That was actually my immediate thought, just for everything to feel a bit more spaced out, larger biomes, and more distance between POI's. I'll doubtless play with adding more POI's - I've already done that with other custom planets of mine - but it's the feeling of scale vs. little ol' me in an HV/SV that really appeals. I've already discovered Akua and Omicron in my current game, but I might try tweaking one of the other planets and see how my PC handles it in SP. Scoob.
Wish I had a video app installed; too lazy to do so atm. I'm not sure if screen shots will be able to capture it. Lets just say: Akua at 13,000 inastead of 1300 seems a LOT more like a "planet" and less like a "large billiard ball" with Dr. Seuss terrain. Mountains, valleys, bodies of water, peninsula, forests, plains . . . all of it . . . it all just seems so much better at 10X scale. I almost wonder if they designed the procedures that generate the landforms at something more like that scale, but then at a later stage of development thought they should downsize everything by an order of magnitude or two, as safeguard for server performance. You can see all the changes I made to the playfield in the .yaml file inside the .zip I attached to the post up above. Suffice to say: more difficulty, more drones, more enemies, bigger planet, about a 20% increase in number of mineral deposits. Other than hearing my fan come on a bit, I have noticed no impact on performance in SP mode (though I can definitely understand why a server admin would be cautious about making such changes on a server . . . if it was a freshly wiped server, then no big deal: everyone understands its a test and every body jumps on and checks it out . . . but once players have setup bases and stuff, having a server wide corruption problem could be pretty painful . . .) One somewhat strange thing I noticed: the icons for the mineral deposits seem too big for the map in some places where they are overlapping a lot. That is probably because the algorithm that determines their spacing is tuned for 1300 size and may not be configurable by users in any of the unsecured files that aren't inside the .exe.
I did dl your .yaml for a quick peek to see what you'd done - I did notice one small mistake, nothing major, your "PresetStyle: 7" entry is too high, valid range is 1 - 4. Not quite sure what impact this will have on the base attack triggers for drones, I suspect it may just default to 1. Oh, we should compare notes on the Drone attack stuff - I've got infinite waves of ever harder drone types working fairly well. Game does naturally seem to take a few waves / certain triggers (that PresetStyle setting again) before they send a full wing of 6-7 drones per attack, however, in my game it starts with the basic Minigun Drones, then ramps up to Rocket, Plasma and large variants of those - I'm hoping to trigger the one with the Dropship model that's really tough, but I'm still playing. Oh, what I was originally going to say: I've tweaked Ningues to be 10x larger, no other tweaks yet, but I might do my usual Drone and difficulty stuff. Scoob.
That would explain why I've had ZERO base attacking drones! "infinite waves of ever harder drone types working fairly well" sounds good, and I'm up for a restart! What settings did you impose to get it to work that way? Got a pretty good spawn that works well with Akua at size 13000, but got careless and died and I much prefer not to respawn unless I have an actual spawn chamber . . . I didn't make it too far: started exploiting the Titan rear section, made a couple mines (LOVE it with all deposits "at least '1' deep" [even with that most of them are quite shallow, but easier to "cover them up" instead of being forced to make most of them open-pit mines else spend a lot of filler fuel to put a dome over them]) and got killed. Like I said, other than the slight hint of my fan coming on (heavily modded Kerbal causes it to go into fits, or at least causes my RAM to racket a lot) and the somewhat overlapping deposit markers on the map I have yet to notice anything that seems out of whack. It actually seems overall BETTER than at 1300 size.
Heh, I generally go for the first Titan section I find and secure it. However, with my current Tweaks that proved impossible until I'd taken out the Drone Base. A constant stream of reinforcements meant my HV on guard duty got totally overwhelmed - I had to manually pilot it and run away - plus the ground troops being delivered via dropship (several times) made being on foot VERY risky. While I managed to get into the Titan section (rear part) and take out the core, the drones started ripping it apart, almost destroying my Survival Constructor in the process. I retreated, build a normal base elsewhere before returning in a lightly-armed HV (minigun + lots of ammo) only to be pushed back once again. Basically, setting up reserve amounts of drones works very very well, plus, as I discovered, said Titan section was very close to the Drone Base, so reinforcements arrived very quickly. Setting up my "proper" base via a Base Starter was fun too, as drone attacks ramped up to 6 drones per wave, about 4-5 waves per game day. It started with Minigun drones, but these became plasma drones after a while - quite damaging those things! I'm out today, but message me later and I'll share some of my settings for you to try. Note: due to my preferred "secure the wreck" game-start, I decided to make the Titan Wrecks basically a trap The Drone Base being near-by was an unforeseen random occurrence, as were the insta-reinforcements making life that little bit harder than I intednded. Scoob.
Well I am working up a "Drone Planet", think of the "Machine City" from the Matrix movies. A literal Hell of drones and bases which will repel any and all attempts to land and establish a foothold. The machines will kick your a$$ upside-down and send you back to space with a smoldering ship, or none at all. That is my goal at least.
