Empyrion Clips, Highlights, and Screen Shots
- Thread starter Dave
- Start date
I wondered what that was about.
Well, at least it wasn’t one of those GET ON WITH IT battles.
—Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
I recorded (but didn't stream) this from an invisible 3rd person perspective, I'll see if I can't put it together and upload it to youtube tonight.
Also you really need to turn your mic up on your stream
And turn Xellosse' mic down.I recorded (but didn't stream) this from an invisible 3rd person perspective, I'll see if I can't put it together and upload it to youtube tonight.
Also you really need to turn your mic up on your stream
GasBandit
Staff member
Here's the 2 hours of me slowly getting beaten down by XPA. I'd like to say I gave as good as I got... but... Despite all the damage I did, they didn't actually LOSE any ships.
I lost 4 capital ships, got another declawed, and lost my base and its attendant defense structures.
I lost 4 capital ships, got another declawed, and lost my base and its attendant defense structures.
Dave
Staff member
:-(
What keeps happening?
Also, because it's so difficult trying to coach @Dave thanks to his stream delay...
Here. This is where the hub/TS/stuff is located on Ningues. Hope that helps. I left the asteroid belt in the pic to help with getting your bearings.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
OBS keeps refusing to recognize when I'm pushing my push to talk button. If I alt-tab out of the game and highlight OBS, it starts working again. It most commonly happens when I check the server for something. I think Teamviewer has something to do with it.
I've noticed that Windows Notification Center will do something similar.
It pops out to tell me a message, but since I'm in a game it's in the background, but it still sits there in the lower right portion of my screen waiting for me to click a button, but since it's in the background I can't dismiss the button, but since it is intercepting clicks I can't do anything in the lower right portion of my screen in the game until I tab out and back in, etc...
--Patrick
Well...this is what I had built (over the course of about a week and a half) to establish a foothold in PvP space and defend against the (then) threat of RDR:Maybe next time you should be less concerned with perfection such that it prevents you from playing the game
BTW this is a planetary design, I just spawned it in space so it is easier to show off (and photograph). Boxy but safe (you know, like a Volvo, and no, I haven't seen the movie), max turret count, enough room inside to set up shop but not so large that it has an exorbitant materials cost (it's still juuuust small enough to round down to a class 1, in fact). The weapons are arranged so that they have a very wide field of fire so as to defend against an attack from any (terrestrial) direction, 360-degree visibility so I can see at a glance what's out there, and enough SI redundancy that it won't collapse if you take out a wall or something. It's a little taller than I would like, but the thought was that the side-profile vulnerability would be compensated by having enough firepower to discourage landing nearby. The roof even has some deliberate whitespacing to help protect against lag shots.
And I was all ready to plop this thing down. I had enough materials to both build it and set up shop (1-2 cargo boxes of every resource), I had scouted out a good location (in PvP space), and all I was waiting on was to save enough to buy a set of teleporters (dealing in arms was netting me about 50-80k/day without much effort).
And then with only a couple hundred thousand credits to go before I hit my teleporter-enabling two million, XPA came and demonstrated tactics that essentially showed me that everyone on the server was just an amateur, that my base design was garbage (not the guns part obviously, but the defense part), and that I REALLY needed to beef it up to enhance its survival time and take that whole whitespace thing more seriously if I was going to make a more useful design.
And so, almost 3 weeks of more noodling around in creative later (busy with work and family, see the rant thread for much of that story), I refined the design and came up with...
This redesign's base area is 1 block shorter in height, but the towers are 1 block taller, so it's essentially the same total height as the earlier one. The overall width and length are increased (we'll get to that later), but the living space inside of the new one is also almost exactly the same size (it is a couple blocks shorter front-to-back, but a couple blocks wider side-to-side), and of course it still has all the guns, and they're still spread out so a majority can be brought to bear in any direction, BUT the entire base exterior has been layered so that there are always at least 4 levels of combat steel between the outside air (or lack thereof) and the interior workspace, no matter the direction of attack. This just about doubled the materials requirement (It technically rounds up to a size 3 now), but the thing about it that took so much time? The part that was the "enemy of good?" It's all whitespaced. EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK is whitespaced and/or has some other block/turret "in the way" so that inward-bound projectiles always have to go through a minimum of 4-5 entire blocks and can't tunnel through multiple blocks in one "step" to wreak havoc on the innards. Plus rather than just spamming the high-triangle count blocks to create all that whitespace, I spent the time to pick the ones that give the coverage I want while simultaneously using the fewest triangles (total triangle count is only ~25k). Plus I think the resultant waffle pattern just looks cool.
