From a MP/PvP perspective: I like the idea of having some sort of limiting factor for how many devices one can place on a ship and have it function optimally. The main reason I like this is that it will increase variety in the sizes/types and armaments of player ships you'll encounter. Currently, most PvP ships are outfitted with the max weapon count of all weapon types, enough thrusters to achieve an arbitrary thrust value for each direction that feels good to the builder, and enough RCS to achieve a very high turning rate. Wrap the whole thing in as much armor as you can without slowing down the thrust or maneuverability, and most serious PvP ships of the same class size have roughly the same capabilities (ignoring edge cases like ultra-small builds with no armor and minimal weapons that are just built to be hard to hit). With the addition of a limiting factor like this CPU system, I hope to see tanky behemoths with every weapon imaginable that lack the ability to maneuver like an F-35, and also smaller less well armed ships that have superior maneuverability, ships that specialize in a single weapon type and focus on being able to out-fly their opponents, multi-purpose vessels that come with some cargo, crafting, and repair capabilities at the expense of being slower or having less weaponry available, etc. I'm hoping this will be balanced well enough to apply to SV/HV/CV equally. If this is the way things are going to go, it will probably necessitate a balance pass of weapons too. All weapons will have to be fairly effective or they'll be universally excluded from future builds. Where BA is concerned, I would recommend not having a high CPU cost for things like constructors and furnaces, but have the main CPU drain of a base be it's turrets. Example: T1 CPU BA would be able to equip a full set of projectile turrets, or a mix of turret types but not max count. A T2 CPU BA would be able to equip a full set of projectile and missile turrets, and a few energy turrets or an artillery. A T3 CPU BA would be able to equip a full set of turrets, but not have much CPU left for anything else. And a T4 CPU would be required to have a fully armed BA with excellent crafting capabilities. Having the higher CPU cost of large turrets would make it more difficult for people to build defense tower/satellite type BAs with a full load of weapons as throw away area defense installations. It could still be done, but they would only be effective against SVs primarily unless they invest significant resources into them (like the rare components for T3-4 CPUs). Any plans on the CPU extension devices being targetable for turrets? That could add an interesting layer to combat as you ship is damaged (your ship can take so much damage that all it's systems are less efficient), and add incentive for using backup CPU extenders, in case your primary set gets destroyed. Also great incentive to not place them next to the core. If they aren't to be targetable, essentially all that happened is the core got bigger.
Seriously, what are you expecting ? They should build paper turtles to fight in groups ? We can't go to Mach 1... bullets fly much faster than ships, so only way to avoid being destroyed is to strafe, or to "tank". CPU restricts both blocks and thruster numbers. As for bases I don't even see the utility of CPU : they don't move anyway.
(didnt read 16 pages of posts) Does this affect POI building at all? Do the Zirax et al suffer penalties if the POI is not designed with CPU in mind?
Hello, I have not read anything here only in English "turn off" search. It only appears once (for the entire system). If my behavior is considered impolite, then you are welcome to delete my post. I hereby complain that switching off devices does not release any CPU! In a video I had heard that excessive CPU consumption can have an impact on the engines. Some of my ships have an atmospheric switch. This releases additional nozzles to leave the atmosphere of a planet with high cargo. Now I thought about turning off other engines and RCS to direct CPU power to the extra jets. You know that from the Enterprise "Laforge, direct the energy of shields to warp drive ..." or something. Will that happen? Then I noticed that the small "cargo box" as well as the big boxes require 47 CPU. I understand that the controller elements and extensions need CPU but the separate boxes should not need a CPU. If someone inadvertently has a pack of chewing gum in their pockets, could the spaceship crash because that should have CPU usage then, right? Such boxes are usually used as decorations and then have to go away o: Please do not misunderstand me, this "cargo box" should continue to have weight, also for the content, but please no CPU usage. Who does not complain, must expect that the world goes down. I seem to have waited too long and hoped too much o: Hallo, ich hab hier nichts gelesen nur mal in Englisch "ausschalten" suchen lassen. Es taucht nur einmal auf (für das gesamte System). Sollte