Because you can fly and make tactical decisions. The AI runs into asteroids and can't keep their front towards you. If a patrol vessel has the same limits as a player ship, they would have 1/6th the fire power as a player ship.
derek smart is that you? rebalance you say? good luck with that. huge undertaking all by itself. anyway, making shields crappy, or logistically weird, isn't the way to balance against a game bug in the logic with turrets. you have to be wary of the butterfly effect. i dont even engage tovera i couldnt care less about them.
The complete overhaul will derive shield strength from the structure of the ship itself. The stronger your armor, the higher your shield capacity. A large, heavily-armored ship becomes well-shielded while lightweight crafts have weaker shields matching their size. At least that is the plan...
Unfortunately, this only ends in an arms race and is not conducive to increasing the fun of the game. It would be nice if you would focus on the fun in the battles. Because fighting against overpowered opponents as well as automatically destroying everything in no time with a mega killer ship is no fun. It all started with the homing missiles that you couldn't defend against....
Impossible. Fun is different for everyone. Some people enjoy sealclubbing noob players in PvP; Some people play solely to loot as many items as they can; Some people play to build giant city-bases; Most come to fight the good fight against the Zirax. I aim to cater to those who fight against the Zirax (and the city-builders). The only problem is that over half those players don't care about fighting the good fight: They only care about winning the fight. Not the fight itself. They're perfectly happy to win a fight with the lowest investment in materials, time and skill. Which is where the spin-ship meta comes in. I can calculate the average accuracy and damage over time of an entire zirax OPV and scale the CPU, damage, speed and durability of the player relative to their target and adjust the OPV accordingly. Player ships all fit into a nice group average. Then the spin ships came along, and screwed all that up. They could devote more CPU into weapons simply because they used so little for everything else. Which caused terrible performance issues. Heavy Turrets were added to condense firepower into a smaller number of turrets, but that just caused people to pile on extra turrets. Turret and Quantum limits were added to cut down CPU distribution to prevent overuse of turrets, to improve performance and cap ships at an absolute maximum in performance. Shield Capacitors and Chargers were added and shield values adjusted to accomodate them, allowing modular shields at the cost of extreme mass and higher power consumption at higher density. Ostensibly to make it harder to spin once additional hull and infrastructure are included. The end result is an unwieldy mess. Too many important systems were implemented late, on top of vanilla-ported systems that were flawed to begin with, and a number of early design changes based on feedback from early testers (CPU to turret ratio and forced vanilla compatibility) that compromised the final product. This comes to the eventual overhaul (next year, not this year), which is NOT just a change to the shields. It's a complete redevelopment of Reforged from the ground-up based on the combined feedback over the last 2+ years of RE's development (we've been around that long) that will reduce grind, add better progression and redevelop the CPU system from scratch. There will be less compatibility with vanilla (e.g. new device limits, weapons, thrusters and infrastructure will mean most ships will be severely lacking) and a larger variety of gameplay elements. CPU will be less expansive. You get a starting CPU limit and most ships will fit into your default limit, up to T4s (Excluding weapons and oversized thrusters), with each CPU extender (capped at 2:2:2:2) each add roughly 10% of your default CPU capacity. Ground-based POIs will be equipped with new planet-only turrets specially designed to engage HV and SV, with excessive force being used against CVs (Note: This potentially opens up the possibility of allowing more CV weapons on planets in a fair and balanced manner). As mentioned previously: Shield capacity scales with the density of the ship's armor. That does not apply to recharge rate, which will still come from Shield Chargers. Tier-based hard caps will be applied to all turrets and fixed weapons. Higher tier weapons have smaller caps, ensuring that ships fit within a calculable min and max limit for damage output. You're looking at 25 total weapons for a CV/BA and 8 for HV/SV. That's 1 Detector, 1 Heavy weapon, 2 Medium weapons and 4 Light weapons for HV/SV that you can mix-and-match however you want; and limits of 1:4:8:12 for CV/BA. Because of the fixed maximum min-max a ship can output, the exact effectiveness against an enemy base turret can be calculated for maximum "fun". Spin-ships will not be accounted for in calculations. I can't be bothered trying anymore. Less hitscan weapons. Additional changes will involve the complete replacement of the existing material system and the hardness multiplier so that when a ship weapon says it deals 100 damage, it will deal 100 damage to a block and not 6.66. This means a complete recalculation of all block's HP and every damage modifier on every weapon in the game. The stripping back of the status effect system to remove many of the unnecessary negative status effects since there's just too many and twice as many treatments; replacing them with simplified status effects (Why is Indigestion even a status effect? and 4 broken bone status effects? 4 Radiation status effects? 4 parasites?). Even with the new (1.7) status effects I spent ages working on for this update, we're still operating on vanilla's layout. This is very early in development, so everything is subject to change.
