General Empyrion Thread

Dave

Staff member
*pfft* Like I read the chat.

Besides, when I logged in today it was #12 or #13, so there.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The server is now making automatic timestamped backups of the empyrion server's savegame data every hour on the half hour. It works! I don't have to do nothin! Yay!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
How does that work without interrupting gameplay? Does it back up a shadow copy or something?

—Patrick
Kinda. I just have a windows task launch a bat file that -
Goes to my backups folder on my RAID volume
Makes a new folder, goes into it
goes to the empyrion save data folder on the SSD
xcopy /e *.* c:
go back to the backups folder
ren "newbackup" "Save Backup - %date:/=-% %time::=-%"

It seems to get everything.
 
Welp, did the tutorial. Went through the whole thing, escaped, and now I'm level 11. So I spent some points.
Oh, and I also learned a little more about piloting. Flew my ship around for a while, discovered I can't land on a planet with it, flew back to the orbital station and successfully landed it back in the hangar.
And then when I turned it off and tried to get out, the entire ship despawned and I fell down and died (or maybe I was just really injured, I'm not sure).
Yay, Alpha!

On another note, this game uses SO many buttons. I'm going to have to play the single-player more to learn the controls/interface than the gameplay!

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Welp, did the tutorial. Went through the whole thing, escaped, and now I'm level 11.
Yeah, about those levels... They only pertain to the exact single player game, or multiplayer server, that you earned them on. When you go online, or start a new non-tutorial game, you're back to level 1.
 
And then when I turned it off and tried to get out, the entire ship despawned and I fell down and died (or maybe I was just really injured, I'm not sure).
Yay, Alpha!

--Patrick
Ha! The same thing happened to me last night. Got back from helping @Aislynn defend a new base, flew my ship back to my home planet, went to get out of the ship, and fell straight through the (3 levels of) floor and out of the ship, nearly breaking my leg in the process (thank god for medium armor).
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Making custom content for the server is kinda troublesome when a lot of what works in 7.6.1 won't work in a8. I'm debating updating my client to the experimental branch so that I can start working on content for the post-update server, but I also worry that things still might change (a new RC patch) that will render my preparations useless between now and then. If there is to be another patch, it usually comes down on friday... which is bad for my schedule because I'll be going out of town saturday morning and won't get back until sunday night.

Hopefully, what I can do is build a world on my local PC monday night, then upload the save data after I update the server on tuesday, and have it "just work." Here's crossing my fingers and knocking on wood. I hope I'll be able to copy and paste a lot of the stuff between yaml files. I don't relish rebuilding them from scratch.

Also, I wanna *play* alpha 8, too >_< not just admin it. Hopefully it won't need much GM intervention after the initial setup.
 

Dave

Staff member
Update to 8. If you need help making shit or adminning I have time and I'm terrible at playing it anyway.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Update to 8. If you need help making shit or adminning I have time and I'm terrible at playing it anyway.
You got a base to rebuild :p Gared has festooned your island with innumerable defense turret tanks to facilitate your rise from the ashes!
 

Dave

Staff member
Not going to bother. I'd have to break down what is there before I could replace, then I'd have to do into the mode to see structure integrity. Then I'd have to get the mats for the new place, then the server would be wiped.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Not going to bother. I'd have to break down what is there before I could replace, then I'd have to do into the mode to see structure integrity. Then I'd have to get the mats for the new place, then the server would be wiped.
Well, that's your call either way. Just remember going forward - Oscutune is considered to be a high-difficulty planet. It's basically masperon but with nice weather.

But yeah, I expect most 7.6.1 servers are suffering from a large bout of "not gonna bother." Renntech certainly has, it has dropped to #28 on the server list.

Of course, HWS is still going strong, but that place is its own beast.
 
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I'm running low on inspiration and gumption right now myself, but I could still use an actual test of the Malphas against a non-cheeseweenie ship. I'll probably still play every day though, just, not as rabidly.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm running low on inspiration and gumption right now myself, but I could still use an actual test of the Malphas against a non-cheeseweenie ship. I'll probably still play every day though, just, not as rabidly.
Probably the best non-weeniecheese ship I've got would be my modified Reliant, but not meaning to malign your design or anything, I think the Malphas would be hard-pressed against it.

There are three common design philosophies to warships in this game - frontal assault, broadside, and point defense. Malphas, from what I've seen, ascribes to "point defense." It expects the attack could come from any direction, so it has some turrets all over it so it can put up some kind of defense no matter which direction that attack comes from.

This makes it strong vs SVs and AI drone attacks, but weak against "full frontal" attack CVs, like the Reliant (or the Weenie Cheese Sandwich :p ), where the design means that all turrets are located in such a way that they fire straight forward and the sides/rear/bottom of the ship are practically defenseless. The concentration of fire the FF paradigm allows it to overwhelm the turrets on a point defense design, and chew through armor to vitals rather quickly. The best hope a PD CV has against a FF CV is to be constantly fleeing and kiting the attacker, and rotating regularly to distribute damage evenly around the ship.

If you want, I can spawn you some things that you and Aislynn can toy around with, to see how things measure up.

I could also swap the server over to creative mode, letting you spawn in whatever you want for testing, but that might upset any other players that were working on bases and stuff (As I know Dimento is right this very moment).
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Since Empyrion-Servers gives me an API that lets me know who has voted for the server and when, I'm thinking about setting up a voting reward to get people to vote. Something to the order of "vote for the server and receive a free stack of refined pentaxid, max 1/day!" or something. What do you guys think?