mein Verhalten als unhöflich aufgefasst werden, dann könnt Ihr gerne meinen Beitrag löschen. Ich moniere hiermit folgendes: Das Ausschalten von Geräten setzt keine CPU frei! In einem Video hatte ich mitbekommen, dass ein übermäßiger CPU Verbrauch einen Einfluss auf die Triebwerke haben kann. Einige meiner Schiffe haben einen Atmosphärenschalter. Dieser schaltet zusätzliche Düsen frei, um die Atmosphäre eines Planeten mit hoher Fracht verlassen zu können. Nun dachte ich daran, andere Triebwerke und RCS auszuschalten um die CPU-Leistung auf die zusätzlichen Düsen zu leiten. Man kennt das ja von der Enterprise "Laforge, leiten Sie die Energie von Schilden auf den Warpantrieb ..." oder so. Wird so etwas kommen? Dann ist mir aufgefallen, das die kleinen "cargo box"en genau so wie die großen Boxen 47 CPU benötigen. Ich verstehe ja, dass die Controllerelemente und Extensions CPU benötigen aber die separaten Boxen sollten doch keine CPU benötigen. Wenn jemand versehentlich eine Packung Kaugummi in der Tasche hat, könnte das Raumschiff abstürzen, weil die ja dann auch einen CPU-Verbrauch haben sollte, oder? Solche Kisten dienen mir meistens als Dekorationen und müssen dann ja weg o: Versteht mich bitte nicht falsch, diese "cargo box" soll weiter hin Gewicht haben, auch für den Inhalt, aber bitte keine CPU-Auslastung. Wer nicht meckert, muss damit rechnen, dass die Welt untergeht. Ich hab anscheinend zu lange gewartet und zu viel gehofft o:
This is my first post on the forums. I have 2000 hours playing this game and enjoy it. I have 2 observations. 1> Blocks using CPU is kind of ridiculous. 2> Shield CPU usage is insane and ridiculous. Everything else seems like it will be interesting. I am waiting for the final balance to see what happens. The ships I currently have built will require a lot of work to bring in line. I may just scrap them all and start all over again. The Devs have been improving the game since I started playing. I appreciate the effort put forth. Also I understand that they are a small company. So cut them some slack after all it is only a game.
Please take the stockblueprints and adjust the CPU Balace so that ALL these structures get along with an Tier 1 CPU ... then you have good values and not something like here at the Polaris (CV_Prefab_Tier 2) :-((((
You really need to eliminate the standard building blocks and decor counts from CPU. What in blue blazes does that accomplish other than absurdity?
Well, it is at first, but my tactic here is to continually evolve the design, you can rip sections off and make it look more like a ship once it gets into space. Or just land it on another planet and make it a base again. It might not be perfect for combat but it is in fact entirely useful as a ship, because most of the real advantages of bases vs. ships aren't implemented in Empyrion, thus a ship that looks like a base is plenty effective. Most of my home-built CV's tend to look like a big hangar with wings on it anyway, so building a warehouse on the ground, flying it into space and adding wings is not so hard. I've only tried the "single thruster" tactic to get it into orbit once, when I was trying to leave prior to having much neodymium. I chose to build a warp drive instead of all 6 thrusters.
I worry with increased restrictions will restrict variability of design. Restrictions too tight and designs become very uniform with little innovation, restrictions too low and they become irrelevant. Rather than a hard ON/OFF switch to govern it I'd rather see a varying scale of severity of restrictions along with the ON/OFF switch. Adjusting either the CPU pool values for each tier or a % modifier for block/component CPU cost. Being a sandbox survival game players should always have varying severity sliders for mechanics as well as an ON/OFF toggle. Some players may even wish to enact harsher restrictions than the base rules will offer. I see nothing wrong with any added restriction mechanics as long as players retain the ability to fine tune the severity of these restrictions (from 0 to x2 or more) allowing for a diverse range of play through experiences.
It will all depend on the balancing, like most aspects of any game. Restrictions generally improve variability because you can't make a Swiss army knife ship that can function in any role. Restrictions too hard and you make very specific builds the only viable ones. And I totally agree blocks shouldn't use CPU. It doesn't take a super computer to figure out how to run a chunk of steel. If it doesn't use or generate power, it probably shouldn't use CPU.
I disagree about bases! The CPU could be a targeting factor for base defense turrets. With higher level CPU faster turret rotation and more accurate aiming could be a huge thing. Right now most poi/base defenses can be stymied by a maneuverable tank flying sideways and circling the base. With a high CPU a good addition might be smart defenses, the ability for turrets to predict rather than simply trail their targets.