I'm having trouble tweaking this scenario. What determines whether or not a POI uses a double chevron as a map marker as opposed to the default reverse tear drop? I have minor POIs using the chevron and it's making me crazy.
Hi. I have some feedback on the Class system. I'm assuming there are some base-game limitations to how this can work? I find it a shame that the player has to select a Class in the first place, rather than just dynamically getting better with the weapons and tools they use. I guess that might well be a design choice though. Playing with this feature earlier I chose the Solider Class as I like Assault Rifles and Grenade Launchers when attacking a POI. However, despite LOTS of combat I've achieved zero level increase as only Zirax Troops count. In my current game, I'm yet to see a Zirax Troop and the POI's I've raided belong to other factions. So, despite likely hundreds of critters and other foes killed, I've not "levelled up". Additionally of course, it's possible to ally with the Zirax choosing to have Polaris and other factions as enemies for example, it seems odd to limit levelling to ONE unit class (Zirax Troops) from multiple factions and NPC / Critter types. Even with Zirax enemies, all those kills of Zirax-aligned Robots, Ripper Dogs and other Faction units (including Drones) simply don't count, which is a shame. Again, I assume this is some sort of base-game limitation, but the current Class system really doesn't work for me due to the very limited levelling opportunities. Is it possible to have more things count towards levelling? My personal preference would be a more open system with weapons (and tool) skills improving based on damage dealt or kills made. This would be limited by kills vs. the same opponent counting for less the more killed. I.e. the first 10 Spiders killed might improve the skill with a given weapon by let's say 10 points. The next 10 Spider kills might be worth only 5...the next 2, then from then on only 1 point per 10 Spiders. Different potential foes would have different base values, but all would give a diminishing return. The opponent's level would give a bonus to that base score for the increased difficulty. Basically, something like this would allow me to just play the game, and get potential bonuses directly from that gameplay. No "I must use weapon X else it doesn't count" sort of thing. I don't know if the Class system is currently considered a mature feature at this stage, with the mechanics set, or if it's still an evolving thing. As it stands, I'm not sure it's for me, which is cool as I expect plenty of people are enjoying it. I just wanted to give my personal feedback on this feature. Cheers.
got some questions about sv shields. light shield - cpu: 1250 HP: 500. Standard - cpu: 3000 HP: 1000 Heavy - cpu: 6000 HP: 1500. Why is it doubling the cpu but only 50% gain in HP? Hardly a nice linear progression, but ratio wise a backwards step.
On an unrelated note, there's something distinctly wonky about Melee attacks. It's been long documented that many critters and other enemies (Nightmares / Horrors being a prime candidate) can "hit" well beyond their visual melee range. I assume this has been retained in order to make up for AI limitations. I've largely just accepted it at this point as it's been like it for ages. This "feature" often leads to the player being hit when they're simply not in range. We of course counter this as best we can by simply staying further away, if possible. That is horizontally further away, not vertically, as being "hit" while jet-pack jumping 10 metres above your foe is a thing too lol. However, there's another twist on this that I've not really recognised before. As keeping an extended distance from enemies can be a little tricky in the confined spaces present in many POI's, it's often preferable to try to dodge left / right rather than retreat. Forcing them to turn to face you before they can attack. This can be quite effective...usually. Today, I've been using this technique to dodge enemies, but they're still hitting me, despite me being practically behind them when they strike. Example scenario: Nightmare is approaching me fast, I jet-pack jump-dodge to the right - I'm very nimble, thanks to Light Armour and Boosters - while turning to face my enemy. A good, clean dodge with me having the advantage now. However, even though I'm not there any more, the Nightmare still does an attack animation, visually striking empty space where I was a moment before. Despite currently being both behind and quite some distance from the Nightmare's attack, I still take damage. It's like the Nightmare attacks in an extended cone that's almost a full circle, based on this example. With Reforged Eden enhancing the AI controlling these enemies, I wonder if certain default "cheat" settings aimed at helping out the dumber vanilla AI need to be turned down? The AI in this scenario doesn't need the cheat long-range melee attack "bonus". Nor does it need this hugely wide attack arc / cone - if that's indeed what's happening. I love playing as a lightly-armoured and very nimble character. However, when hits are still counting when