Empyrion - Galactic Survival

ADHD CLUTTER PILE This dev team never met a design challenge they could not simply abandon. The game is in - approximately - early beta state but they have been releasing paid expansions for how many years? With bare-bones simulator physics, graphics from 2007 and a UI from 1998 - EMPYRION is not about surviving the Galaxy - but about surviving the insane crafting and resource system. It is about surviving the game's design. I bought this game because my friend suggested it so we could play together. I have put over 200 hours in, and I have a FEW QUESTIONS": ------------------------------------------- CORE MECHANICS AND GAMEPLAY ------------------------------------------- - WHY is there NO GRAVITY. In a game about space exploration - gravity exists only inside planetary envelopes - outside of it all objects are static. - WHY is velocity limited in SPACE. - WHY does the velocity vector follow the ship's orientation - NO INNERTIA. - WHY do all vehicles top out at 130 in vacuum and 70 planetside - regardless of engine configuration - everything goes this speed. This works against player design choices, which are the heart of the game. rendering them largely superfluous. - WHY is there no fractional thrust!? It is On or OFF - GO or STOP - even some NES games had already figured this out. 'Coasting' with 'I' is cumbersome and does not actively lock the chosen thrust level - it still decays but at a slower rate. It effectively replaces a missing 'Brake' input and adds an arbitrary effect. The sane design would have been: Standard innertial simulation with regulated thrust, and a brake function that produces retrograde thrust. - WHY , on God's green Earth, is there no DAMAGE UI of any kind? You have to open the management screen to see your shields. so you can't pilot and monitor your damage at the same time. There is no locational damage indication of any kind - no way to know how much damage you are sustaining or where on your ship, until you look at it from the outside. REally? have the devs played X-Wing or MechWarrior or Wing Commander? I get it, the Capital ships don't really function as space ships - are not designed as space vessels - but have a up-and-down, left and right - fake gravity design that makes them work more like watercraft in 3d. OK. So, the core mechanic of naval combat is maneuver and damage control by location - how in the F can you do that when there is no damage control UI to speak of? - WHY are the weapon ranges so minuscule? I suspect this was another engine challenge that was solved through closure. Any sections where the devs could not figure out how to make things work - they simply walled things off, or in some cases just left the broken. The result of weapon ranges being only 300 meters - is that there is very little room for maneuver and skill - based play: with velocity capped at 70 m/s - that means you have about 4 seconds after entering the enemy's fire envelope to discharge your forward-firing weapons and maneuver off collision course. The AI accuracy does not vary with range, vehicle size, weapon type, or your maneuver - it is pin-point accurate at any range. Large guns track just as rapidly and accurately as small ones, and there is very little room for any creative tactical play - the only logical option is to build the most resource (and therefore time-) - expensive craft that can simply tank damage and deal enough - and then kite in and out of range, grinding the AI down with firepower and energy. This removes most tactical ideas - piloting, gunnery, positioning and craft design - all are mostly useless. The effective approach by design - is to just have MORE STUFF. Which of course is all about grinding. - Finally, the resource grind is staggering. Intermediate tech already requires absurd amounts of rare resources like Gold or Platinum or Tungsten. And all of this is left for the player to simply run into like an invisible wall after 'unlocking' the designs. It took me about 200 h to get access to these in sufficient quantities to build a somewhat capable craft, which got subsequently cored but a couple shots from an enemy CV. 3 seconds. about 6 hours to build. Another 12 hours to gather the resouces required. No damage indicator. No idea how to avoid getting hit. No clarity as to AI's target selection criteria. I don't think they exist. Oh, and by the way, WTF is 'Sathium'? 'Erestrum.? What is this, middle school? I need to find a restroom? You are aware, possibly, that the periodical elements table exists, and it is called that because every element in it is a possible combination of particles within reasonable half-life ranges. Helium is Helium and not Hydrogen because it has an extra proton and two neutrons. And Uranium has 238. So let me ask again, WTF is 'ZaRCOsiUM'? - Oh, one more thing. All you have to do to become inaccessible to the AI is go underground. It simply does not have the concept of below-ground pathing. Build your base in a tunnel and the AI will simply pump its endless rockets into the ground above your core, and send its soldiers to stand around on this patch of dirt frozen in programming lapse stupor. AI hostile NPCs will also occasionally lose their will to live and fight and simply stand around waiting to be shot. Barring that, they will fire with 100% accuracy at all ranges and targets moving in any pattern just like everything else. Here is how a sane combat design could have worked: AI accuracy decays based on a number of factors: 1. Range / target cross-section / target movement pattern 2. Weapon size - heavier guns have a slower traversal rate. Start neutral and take time to train of target. Also, see above - they should be 'designed' for larger targets. A heavy gun hit on a small craft should be a 'lucky' shot, almost a stray bullet. 3. Ai 'level' (hostile NPc or craft 'rank') All threats alert the player by default. Hostile wildlife, turrets and enemy soldiers have some sort of squawk before attacking, again, variety may exist between lead times, with the general rule being lead time is proportional to threat level. Some enemies may be silent assassins, or fall athwart this rule in some other ways - but by default the player should have clear visual and auditory cues from threats. A somewhat transparent aggro system, standard in MMO games where team play against AI is a mechanic I am not 100% clear on how explosion damage is modeled, but I suspect it differs from the following: blocks within explosion range should 'absorb' the explosion damage, in proportion to their size and distance from explosion center. Damage dealt by explosions is distributed through the explosion's envelope. Damage does not propagate past existing blocks (I THINK this is currently true but not sure) This means that given an explosion with damage 1000 - if it hits a wall of blocks at 90 degrees incidence - only 500 damage will be dealt, distributed arithmetically by proximity between all affected blocks - this means that block HP DENSITY tanks damage - not block size. Just ask AI to help you model the damage algorithm. --------------------------------------- UI AND GRAPHICS --------------------------------------- - WHY is there a search function from the fabricator but not from inventory> - WHY are item attributes shown in tooltips that frequently exceed the height of the screen and are not scrollable? - WHY are tooltips not on a delay for petes sake - this is elementary UI design - they clutter the inventory and obscure the contents when you scroll - WHY are all the Armored Cockpits internal view shaders broken on the canopy struts material - they glow bright blue for no sane reason. - WHY is there no automated way to commit resources in required quantity to a Factory item? The user must drag and drop, drag and drop .. - I reached char limit. But there are more questions. Shops, ground air-tightness, plant lod glitches, lightsource visibility at range, switches broken, glitches, etc