Here are the old and new versions side by side (again, in space because less hassle).
Imagine taking the one on the right, coating it in ~3 more layers of combat steel lacquer, and then sticking the turrets back on, and you kind of have how I arrived at the one on the left. That, and two weeks' worth of GM mode ghosting through the blocks to make sure that you are never able to pierce more than one block at a time.
Now some of you may be counting turrets and thinking to yourself, "Wait, why are all your turrets pointing in one direction? That seems to be a little unbalanced." And you'd be right. Which is whyyy...
...it was actually designed as half a base, with the two halves stitched together once placed. Twice the guns for twice the funs, or something like that. I don't recommend assaulting it from the air, I will tell ya that much. From a distance, the profile looks like a battleship.
FYI if you want to try something like this, the game won't let you precisely align two bases. It just won't. Even if you get them perfectly aligned, once you click the mouse button the game will always shift your second base over by about 1/3 of a block, ruining your painstakingly perfect placement. Yes, even in orbit. You can't even compensate for this, because when I tried shifting it back about 1/3 of a block to compensate, the game would place the second part almost an entire block further in that direction, which was even worse.
And I know that Gas and everyone says, "The best base is 5 bases," and I don't disagree, but hey, I've only been playing this game for maybe two months now and it's my first attempt. Cut me some slack. And if I ever adopt the design to a 5-way variant (which shouldn't be that difficult, actually), you can bet it'll be very ... shooty.
--Patrick
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At the time I started the design, one base was more than three RDR could handle, so two bases should've been utterly impregnable.My only suggestion is to try to space out your turrets, so AE damage doesn't hit more than one at once.
And yeah, put a few defense tower annexes around it. That oughta take em at least 10 mins to destroy
As to the AoE factor, part of my scouting was also about finding a planet with unusually high atmospheric density so as to severely restrict the ability of non-base weaponry to assault it (before being torn to shreds, that is). The best CV weaponry can do to attack me is about 350m, but everything on my base (except miniguns) can start hitting YOU at 375 or more, so good luck with that, and most HV weaponry can't even crack 325m.
Oh, and also it's on top of a 200m-high butte, so good luck landing a shield wall CV beside it to hide behind. When you announced the wipe, I was even in the process of leveling all the terrain around the base of the butte out to about 400m to remove any hope of sniper cover. I picked an area mostly surrounded by empty space just for that reason. This is how I discovered two things:
1) The new, vastly increased power requirement for HV laser drills. Yikes.
2) The game's terrain management absolutely sucks...well, rocks. BIG time. Any mountain I flatten reappears once I move more than maybe 150m away from it. The game apparently "forgets" terrain changes until an actual player is within a certain radius, at which point it hurriedly makes the adjustment. This has led to such amusing things as shooting down an attacking drone and watching it fall and come to rest on top of the mountain I just flattened (since no player is actually close enough to trigger the terrain update). I have even flown fast enough that the game couldn't "remember" my terraforming fast enough, and so I would crash into...nothing! And then I would back away about 50m and approach again more slowly, and now I would be able to land in the empty space. Oy.
--Patrick
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GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, unfortunately this is the dev's idea of a performance-saving measure - only the ~150m around you is actually sent from the server. The rest is just cached ahead of time from the yaml and seed (that's the "loading planets" part of joining the server). So, the vast, vast majority of terrain you see from the air is actually just your local cached copy of the pristine, untouched voxels, and your client treats them as solid until you get close and the server overrides the cached info with updated voxel deformation information.
And that's why the server rarely uses more than 1mbit up.
Oh, I already guessed that was the reason. I know you chide for guessing wrong on stuff, but you gotta admit I'm right a lot, too.
Also I added to the AoE section in my last post (re: weapon ranges) while you were replying, in case you're interested.
--Patrick