Well, I'm stranded. I passed a little too close to a Zirax supply station, so they sent their drones after me and called the dreadnought. I thought I would hide my ship under the TOPS brewery between the 4 dirt clods on the underside of the station. Since I wanted to continue the story mission I jetpacked into the station to talk to the brewmaster. Yeah, that was a mistake, I should have flew away until I knew the dreadnought was no longer hunting me. You can guess what happened to my ship, and now I stuck inside the brewery until the dreadnought decides to leave. ... which is not going to help much, because I have no way to leave the brewery. (mumble, grumble, snarl).
I'm really not sure about the new Zirax PVs. Fair enough if Zirax territory is infested with them, but the starting solar system? Not sure. I would actually like to see more of the low level PVs on the planets, the basic ones up in space with destroyers and especially dreadnought pushed out to other systems. It isnt that I cant deal with them - I have a reliable dreadnought killer CV now, and I have a level 15/T3 CV that can reliably kill anything else including the Zirax destroyers and pretty much all Zirax space stations (I think). Early on, I now use an armored shuttle SV for my first trip into space because it can survive being shot at before drone get into range for my SV's turrets to shoot back, and it has even survived strikes from a PV's plasma turret. But once off planet, then my priority now tends to be to go somewhere quiet where I can mine in peace, but of course that is boring as hell cos well, apart from wildlife on a nearby moon, the place is utterly dead. I guess if doing the missions, you dont get that luxury. What really annoys me however is all this exposes just how awful the current situational awareness and the hud mini map display is when in space. It really needs a decent elite style 3d element to it. It is pretty much useless if there is a POI or PV almost above or below you (even though it may be 10-15k away). Like I said, I have CVs that are reliable killers of anything that gets thrown at me in space, but they are not ships I like to live in - odd shapes (resulting from their function) makes them unsuitable for planets, then it just also means i have to swap ships regularly, which is a complete pain in the arse when the other one is way over 30ly away (without editing config to extend transporter and jump range). All in all, while part of me welcomes these new threats, I am finding on balance they just badly expose all the other failings.
Started yet another play through... I was going to try Reforged Galaxy again, but it has stopped loading for me, so until I can figure that out, it was back with good ol'vanilla. I decided that it was about time that I tried to play the game without the use other peoples builds through the factory. So, during this playthrough my self imposed rule is that I can only spawn something from the workshop that I personally built. And, so far its been a blast. I set up on an arid planet, weights/vols/cpu enabled. I set player progression to fast, because I personally think the leveling system is somewhat silly. Not sure how shooting 100 Zirax suddenly gives me insight into building a warp drive...but I digress. I did use the wrecked HV to gather my first little bit of materials to build a starter base and get a foot hold. But, it fits in my rules for this game because I fixed it, I didnt bring it into the game from someone elses design. So my first SV: The Buzzard: Because its job is to clean up carrion and refuse from the starter planet to get me going. After clearing a few easy non-combat POIs I was able to get a pretty good amount of ore, and just a wee bit of the "special" stuff, so I was off to a good start materials wise, so I would be pretty flexible with my "build". But then I decided to go full on with it. I built an SV nearly completely out of container extensions in "creative" mode. I wanted the max. No more of this "to and fro" with mining. I wanted something I could go, suck dry at least 3-4 deposits before having to return. I tweaked the thrusters and stuff, added a T2 CPU extender, and actually managed to build a decent looking ship. Has 3 minigun turrets, two gatling cannons, 32k storage. I decided to just use an ammo container. It prevents it from being as modifiable, but it simplifies everything. After I got it flying in creative, I did some detail work, adding flair and made it looks actually pretty decent. In testing, I actually coulnt be happier with my first real attempt. I hit space and got a wee bit of promethium and cobalt, fought a few drones, but I had left my EVA boost, so I couldnt dwell too long in space. The turrets worked well as a warning if anything was getting close, and I didnt get a scratch in space. I then went back to the planet and completely depleted about 5-6 or so ore deposits, and topped out at around 29k storage before the actual tonnage limit was hit. I believe it can lift 142tons, and I used every bit of it. Dont get me wrong...when it was full taking off was slow, and its max cruising speed fell to 40ms. But it moved, and got be home. The problem then was I had nearly 30k in volume, and just 16k in base storage! So, I had to upgrade my base with container extensions. But for that, Ill need to upgrade to T3 CPU to get the full effect. So, that means Neobdymium. I spent some time >in game< hacking my ship up to add a warp drive, slapped some steel plates over it, added the O2 tank I had originally forgotten, and got it flying again. Had to strip a bit of storage, the miniguns, and one turret, but...it flies. Tonight, my goal is to go back to the drawing board and build a Buzzard 2.0, with its warp drive actually designed in, as well as a few tweaks I want to try. In game, Ill end up just salvaging all of the parts to Buzzard 1.o and using it to build the new one. TLR: Using ships from the factory is fun, and I will still do it. But there is something pretty awesome about taking your own creation and seeing it actually work, and work well. Oh, I play on a different computer than I post, so no screen shots of the Ugly Buzzard for now.
