Like many of you, I feel that the empire is quite empty of life, and I'd love to see more activity, especially with spaceships.

There's nothing like gazing at your space station and seeing dozens of spaceships coming in and out, right?

Right now, this isn't really possible, though.

Sure, you can do that manually with actual starships and crews, but you can't get enough ships to make that scenario happen unless you've fully colonized a ringworld (which is kinda tedious). Besides, even if you've got like 20 trading ships, considering the size of it all, you could maybe have 3 or 5 at the same place and time?


We have brokers with automatic shipments. 

We have a system to trade.

We also have blueprint models for ships. 

Why not have the broker act as a kind of special "spacecraft factory" and generate a small, low-poly cargo ship, taken from a select list of blueprints, spawned with an AI crew that follows a simple trade route loop?

To make it even more "bustling", it could also be done for any interplanetary trading (if it's not too taxing on the CPU/GPU)



Here would be my suggested changes:

- Brokers now require a cargo ship to run their shipments between systems (+ planets?). The ship can be selected from any valid "trade ship" blueprint. The ship will spawn at the broker once the shipment is ready, along with an automated crew.

- The ship's roster is not changeable, nor its mission (set based on the shipment orders). The ship will follow the trade route as a normal ai-run ship would. Every ship has a simple "travel-to X -> move to space station/airport -> deliver cargo -> refit & refuel -> despawn or return to destination with or without goods" mission it will complete without interruption unless attacked or the shipment cancelled.

- A new type of ship is now available: cargo ships. These ships require a considerably lower poly count and have their size limited. They also require a certain storage mass/total mass threshold to be passed. They require resources to build just like any other ship. The ships' speed is based on the design.


Other cool gameplay benefits:

- Shipment arrival will be a lot clearer now, and each successful shipment will have a satisfaction to it (instead of being just a numbers refresh)
- Pirate attacks can finally be more meaningful (once they are reworked I guess). With smaller, weaker ships, it will make pirate-cleansing a worthwhile activity for the bored player.
- There will be a true meaning to overextending empires, protection, guerilla warfare, economic war, sieges and blockades. Players will have to expand their military fleets to patrol precious shipment lines, giving a natural expansion difficulty to counter gigantic yet "empty" empires.
- Distance can be more of a serious factor in expansion, instead of just hunting for the highest quality of resources possible, even if it's over 100 parsecs away.


Problems/criticism I thought of:

-It would put too much pressure on the hardware, resulting in lags and stuttering.
With a very low poly count and lowest-Q textures, this might be ok? Since they are not meant to be interacted with up close unless in cases of attacks, this should minimize system load.


-It makes the game unnecessarily more difficult or complex.
I would say that the gain in "aliveness" would be worth the complexity here. Any system feels dead until you acquire a massive fleet, which is endgame stuff. How many players who RQ the game due to all the bugs and unnecessary difficulties would keep playing if they saw a few little shuttles going back and forth between their early colonies? I know this feeling is what has kept me coming back to SoH like a relapsing crack addict for years!

-Furthermore, it wouldn't require any extra work from the players, since it would all be automated. It would only require the selection of a cargo ship blueprint at shipment setup, that's it.


It will only add frustration as shipments run out of fuel, get attacked, atmodive or sundive. We have enough frustrations!

For sundive and atmodive, nothing to do here but improve the code. Should be fixed at some point.
For fuel and attacks, I see this as part of the gameplay. As in "game" and "play", not "work". Trade routes are essential to any empire. I see this as a critical part of the whole experience that most players are looking for.
Well-managed shipment lines with the right designs should never run out of fuel. As mentioned earlier, attacks on shipments will add an interesting aspect to all kinds of expansion and warfare.


-It's too complex to implement.
As I see it in my mind, it would only require:
- creating a new spaceship category with a few criteria for eligibility
- tweaking the broker to add a spacecraft factory tab, only allows construction of cargo ships, make it require a small spacecraft spot, as the ship spawns automatically load a crew with a looped mission, despawn on mission end.
Add a few custom lines like "deliver to a space station first if there's one, if not then airport", basic defense/surrender script against attackers (I think that's already in the code anyway) and voila - should be on!



