POI Bases on planets have a maximum detection range of 300m. Beyond that, even with a range of 1000 they won't fire at the player since they can't see that far. In space, the alien and zirax turrets have roughly the same detection limitation as the player. They must have slightly longer range than the player's weapons in space to prevent exploits between the rudimentary thing that passes for Ship AI and a player's ability to fire from maximum range without a valid target. If you can fire from outside the AI's range, you win by default as they cannot respond or react. The ships are too slow to compete with the player and will on average have less armor and weapons than the player's ship. Zirax weapons are also all launcher-type, which means the projectiles have travel time between the target and the player and a visible projectile that can be seen and avoided; while the player has several hitscan weapons that cannot be dodged. This does not include the fact that the AI turret targeting AI is almost as bad as the ship AI and is pretty much guaranteed to miss at longer ranges if the player simply taps any direction key; throwing off turret AI by 30+ meters.
I didn't think everything was so bad To be honest, I am satisfied with the mechanics, which implies the war of your turrets against the enemy's turrets and the accompanying shield / armor competition, and the player is only given to maneuver on the battlefield. help maneuver an aircraft of the First World War - you can't fight much, it's some kind of circus .
It's far from being so bad, and the numerous players' reports on the difficulty to tackle POIs and AI ships are proof enough of that. Lower "AI Turret skill" is compensated by the amount of turrets and absence of fuel requirements (enemies don't have to grind to play). Also add the drones in the equation, that players don't have the equivalent as proxy defenses (some drones have 2km view range), and to stop the drone spawn chipping at player's armor (and resources...) the only solution is to shut down the POI. The developers are not stupid : they know all players do not live for and around the game and want to win without spending too much time on each fight. They also mentioned quite a few times that not all POIs on a planet can be defeated from the start, just like in so many other open world games where players can jump in the dragon's lair at level 1 if they want - but they will not win... !
I do not find the current combat system easy for the casual player (like me for example). It is impossible for me to run with a shotgun to the nearest Zyrax POI and dodge all the turrets alone without death and destroy the core by killing all the soldiers along the way. It's just that the current balance looks strange to me and a little illogical in some things. There is nothing wrong with that - everyone has their own opinion.
Something people forget is that turret range is based on the distance between the turret and the block it's trying to shoot at, not the distance between the ships. If you have a 200 meter long ship and your camera is an additional 50 meters behind your ship, that Zirax cruiser is going to be shown on the HUD to be 250 meters further away than it actually is.
Well this comes out of the left field, as I thought the discussion was started around AI ships range vs player's (ship) range. Foot combat is related to each player's combat tricks and methods, and there are 50 ways to skin the cat here. Some make tunnels, some use a motorized "wall" to get close by and chip away at the shields in a blind corner where enemy turrets can't reach them, some use mini-SVs that fit in corridors, etc. Going face-to-face while being clearly outnumbered, in most shooters, requires some care, and success is not always garanteed. Most games have some kind of "alternate" method like stealth or cover mechanic that allows more casual players to get an edge when outnumbered, but I think Empyrion simply allows for lots of different methods even is lacking stealth or cover. Personnally I simply backtrack a bit until numbers come down and allow me to move forward safely. We do have snipers, and we can take down walls and poke holes in floors, which most other games don't allow.
Yes. When we need to destroy an enemy POI, and there is no normal CV available, we dig in. I thought to build an HV with a bucket in front to absorb damage, but I thought it was too stupid. It turns out that all the current tactics of assault on POI looks like cheats or crutches. And most of the game you wonder - when will I fight "normally"? And I do not understand when this moment will come.
This all boils down around POI design in fact. For foot combat, were are limited because there is not much "design" involved since we can't tweak the AI enemies so much, but we can still avoid the boring corridor shooting gallery with a spawner at the other end. Because the "random" game does not allow precise placement of POI clusters, there is a tendency to make monolithic buildings where all combat outside is difficult because its a all-or-nothing approach. As long as shield are up, players can't defeat one single turret, and once shields are down, the POI is virtually "taken" with any kind of care. But if instead of stacking all turrets on the main structure the POIs could be small clusters with perimeter defenses that each have their own shields and weapons, players could then tackle these one by one, and the main structure's shields (and maybe 1 big gun) could be taken down via a trigger somewhere, like happens in some designs already. Problem is that some of the older POIs were not made with that in mind, and making POIs that can sustain attacks from a lone player does not have the same requirements as a POI that has to sustain a COOP attack, for example. But all these POIs are in the same folder and can be used anywhere. It's a limitation of the "procedural" systems where there is not one solution for all cases, unfortunately. For AI ships the shields system is problematic, because we can't use "separate outer defenses" like on bases, if I use the example I gave previously. So if we make ships (players and AI) have much more powerful weapons to be able to take shields down in a reasonable time, then ships become unbalanced against bases, and in multiplayer it will cause outrage...