I'm not there any more, it gets quite irksome. One false "hit" invalidly slowing my character down totally negates such a build. To reiterate, this dodge to the side / manoeuvre to the rear of an enemy tactic has proven pretty solid in the past - it's great vs. Raptors, Spiders and the like in open terrain - these critter's improved speed often makes it preferable over just maintaining distance. However, I seem to be getting hit by melee attackers that I'm behind and their attack is going away from me. So, something is off. Note: I'm playing Single Player on a decent system - good, solid FPS - so I don't think these issues are in any way related to lag / poor performance, but there could of course be some unknown factor I'm not considering. Final thing. I rely heavily on my skill during the early-game when I have poor equipment, so being able to dodge is crucial. Later, when I can tank damage and have ample supplies of meds I can take a different tactic and be a little lazier with my approach. Both can be fun, but in different ways. It's a shame when the tactic relying on my personal skill is negated by unusual enemy behaviours. Love the scenario, needless to say, I'd not spend so much time verbosely providing feedback if I didn't
maybe its a desync thing? but yeah i thnk i mentioned the ground AI is like wolloping. before with good tactics, careful work and enough meds etc, io could go through a poi dying a couple times, now i get splattered. dont even mention the elite zirax plasma guy with an orange beam laser weapon. you aint dodging that and he has more instincts than spider-sense.
ok so like a built in resistance value. wouldnt know that otherwise. also do silver poi respawn? oh heavy laser effects are awesome...i like how they shoot three bolts too per shot. and the bolt is nice special effects good job!
This should all be in the in-game PDA (that nobody reads). Silver respawns if POI regeneration is enabled on the server. And glad you like the heavy laser effect! I tried to make a variety of cool looking weapon effects.
That still doesn't answer the question why shouldn't the player be able to have a similar ship. An AI also can't make a strategic decision to accumulate enough resources (through means of mining, scavenging, piracy/assault, or trade) to build a dreadnought of matching strength, yet for some reason this decision is off the table for the player, being hard blocked by design. It is strange, considering that AI gets its ships for free, and the player has to get the resources for their ships, and it can be tuned to be as hard as a developer wishes. At the same time the tactic of exploiting the (clearly unintended) stupidity of an AI is encouraged, if I got your message right. How do these two add up?
Like I said, if a NPC ship had the same rules as a player ship, then the NPC ship would have 1/6th the firepower of a player ship.
HA, i checked the empyriopedia first. must have missed it. or not easy to find. in terms of index. now if you could only use those custom sounds i have. When i first returned to empyrion and tried RE, i thought the artillery turret sound in space was so cool. i think it was 1.4. changed the dynamic of space comabt for me, because before it felt too quiet, these massive destructive weapons firing and no sound. still think sounds are too soft, but i guess its the 3d effect and distance from the guns firing to you character, because firing them from inside the turret they are loud. also could you look here and possibly offer any idea why this would happen? https://empyriononline.com/threads/weird-sv-flight.99669/#post-450246 never experienced it with any other ship in RE
Hi, I don't know how much control you have over this, but is there any way to stop NPC's from being able to simply walk right through the player? I just had an Abomination run right up to me and merge with me (as horrible as it sounds) then proceed to move with me wherever I went! I entered an elevator block, the Abomination stuck with me, I exited the elevator and dashed down a corridor and it still stuck with me. All this time it was attacking. In the end I was forced to exploit God Mode to un-merge myself from this NPC in order to be able to shoot it. I guess the NPC was just "moving to my position" in order to attack, but it moves to my exact spot...the one I'm currently occupying. Of course, it's not just me they can clip through, they clip through each other too. I had three of these NPC's charging me and, when they got close they all sorta merged together to attack me. Realistically, only one should have been able to hit me, with that one effectively blocking the others. Oh, on another note, those scorpion hatchlings, the tiny ones, appear to have a similar attack range to the large version. There was approximately a block and a half (horizontal) between myself and said scorpion hatching, yet it was still able to hit me. Is there some hard limit for minimum melee attack range do you know? Other than that, having fun raiding POI's, I think the enemies - odd clipping abilities aside - are generally better balanced and not such bullet sponges compared to what they were. Much nicer.
