HWS 4.0 Universe - Sneak Preview

HWS Announcements
,
1

Hey guys,

here we go… my promise to show you a sneak preview for the upcoming HWS 4.0 universe!
I don’t want to go to detail 100% but let’s bring up some important points. I really tried hard to present it as good as possible for you.

So we already got the point of 4.0, right?

Back to the roots!

Let me explain my mindset for the new universe first. Why back to the roots? Why a big change in general?
Well most of you know it: the game is in a not so good shape right now regarding Multiplayer. The survey showed us something painful too: the majority are Singleplayer people.

But we don’t accept this and try the best we can to create something great out from Empyrion Multiplayer, right? Right!
So not only because of the feedback that the HWS 3.0 universe is too big and lacking PvP here and there and the planet conventions aren’t good we saw something very important:
after more than 6 weeks runtime, 1651 people joined on the NA server and 2108 people joined on the EU server, with a peek of 117 people online at the same time, ~30 new people joining per day, with a backup size of 11GB we created such a big database and learning curve to know very good how an Empyrion server can be run or can’t be run by now.

But also regarding gameplay the hate was real about PvP… PvE… lags, bugs, hacker, cheater, drama queens, hater, lover, etc.

Let’s start

So I grabbed my pencil, wrote the initial letters of our factions and created P A T H… path… I followed this path and thought what about an infinite path?

Like the universe is infinite (close your eyes and imagine Enpyrion will be the same… somedays x))

But infinite can also be boring and the dynamic and back to the roots part was missing, so I came up with this

The DNA… you can’t go back more to the roots than this :wink:

HWS 4.0 Universe

Now combined all of this together I present you the first draft of the HWS 4.0 universe (click for 4K rendering):

HWS-4.0.jpg3840×2160 908 KB

There we go! Let me explain the minimal details to give you a good sleep:

  • the spheres on the image represents Orbits not the actual planets.
  • 2 Starting Worlds: PvE World and PvP World. Again with 2 PvE and 2 PvP planets. Again with regular wipes for the PvE World
  • the distance to each system will be large
  • Elemental Marketplace is the only free permanent PvE place now but strictly limited to trading (seems that we implement the HWS Marketplace instead of keeping the Eleon Marketplace)
  • the outer planets are individual resource / POI playfields…
  • the system right of the PvP World and left of the PvE world are reserved places for custom planets bought from awesome supporters

But wait… there is something missing right? Right! Look at this gif very closely:

HWS-4.0.gif1920×1080 1.68 MB

The DNA, the universe, everything is dynamic, why not our gameplay? We have an infinite loop through the systems to make them PvE for 2 days (3 weekend). Since we have two sides you can double this. What does this mean?

  • no Peacekeepers anymore, no permanent camping place for large stuff and causing laggs after some weeks
  • you wanna go to vacation, you wanna plan your next stay: keep the rotation circle in mind and plan wisely
  • a base as a CV is your best friend. Mobility and Firepower can’t be topped
  • building a base is equal for everyone now and combined with the 50 devices on planet rule you can be creative and unique
  • during the PvE time you can make friends and build without stress

Alright, don’t give this guy a pencil… wait… still not ready? Nope.

You see the faction systems*, right? Now let me introduce them last but not least:

  • every four faction planet is equaliy PvE - permanent!
  • restricted to the proper faction*! A Pirate never ever can smell the air on the Trader planet
  • but staying on these planets have a price! The price you can control with my formular*:
  • Block Count * Device Count : RP / day
  • You love big stuff? Pay for it. Example: a 1000 block base with 100 devices and having 7 Reputation Points cost you 14,3k credits per day. Assuming the highest amount of 10k blocks and 700 devices and people currently having about 37 RP you would pay 189k credits per day.
  • Don’t worry there will be enough gold here and there
  • This system ensures refreshing gameplay by trading / raiding for more gold on the one hand and never overcrowding planets on the other hand
  • If you have no credits in your bank and can’t pay the bill you have to find a new home*

* This requires Jaschas godlike coding skills - need to review this with him for 100% bulletproof

Alright, alright… I would give you a potato if I wouldn’t need to work further on all of this…

Please let everything review slowly in your head and please give me feedback on this. We can still screw some things here and there but overall, what do you think? Is it called full PvP server? Is it called Dynamic PvPvE Server? Is it cool to join and have a daily goal instead of “uuh, what should I build today again…”? Is it like factions for victory!? Playing together? Requesting help to pay the bill and create fundamental Traders? Is it like “let me rest here in PvE for a while till my new 4.0 repair system repaired my awesome fight from yesterday”?
Or… ?

