As dean aptly pointed out:



I'd like to therefore remark that offline protection is at this point being employed to ensure that cities cannot be retaken ever by placing them into an always-offline alt empire, which has been employed against Syndicate (specifically our vassals) at this point and which I think is not good.

I am not opposed to protecting beginners, and would even say something like 2 months of invincibility in their home system they spawned in to get them started would be perfectly fine, but the current feature is basically just unpleasant.  You can imagine if someone takes your Q255 crystal system and then surrenders it to an empire that exists only to surrender cities to, then thats somewhat frustrating because it will never be seen again no matter what you do.  Well, to be clear you could give in to their demands, but there is literally nothing that can be done to fight back against that.  This happened to a vassal, not to Syndicate proper.

I feel like even if you don't like Syndicate you can agree thats kindof BS and that at the very least some kind of change is needed.

Many of the buildings in our cities are overlayed with black textures which make them really hard to navigate. It started a couple days ago.

It looks like missile size is scaled on every dimension by the number of missiles launched.  This has unfortunate side effects, such as the following with large launchers:



This isn't really a bug per se, since it seems to work fine, but I suggest scaling the missile by the cube root of the number of missiles launched, as that is more mathematically/volumetrically correct and will limit how often this kind of thing happens.

Feature Request: 

Add the ability to request what transporter station should complete the request when asking to beam up. 

Either pull the group name of the station or the ID, group name is a bit more friendly but either would work.

Since the update yesterday, ship/station doors are no longer visible. Both in the editor's preview mode, as well as in universe.
I have tested with the following door states:
Open, Open-40, Open-70, Closed, Stuck-Open, Stuck-Closed, Locked-Open, Locked-Closed

The doors still function, when you are able to find the interaction box. They are just invisible.

This started after today's patch (4/12/22)

I have 6 alts, all are flyers, 5 are hovers, 1 is a glider. The hover flyers have no issue, this only effects the glider.

I can play fine until I try to lift off. After liftoff I can fly in a straight line, but as soon as I try to turn I freeze up. If I click off screen I can get the cursor back but as soon as I try to do anything other than type the game locks up and stops responding forcing me to kill the process.

edit* .. It seems that as long as I am moving I can fly. If I stop and try to turn it freezes.

This started when I logged in after today's patch.

Account Activation
Abandonment decay depends on accounts becoming inactive. The switch to free-to-play is preventing anything from decaying.

Account activation time is now reset to 30 days whenever you login. If the account was inactive, it becomes active.

You can login using Shores of Hazeron, Hazeron Commander, Hazeron Mail, or the accounts page on this web site. You don't have to enter the game universe with an avatar. Simply logging in refreshes the account's activation status.

Accounts become inactive after you have not logged in for 30 days.

The lands that belong to avatars in an inactive account stop being immune to decay. Buildings will begin to disappear.

The process that deactivates accounts is not currently being run, to give people a chance to activate their accounts. That process will start running in a few days. It will deactivate accounts that have not logged in since the update today.

Server Crash
A bug was fixed that caused three servers to crash since the last update.

In the old days the size of spacecraft you could manufacture was limited by the quality of the materials available (specifically the old TL value) and some research time, finding better quality resources was required to manufacture bigger and bigger spacecraft. Since its removal people have floated some ideas around about if or how the size of spacecraft manufacturing should be limited again.

Issues

I doubt we can expect a whole rebalancing of spacecraft combat. So I won't expect anything fancy like ship size classes or whatever else is normally being suggested by people. Best I imagine is limits that are easy to implement and understand.

Quality of spacecraft manufacturing materials can be annoying to keep track of. Anyone that remember the old TL technology system might be able to remember having to figure out their current size limit and then design their spacecraft blueprint out from that. This is what I would say is one thing I don't miss about the old system, having 32 different spacecraft size categories. This might not be an issue right now, but I think it is good to keep in mind.

Technology has no baring on spacecraft manufacturing, it only affect which modules can be manufactured and the end result quality level of the subsystems on the spacecraft. The research time on some of the more advanced modules (FTL drives) are very very long though, and I doubt we want more of those boring time sinks.

There are no special infrastructure requirements to manufacture the biggest of warships. You just need a spacecraft factory, warehouses filled with the materials and a tiny space station in orbit. Yes you need to actually have harvesting operations and materials manufactured, but that doesn't have to be in the same solar system at all and can just be shipped to the spacecraft factory's city. You can have a tiny city with a population of 10 manufacturing gigantic spacecraft, and this can be thrown down anywhere in just a few minutes.

Ideas

Advanced metal resources (Magmium, Vulcium and Adamantine) don't play any role in spacecraft manufacturing aside from a stronger hull module. This could be one simple way to limit the size you can manufacture a spacecraft at, simply have the hull module type limit it. It has the added advantage of being easy to understand by players and designers alike. For example the metal hull module could limit the size to spacecraft that can normally spawn on the ground. Converting existing spacecraft blueprints to a system like this should also be simple for Haxus to do, or simply allow us to do at the time of manufacturing.

What we don't want is a meaningless research wait timer. So making it a patent research seems like it would be a bad idea and wouldn't solve the issues above.

Limiting spacecraft manufacturing size by city infrastructure could be done by having it require a spacecraft factory of increasingly bigger size with a lot of citizen jobs to operate, so a tiny city with a population of 10 can't make a gigantic spacecraft. Or it could require special buildings like a space elevator and more orbital infrastructure, as long as it requires the city to actually have workers. It would give reason to have larger cities for a shipyard, rather than just a tiny city with lots of warehouses.

Conclusion

There are plenty of options for limiting spacecraft manufacturing size. The ideas I mentioned above can't be the only good ideas, so do share your ideas and give feedback. I assume a mixes of ideas to limit spacecraft manufacturing size by multiple factors would be best, such as all the ideas I mentions or something like that.

Lets brainstorm!

Here is my proposed format change: