Greetings to you all. I hope that you are all enjoying the space and the building and the shooting and the looting of the things. Why am I posting a thread here? I have decided to throw my hat into the Empyrion modding arena. I see alot of mods out there that make EGS an even easier game because ... im not sure, its not easy enough in its own right? I am historically known for leaning in the other general direction when it comes to things. Yes easy is nice for the casual player, but unless you got a cheese vat behind you, you didnt choose to play a game as deep and complex as this for that... at least i didn't. I believe firmly that : Nothing worth having is ever simple or easy. To that end the mod i am working on is being developed around Reforged Eden 1.6 R3 and requires its base files to function. (raiven / vermillion - dm me the private licensed asset list as i might own these already, ty.. ). The devs of that have done a fantastic job of expanding the universe and base game into some really amazing directions. I aim to build on that set of expansion mods by expanding other more basic things in the universe. I am not using any coding or api stuff at the time of this writing, all config file stuff so far, but i know some of the other stuff i want to do i will have to do through that, so well see how this goes first eh? This mod changes the game flow significantly the following ways : By altering the construction processes through and through. --15 new ore types have been added, --a significant amount of real world production process has been researched and applied to the templates to simulate on a loose level - real world construction of materials where applicable. --currently over 325 new items are being prepared and balanced for the game, along with all existing items in the game getting a full template rebalance to include the changes im adding. --an expanded and more powerful endgame item set and scaling changes for most existing items in the game. Other significant changes include : -- The need to push all ore through the furnace forcing bases to exist. -- furnaces turning metal and into a molten state to be able to work with it. these molten metals cool over time and require reheating for any kind of advanced application. --Constructors are being altered. No more do whatever anywhere. Each constructor is receiving a defined role, and almost all tasks will be assigned to a single constructor. Additionally, this mod seeks to the removal of capitals from all planets. No spawning, building or atmo entry for capitals. Quantifying their existence solely to space- where I believe the devs intended them to be, off fighting capital battles in space and not cheesing poi's or the player base attack mechanics, while providing what i believe is a proper role to sv's as short to medium distance vessels that do go planet side. So that is a fair amount of info on my intent, and my secret goal is to get some feedback.... Does this sound like a worthwhile mod to continue to develop for EGS? Has someone else done this and im reinventing the wheel? Any suggestions? Any requests ? Am I mad? Have others gone mad attempting this?
Don't overcomplicate resource types, a tiered system is already woven into the game but extra depth in a considered way sounds interesting. I haven't counted personally but there has to be at least 60 components to get to endgame buildables in RE... If the end result of additional requirements comes with highly complex and rarely seen equipment to make up for the effort that is considered cool from my opinion Next is the intermediary process that you suggested; I say 100% no dude - smelting ores and forging metals before even creating components and makes no sense to be brutally honest imho; We living in the age of 3d printers and automated factories right now and even though the players are stranded with nothing more than a simple suit construction unit I don't believe that they would have to go stoneage? Lastly I have mixed feelings about capital ships: There does need to be a new way to separate frigates/destroyers which should be atmosphere capable from cruisers, battleships and carriers who have no business whatsoever in any environment but high orbit unless they are disabled or attempting kamikaze. It's definitely not a bunch of twaddle you have been thinking about at all but if I were you I would have a chat with ravien and vermillion to flesh out the thinking and then see what you want to do
" I say 100% no dude - smelting ores " This goal of this mechanic idea is to help reinforce the new process of all ores having to pass through the furnace, and preventing people from amassing a large quantity of base material into a cap and flying around with it, and turning it into any and everything they need when and wherever they need it. Sure they can kind of do this with more advanced mid industry process items - but everything wont always be available to do that with hopefully, forcing people to plan ahead properly when endeavoring far out. Even those 3d printers and automated factories are limited in what they can produce that is functional - less so the factory - but that requires alot of invested time and modifications to alter. Off the top of my head the technologically advanced universes of star trek and star wars use refineries and smelters, and we have such POI's in game... They are an unavoidable step of the massive amounts of heat used to process the ore with in large quantities, but this mechanic is also aimed to be used as a similar semi realistic approach of manufacturing some of the lower end material components and things like metallic alloys.
Simple solution: remove constructers from vehicles altogether edit; Also add tiered construction units of increasing complexities and power demands while at the same time removing the next level construction equipment from being able to make the earlier stage components
I am doing that kinda also - there will be variants that some ships can carry - not HV's tho... and the hardcoded limit on constructors is a hair puller for me in design, but i think a good system is in place now for what i have to work with given those limitations. I am globally rebalancing power because of the advanced power items that im going to be putting in - adv power req's for the mobile line of constructors is in. What I am removing is redundancy, in the way someone can currently make most things from any constructor - to not be a thing. Streamlining the theme of production for the Constructors globally as best as i can, like a specialized manufacturing machine with a purpose, not just a bigger version of the same thing... This will mean that one constructors production might rely on one or two other constructors outputs - instead of all being done internally in one machine. This can get difficult to do in one superbase with all the constructors on the same base, kind of making the aim to be a sprawling base consisting of a series of smaller more focused buildings. Sure endgame superpowered can bypass this with mega material gain - but it will be (should end up being) difficult to do.
If constructors work the way they do now it's because lots of players asked for this, to reduce the tediousness of making intermediary products. Not saying there are not some players who may enjoy spending all their playtime looking at menus, but I think for vanilla the message from the playerbase regarding this was pretty clear : forcing players to jump through rings of fire to get boring stuff done is not "new gameplay". "Difficulty" in a game can be forced on players in many ways of course, but that does not equate to "fun gameplay".
In my experience theres an overlapping disconnect between the definitions of fun gameplay and lazy players who dont want alot of effort invested but want all the end game cool stuff, and as easy to get as possible. Its never the content players who cry in forums.
For example - in eve online - scanning used to be a thing anyone could do but only a few were really good or excelled at... Scanning was lucrative, so those who could not do it quickly or easily complained on the forums till this changed and scanning was made.... "more fun and accessible for everyone" This generally outraged the scanning community - as their unique skill was effectively dumbed down to so simple a caveman can do it. They never complained about it before that point in the forums, why would they? Some quit, some carried on, sure - but the damage there to the game mechanics and the unique thing that you could achieve or be known for was done. All because people who were bad at it cried it wasn't easy enough... For something that wasn't really supposed to be easy in the first place. This is not the only example of this, just the most relevant one i can think of.
Because "fun" is highly subjective. We still have cheat codes, so any "difficulty" one might think of adding to a scenario can easily be bypassed this way, so this is where I'm looking in terms of "new gameplay". If we can skip fiddling for 5 minutes inside any constructor's interface searching how to do X by going through Y to get Z by simply using the ItemMenu, then we can get back to do something like exploring, shooting enemies or watching events unfolding. On the point of preventing players from getting all end game content in 5 minutes, I agree that it has to be set up more carefully and sparsely, and somewhat tied with progression, but not necessarily "level - based" because this does not make a lot of sense, as often discussed on the forums. Having "discoveries" unlocking new tech makes more sense than tying "tech tree unlocks" to XP gained in unrelated activities, IMO. As for the lazyness of players, this also is subjective. Games are supposed to be for leisure, so when it infringes into the realm of "grind" because delays are perceived as too long between "tasks" and "rewards" some players will obviously switch to something else. This of course varies greatly from one player to another, but the basic principle stays true. What I see in your project is the introduction of many additional "artificial limitations" to achieve your goal of forcing players into a more linear path for all crafting aspects of the game. I'm already not a big fan of watching the little circular craft progress icon, and I guess I'm not alone since traders have become so popular in the latest versions of the game. I'm really not into the "get good" type of arguments regarding what players should or should not be able to do in an open world sandbox game. I'm way more into games like Dishonored or Dungeon Keeper 2 or even the old No One Lives Forever series. These games all have great replay value because of their non-linear approach to missions, imaginative AI and a focus on providing the player with a sense of being someone special, not just another lazy bum that needs to be kicked back in the ranks of the "get good" philosophists because he's trying to evade work in a game. That being said, I think you have a clear idea of what kind of system you want to put in place, and I can't judge of the results before I actually see it. I'm just telling you my very personal take on it, and as I mentioned in my previous post there are players who will surely enjoy the additional layers in crafting systems. I'm just more into building and action so for me this is not cutting it. If some ships are not allowed on a planet, I want it to be related to physics and logic, not by another artificial limit that makes no sense depending on circumstances. If I can build my own machinery, I want to have the freedom to think I'm wise enough to understand the various steps required to build something, and that I did build my constructors accordingly, instead of thinking there was someone else involved in the process that decided this for me, while I'm stranded alone on an alien world. Because ultimately, this is what it all boils down to : a lone player making all his stuff himself, in a universe with some obviously magic tech knowledge (teleports, multi-tool, instand bone repairs, etc) but he can't design a house-sized machine to make some basic items because it's "of the wrong type" which brings into question the sanity of the player who built this himself. He either has the knowledge, or he doesn't. The way things are set up now makes the player be a fool that imposes ridiculous limits on himself for no sound reason.
I suppose one way of countering that would be giving tiered constructors build-time bonuses/penalties for particular products? Basically allow an advanced constructor to craft all components from the ground up as it is now but have (for example) an electronics fab make electro parts 3x faster, a magneto lab craft motors etc at 3x speed, a foundry producing ingots the same etc? That way you have the flexibility of the adv con being able to do everything in one place but a choice to specialise production at much faster rates?
There are unfortunately hard coded reasons that make those things are either extremely difficult to, or just outright unimplementable in config file modding alone.
An idea. The problem I see is that "craft time" is defined in each template/ recipe, while constructor speed is hardcoded per type, ranging from the slowest (suit constructor at "speed factor" 1.8) to the fastest (adv. constructor at speed 0.5) ... or maybe the furnace at 0.2 speed. I just saw @the last TRUE gamer already answered. Basically the closest one could get to this would be specialized constructors that only do certain recipes, then have each of these constructors have different tiers, which is already what the OP proposed here. One "semi-acceptable" trade-off I could probably live with would be if, in exchange for the additional crafting steps and device count requirements, each constructor was lighter, smaller and more energy-efficient. Otherwise this pushes the ships and bases builds towards the upper limit, and this hinders nomadic playstyle and might cause playfield clutter in multiplayer. One thing that can't hurt is also to make constructors more visually distinct, to make it more believable that they all have specific purposes. Obviously a machine designed to melt rocks would not look like a small fridge, and a micro-electronics constructor would not require to be 8 CV blocks size.
I did not include the full scope of what i am planning in the initial posting of this thread... Im limiting myself to non coding content changes - but a sweeping set of changes across the board that are based on the things i did list. Because i cannot yet confirm a detailed scope of those changes yet, i have omitted them. Im not a fan of jumping through hoops of fire for the mundane either - but when i look at minecraft crafting .... mine... craft... vs the depth of crafting in a game that scales literally the entire galaxy... where every object exists from a mixture of.... 6 basic and 2 or 3 magic materials.... it really makes me think that with a bit of effort in the balance of application and taking some real world queues that there can be more depth in the universe overall as opposed to ...... 6+2 being the answer to everything...
when i am done with what i am doing - i have bought an asset pack that i intend to apply to some code based modding where i will address the constructor limitations if i am able to .... i have read the documentation and it kinda looks like theres a way but its not well documented in how... But none of that till i have completed the current project, which i firmly believe i can do without resorting to coding.... I think
I find the building interface of constructors to be boring to watch, simply. Ok for a first playthrough, but after a while... So this is where I disconnect regarding time spent in the "crafting loop". But... ... but if we were able to build - "place visually on a ship/ structure" - the actual "parts" of many "devices" as building blocks, instead of seeing them as a whole "ensemble" already assembled, 4x bigger than the machines that made them, this could be cool. It would be coherent then to have smaller constructors, and players can spend more time placing stuff while other parts are being made, instead of waiting for huge chunks to be completed and juggling with 75 tons of steel with a magic telekynesis ability... An example could be fuel tanks, been made from "cargo extenders" so we can shape them as we want, and capacity grows with additional blocks. Or making "thruster cores" and "casing blocks" separate so we can design "propulsion groups" as we want, "Power groups" instead of generators, with various parts plucked together and power growing with this, etc.
this part would have to b coded i think and if you could choose what generators power that would be epic, and something on my to look into list - basically take the power panel and remove it from the structure window and apply it to the config section of a generator instead.. im not 100% sure the api ends needed to do this exists lol, but that would a better approach using the tools that already exist i think...