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

RexXxuS

4 Likes
4

Hi RexXxus looks amazing but i notice there is no lawless world any reason why?

1 Like
5

My head is spining like that DNA. Trying to figure out how many planets are in there.

I have to say this realy is back to the roots, looking like dynamic gameplay as you said and i think it could be good, if ppl will understand that nothing is permanent.

Even most beautifull flower will wilt one day as every base will be destroyed sooner or later. (this is also for SWP :family_men_boys:)

Still missing the bonus for capturing planet though, i would love that. Like if you hold GF your autominer is producing more gold)

Also i think there might be a parking place for ppl who realy leaving for vacation, maybe something where you can go once a month or so, of course you can fly crazy distance away too, not sure.
Also there is no jail so its not clear to me where siners will be :smiley:

Also: Clear Question – Clear Answer: fa:scan?

6

This sounds very good to me. I am intrigued by the rotation of PVE vs. PVP status for many planets.

I am also interested to know what your vision is for Lawless factions.

7

Looks good to me too. Less lonesome flights more action… But yes a lawless planet is definetly missing.

1 Like
8

Welcome wind of change. Our faction has grown fat on the GF, lost his grip and stopped a lot of loot. Now we again become hungry and angry. Beware server !!!:imp:

2 Likes
9

It looks really interesting but the concept’s are very daunting for new players like my self. I’m still not sure what I am doing to be perfectly honest. I would like to get in to the PVP circuit but have a PVE starting point make’s getting to that point possible.

Have you given any thought to a tutorial style wing of the DNA string?

Is it possible to make custom missions in the PDA that would walk your through this system with a little better detail than currently exists?

10

Awesome Work Rex :smiley:

Can’t wait to try this new Universe, and the dynamic direction for the server is epic ^^

I think you get rid of the Lawless faction and it’s a good thing to balance the 4 others factions !

11

Reading this was like watching and episode of Mr Robot - I like What I see and hear, but have no idea what the feck is going on?? :slight_smile:
I am sure it will be great - but I thought the idea was to in courage more players and get Empyrion on the map - this game is hard to get to grips with and multiplayer has a very steep learning curve - I believe this is why a lot of people are playin on single player servers to build and explore and more importantly have fun.
Sometimes it is not good to over think things keep it simple - build it and they will come - but only if it’s fun and easy to get into.
Only saying :slight_smile:
But idea sounds great.

12

Thank you guys for your feedback! Kind of relieving to not see too much hate but good critic.

Lawless never had an own planet @minde. Like the names says: they don’t care about the way HWS can be played so they don’t care about PvE either. The name convention is really not that hard to go to one of the four factions. But we can make a tutorial for that also.

They have still some benefits like fa:survival but as I said it is up to them what path they are going.

Well keep in mind that Eleon Auto Miner are coming. You expect too much. We could code something like this for our Auto Miners though. Capturing planets can (will) be later a part of special factions to get more RP maybe.

Some player requested this in form of a donation. We don’t know if we will do it. Have to see.
The CSW orbits, prison, EA and EE isn’t part of the sneak preview but they are there of course. :wink:

fa:scan… yeah worked already a bit on it in HWS Connect but 4.0 was more important again. Will do it soon again. Reminder: fa:scan will be removed and instead you have in HWS Connect instead of “???” the block count visible as an Alliance.

That is ok and I understand this. We trying to provide as good and many information as possible. Like now it is just one key button away from you: F1 - PDA. Almost all HWS informations are in there. We will improve it for 4.0 of course.
Faction mission in terms of a tutorial is a great idea.

Very true… and you are right. HWS has a high learning curve and maybe frustrating for very new people. Till now we kind of assumed that players at least played Singleplayer a bit before joining. Even though the new universe with its dynamic nature and paying bills to stay on a planet is kind of difficult but since they improved the PDA we try to push the limits out of it too. So a new player needs only to press F1 and he gets every information he needs.
If he is too lazy to read than we even try to provide youtube tutorials.
All we can do. The general concept for beginner needs to come from Eleon.

1 Like
13

The problem with teasing such an awesome 4.0 is now 3.0 seems… kinda dull lol.

The whole concept is awesome, I can’t think of a true negative here…this is a universe that is hitting all the right buttons for every player type, it doesn’t cater for just pvp or just pve it keeps things interesting in being dynamic and the faction planets and rent idea is a great way to stop over crowding and keep you on your toes.

