As I'm approaching nearly 400 hours in EGS, I wanted to take a moment to give my feedback on some of the things in Vanilla, the decisions made, that I just don't understand. I would like to start by saying that I've adored this project and it's given me many hours of fun with vanilla, MP, co-op, scenario, etc. So, please do not take my questions and feedback as bashing on the game. It's a great little project that I've been singing the praises of to my friends. With that said though, let's get to it.. 1. Why is it that we can't have more than one shield gen or warp drive? On the same note, why don't we at least have better versions? Is it a balance issue? If it is, why can't that be solved by the CPU and Weights/Volumes system anyway? We have a big galaxy now and I want to be able to upgrade my ships travel range. 2. Why is in-system travel the same as out-system travel? Why can't we travel say 10x the distance in AU per unit of pentaxid that we can in light years? In short, why can I travel 200AU and 200LY, why not 2,000AU and 200LY? What's the reason for having AU/LY travel ranges be a 1:1 cost per unit of pentaxid? 3. Speaking of pentax, why can we only have one pentax tank? Now that it's important for shields as well as travel. We can have multiple fuel tanks and O2 tanks, and tons of storage for other things but we somehow can only have one pentaxid tank? Why? 4. I like the teleporters, but why can't we build the stargate like portals in survival? Make them really hard to build, sure, do that, but if you gave that to us in SP/MP Survival, we'd get to live a bit of stargate fantasy building networks of gates and bases. Something I think a lot of people like me might actually enjoy. Maybe even have a little block that's basically a "DHD" 5. Why do we still not have a way to build ships and vehicles outside of our inventory in SP? (outside doing it by hand of course). Why do we not have a factory or ship yard block that will slowly build the ship for us? We have the repair block feature that can fix vehicles to template, what about one that can spawn things? We'd actually be able to build literal factories or shipyards with this. Another bit of gamaplay opportunity I think would really be a positive boon to the game overall, especially in multiplayer. 6. Back to shields, why don't they have a base line regen rate even during combat so that you have to overcome a shields regen by overwhelming it? 7. Lastly, when we will see better character models, and weapon model upgrades along with finally fixing the little bike we can make? That's my bit for now, again, thanks for the nearly 400 hours of fun and yet another great space game that is part of my mainline staple. You've done great work team.
Some of your queries can be adressed by mods like scenarios like RE, others are already in the development pipeline queue others I would also like to know myself......
Well, I suppose that's the thing really is that "we can do it with mods" shouldn't always be the default answer yeah? It really defaults to, "well, why?" Why /must/ it be done with mods and why /can't/ it be done in the base game?
The shields already regenerate during combat, but the rate is actually too low for it to be noticeable. Combat has to stop, or else it may be able to regenerate slowly against a puny weapon firing slowly at it. Travel distances, recipes, device limitations, all these seemingly arbitrary limits can be there to avoid giving too much power to players early game so they can completely bypass quests requirements, or break them. Storyline quests are already flaky, if players can simply zoom to the other end of the galaxy to get what they need, or if they can sustain all types of attacks with minimal damage, this limits the waty quests can be designed. Usually quests are not living well in open world games, players can jump all over the place and do things that were not envisioned by the developers, and will require patching and fixing many unforeseen aspects of the game. Not a bad thing in itself, but given Eleon's manpower and priorities, it's unlikely (and unproductive) to address equally minor and major issues. Game balance issues can be solved almost completely by players via scenarios or modding, but core features require Eleon's core team. I prefer them to work on fleshing out things like the factory so many players asked for, or refining the player character movement and general animations at large, than wasting their time on tiny issues that players can solve themselves. And on this, the main reason is that players want something and its contrary at the same time, and the developers will see no end to tweaking these minor issues to satisfy someone then being asked to revert/ nerf/ buff the same over and over again. This was the case in many updates prior to v1.0, and it can easily be verified in the numerous release notes in the forum archives : lots of items in these long lists are minor adjustments made after players complained or discussed for and against, and in subsequent patches the same items were again addressed. Rinse and repeat. This was a huge waste of time, but of course most players don't look at the details in the long list of realease notes, they simply see a long list and don't try to measure the proportion of the work that was spent on minor items, while the main issues were not (and many still are not) addressed. .
