HWS Config | Gameplay Changes Part 2

HWS Announcements
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EWS got not changed.
The almost only change were done about ROF and Reload Time.
For Drills also the Radius and Damage.

That fights do take so much longer now is not really true. Example HV Turrets:

Left = old. Right = new.
Before the total time span for let’s say “rockets in the air” were 9.9.
Now it is 10.
The gain you got in ROF got reduced in Reload Time. That system got applied here and there to give you an idea. The fights are faster but once you retreat for reloading the performance drain can cool down a bit.

The next revisit / benchmark of the Config will be damage.
The higher the splash damage, the more performance issues.
The sad fate of Voxel based games…

Personally or maybe a question to the Community:
What do you think of the mechanic to have a Dual-System of Voxel vs Static Ships?
Let’s say in your home basis you can build your ship as right now.
But once you click somewhere “bake” or “materialize”, all the Voxel blocks get calculated fix with colliders, hitpoints and resources.
So in a fight you would fly with static models (like the Space Drones). If you damage a ship a global healthbar (like in Fractured Space) would decrease. Once “destroyed” (healthbar = 0) the ship can’t move anymore and you can loot it and “dematerialize”.
I roughly discussed it with Eleon and the performance gain would be over 10 times or so.
But probably off-topic here…

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I don’t think a health bar would be as satisfying as blowing away chunks of ships IMO. We are creatures of war; building things looks nice and makes us feel good, but destroying things makes us feel great! Best way I can relate is to build a demolition derby car IRL. It’s a lot of work to do to get it to last in a derby, makes you feel good. Driving in the demo is a f***ing blast!

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What’s wrong with Rex? nothing) Why are you looking for a problem where it is not) First, the game engine will not be good in multiplayer, now and hardly in the near future! Second, You have very weak server (FPS in weekdays and weekend days). There’s nothing more to add!

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With all do respect. Heck no!.. I came to this game to get away from those cheesy kinds of games.

In terms of the 6 strong vs the 10 nerfed drills i see a problem of choosing quantity over quality. Why add more drills if its similar to having less but better quality 6 drills. To me this is just making problems and chasing your own tail of making problems by now nerfing the perfectly good 6 drills that worked well before.

I understand that you want to test stuff and thats great you should, Rexx. But if 6 drills worked fine before changing it to 10 drills; why not revert to the 6 drills? Reverting back to 6 drills with better quality is i think the more logical thing to do. I don’t even get why a cv needs 10 drills to mine when i mine (or perhaps now i should say ‘used to mine great’ with just 5 drills". This is what i mean when i say that this is making the mistake of choosing “quantity over quality.” Finally, 6 drills are less devices then 10 drills which means less things to load and less lag.

regards

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Yeah that’s what I thought. With EWS still in place, this shouldn’t make fights take a lot longer, especially with the reload changes to compensate ROF.

This is a really interesting idea but like Taco said… I think it will take away some of the satisfaction.

That feeling when something gets blown up on your ship, when you’re able to fix it and get back in the fight. It’s so exciting. And when you make it back to your base and check your missing blocks/damage and see how the careful modifications made by you (or someone way better than you like @Vandruis <3) made a difference.

Personally I think this would be changing one of the core aspects that I really like in Empyrion, and not in a good way. I’d rather see if we can find some happy middle ground with config/engine/hardware/netcode before we go a route like that.

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Many other games use the static model shell concept “like the x series of games” yes you can have epic large scale battles with hundreds of assets on the play field without much in the way of performance degradation but the charm of Empyrion is “as Taco put it” seeing chunks of ships flying off when fighting but also the design concept of learning from combat, adding armour to weak spots, moving components around ect so if it became about hit points rather than design and clever thinking Empyrion would be just like so many other games and lose its charm.

