Whine about Empyrion thread
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
Dave
Staff member
I hate hate HATE the scan function. It makes it WAY too easy to find stuff. You can't hide at all. Anywhere. Not in space and damn sure not on a planet. And if something like, say, your 96k sathium PvP ship that you haven't used yet runs out of power and the OLP goes down, well, it'll just be gone.
Pretty close to being done with the game. I can't find any fun in it any more. Even PvP combat is just sitting back and letting your turrets fire for a half hour or more. There's no stealth. You either have to go PvP overwhelming power or stay in PvE space because you're fucked.
Pretty close to being done with the game. I can't find any fun in it any more. Even PvP combat is just sitting back and letting your turrets fire for a half hour or more. There's no stealth. You either have to go PvP overwhelming power or stay in PvE space because you're fucked.
GasBandit
Staff member
I understand and I feel for you, I'm frustrated with the meta as well. If I could just make one tiny suggestion though... you built in the busiest PvP sector, and did not build far enough out. 30+km at minimum, more if you're on the ecliptic plane, is my recommendation... and that's if you're in a backwater.
Also, the logs showed me you parked it 1km from your base, so the base couldn't defend it because it was out of weapons range.
If it's any consolation, the person who took it took it intact, and given that it isn't who you feared it might be, they might be convinced to give it back.
Yeah... outside of finding a good PvE server, I'm starting to be pretty much done as well. I'd love to run some of the new PoIs, but I'm not going into PvP space again, just to be ridiculed. Fuck that.
Dave
Staff member
I was also under the impression that once you got more than 20k out it got glitchy.
GasBandit
Staff member
Glitchy, yes, but it's all visual stuff for the most part. Most of our PvP bases on renntech were 30k out.
The coordinate logs told me a different story. I don't want to post coordinates in an open forum, but the distance between them was just over 1000 meters. Now, maybe the ship was a couple hundred meters wide, and maybe the base was, and that might bring the distance down to the ship being in weapons range, but you also have to remember that the approaching aggressor has the same weapons range as the base... so if the ship is even 2 or 300m from the base, he can angle his attack in such a way that he's only in range of the ship and not the base... and then once the ship has no weapons, he can use it as a shield to conceal his approach from the base turrets, get close, cut the core out and put in his own.
Another tip for anyone else - you can extend the range of your base's OPD field just by building a line of blocks out as far as you want the shield to go in that direction. You can make it cover an area the size of gargantua if you want, with just a single line of blocks in each direction.
But if you guys want to experience the content without the PvP danger, I can give you guys a copy of last night's save backup, you can throw it in the saves/games/ subfolder of your empyrion install, and play it single player. It won't have my config mods (flashlights, solars, custom merchants, etc) but you could run POIs and stuff solo.
GasBandit
Staff member
Getting em wedged into the existing sector map might prove difficult. And even if I can do that, it'll take me several more nights of work to generate the yamls for the new planets. But I'll think about it.
GasBandit
Staff member
No. It's far too popular with everyone else, and finding asteroids without it is damn near impossible. Unless Eleon puts in a better system, I'm keeping /scan.
You might be interested to know that I actually toned it down from the start - the default settings for /scan was 10km... I reduced it to 7.
GasBandit
Staff member
That part is pending an update from the mod author. It's SUPPOSED to be 7km in SPACE, and 1km on planet... but after the changes in 8.5 to how the sectors yaml handles naming conventions, the mod can no longer tell the difference between a space playfield and a planetary playfield, so it assumes everything is a planet. To fix it in space, I had to increase the planetary scan range. Xango says he's working on a fix but that it might take a while.
And yes, I realize that, at current, doing a /scan from an equator on a size class 3 planet will reveal the entire hemisphere to you, from pole to pole (because class 3 planets are 8x16 km)
That's how VAC has been able to find people on bonanza immediately upon arrival thus far.
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I’m actually ok with the /SCAN range being reduced to 5, or even 3km. Enough to be useful, but not too cheat code-y.
Alternatively, as Gas says, the best base is 5 bases, and all that, and it could be that they should be designed so that your good ships can nestle in them like a moray eel in coral, or a clownfish in an anemone. Make those attackers work for their conquest.
—Patrick
Alternatively, as Gas says, the best base is 5 bases, and all that, and it could be that they should be designed so that your good ships can nestle in them like a moray eel in coral, or a clownfish in an anemone. Make those attackers work for their conquest.
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
True, I do say that (and it is correct), but even with 5 bases, a found base, undefended by players, is a dead base. It's only a matter of time, because a ship can always find a way to attack so that all its turrets are shooting only a small fraction of the total turrets of a base. The base will be whittled down turret by turret, and then taken. Eleon needs to increase the range of base turrets by, like, 50% at least.
Range isn’t the problem. Base turrets already trump CV turrets by a noticeable margin in both distance and damage dealt. The problem is that (in space, at least) the attacker can always bring more turrets to bear on the base than the base can retaliate with. In fact, it would take six bases to equal just one attacking CV, since each base would have to be placed so as to have its full complement of weaponry facing one of the 6 directions (up/down/right/left/front/back) in order to just equal the number of turrets a single CV can bring to bear...except that bases can’t carry fixed weapons, and the attacker can (gasp!) bring more than one ship, sooo...
—Patrick
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
The range difference between CV and Base turrets is negligible, currently. The range increase I specify is to combat the exact facing problem you're talking about.
It won't stop 3 people in CVs from taking out one undefended base, but it will make it much more dangerous for a single CV to take out a cluster of 5 bases... whereas currently it's entirely trivial.
GasBandit
Staff member
You and me being on at the same time isn't a very common occurrence. Is it a sensitive discussion, or one we could just have here?
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, I'd really like there to have been six blades instead of four, but, welp, MY OWN LIMITS say no to that. So what I'd been doing is putting a CV to do the up and down parts. I've temporarily redeployed those CVs to stop Dimento from swiping my gold asteroids, though.
I'm also working on a CV version of the Orbital Defenseblade, but I've not had the time to actually get it done, what with Stardew and all.
You don’t even really have to go with 6. Even alternating horiz/vert/horiz/vert would’ve given vastly better vertical coverage without sacrificing too much of your horizontal coverage (not positive, but even 4xVert would’ve probably been better).
It’s true that a cube is probably the best shape to cover all directions if you want to address all 6 planes (because duh cube=6 planes), but if you’re going to limit yourself to only 4 after building your main base, then your best bet in 3D space is going to be a tetrahedron, not a rhombus.
—Patrick
It’s true that a cube is probably the best shape to cover all directions if you want to address all 6 planes (because duh cube=6 planes), but if you’re going to limit yourself to only 4 after building your main base, then your best bet in 3D space is going to be a tetrahedron, not a rhombus.
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, like I said, I'm filling the gaps with CVs, so I'll have a cube soon enough anyway.
If only the turrets in this game were like space engineers' turrets, which were designed in such a way that they had absolutely no problem pointing straight up.
I've been running a co-op dedi-server for Aislynn and I for the past few days. It's fun... it sure would be nice if, every time I get out of the cockpit of my SV, the game didn't empty the weapons of all of their ammo. It would also be nice if leaving the dediserver running all night would actually progress time forward - I can't tell if it didn't age overnight, or if it did, and everything is just broken. Grrr.
GasBandit
Staff member
I got in a CV duel last night. That was over within 3 minutes of it starting, because we both got lagshot immediately. I lost all my ammo, but was otherwise fine, and he lost his warp drive. Both ships otherwise completely intact. And we both had designs that were supposed to protect against such nonsense, and were both class 2. In a playfield that had literally nothing else to cause lag (Mustafar Orbit).
I gotta say, the shitty netcode has me this close to throwing in the towel.
I gotta say, the shitty netcode has me this close to throwing in the towel.