This is a pretty standard software problem and the industry standard solution is making stuff configurable (hence the "the solution to your problem is a mod" approach) ... generally it makes more sense to add configurable functionality than it does to refactor a one size fits all approach or, as you describe, run around in a circle. I've seen people push back on configurability here saying it leads to fragmentation but that's more of a myWayIsTheBestWay mindset than an actual argument. In an SP game there is no fragmentation of what it means to play the game since you're the only one playing. In an MP or Coop game the host and their guests get to decide the sort of party they want to throw or attend- again no fragmentation. It may be that running the "official" servers stilts Eleon's view on what game balance means. If I could wave a product owner wand I'd encourage them to focus on clearing the bug list, engine functionality, and expanding/improving the UX to make POI and scenario development as easy as it is to workshop vehicles and bases. With so much space to fill, finding ways to avoid having three of the same POI on a planet or discovering same two dozen flora and fauna (with all the same uses and behaviors) across every star in the sky leads to the "these planets are all the same" sorts of issues that plague procedural games. Addressing those sorts of issues seems like a challenging/rewarding focus for a small team. That said they're doing a pretty good job given how many raw hours people spend spinning their prayer wheel. 8^)
Literally all of what I gave as feedback can be done on EGS's back end, baring the creation and implementation of the factory block system. Again, I ask, why only one pentaxid tank or warp drive or shield?
Sorry Damion, I went off-topic. I'm not in a position to explain why the devs have made specific decisions. From my perspective many (!) appear arbitrary but since they know their own code and how they feel the game should be played it's pretty hard to second guess effectively. That said- 1. It sounds like what you're asking for here is backup systems as a way of increasing shield strength or warping. Doing it that way would also eliminate the single point of failure for these units, but making them single points of failure *may* be the entire reason for the limitation. The max charge of a shield or the overall range of a warp drive (or capacity of the pentaxid tank) can be altered in the \Content \Configuration \blocksconfig.ecf so if you're playing SP or have leverage with whoever is hosting your MP game you can tweak those with the issue of updates requiring "fixing it" with each release. A lot of things can be modified this way. IMO, adding multiple units is a very intuitive way to increase capacity/capability within the game with the side benefit of not having single points of failure but, for whatever reason, the devs haven't enabled this other than with fuel and oxygen (disconnected storage mechanic) or with the various container controllers (contiguous storage mechanic) 2. Only guessing but I think this is an integer math thing. One crystal of pentaxid is the smallest denomination of warp currency- it's the penny for warp travel dollars. Another way to frame the question is why is it so cheap to travel light years. 8^) You can modify range costs at the engine level in blocksconfig.ecf but the impact on mining pentaxid might make it painful; the resulting inflation for LY travel would mean serious grinding or require the introduction of something like crystals > bundle > biggerBundle > largestBundle like promethium fuel pellets into fuel packs. 3. See (1) ... you can increase the capacity of the single tank but answering the "why" question requires a dev to go on record and, in my experience, rationalizing why they've made specific choices in writing isn't something that happens that often. 4. Totally would love that (including the DHD) with the hope that it could be done in a way that didn't provoke MGM & Wright et. al. to chase them through the courts. Long range jumps that could handle a small SV/HV puddle jumper would be cool. 5. Would be neat. Maybe the ship repair mechanic could be used with a multi-pass rendering over time by material/component type to simulate a build out (blocks, windows, doors, devices) ... 6. Regen rate and total capacity is configurable but sometimes it seems to drop cycles at the worse possible time. Not too sure what goes on there either (or why). 7. Both Eden & Reforged (and Reforged Eden of course) are doing stuff in the new and improved weapons arena but as far as the avatar puppets and that crazy motorcycle you're in good company as far as asking why. Not getting answers to reasonable why questions from the folks in a position to know why answers frequently drives people crazy. I'd imagine that at some point they tried and ran into debate trolls (owning my 12 step journey- "imLarry. Hi Larry!") who couldn't let something go- it's often easier to not respond to an entire class of questions than risk a jump into that sort of quicksand.
Technically, if they allow any other quantity than 1 then they open the door to "I want 3" and "no, 5 is better" and so on. On the practical side, almost all aspects of these devices can be nerfed/ enhanced via the BlocksConfig.ecf, removing the need to have more than 1 or each. We can change the max pentaxid amount a tank can hold, we can change the max distances a warp drive allows to reach, we can change recharge rate and strength of shields, etc. We can also change power consumption of each device, their armor (hit points), the heat/ radiation they emit, the components required to make them, etc. So if the devs start giving in to some requests, then where will this stop ? I know you can tell me of reasons why redundancy would be practical, but that infringes into design territory where the developers can't realistically anticipate all what players can come up with in terms of stategies and designs, hiding or exposing devices, etc. Some limitations on device numbers (and the CPU limits) were introduced because some players try to put max amount of each possible device on their ships, max weapons, max ship dimensions, etc. This has a performance cost on servers, and although Eleon seems reluctant to admit that servers are not quantum computing machines that can simulate the complete universe without a hiccup, the reality shows that many servers have problems coping with the demand. So... limits here and there. On the same branch, why not ask for 2 cores since when the only core a ship has is destroyed the player "loses property" of his own ship, even if he's physically still in touch with all blocks?