I just wish I could figure out a way to automate it.

In fact, maybe it'd be better to be a credit reward, I can do that from the server console without having to log in.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
#6 on American servers....
And the #4 American 7.6.1 server! (2 of the US servers above us on the list are on experimental)

But still #11 overall, and I think that's really the number people care about. Still, that's pretty good, given how astronomically young the server is.
 
Probably the best non-weeniecheese ship I've got would be my modified Reliant, but not meaning to malign your design or anything, I think the Malphas would be hard-pressed against it.

There are three common design philosophies to warships in this game - frontal assault, broadside, and point defense. Malphas, from what I've seen, ascribes to "point defense." It expects the attack could come from any direction, so it has some turrets all over it so it can put up some kind of defense no matter which direction that attack comes from.

This makes it strong vs SVs and AI drone attacks, but weak against "full frontal" attack CVs, like the Reliant (or the Weenie Cheese Sandwich :p ), where the design means that all turrets are located in such a way that they fire straight forward and the sides/rear/bottom of the ship are practically defenseless. The concentration of fire the FF paradigm allows it to overwhelm the turrets on a point defense design, and chew through armor to vitals rather quickly. The best hope a PD CV has against a FF CV is to be constantly fleeing and kiting the attacker, and rotating regularly to distribute damage evenly around the ship.

If you want, I can spawn you some things that you and Aislynn can toy around with, to see how things measure up.

I could also swap the server over to creative mode, letting you spawn in whatever you want for testing, but that might upset any other players that were working on bases and stuff (As I know Dimento is right this very moment).
The big thing about the Malphas is that it's not designed to go up against anything on its own - it's designed more for use as an escort for that massive carrier of yours. It's also designed to have a second person riding along to man the guns for me - either figuratively or literally, as they can either control specific turrets, or just pay attention to what side the primary assault is coming from (I know, lots of jinking will be going on, but bear with me) and shut the broadside ramps on that side, delaying the destruction of those guns while I roll the ship and attack with the full strength of the opposing broadside. That's also why I fully jacketed in the direct-fire weapons and stuck a turret (rather restrictively) behind a shutter door on the bow of the ship. There are also some redundant (though definitely not decoy) thrusters, RCS blocks, and the like up front, behind several spaced-out layers of armor. That way, I can bore in on a frontal trajectory, let my opponent's turrets lock onto those weapons, and then turn my sides to them and open up with my turrets, denying them their targets while I soak damage so you don't have to try to jink with a carrier. A gunner would allow me to worry about the piloting while they gave me roll instructions and opened and closed broadside ramps as needed.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
At this point, I'm leaning toward a voting reward of ~6000 credits. That's enough to buy a T2 drill, or 20 large medpacks, for example... but the price range npc merchants have on boosters is 6400-9600 credits, so it's just shy of that.
 

Dave

Staff member
I like the credit thing. I just wish there was a way to do what you want to do, which is a server-wide economy. I tried to google whether this has been addressed and started reading a page about this before I realized that this was a REAL wealth management company called Empyrion!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I like the credit thing. I just wish there was a way to do what you want to do, which is a server-wide economy. I tried to google whether this has been addressed and started reading a page about this before I realized that this was a REAL wealth management company called Empyrion!
The yaml comments make it SOUND like there's a way to change the NPCs to work the way I want them to, but there's no description I can find that tells you how to implement that. Also, apparently there's no way I can find to make it so that the trade network doesn't require you to go to the trade station to trade. Apparently the rationale for this change was that it was being exploited in PvP. People would strip down to nothing but light armor and carry no items, park a CV out of range of your CV/Base, then bodily prod for blind spots in your defenses. When they die, they just respawn in the same area, losing nothing. When they found a weakness, they'd pull up the trading network, buy weapons and ammo, and break into your base.

I'm not sure that's justification for the change, honestly though, what with Offline Protection now being a thing, and also sounds to me like people just needed to git gud at base defense design.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Incidentally, Edrondol and Garedicus now have their 6000 credit rewards for voting today :p Spend em while ya got em!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Soooo I'm still an "elder" in the renntech discord... and they're over in their clubhouse talkin' bout crazy shit like limiting everybody on the server to one CV and one base.

Whuf. Got outta there just in time >_<
 

Dave

Staff member
The fuck? So what happens if you want to have a base at a different planet? Do you have to set the other to public? And is that per person? So can others in your faction have a different base? And limiting CVs I can guarantee is because of the way we set up our bases with CV protection.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The fuck? So what happens if you want to have a base at a different planet?
You have to remove the core from one base to place another.

And is that per person?
Per person and per faction, if I read them right. So, GBI would have gotten one CV, and one base, and each member could also have one private CV and one private base.

Clearly they want to minimize having another wiener cheese sandwich incident, and give the mods a fighting chance against the players again.

—Patrick
Supposedly a lot of people with crappy, out of date computers are extremely upset that Alpha 8 now preloads all entities in a playfield when entering it, instead of waiting for them to move into visual range to load them. Me, I say thank god, I hated the stuttering that happened when you first moved into visual range of a base with 6 or so CVs parked around it. Jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, because the server had to stop your client to send all the block data for all those ships. Preload away, I say, let me take a few extra seconds warping in to eliminate the jerks - I just hope they're telling the truth about fixing the memory leak issues, though.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Hah, and then Ztrobe found out about it and threatened to take his ball and go home. He wants at least 10 bases and 10 CVs, he says. He reminds them that PvE players are a thing. THAT'S gonna convince Noodle and Dos. :rofl:
 
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