Huge wall of text time again! Mostly hoping to give decent feedback (and maybe some advice to aspiring shipbuilders and boss killers). I'm gushing a little over how insanely good the scenario is right now so bear with me/have some mercy... Work from home has never been harder. So the update is absolutely divine, take any whining with a grain of salt SPOILERS and such so read at your own risk I guess (also just read the PDA, almost everything is there xD I've never had problems finding anything in RE o.0) Background/Setup: I should prolly mention I play with block limits off (eh, design freedom, please don't enforce hardcaps in the future <3 but your scenario, your rules I guess ) and no forcing of exposed thrusters (is that even a setting? If it is I don't like it ;p I like the idea of grav drives from reading too many space navy novels anyway), in a LAN at home, so just two of us playing now. Everything else on. Started new save and copied our stuff over except quants, auxes, etc (played the early game too often to be bothered with it again ). Aaaanyway... Random thoughts: I find it pretty funny that the current state was called an unwieldy mess, because actually I think stuff is incredible right now. Shipbuilding is great and if I wasn't a little tired of it from rebuilding the entire fleet, it wouldn't be too hard to squeeze a fair amount more performance out of 'em. We've mostly been fighting in drone space, killed some zirax of all types on the way (in 2.1 mil cpu ships) and it was pretty easy all things considered, tag teamed a dreadnought (got a quant so yay) but soloing it was perfectly viable if I could be bothered to tweak the ships loadout a little. Tweaking loadouts for specific content is a must if you want to solo ''group content''/''bosses'' I think. Having better shields definitely makes ship-to-ship combat way more interesting and I'm curious to see how this will feel with progenitor shields. One of these days I will build a ship using the battleship shields, but they are so big it's gonna be tricky. Shipbuilding+Explanation: Large digression on making ships because I get the impression (maybe falsely) that newer players don't understand how to make them excel under the umbrella of current game mechanics (but no thruster enclosement forced so maybe I'm just a cheater xD); Made a proper endgame ship hull (3 mil cpu ungunned, she's smaller than my old 2.1 mil hull, but far less armored. Handles very well - can dodge shots so everything is fine.) since we're aiming for endgame here, she will eventually be auxcapped at the very least. And despite not being really built for it, she took hits like a champ. Why? Well, armor. What you do is build out the nose and don't put anything vital there, except the core. Because NPC ships target the core. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that anything but combat steel is armor, xeno-steel is light armor. The HP-to-weight-to-space ratio of anything else is absolutely terrible and not worth using for anything you expect to take hits. But if you build your whole ship out of combat and xeno, she will fly like a brick unless you understand basic geometry. Adding an extra layer of blocks is not a linear increase, it scales way harder and you can't beat that by just adding more thrusters. So gotta build smarter instead, but since NPC ships target the core, you don't need to heavily armor everything. A 5x5 combat steel nose with the core in the center can take a lot of hits, especially if you pay attention and ''tank'' incoming hits with the parts of the armor that aren't shot to pieces - use some xeno to prettify it - give combat steel layers different colours so you can identify when you are about to die, put all sensitive parts in the back of the ship. Fixed guns are to blow up the core, turrets take down shields and strip guns to make the fight a little easier over time. Face front towards enemy at all times, dodge and try to build your ship to be a ''narrow'' target. Sorry for the tutorial xD (The above is also why I asked for much beefier and different types of armor blocks, the problem is concentrating armor to make it really effective instead of just a fail-safe... I shouldn't be damage testing retracted turrets to see if they can work as armor xD) For the rest, you get more yaw/pitch/roll by playing thrusters further away from centre of mass so clever placement makes a huge difference in the performance there. There's not a lot of need to constantly be flying at speed to dodge though, short subtle horizontal/vertical strafing maneuvers work best (use boost). Drone space But yes, drone space. So the fighty content there is absolutely amazing, I've never had this much fun in empyrion - looked around for some ground based interesting POI's but didn't find anything special, that said I didn't look a lot. So space it is. Definitely not the pushovers they used to be. My only gripe is that stuff gets laggy pretty quickly over there. Losing shields is very dangerous, but once you take out the nullifiers everything goes back into pushover territory more or less. The overall fighting balance is great and fun and somewhat dangerous but not overly so if you know what you're doing. After clearing a proper ultra difficulty sector (Rogue-type) we went for the boss; a hive mother. Very interesting fight, grinding down the shield was a lot of work and maybe it's coincidence or maybe there's a phase two, but once the shield went down she