stranded on a desert island, wishing to get back home at any costs, but instead of slowly building the ship to get off the island I started building a fancy castle... I disagree. All these players that have a life outside of Empyrion don't like to grind for resources. I don't have to cut 50 trees to know I will never make Biofuel my main power source, because it's simply not "fun" nor "challenging" and requires no skill. I don't enjoy wasting time on things like that, or staring at a constructor's slow progress bar, or watching rocks melt when mining. So if I build a survival ship, it's not going to have 30 bedrooms and a tennis court in it. CPU has nothing to do in early game survival, and not even mid-game. It is purely related to Multiplayer PvP, and "specialization" happens naturally when playing the "survival" game without "cheats". When building small or just "practical" fuel is always a concern because of mass and autonomy. I don't think it's necessary to make it worse than it is. Yes, that's an idea that has its own merits, but once again don't spoil it against CPU if "specialization" was not the objective. But first, we could ask ourselves : - Is "lack of specialization" a problem in Empyrion? - Do we need "incentives" to make specialized builds or does it happen naturally ? - Are there real benefits to make specialization rules/ limits compared to leaving things as they are now ? - If it's not broken, why fix it ? Honestly, despites the CPU mess, I think I would prefer to have all other features in first, so we can see the whole picture, even if elements are not all in the good shape or color. That way it will be much easier to make consequential balance and "harmonization" suggestions.
I think you're on the money with a lot of stuff in your post, so I'll just mention that I think there are already incentives and they are to build maxed out CV, regardless of your playstyle. You get punished by the gameplay if you go against this with your own aesthetic preference, such as a desire to mainly use rockets. I think this is a good point. I'm now thinking the key will be in convincing Eleon to build in easy customization for servers, so that there will be the possibility of setups that suit whatever your focus (solo/coop/PvP, combat/building/mining/industry/roleplay/survival etc etc). That way the game components won't lock us in too much.
Long time after Just Cause 2 was out I bought it, and that was the best time to buy it because all mods for Multiplayer were out, tested, debugged and mature.
Agree on all of your points, but I'd like to clarify my comments about making it take more resources to get off world. I am not an advocate of grinding, or having people spend a larger percentage of their time gathering resources. I would however prefer to see there to be a bit more of a "balance" that brings the survival element back into focus, and I'd like to see certain things be a bit more challenging to do than they are. As far as grinding for resources, there's an entire element of the game that, at least at one time, I thought they were going to add, that they haven't. (There were some videos a long time ago where they talked about "mining bases" and such, I guess autominers was their answer to it, unfortunately.) Namely, you should be able to at some point establish production facilities, like a mining base and so on, that are automated. Not just an auto-miner but a base that can do stuff like mine a resource or gather wood or whatever automatically. I never thought it made sense that every single bit of ore you mine is with a hand-drill (not to mention there's nothing about the current mining mechanic that's even vaguely like mining actually works). If acquiring a source of more energy worked more like this: Explore dangerous territory looking for a promethium deposit - most are substantially defended Defeat any opposition and secure the area Build a mining and refining base Defend the base from attacks even when you're not there by adding turrets etc. Set up an automated vessel that transports the refined promethium back to your main HQ automatically Now, you might need more energy to get off world and to fly SV's and other ships than you did before. But does it require "grinding" to get it? It doesn't have to be this way. In a building game like Empyrion, I think resource acquisition should be more complex and interesting since it is a core part of the game. As it is now, you don't really fight over resources at all (unless you PVP). While everyone's gameplay preferences may be different, what I want is the same thing I think everyone else wants : more to do. Not "grinding through 100 alien POI" but actual meaningful content. Taking something like mining or farming and making it more complex and interesting would be good, or adding a lot more quests, or more of a 4X dynamic of the factions duking it out and you helping one or more of them. Really, anything. The problem I think they have now, is that up until 10X the "endgame" is basically just building a lot of stuff. Building ships and bases that look cool but you don't really need for anything and can't do anything practical with them. But at least you could build whatever you wanted, and that was fun for a while. But it seems like they've now broken the main aspect in the game that was actually working. I wish I understood their motivations here, I don't understand the direction of the game at this point.
How could the whole human fleet, with Titan-class ships and all that, travel across the Andromeda galaxy without having to put fuel farms all over the place ? Was CPU the reason of their demise to the hands of much brighter aliens that had no such things in their own technology ?
Probably something like that. At the very least it seems unfair that the aliens are unaffected by CPU (pretty sure most POI would be over the limit).