All depends on what individuals class as "normal". These are going to differ from person to person. I see no problem with digging to a POI and taking a wall down. It's a historic tactic that works well. It's unfortunate that the dev's don't think so and now Explosives can't take shields down. As @Kassonnade has mentioned above, it would be great to have small clusters of POI's, but be able to take them down however you like. Along the lines of 7D2D.
I suppose it all depends on how you balance them. If you stick a couple of turrets on each one then that is going to be over the top, if you have 10 POI's clustered close together.
I think most players know that clusters of POIs do exist, but that was not the point I made. I think most players are aware that any POI, single or cluster, can be made easy or difficult, and what I mentioned was an example without all details how to make "one" POI from several smaller ones with a "central" structure that does not have the main shield and weapons. One simple example : a ring of turrets towers of moderate height, not towering over the central structure to prevent them from being able to reach approaching players at all angles, and each of these towers/ outposts have a somewhat weak shield and some turrets. Players can disable one without being exposed to all other towers/ outposts except if they move in from too high (depends on terrain also). Players can defeat one small outpost/ tower and use it as cover to attack the next one, or it simply makes one "rest area" where they can retreat while attacking another part of the cluster. Configs can be now made to accomodate this kind of design, for example by having turrets with a lower range so they can't cover all the ground around another tower, or having another weaker tier of shields for these "outer" defenses. It's still possible to make a "compound" POI that is nothing like a cluster loosely placed by the game but only on fixed playfields. If each player had started making one full thought out and elaborate playfield all by hand when it was possible, we would have hundreds by now, enough to keep the game interesting without always falling on the same type of enemy structures and defenses all over the galaxy. Some players complained that having fixed playfields would be boring are now seeing the other side of the coin : all procedural playfields tend to look the same. This is a very sketchy explanation, but I think you can see the point. If a scenario requires keeping the player in a strict path, structures can be made for this by weakening some blocks at the building stage and using admin cores for undestructible parts, or even decals as walls/ obstacles. Best is to place them by hand, but it is more tedious and requires more work, but it's like everything else in life : no pain = no gain.
You can come pretty close even in a random playfield. Using random poi placement you can put a ring of defensive structures surrounding a central tower. It's not going to be as perfect as a fixed playfield. Fixed playfields also exist still exist but you have to still use a seed to generate the terrain and then place your POIs on it. You can't directly hand shape the terrain sadly, but with a combination of a fixed playfield and planet configuration and fixed POIs you can get pretty close.
Of course, but the "ring of defenses" was just a simple example, otherwise I would need an image to show different setups where "one" POI could be made from several smaller ones, to have more than just 1 shield and all weapons on the same structure (the problem). Lots of solutions are available now, like I mentioned some time ago in the "decals" thread, among other things. But these solutions did not exist previously. We can also simply avoid the shields altogether and use specific blocks materials strength, even "custom models/ devices" as structural components, or any mix of these components to make it possible to destroy turrets on a lone structure one by one without the "shield" problem. We could also simply make a very basic "drone base" on a starter planet, where it will only serve as anchor for the whole AI / base attack system, but still easy to take out. All scenario or context dependant, of course. We can directly shape the terrain with custom stamps and fixed biomes, in fact we can cover the whole playfield like that, and have terrain and structures tightly integrated. We can even design the "heightmap" in 3d (Blender) to see the terrain results from all angles, then generate the grayscale image from the 3d mesh to be used as stamp. So with a simple set of basic, flat planet templates (1 for each type) we can make anything we can think of, with a little know-how. We could go as far as making a whole planet as a "linear mission" where players have no choice to follow a straight questline, and can't dig everywhere to circumvent the puzzles. It would be very practical if the "stamps" folder could be also included in custom scenarios, to avoid problems with the main game. I'm completely off-topic now, but I think weapon ranges and the way playfields/ missions and POIs are designed are part of the equation. .
Some tests I did a while back (1.2? maybe 1.3) suggested to me that a turret first looks for valid structures in range according to whether the origin position of a valid target structure is in range. If it is, then it simplistically appears to be able to fire on the whole structure regardless of whether a specific target device is in range or not. I use the term 'simplistically' as I think there is a little more to it that that - probably something that started with a very simple implementation then got hacked around with over time.