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I think you have done a pretty solid job with HWS so far, I am much more worried about Eleon.
You are always trying to make the best of it:)

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@RexXxuS
lets do some math on SV pulslaser example

before we had

200 rpm and 200 magazine -> 60 sec to fire and 4 sec to reload -> 64 sec to fire and reload a whole magazine

now we have

120 rpm and 200 magazine -> 100 sec to fire and 2,5 sec to reload -> 102,5 sec to fire and reload

thats a way less damage per time so “* Adjusted Reload Delay to adapt to the lower ROF” i don’t think so or i missed something
one can’t simple reduce the reload time the same percentage the firerate was reduced because the time to reload is just a small fraction of the time needed for the whole action

the better way is imho increase the damage per shot

Edit: RexXxus has changed Pulslaser to 375 Damage and 133 RPM

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Reducing CV drill damage is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Instead you really ought to leave the damage the way it’s been for the past few weeks and reduce the maximum number of drills on a CV to 6.

The reason for this is very simple. All the gold and most of the rare resource asteroids have been moved to PvP space. The reason for this was supposedly to encourage/force more players to venture into PvP in order to acquire these resources. But with the other HWS weapon limits coupled with the game’s maximum of 21 fixed weapons (including drills) that can function on a CV, it simply isn’t possible to put 10 drills on a CV and still have it be competitive in PvP. You’re either going to have so few drills that harvesting asteroids takes forever, or half the number of fixed weapons as any pirate ship you encounter.

So the players whose arms you’re trying twist to make them risk PvP have a choice of either taking a ship that can’t possibly survive if it gets jumped, or a ship that can fight but takes forever and a day to harvest any significant amount of resources. Either way those players are just going to have an unproductive and frustrating experience and will likely either decide never to go back to PvP, or just leave the server and go to another where they can acquire rare resources in a way that isn’t suicidal.

Overall the HWS Config and higher HWS weapon limits are a fantastic thing; they force ship designers to make design choices and compromises depending on the situations they expect to encounter the way real-life designers have to do. In vanilla there are fewer meaningful choices because all the weapons affect every sort of target the same way and you can always just max out the most efficient ones. However, forcing an absolute design choice/compromise between drilling and fighting is nothing but bad for game play because it defeats the whole purpose of putting the rare resources in PvP space to entice players there.

And 6 drills still does force some compromise, because you can’t max out weapons and take all six drills. But the choice is not nearly as harsh: leaving off a few missiles and a drill or two (when the remaining 5 or 6 drills do decent damage) doesn’t make the ship completely hopeless for either mining or fighting the way sacrificing either half your fixed weapons or almost all the drills does.

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I didn’t have any problems using the cave reward ship in Phoenix system the night before last and it’s 2 CV drills did just fine. It’s amazing how underrated this free SV is.

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Also about this.
You can think of it another way.

People mine on golden globe a lot more, than doing 30 player fights, which are not very common fights.
So it’s about finding a balance that makes it worth it to actually mine, and makes fighter better.
The update you made today, is a lot more on performance side than mining side. And yes like you said. Performance should beat gameplay. But if all you have is performance, there won’t be any gameplay, so it’s very important to find a balance here as well.

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I think that was before the change took effect.

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this game starting :part_alternation_mark: . can’t wait alfa 11 :see_no_evil:. rexxxus i’m think you gonna create new problems . fix it old one’s like garage ships, where they are ? sorry if i’m rude

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I agree with Israel. many people came to Empyrion because the game allows you to create design and customization, especially pvp ships. where it belongs how much the player has experience in building. now the shield killing creativity because now workshop ship whit the shield have chances almost like made of veteran and upgraded many times.

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of course this topic is extensive and I haven’t read it closely but my 10 drill cv is out mined by someone with an epic drill doing E.V.A. I am already working on adapting to the drill change which has rendered weeks of design work that was almost complete useless in my opinion :frowning: but that is the life of a dynamic game. it’s just odd that I should ditch my 10 drill ship for an epic drill and a micro ship to move quickly between rocks to mine the best possible. Just an observation, do with as you will. Looks like precision mining is required instead of the slice mining I was doing. I’ll design a new ship and give it a shot and see how well it works in comparison. but as it stands mining has been made to take literally prolly 20x longer then it did where I was able to eat a rock in 20 seconds it now can take up to five minutes to mine the meat out of one rock.