Class size is a measure of how taxing the object is on your GPU. It's not a measure of physical size but complexity and how much lag it's going to cause.
Yesterday and today, I have been touching some of my older BP. At one point I had participated in a challenge to build a racing HV and BA for display. Since BA (vanilla) don't have spotlights, I had built a CV as well to compliment the set and toss down some spotlights as part of the complete display. Well, yesterday started with something about covered thrusters, and quickly I was looking at some of my bp that actually use the open shutter windows (which don't block thrusters) for visual effect more than practical protection, such as that racing HV. The shutter windows are there on this particular build for the visual look. So after adding an extender to bring it into CPU compliance, I also removed a couple rcs and added a couple LCD projectors for warnings about the thruster heat entering/exiting the HV. Then after toying around with bringing the HV into compliance, I decided I ought to look at the BA and CV that accompanied it back then.
After doing far too many ruins I am back to building my perfect CV. That's an ongoing infinite project. After turning the Monoloth into a CV and making a mothership for it I realized this was not my playstyle. I do not build bases on planets, not even simple landing pads. Its just too many places to visit, so I just land my CV, visit the POV and go on my merry way. Too bad, but scap one Monolith. Then I made a ship consisting of mothership and planetary lander. That was great, but... do to unbearable hassle while loading 2 HVs and an SV from a mothership to a lander EVERY SINGLE TIME I wanted to visit a planet... I scapped another one. I was also introduced to the joy of asteroid mining so the need of having only a small ship landing on a planet vanished. In the end I just landed the (rather large) mothership and did all the transferring and exploring on the planet. Third try. (Well third of my current tries, there were many, many more...) Here we have a medium sized mothership (size class 4) built around something that was inspired by @spanj 's Ground Pounder. (Hi Spanj! Like your videos!) So the idea was to explore the planet with the mothership and then do any fighting with the ground-pounder-thingy. Works quite well, has a few issues here and there, which are being worked on, but I expected as much. The ship has the preliminary name "Thargoid Mothership" because of... well... Elite. I refer to the 1990's version of Elite, that was the only version I saw Thargoids in. (Didn't play the others much, but that's a different story) Here you can see the GroundPounder - I need a different name, that's Spanj's copyright... So here you can see the... Attack... Ship... detached. It is more or less just a frame for 12 downward facing projectile weapons and a shield generator. While brutally effective that eats ammo like candy. The white column is combat steel around some redundant generators so the AI-turrets think its a cool thing to shoot at. The only thing that is really special with this ship are the boarding ramps which are angled sideways so there is more room to maneuver inside the rather largish hangar. There are two ramps, one at the front and one at the rear plus two openings where SVs can come in. Oh yeah, and it has one giant block built Pharos symbol on it.
Compliance.....yeah. In the beginning, everything I did was in compliance, Of course, there wasn't much to comply with and I didn't have a real grasp of the command console or the config file. Now, a great many BPs are non-compliant. While I'm not a big fan of CPU, W/M and other balance restrictions, I fear I may have to go back to refit those items as I was hoping to create a workshop of my own. I'm not sure non-compliant BPs would be acceptable or allowed. The HV looks great btw.
There are a great many non-compliant BP on the workshop. And some of those that "comply" may comply with the standard game, some may comply with the Reforged Galaxy mod, and some may comply with both. So as for the workshop, I wouldn't worry about it. It is mostly a personal goal that my stuff comply with vanilla. I figure that if I make my stuff compliant with the standard game, then anyone else who uses my blueprints can expect at least that much. Then if they go use a mod that changes the rules of the game, well, I cannot possibly plan for every possible way that someone might alter the core rules of the game. Part of the reason I play Reforged is to decide if I even want to have a subset of my collection that complies with the alternate rule set. If I ever did that, I would try and mark those as Reforged builds, possibly trying to add a requirement for Reforged. But for now, my builds for Reforged Eden are focused primarily on my own experiment with Reforged, none of those are going to the workshop unless I change my current position.
Alot are probably non compliant now because of some random 'minor' CPU tweak that someone at Eleon did on a whim. Stuff that was just inside a limit is now outside...