I plan to make it as nasty as possible, but clearly I have to work within the limitations Eleon has imposed.
Hi all, The max number of drones you can have on a planet is 39, max number in space is 40. ( I've done a ton load of extensive testing creating sectors, planets, poi's and all that jazz. ) As an example, a common way I set a fair few of my planets up (I'm the Admin of a 100% custom planet server) is to have groups of drones randomly roaming. Remember that a planet's axis will range from -4096 to +4096, so you can space them out accordingly. Bearing in mind you can have a max of 39 on a planet (guessing the extra 1 is for the troop transport, because you can have 40 in space), check the following, you'll see what I'm doing - spreading them out evenly. I then assign 4 to the drone base itself for protection, using up all 39 spots. Put the below code into your yaml .... it will make sure there's quite likely a drone flying nearby, and will be replaced if you shoot it/them. Andy. ------------------------------------------------ DroneSpawning: Random: - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: -3600 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: -2400 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: -1200 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: 0 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: 1200 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: 2400 - DronesMinMax: [ 5, 5 ] CenterX: 3600
Hey Andy! Thanks for posting this - I was not aware of this approach but it will certainly help out. Is there a similar method to use for the POIs? Cheers.
So, I just visited my custom 10x the size Ningues for the first time... I think I need to tweak another parameter, as I came out of Warp into the planets atmosphere - makes sense for 10x the diameter lol. I left the atmosphere, then dropped my HV onto the planet from orbit, as per my usual play-style. First impressions, planet feel HUGE, it's great. No performance hit that I can see, I didn't up the POI count, but I do have a LOT of drones, both at POI's and resource deposits, as well as general roaming ones. I must have downed 10+ drones in the first few minutes, before even encountering a POI. The map however is screwed up. The planet cannot be rotated fully - it resets back to the original position when you try - and all POI's are marked in the same rough area. Might make finding POI's / resource deposits again a little trickier, though not impossible. I'll second what was said previously regarding larger planets, they look much nicer, mountain ranges, valleys and forests all just look better. Normal 1/10th size planets looked squashed by comparision. @arg821 - interesting stuff, though I only have the one Dronespawning entry, but with higher numbers, I too appear to have lots of free-roaming drones spread fairly evenly around the planet. Also, I've never had a value of 5 for the max amount of drones at a POI / Resource Deposit every do anything, 3 seems to be the max. I do increase the reinforcements at a Drone Base a LOT, it makes for interesting times when you kill the three drones at a POI and three more fly in right away. Just this evening I encountered two POI's that were very close together, killing drones saw a stream of replacements heading in constantly as I fought - including drop ships deploying troops, which made going on foot (I stayed in my HV) rather dangerous. Still playing around with settings myself, though have been using custom playfield.yamls for a while now, mainly tweaked to make things harder with more and higher tier drones during base attacks and the like. Scoob.
Update: well, my custom Ningues seems to work, though I'm not sure it's quite 100% due to the larger planet size. Like I said, the map is screwed up but I'm flying around the planet just fine. However, I think I may have missed a setting as while the landscape seems quite vast when flying around, I appear to hit the poles too soon. Rather than the usual flat landscape beyond the pole, I have a continuation of lakes, forests, mountains etc. but none of it is reachable. I'm going to play some more, but I'd be keen to hear from anyone else tinkering with this, just in case I've missed something. I literally just changed the two Planet size variables in the yaml - RealRadius and ScaledRadius, increasing them 10x. Any tips anyone has, I'll try on the next planet I plan to visit - likely one of the Lava ones @Xango2000 - is this something you've tinkered with, or are you sticking to standard planet sizes? Scoob.
I've been sticking to standard size but I have a thought Have you looked into the PoleLevel setting? its in the Terrain section
I was actually wondering if that's the thing I need to change...not sure how to change it though! Hopefully @dichebach will respond, as he's got more experience with planet size changes...I wonder how he's getting on with the drone tweaks I sent him.... Scoob.
I've been tempted to tamper with that but haven't had time to do it. Go for it man, let us know what happens (at work, again, so no EGS for me).
Well that was odd. I left Ningues in my SV to meet up with my CV on orbit. I'd actually established my Base right next to where I landed in my HV - so, right underneath my CV. However, it just took me over 10 minutes to fly around my much larger Ningues once in orbit to get to my CV. I just took the CV into the atmosphere - going straight down - and there I am right on top of my base. I guess this is another artefact of larger planets, though why it would warp me to the opposite side of the planet when I enter orbit I don't know. Still, part of me liked the fact that my CV took a while to get to, does give a better sense of size Scoob.
Wait so going straight in you get to your base, but going straight up you have to fly halfway around the planet to get back to the CV? That's quite odd. How much planetary / moon/ orbital / rotation or movement is there? I didn't think any, but have noticed some other things moved around before too, but I didn't ask about because I thought I was just losing my mind.