It’s clear to see key points from the community have been considered when making the universe so a lot of appreciation for this!

Good job Rex

1 Like
14

It May sound like a strange question but could it be possible for the Trading Faction (and other factions) to be able to land in their faction world a CV with devices > 50. I.e. would be nice to be able to park your CV when your staying at your Faction world. Maybe make it that it’s only available if you already have a BA in that world and that you are already paying rent.

In any case all of the changes sound very interesting.

15

Ok, gameplay wise I see this working out very well, I might be missing one thing on this though. How does the pve migration merge with the story. Is this turning into some sort of “hunger games” storyline or have the pirates and lawless developed some sort of “habitual migration path” or is it more like a cease fire story line? and will the pve migration make it harder for the hunters to provide a service? these are all the questions i can think of right now.

16

Winter is coming! noone is safe.

1 Like
17

One question how are we to protect the CV’s when 2 SV’s can take out a CV even more so when the CV owner is offline?

18

Thats easy, Space…I’ve had a CV in space for 2 weeks and was never found.

19

SOMEBODY take that pencil off him and give him a eraser lmao mmmmmmmmmm i think you will have more traders than anything, living life in a cv moving from one place to another running away from danger lol wow its become a gypsy/pickey survival game lmao. when is the 4.0 ? will we take everything over cr,ingots in factory and ocd and am if the applicable donation has been paid ? im up for a change as long as no more internal errors pop up lol i think 3.0 up,has been the worst yet…

1 Like
20

Looks interesting.

21

As we can see now - device limit doesn’t help to reduce lag. At all. Looks like there is some new problem in the game itself that causes lag when there are a lot of people(!) in the same playfield. Not devices.

Anyway device limit is the game-killer. When you have all your cargo boxes filled with all possible resources, the only thing you can do - build a giant CV with 500 turrets and use it in fight (on planets too). Now you are killing this moment of the game. For what? To fight lag? It doesn’t help anyway. Let people do what they want to do, leave it to the devs to think about performance. And they work, as I can see there is no more movement lag during fights with thousand of devices involved. The only problem is the delayed response for some actions. But you can’t fix this with device limit. Try it yourself - bring 10 people to one playfield without any ships - the lag will remain.

I hope you will reconsider this device-limit philosophy. At least - test 4.0 yourself when it arrive and make necessary changes.

22

Can agree with that is no helping, there is still difference if you ahve CV you described and 50 dev CV. I would say it has impact but its not only n. of devices. Number of ppl…im not sure, yeasterday we was on GF in 4 ppl, 3 MAD and Rem from SWP. Lag was about 20s.

It looks like you see smooth movement now, but also you see your oponent shoting at you, while that means him shoting at position when you was 20s before and you are behind him shooting him but no explosions happens. You see these explosions 20s later on place where he was when you was hiting him.

So lets say good example would be this GF fight. 4 ppl. CV probably under water, 1 small, and many cores of HVs. Now i would say it was number of turrets and cores.

Generaly i would say its not wasted by Rex who is trying whatever he can to make it playable for us but by the devs, they fucked it all up since 3.0.

One thing im starting to agree is that universe wont work, it would probably if game would work.
I dont have even some idea anymore. Its all up to devs. Game is broken to much there is no thing someone can do to make it work.

I still like returning to roots of course, but probably we need to roll back to start of alpha, 1.5. I know, negative post, but lets be honest, its completly fucked up.

It still can be played of course and have some fun, probably as such casual game when everything is realy temporary. Focus not on building CV but on improving your character OCD and AM levels. If you are in mood make SV and CV and fight somewhere for a while.

You know im writing this because its evening and i should continue with attacking GF. We will shoot down all SWP SVs in huge delay between hit and seeing hit, in brutal desynchronisation when all of us will be on different place that others see us. Then base will be the target. We will go in trying to take out turets and we will be trying to move like turrets are shoting at us. then we will fire and start to disengage. Then we will watch from distance what happend as turrets will start shoting at place we was 20s before and if we was hit there after some time we will start to be damaged. And this way, watching the past, we will be there until we will die.

And new universe will be about this on all planets. So this rediculous nonsense will be happening on all planets. It simply cant work without devs making better code, no need to try to figure out something, it wont work until game will work. Its a fact im afraid.

Dont get me wrong, I would love to paly in unverse Rexxx invented, if the game would work, but thats not going to happen and that will waste whole idea.

1 Like