I've been discussing this with
@Dave, but figured I should share with everyone.
Why I can't recommend a game in which I have nearly 1200 hours of playtime:
There are a lot of serious flaws in this game. Not just alpha-related bugs, like the drones that fall through the planet or the PoIs that don't regen, but seriously massive balance and design flaws. The fact that it's not possible to, through intelligent base design, build your way around two or three people attacking five bases (for a total of 210 defensive turrets) without cheesing the system and building your generators and core behind un-assailable ground is mind boggling to me. One of the things that I liked the most about Empyrion was that it was a great platform for exploration, survival, and design - but if the design portion can be defeated so easily and completely by parking one decoy ship in range, then that takes out a third of the potential of the game. And, since we're level 25 and have been to most, if not all, of the planets, there's very little exploration aspect left (not to mention is fecking tedious on size class 4 and 5 planets); and with heavy armor and decent weapons, the biggest challenge to survival tends to be forgetting to eat and/or running out of O2. Or stoned PoI running, but that's more dangerous for my teammates than it is for me, really.
Design was all I really had left. Absolute turret/weapon maximums regardless of vessel size means that ship design theory is really limited to two schools of thought - the "giant hunk o' cheese" school, and the "tiny maneuverable mosquito" school - and Gas' two hour long stomping by XPA shows which one works and which doesn't, rather decisively (as if the three times the Malphas was slagged in combat weren't enough). Aside from miners/harvesters and small, fast scouting vessels, HVs are completely useless these days. Adding combat steel blocks to their component list but not adding to their thruster pool has created a horrible diminishing returns situation where you can never have enough thrusters to move your added armor while also keeping those thrusters safe - and they all have so few hp that if you don't jacket them in completely, you'll be immobile within seconds of the fight starting. And that's before the fact that they sink over water, they can't handle fields of rocks, they get stuck on cacti (that don't even provide wood when cut down), they can't go around or through trees, and all of the other crap they've started doing.
Combine all of this and it starts feeling like talent trees in WoW. Sure, you could choose any talents you wanted. Unless you wanted to be effective, then you had to pick these very specific talents, in this order, with this armor, and these weapons, and these supporting party members, and that's it. Any deviation from these directives and you can kiss any chance of being effective goodbye. In Empyrion's case, however, it's:
If you want to be effective, you have to keep most of your stuff in PvE playfields, because PvP playfields are just too vulnerable. No combination/amount of bases and ships can defend a base against live attackers, so having multiple bases is a detriment. This means, sadly, that being in a faction with your buddies is more of a hindrance than it is a benefit, because you either all have to use the same base in PvP territory or have all of your bases in PvE space, because if any one of you is logged on, all of your stuff is vulnerable. In fact, you can't even have alliances with your friends, outside of factions, because any time someone's allies are on, everybody's offline protection is deactivated, which means the only way you can have bases in PvP space without everything being extremely vulnerable to the point of laughability, is to have a complete free-for-all, or just have informal truces with people and manually chart their bases so you don't run into them unexpectedly. If you want to be effective in PvP combat, you have to fly a small, agile CV, with really well protected rocket launchers. Or, you can build whatever you want, but if any of your opponents are playing with a small, agile CV, you'll lose every time.
I just don't like being shown tons of choice, but then railroaded down to one specific, narrow path. So really, unfortunately, running up against XPA has completely destroyed most of the fun I had playing this game. Not because they're bullies, or server locusts, or cheese monkeys taking advantage of exploits, or anything like that. They seem like really nice people. It's just that they've exposed the meta-theorycrafting required to win at the game, and that took all of the creativity out of it. So, now the exploration is grindy hell, there's no survival aspect worth mentioning at this level (and no consequences even if you do die), and no fun creative design. Oh, and if I play with my friends, we're all at a disadvantage. Sounds like a blast.