Not necessarily. Power, storage, thrust, fuel capacity all add up with more devices present already. It's more a question of making the different "parts" required for the whole to behave like 1 big gen. In other words, something like the generator control unit, then many rotors can be added and power grows with their number, a bit like controllers and their extenders that allow volumes to stack. Some new parameters have appeared recently in the configs, I'm going to have some investigations... ^^
i was thinking power distribution blocks at one time.... like generators can generate x power, but power distro nodes would need to be placed within 10 blocks of anything that required power... maybe even power carrying variant block in a string of blocks from the genny ... im not sure
Not a huge fan of requiring furnaces for ore processing. Space bases are pretty trivial/safe to setup so all it'd really do is promote spamming those. I also don't think it's a big deal people are creating CV only bases. It's a lot of material investment and the designs are harder to balance vs bases. I do wish HV/SV gameplay had more of a role in the game. This is to me a pretty glaring issue of the game in that most of the vehicle types are basically just used for mining/harvesting purposes. Restricting CV's from atmo(or maybe just atmo combat) might have a lot of knock on effects though. I personally think rather than trying to create some massive mod that tries to redo everything, a mod that makes CV's non-combat in atmo and creates a bunch of new buffs/addons for HV/SV's to make them sexy would probably be a big enough task and require a lot of play testing and tweaking. Adding new ores(or new alloys) I'd be okay with, so long as it didn't mess with the lower tier stuff. I think it'd be more interesting in regards to the higher tier gear. Like maybe advanced weapons, shields, armor, warp, gen, thruster systems, etc start to specialize into different ores and alloys.
When we look at the game as a whole, it's obvious that it's much more about exploration (finding "Empyrion") than a sporadic "tower defence" around bases players would eventually leave behind to finally "find Empyrion". I see the developers trying to promote exploration, and players doing all they can to make their bases "permanent" and impervious to attacks, despites the fact that any base at any point before knowing where precisely the "end game challenge" will be is just a shelter while trying to get something better (a flying base = CV). There are a zillion ways to enforce roles for specific ship classes, but all this needs to have a context, which is the game story or plot. Else it's just a sandbox with some bits and pieces of story tacked on. Whatever the mod, I just think it's too early, and it's too easy to have content stolen by others who will claim all credits. The way Eleon set up its EULA and the fact that all what players do can be used by everyone else with no reference to original authors makes it a serious bummer to waste time on modding now. I don't mind playing the monkey game to some extent, but spending all my free time just to feed the other monkeys is not my cup of tea. This is a bit like Google's Play Store, where an original app simply gets drowned in clones and bad copies, and no one cares. And yes, it's all about "ads" and staying on top of the charts... The way this is done here is something like high-school grade politics, where some people try to dirty the original game's image so their cute mod looks shinier, which is honestly a stupid move. They mimick most of what the "originals" (Eleon) are doing : publish frequent updates (which is just shuffling a few numbers here and there in configs) with long, flashy "release notes", have feedback thread where players submit requests, call themselves "developer" on Steam to better muddy the waters, and I even saw some usage of a pseudo "trademark" on Facebook, while all this is simply some text editing on a framework provided by others. Fun fact : the "real" debugging is still done by Eleon, because these modders have no access to the game's code and they have no clue if they are breaking things with their mod or if it's a problem with the core game, but that doesn't prevent them from throwing a lot of BS around that most non-modders will believe at face value. Many times it's a simple thing they have no idea how to change so it's easier to blame the original game, when there are things they could fix themselves but, hey, they didn't see another monkey doing it so they say "can't be done, blame Eleon"... Mods that truly benefit others are things like the Playfield Editor, the Web tools made by Rexxus which anyone can use to personalize their game, or the Server Admin tools to manage servers. So instead of making a "parallel game" and throwing tomatoes at the originals, players would have seen way more benefits from a real collaborative effort to make the original game easier to play, adjust and customize, and help the developers look forward into making the "master framework" more robust and complete. And that is the sad thing we see everywhere in life : there are some people who are "sources" and work hard to bring something new into this world, then there are the "monkeys" who take their work, make it their own, and try to get a profit out of it, either financial or social. A monkey game. .