spawned a horde of swarmers. This crashed the local co-op server xD I assumed the worst that our ships would not exist when we got back, but they were alive, if quite damaged. She had 20% shield again, maybe as a mechanic, maybe from restarting the server. I hope it's a phase-mechanic a-la fromsoftware games because that's just very cool. Finished her off - loot was great, 100% worth it. If I wasn't super lazy and reconfigured my ship to anti shield turrets only while relying on fixed guns to finish her off, killing her solo wouldn't be an issue. Insanely good job on the balancing here. I don't think we've ever had so many times where we came back from fights with partial damage to the ship instead of being completely pristine. Also I was hoping to find some end-game hacking content here Seemed to make sense in my head but those are just my self-created expectations, still kinda makes sense maybe Trading & Missions: Prolly would be more interesting if we were on a fresh save, but I feel it's sorta unrewarding until it suddenly isn't xD But such is the nature of progression. Grabbed a lifetime supply of things we need and never looked back, so not a whole lot to say. I got the impression that asteroid mining facilities didn't respawn their inventory which was very annoying (I NEED PROMETHIUM xD). But my impression might be wrong, I dunno. Didn't touch the rich asteroid stuff yet, don't need the money Also forgot to buy the drills and fuel in colonist space on the way to drone space hehe. Ground FPS'ing: More toys to use so more ways to manage this. I specifically mention ground fpsing because doing it in space is suicide due to EVA boosters being needed and such. That being said, I feel like a low level infected zirax with a laser gun shouldn't kill me in one or two hits when I have dura heavy armor, adv armor booster, adv multi booster and a regular multibooster (and adv mobility), HP nanite, HP implant, royal dino stew, sprays and infinity healing items. It's bad enough they tend to spawn in perfect anti-infantry combos of regular shooters, laser shooters, rocketers and flamethrowers. Then again, I kill them in one hit too, so time-to-kill both ways seems a little extreme - but especially the green laser rifle boys are just incredibly lethal. Also pretty, pretty, pretty please with sugar on top and caseful of money under the table, can you nerf the heck out of the flamethrower audio? My cats have learned to identify and pre-emptively leave the room during ground POI assaults due to the heart attacks they get every time a flamethrower goes off xD The new nuggets (tungsten, etc): God I hate these so much xD I guess this is something experimental but it's so incredibly glitchy (never been yeeted to the surface so often), hard to find (prolly on purpose), hard to mine. I think I understand why this is interesting to experiment with (presumeably the auto-targeting of mining turrets). But I just really dislike the implementation, as does my buddy. Still, not everything can be perfect. Other things: Good god, the new shield things guzzle fuel like mad. I'm happier to find a promethium or ice asteroid than a gold one these days. Then again, if I want my ship to perform like crazy, I guess it's fair she drinks fuel like mad. I have 10 autominers on promethium (never deplete) and 40 hydrogen extractors. It's barely enough xD The hacking minigame is a cool idea, but the implementation is a bit wonky. Time between steps is very long and the dialogue escapes the text box *and* gets unreadably small. It's really hard to keep interest in what I'm doing. I get that it should be immersive but the time between steps should prolly just go out the window as it feels less like a minigame and more like a waiting game instead, which is a shame since the system is quite cool. Final thoughts: Finally ran out of stuff to say! Just kidding. I can't stress enough how good the scenario is right now. You guys are doing such a fantastic job and I can't wait to explore every territory, every homeworld, kill every boss-type enemy, build more ships, etc. Please don't let detractors or whining discourage you. I've spent some time on the balance team of an established RTS game and if there's one piece of wisdom I can share from that it's that no matter how good a job you do, the way that people will react to it can make you think you're uploading videos of kitten executions instead of trying to make things better xD People resist change, it's just the way of things. Thank you so much for your time and effort on RE PS: Some things I forgot; With the harder enemies the screenclutter from so many missiles etc can make it very hard to see what you should dodge. Not sure if there's anything that can be reasonably done against this. Or if this even needs to be remedied xD Desync (invisible ships that show up properly again once you go to their ''old'' location) happens quite often in Drone systems, guessing since they're so busy. Could be a local issue. Prolly a base game problem. Dunno if this is still an issue, but co-op works perfectly fine if you are actually in LAN together. Maybe there's a clue here to fix it for others if it's still problematic. Spinning ships with invisible walls after coring them can be fixed by slapping on your own core and turning them on-off. Was very happy to discover this. CV Laser turrets won't fire against shielded bases in atmosphere no matter what I do. xD They shoot everything else just fine.