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Hi Rex can you make the CV drills back to what you had before changes please. I understand the planet HV drills making to many holes but now it takes forever to mine an asteroid, mining roids was good before and a lot of people were doing it for resources now its just way too long with the nerfed drills. Its wasting what game time i have, PVP is resource intensive so less resources means less PVP and I really dont want to mine for hours.

thank you

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it is and interesting idea, if weapon fire make that much performance difference, lets just halve the number allowed and double the damage, same thing just less lag :slight_smile:

After thinking about it more, I would even be happy if you only had 2 of each SV weapon, as long as the damage was the same. Less weapon mounts would make builds better and easier also. Especially on class 1 builds.

On CVs and HVs also cut in half, or more, but boost damage to match. It would help so much with making ships that are more then just a pile of guns.

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hey already make hv blocks hp very weak, but whit shield its no difference

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I don’t think a mining ship should be equal in combat to pirate freighter meant to hunt.

Love this expression :grin: Hear it too rarely

I have to disagree. Most players can survive even when getting jumped due to warping. They are not supposed to survive by fighting off the pirates. They can escape.

Overall to the topic… It’s a complicated subject.
In one hand fighting inflation & lag is important & the latest update addresses them both.
The game is supposed to be hard, survival & I think you’re supposed to feel the pain of losing ships & resources. In the previous situation I can go ahead & spawn 100 HVs for single battle & give literally 0 care if all of them are destroyed. Only blueprints were worth anything, not the actual ships.

If the changes stay as is, it will create a scarcity of resources sooner than many will think. If some late game player decides to hoard all the millions of resources they have, so be it. Maybe they can make a good amount of cash after season reset by selling them. Regardless if you spend them or not, the overall supply in server will go drastically lower over time.

If you’re concerned of veterans having several million ingots of gold or credits in stock & and big OCDs full of resources → advantage, you shouldn’t. The scarcity of resources (And the price increases caused by it for the greedy ones) will eat away the big supplies sooner or later & wipe + high gold prices to come will take care of credit surplus. Veterans will likely invest their credits in permanent benefits such as OCD levels as sparing their hard earned cash is now much harder at very limited gold supply & carry-limits in Elemental Bank through wipes → Credits are gone.

To reach this goal, obviously interest & NPC traders need to be addressed too. Massive interest & low yield of resources will increase the resource prices massively and turn the main income back towards elemental bank which I think is not very healthy direction as this supports adverse behaviour. NPC traders in the other hand can offer major resources for low prices.

If I had to guess what happens with current settings without addressing interes & npc traders is that players stop mining resources & instead will focus on gaining interest + RP & then spending it on resource packs from NPC traders. I don’t think this is the goal with your change.

Edit: Added the other side of my thoughts
Then, the other side of the coin is obviously what is too much. Currently the player-base is spoiled with easy resources & addressing the issue might be necessary. But to what degree? The current decrease is a major change. It feels like the attempt is to reach the optimal situation very quickly without having to wipe.

Personally I appreciate this idealism. Clearing a huge chunk of resources without having to take anything from anyone directly. The player-to-player interaction combined with reduced income will take care of it by itself. Suddenly introducing “dry season” that forces player-base to adapt or be destroyed is interesting concept & maybe could be introduced in story as “anomaly” of sorts. However I do believe big amount of the server’s player-base is looking for a bit more casual environment or at least not such a quick change…

RexXxuS has time to look into feedback, server statistics & find the optimal balance. Just keep the feedback coming, but make it constructive to help him achieve the balance :+1:

Ok, enough rambling for now.