Thanks @dpburke2 & @Khazul I appreciate the input. I'm not sure just what I'm going to do about it, but you've helped me a lot. Meanwhile, I sort of took a break from Project Eagle. Actually, the project is in a Freedom Mode game. I simply went off-world for a brief adventure. I came across a Zirax frigate. I powered my shield, armed my weapons (of which I have an abundance) and attacked. I destryed the frigate, but not before taking substantial damage to the forward section of my ship. One thing stood out to me. I saw that some of the bridge windows were damaged. What was not immediately obvious was that some of them were blown out completely! It seems to me an alarm should have sounded that I was losing oxygen, just as it does when power is suddenly lost. It didn't affect me as I was in helmet. There were other areas where hull integrity were lost like some fixed weapon locations that could not be replaced due to non-compliance. I just plugged the holes and returned to Alpha. I forgot to mention the frigate fired first as I was drilling an asteroid under its watch.
@Track Driver You can STILL have BP in your Factory that are not CPU Compliant. Only note it at the Top of the description that they are not. No further Headaches. There are thousands of BP in the Factory of which their creators don't care/have forgotten/have left there which do not tell anything about yes or no (CPU). So your non-compliance BP are for a majority of the Players who do not like/use CPU
Spent some more time with my building. My first "Buzzard" SV was a great success in my opinion, but it wasnt warp capable. But using it I was able to get enough Iron/Copper/Silicon/Promethium/cobalt to last me a long while. But I still needed that neobdymium. I had gotten spoiled on swamp biomes that have neo/sathium rocks, so I realized I would need a warp capable Buzzard. So I spent some time building a new Buzzard 2.0. I had to drop the cargo down to about 19k (which is still plenty). It wasnt as "pretty" of a ship, but it functioned and I was able to get to another asteroid field and get all the Neo I could need. I did die once while mining when I didnt get back in the ship fast enough, but the Buzzard 2.0 saved the day by taking out the offending drone with its three minigun turrets. So that was pretty satisfying to spawn back in nearby and see that drone go boom. The next challenge was a decent starter CV. And with this I struggled like crazy. My first two attempts looked horrid, and were just boxes with thrusters. Hated it. Finally, after a few hours of banging my head on the keyboard I decided that I needed to just focus on what I wanted. A warp capable CV that could hold a mining HV on the top. I like to process ores on the go, so I fit 2 advanced constructors, two cargo controllers with around 200k each, an ammo controller with about 30k storage, a gravity generator, a few small cargo boxes for gear/fuel, two fridges and a food processor, and a bed. I didnt muck around with grow plots and all that, because historically in my play throughs I dont live on the "get out of the system" ship long enough to really need it. I was also able to slap 3 minigun turrets and 6 cannon turrets on it...so that was nice. The fun part came when I spawned the ship in (After learning about forbidden blocks...had an alien crew terminal and two personal cargo lockers). I realized I didnt add a wi-fi or a detector on it, so had to do some work in real game to build these. It works. It isnt the best looking ship. But it flies, can defend itself from drones, and will process ores on the go. Came in with spare CPU at Tier 2. It doesnt have a shield (because I forgot to add it, nor add space for it. All in all, I learned a great deal about building a CV, and that a lot can be done with deco blocks and just adding on decorations in the way of building out/up/down using regular blocks. It gives one a real fine appreciation for the builders that put out those highly detailed ships that are insanely textured and detailed. My next step will be building a mining HV to dock to the top of it, and then learning how to add textures and details that further prevent my creations from just looking like decorated cubes and rectangles. But...it works.
I have been using the Barracuda quite a bit and decided that I should downgrade it to a LVL 10 CPU tier 2 version for earlier deployment. The hull has been downgraded to steel blocks, since it is much lighter many of the thrusters were removed. All windows were downgraded. The shield generator was removed and the space left open for when the player can find/make one. It still has the same storage space. So, here is is. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Barracuda Starter
Yesterday I was working a lot on my new savegame tool (shameless advertising ahead) that will allow you to copy your bases and vessels from one single player savegame to another. Please help me test here: https://empyriononline.com/threads/...y-bases-ships-from-one-game-to-another.96142/ Also I decided to get rid of the Zirax menace from my solar system. But I failed so many times trying to take down frigates and corvettes. Never felt so helpless. Those huge beast destroyed my vessels like lego blocks. So now after a lot of smelting ores simultaneously in my bases and trading a lot to buy and build large optronics stuff I have to wait until my "IW Topaz T4 Destroyer" is built. 9 hours but it'd be worthy (now 3 hours left after spending time clearing Zirax POI next to my inverted pyramid base). I only tried the xeno version but I highly recommend this desstroyer. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2210199927 No more losing to Sunat or Periat class. Hopefully.
Just need a t3/lvl15 cv with a load of rocket turrets and cannons on it. Easily kill pretty much anything you will find in space except for the dreadnought of course. I use this thing for this purpose (also good at trashing ground POIs too - 10 forward rocket turrets, 10 forward and downward cannons). Can even kill those shielded destroyers without loosing its shield. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2254540124
Wanted to comment: I really like this design. It has a real "mass produced" look to it. And I mean that in a good way! It looks like a design that is completely utilitarian as opposed to massively personalized. It reminds me of a solid "ship of the line".