I'm done until they get some of this stuff cleaned up. Having all of my ammo constantly disappear when I get out of my seat was the deal breaker for me. We were trying to run a co-op survival game where we conquer each sector before moving on, and we can't even conquer the friggin starter world because every time we get out of the pilot's seat, we lose 6x300 rounds of 15mm, 4x15 rounds of homing missiles, etc. It makes me think they're trying to do something about the fact that when you put a weapon on a ship, it starts with ammo in it - or at least it used to - so people were getting free rounds of ammo. Add this to the fact that on "custom" difficulty settings we were getting absolutely shredded by PoIs - Easy difficulty with the number of drones left at normal, no autominer depletion, normal constructor rates, normal character advancement rate, no requirement to spawn ships at bases - and I mean, just flying somewhat near one non-clustered Advanced Spaceport meant walking home. All of their laser shots went straight for the cockpit - none of those "plinking shots off the armor constantly", no damage to any of my systems (except for splash damage from drone rockets), no weapons damage, just constant barrage directly at the cockpit, good luck mapping the world on foot.
Add that to the fact that ever since 8.5 hit, @Aislynn's average FPS sits around 6 (while I have no problems whatsoever and rarely even break 2GB of RAM usage for the game anymore), and we have a recipe for unplayability. Oh, and if we're both in an SV, and I'm flying, she gets about 10-15 FPS (as opposed to the 3 she usually gets) to my 60, and can almost see what's going on. If she's flying, my framerate drops to 3 and neither of us can see what's going on or do anything about it. We spent 5 minutes upside down in a small pond yesterday, because the ship was sinking then floating then sinking then floating repeatedly and we couldn't "stop the ship" to get out and swap drivers. Once it finally settled enough for us to get out, and I could get in, it took three seconds for "O" to flip the ship upright and take off out of the water.
Maybe the toxic members of the community will get bored and wander off in the meantime.
I was like, you're really arguing over whose work history is more impressive? Then I realized what thread I'm in.
Tell me about it. I just bought an SV.
Though the idea of building a curriculum vitae that's max turrets but under size class 2.0 and resistant to lag shots would certainly be an exercise.
--Patrick
Gave it a shot in SP mode - I can't help it, I like the game and I want it to play well - some things were fixed completely. The ammo thing? Not an issue in SP. That framerate issue Aislynn runs into? Nope - she was playing an SP game right next to me, pulling 30 to 40 FPS in all but the most hectic and drone-infested areas, and a simple relaunch fixed that for hours again. So the memory leak is still there in SP mode, but it takes a lot longer to become a game breaking issue. PoIs are still aiming straight for my cockpit, but were suddenly much, much more survivable - I suspect I was taking lag shots from PoIs before, since the ship would be in perfect shape and I'd be dead. This is some seriously shitty coding.
My biggest problem with POIs isn’t that they lagshot through my armor, it is that their targeting automatically and instantly adjusts for my vector (“leading” me as I fly around, which it is supposed to do) BUT the lag means my ability to adjust my flight path is always slushy and slow, so unless I’m actually pressing the keys in anticipation of where my ship is supposed to be at that moment, the POI gets in all of its shots with a sort of built-in +2 Dex bonus.
—Patrick
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
I don't know what the specs are on your ship, but let me just remind you, if your ship can't exert at least 30m/s² in every direction, you aren't going to be dodging the red lasers, and you better have a couple layers of armor to soak the hits. The green ion cannons should be easy to dodge no matter what, though.
On my exploration vessel? Heh, not worth mentioning. It only gets about 20-30min flight time while in atmo, but I did give it enough oomph to escape a high-G world, @Dave . It’s not meant for POI assault or anything like that, it’s supposed to be juuust tough/fast enough to survive a close call with a POI if it has to while I schlep mats/miner/myself around the galaxy.
—Patrick
Oy vey... I played a single player game to its natural conclusion today. I call it the natural conclusion because I can't honestly think of any other way the campaign would be supposed to end when the only planet that has Zascosium in the entire galaxy is completely covered - and I mean covered - in clusters of heavily defended PoIs... all of them completely covering the 6 small to very small Zascosium deposits. If I had some Zascosium, I could have built a tank to blow some of those PoIs off of the deposits, but I didn't... because it was the only planet in the galaxy that had any. I also had two sectors that were empty aside from trading stations - and since neither of those stations was Gargantua City, they were pretty friggin' lame. But the best part of it? Getting to my destination - base or CV - and needing to pause long enough to take the landing feet off and put them back on so I could dock and get the heck out of dodge.