Don't let defaults stop ya ... figuring out what it can already do is where you go after level 25! 8^) Opening any tank adds to the total, volume of the ship is the sum of capacity for all tanks. By default MaxCount = 1 ... here it is set to 4. # Before: WarpDriveTank { +Block Id: 336, Name: PentaxidTank Class: WarpDriveTank Group: cpgWarp [snip of lots of settings] MaxCount: 4, type: int, display: true [snip of lots more settings] WarpAccept: PentaxidCrystal Radiation: 15, display: RadiationLevel # Radiation (= Radiation Protection) already exists for Player Armor Temperature: 35, display: true }
Pentaxid tanks act just like containers so we can add more and it will not bug the game, but I did not test this and normally I would check if all contents of the multiple tanks properly add up and are considered in the total pentaxid available for travel. For other devices tied to a specific effect (ex. shields or repair blocks) it may be possible to add more than one (or not) but that has to be tested ( I didn't), and the effects will not add up even if by some luck the game allows placing more than one. Usually when there is a hardcoded limit (like for repair block) even modding the BlocksConfig.ecf makes no change and the block/ device outline will turn red when trying to place the block and refuse to allow it. Just out of curiosity, why would you want to add more devices instead of making the existing ones more efficient, for example ?
Without double checking (from memory) doesn’t the zirax dread nought have 2 shields in vanilla? Don’t know if it makes a difference in combat. Would make more sense to me to make existing ones more efficient. another point raised is about warp drives and shields, I’m sure they can upgraded in the RE mods? Please correct me if I’m wrong. Not sure how a larger portal would work, I’m guessing like the smaller one already in game. I have submitted a ‘jump gate’ Poi for ARC faction but it’s more decorative/Role play that actually a working portal but I guess something like that could be used like a portal with coding?
I suspect that there may be 2 "visible" shield gens, but surely not 2 shields. One may be only using the model as a decoy (ex. deco item) and the other is a genuine shield gen. Totally possible, they can also be modded in vanilla. All the parameters we see in the BlocksConfig and ItemsConfig can be tweaked, some parameters can be added or removed (testing required) to some objects, but there is no way to change anything that is hardcoded like "only one shield effect per ship" ( game does not stack shield effects) or "2 warp drives = twice the distance". All interactions in game are based on colliders. We can make custom models so it's surely possible to make different shapes for portals. As long as the player touches the collider, whatever shape it has, then the "teleport" effect can trigger. Now think about "traps" and not just "visible teleports"... hehehe...
Just as you say @Kassonnade, the contents of multiple pentaxid tanks are available to shields and warp engines but adding secondary shield generators or warp engines didn't change the regeneration or range. The only benefit would be the elimination of single point of failure at a cost of both power and cpu. The "right" way to adjust the ShieldCapacity and ShieldRecharge for the shield or the CostPerAU/LY or RangeAU/LY to get those sorts of buffs would be to tweak those parameters. I just jumped in and did some back and forth with a Zirax defense tower to check. Having multiples of the active "effect" devices seems to satisfy a "at least one" as far as enabling a jump or performing the shield strength calculation; even though one is effectively a dummy it behaves as a hot standby as opposed to a deco block. The z's can destroy one but shields and/or warp capability persists until both are gone.
I would guess your right that even though 2 are ‘visible’ there is still only one shield I’m not on pc so can’t check until tomorrow. Yes makes perfect sense. so the jump gate could actually be turned into a larger portal? That would be cool, would it be player only or would you say be able to take a Sv through it?
Just like @imlarry425 wrote (I just checked too) it looks like we can "have" many "one only" devices on a ship, but the effects do not stack. I checked the Zirax Dreadnought and the total shield HP was at 50000, after removing one gen it was still 50000, so the second device can be used as a "backup" with the penalties mentioned. One tricky part is that the game does not allow to add the second device normally, so it was probably added by copy-pasting blocks in creative. Not sure how this would behave on a player ship when spawning the blueprint in a survival game. Surely. Did not try it, but since it's a pretty straightforward model with no moving part it should be easily feasible. I have no clue about this without testing it. IIRC at least one player mentioned something about this (suggestion ? mod?) in a thread not too long ago, but I would have to search the forum to find it. You can test this yourself (maybe) with a very tiny basic SV and see if it teleports with the player ? Problem I suspect is that the player can not interact (collide) directly with the portal's collider when in a ship, but "motion sensors" do detect the player in a ship when flying in a detection field.