As someone who has only been playing this game for about a month, my opinion as it stands right now would have to be negative toward CPU. It seems like the devs are implementing a system that is going to be a BEAR to maintain and constantly update balancing concerns. Seems to me that there are a lot of other areas that could use that time and attention. Only my humble opinion and I could be totally wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.
You are not alone in your opinion. I Have ~2000 hrs in and am scratching my head wondering what the point is.
I agree balancing is going to be a bear. Luckily they can offload the responsibility for that to server operators. For single player you can simply turn it off, same for MP. But if you choose to use the system on your MP server, tweaking the CPU costs of each device via the config file shouldn't be too hard. As far as bases gaining improved/predictive tracking etc. based on CPU, that would likely entail a lot of coding to make happen. It would be much easier to simply increase the projectile speeds of weapons you want to be more accurate. Losing CPU efficiency could affect rate of fire, turret rotation speed, reload times without much effort. I assume this is what the efficiency stat does already. I don't mind having small fast ships that can evade most weapons fire, but to achieve that kind of speed and maneuverability you should have to sacrifice having heavy armor and a full weapons compliment. Example: SV with t1 CPU could equip 4 homing launchers and enough thrusters to achieve great mobility with 1 layer of steel armor. Upgrading to heardened steel armor would require more thrusters/rcs to maintain superior maneuverability, which would require T2 CPU. Adding additional weapons also requires more CPU. Now it would be possible to go with the T1 CPU and take the efficiency hit without much trouble if you overbuilt your thrusters enough that they still perform well enough. That would probably require extra power generators as the efficiency goes down and thruster count goes up, which adds more mass and decreases efficiency more. And the result is that you can't just keep adding more and more devices until you achieve the ideal stats for everything because of diminishing returns. I personally think this is a good idea because you won't have generic "combat SV" that can fill the role of SV combat fighter and BA assault craft and interceptor at the same time. Also I'm hoping weapons can be balanced to the point where which ones you use is a personal preference and not just everybody uses homing rockets and lasers cuz all other weapons are junk and only useful for drawing fire away from other critical components etc.
I haven't had much time to read through all the threads related to CPU so I can't gauge the public feedback so far, but surely the purpose of having so many extenders and that they are 2 blocks wide is the build restrictions this creates. This stops us making tiny T4 ships. My suggestion only added 1 block to the total block count: 13 in the live scenario and 14 in my alternative. This is also assuming that you have the redundancies of each level. In my musings I did consider the 1 block scenario but this looked like it would be too easy to abuse. If you wanted a T4 ship then all you would need would be 3 blocks (4 including the core). This would be waaaay to easy to build a small, nimble SV covered in guns and RCS. So this is a 1-block: 1-device ratio scenario (ignoring the core): T1 (core) = 1 block / 1 device T2 = 1 block / 1 device = 1 block space needed for this tier T3 = 2 blocks / 2 devices = 2 blocks space needed for this tier = 3 blocks space needed with previous level redundancies T4 = 3 blocks / 3 devices = 3 blocks space needed for this tier = 6 blocks space needed with previous level redundancies ...and this is a 2-block: double device scenario (ignoring the core): T1 (core) = 1 block / 1 device T2 = 2 blocks / 1 device = 2 blocks space needed for this tier T3 = 4 blocks / 2 devices = 4 blocks space needed for this tier = 6 blocks space needed with previous level redundancies T4 = 8 blocks / 4 devices = 8 blocks space needed for this tier = 14 blocks space needed with previous level redundancies Now, power consumption is off-wack across the board so I was not surprised at how much power these devices need. Again though, if you have the multi-tier redundancies then of course the overall power consumption will be greater and you will be supplying power to things that aren't needed.
You'd have to drop the tier system though in favor of a 'capacity' system, otherwise your tier levels would get unmanageable. So each extender adds another 1000 CPU (arbitrary number at this point - the true value would need testing and balancing) and you could keep adding extenders to get a customized CPU capacity. This is nice alternative. What is nice with this system is that we already have it - cargo controllers and extenders. No need to invent something new for players to get their heads around. Once they understand one of these systems they will understand the other.
