Yes, this is true. I'm a believer in being able to make a single larger base instead of forcing multiple bases. You need to talk to the server admins then, as they are the ones who have to set up the server for PvP.
What do you mean? So that the server administrator creates a configuration that increases the performance of solar panels and other things?
Yes. They should be either providing you a smooth pvp experience, or you should find a different server (or make your own!), or accept that PvP is very different from PvE and you're going to have to work that much harder for your resources compared to 99% of the player base.
It's a bad idea to shift responsibility to third parties. It's like building a car and offering customers to install engines, wheels, and so on themselves. The more different server configurations (not scenarios, namely the parameters of the number of devices, damage, etc.), the more chaos and the less population on these servers. All this will eventually lead to the departure of pvp players from the game, and in pve people rarely play for more than 1k hours. For example, I spent more than 4500 hours in the game, of which 3000+ I spent on creating an array of blueprints for pvp due to the vastness and complexity of various tasks. For pve, it is enough to build 1 CV, 1 SV, 1 HV and nothing else is needed, because you can live on a ship. You can complete all the quests in general for a maximum of 200 hours, after which there is nothing to do in the game. And this is typical for all pve worlds, when you reach a maximum of 1k hours and you become the emperor of the universe, and the NPCs stand in a position convenient for you and tremble with fear.
That's very subjective, "good" or "bad". I think it's a wonderful idea, but it just comes short of a few core options regarding customization. First I think that if only the PvE content can already provide 200 hours, for 20$, that's quite a deal, but a little bit off-topic. Just to show that besides the creative fun that can take also hundreds of hours, the game has enough handles for any server owner to make things very easy for his playerbase, not requiring complete overhauls. And for those really into modding, apart from these few missing options (animated blocks/ doors/ switches etc) it's possible to completely transform the game and make it light on PCs, remove the tedious resource grind, and make combat more engaging. There are currently 2000+ free slots for new things (items and blocks) and this means we can - if we want - replace most of the game's vanilla objects with our own. But not going there for now, because this requires a fair bit of planning. It's an interesting experiment to tackle, and I'm a bit sorry to see that so few players were really interested in this, because it could have generated lots of clever tweaks and systems. But just regarding the basic, "core" changes that can make the game require less grind and more fun combat : -Mod weapons so they can deal damage to all objects and blocks, but with intelligent multipliers (pistol will take a week to destroy concrete block for example). But all weapons can be used for any task. Lower projectile speeds so ship combat relies more on skills and less on auto-aiming turrets. -Lessen the impacts of hunger, remove a few "illnesses" and conditions so they are less "central" to the experience. It's OK to have these as "surprise" element when players are careless, but eating a mammoth each 3-4 hours else we die is completely ridiculous. It also requires maintaining large gardens for medical and food purposes : cut a bit in the fat there and make the constructor/ food processors interfaces a bit easier to read with less intricate products and recipes = less gardening space required = players can have smaller CVs... -change recipes so they require less time and materials/ make all essential recipes require base materials that are easily available everywhere (ex. crushed stone). Have recipes yield more end products, so less time spent on contructors, and less contrustors required. -keep "ore" deposits for special occasions, like requirements for special, exotic things, that can only be found by searching many planets. Make the "crushed stones" and some other element the base materials for 75 % of the essentials for normal play. Players digging holes in all planets/ moons are the ****** of server performance, so make it easy and use deposits sparringly. Use meteorites instead... or make big deco rock chunks models and have them yield tons of crushed rocks. Put these on all moon templates. -Keep the tech tree for top-notch stuff that require exploring planets to find the exotic materials. -Tweak CPU values, mass and energy usage of main devices required for base play (solar panels included)... ==================================================================== For more advanced tweaking: When making playfields, use the class 4 and 5 planets, stripped from most of the deco, and make terrain interesting by its shape. Use decals to make huge structures, use trees sparringly, animals should be scarce too. Temperate planets could be the "hidden diamonds" that require searching a lot in the galaxy, and the "common" playfields could be more barren like Mars or Moon. These don't kill the PCs because they have much less deco/ entities. Use decals for main walls and parts of huge structures, they're dirt cheap on performance and indestructible (for POIs only). Make ancient ruins/ industrial building large enough so players can use them as cover for small bases or to park their CV when exploring a planet. Remove most stamps in the playfields templates and just keep a few so terrains are easier to navigate with HV and less prone to bugs. In our "real" solar system, the main type of celestial body is similar to the Moon, littered with craters and crater ridges, and almost never tectonic features. Even our Earth has deserts and lots of places without trees or grass : make the same in Empyrion. On temperate playfields, have forests in patches and the rest of the playfield be barren/ rocky/ water. Remove useless water content : only a minority of players go there, but all suffer from the performance hit. Temperate planets might be the hardest to render because of all the trees, water and deco, so best to populate them with sentient life, a few patches of forest, and lots of places to buy resources for dirt cheap. This will prevent players from digging holes everywhere and cutting all trees. We can even make homeworlds where "ecology" is valued and the ground can't be digged, so players have to trade. The game does not have to be a "destroy all what you see" circus, and with a little more care we can shave lots of performance here and there by design, not only relying on Eleon to pressurize the code. We don't have to put all bells and whistles on each playfield, this is useless and makes players want to stay on a planet. Planets could be more heavily "typed" so exotic resources are not necessarily sitting next to a 100k blocks POI with tons of guns, but environmental conditions can be quite harsh. Keep the temperate/ swamps for specifics, and spam moons and lava with lesser deco and stamps, less POIs, spawn lots of drones if needed with a very simple (and hidden) Drone Base so there are always drones "sent from X faction" to protect resources. Stay away from the complex Base Attacks and reinforcements mechanics on playfields where this is not required. Use the fixed biome's feature to make huge custom stamps where all the action happens on certain important planets. In space, make huge stations with decals, where several POIs can be used as one and "linked" together with decal's geometry. Make "protected zones" for specific structures on planets with custom stamps and decals, reduce space cold/ radiation in more space playfields, in fact reduce the overall tendency to kill the player all the time for all kinds of reasons apart combat and sheer negligence. ======================================================================= It's just an example, but if a server owner sticks to the very first elements of this list they can already eliminate lots of problems and have the players focus on exploration and combat, and much less on grinding : fix the recipes and weapons, and use crushed stone as the main ingredient. This is the future with machines that can change the atomic structure of materials, so why not... Server owners can easily make their game much less complicated than vanilla, which requires quite a bit of learning just to get started with the basics. A great number of server owners have disabled Mass and Volume and CPU, that's a starting point, but the grind to make a few steel cubes is still there, because the requirements are complicated and the environment unfriendly. .
I've asked about this for years. The ultimate reason for the limit of 15 is performance in MP. Now, if you're the server admin, you're more than free to change this if you like. I have, and haven't had any discernable issues bumping the solar panel limit all the way to 16. It gives me ODC fits to have to build stations with 14 panels or 15 panels and have them unbalanced-looking. I've had as many as 80 players at a time and been completely stable, but your light-yearage may vary.
I really wish they would change the limit from 15 to 16. 15 is just a WTF?!? number. At least 16 suits symmetrical builds.