-It's good, but it's low prio, will probably never get considered
IMO it's one of these low-hanging fruits that have a lot of potential to uplift the game experience at very little cost. Honestly I only see fixing common bugs and finalizing proper AI empires as having a higher prio. I think this would make a great next step afterwards.

Oh, and making the designer simpler/working with presets more easily. That too.




Let me know your thoughts! Do you think it would work and should be next in line?

So I finished scanning my 3x3x3 area around April the 6th (10days ago). I remember having found about 3 to 4 Q250+ Oil sources, when i still had to scan 3 more sectors. Then played another game for a while. Now playing hazeron again for a few days.
When I searched for Q250+ Oil, at first not a single one is shown. I manually search a few systems and even find a Q255 Oil source I hadn't previously found. It only showed up in the search tool after traveling to the system.

Of the multiple Q250+ Ore I had also found, only the one in the system I had colonised still showed up.

It seems to me that you have to revisit systems to make their resources show up in the search tool. I understand system decay is needed to keep the save small.

But since all scan reports are still available, is it possible that there is some code from system decay that causes this information not to be available to the search tool unless the system was recently visited?

I just started a new character (Omnivorous Glabrian), with rather high speed (not even the maximum). I kept getting "hit by the terrain" and even died from it ... from just running (and even walking) around. Just imagine being a new player and this being your first few minutes in Hazeron. I can imagine this would cause many insta-refunds.

I know you can turn it off, a new player however likely does not. I remember a new player who refunded the game also complaining about "colliding with the terrain". (the guy who said he never played anything this bad)

therefore I suggest to have it turned off by default, until it is fixed for alien characters.

I had no such issues on my chordates.



Edit: Iirc for collisions with walls this was an issue at some time also and the treshold was then increased to about 15m/s so people wouldn't keep dieing from hitting walls. Max speed characters should be able to run around without dieing from minimal height differences otherwise what's the point of having max speed.

Right now when you want to scan every system in a sector ith 30 systems. You need to to right click the system, left click travel to system, then right click again, left click scan system and then preferably also left click the system name to select it so you know this system is done. => 5x30 = 150 clicks to get a list of mission 60 orders. We all did this, even in the MMO. The tedium didn't deter us. Now it's singleplayer, maybe player hosted sever multiplayer in the future. So might aswell remove the tedium.

What if in the starmap there was a single order that said "Scan every system in the sector" or "Scan Sector" that added these 60 orders in 2 clicks? (maybe even with an optimal route, to minimise back and forth travelling?)

Not urgent by any means, but would take some tedium out at least.

And no I don't want a scan galaxy order :D (and there is no use for that really, you'll find all Q254-255 in under 50-100 sectors probably).

So that are 15000 clicks that could be reduced to 200 clicks for scanning 100 sectors of 30 systems

As the title says, it's singleplayer now, it would be neat to have the possibilty to have only "real logistics" like in X4 Foundations, were every good is only ever transported through a ship, never teleported. We also have broker shipments (magical teleportation between systems). I never use those and am glad it is not forced upon me. I'd like to have the same choice with airports.
Could be for goods, but also for passengers/migration. Ringworlds/habitables and self sufficient colonies would suddenly become alot more valuable.

Since it would be optional, you could still have magical teleportation, if you so desired.


Then something I think could add some sort of missions (this is just an idea and wouldn't bother me if never implemented, because I could just send ships myself)

The above could be coupled with shipments & people wanting to travel somewhere ("passenger shipments") being issued by cities (and by the player), which ships set to trade and/or ferry passengers around the system could then fulfill, . Instead of shipments, these ships could just look at supply and demand from cities directly perhaps, just like the autotraders from X4 (and I think the passenger transports in X3TC, or were they only for player use?).

So you could still send shipments, but they would only effectively be fulfilled if one of your own ships (or an AI empire ship) actually pickup and deliver the order.


The shipless, magical transportation is one of my gripes with Hazeron atm (after the bigger issues like the designer tedium and the lack of threat/interaction/combat).

The main thing I'd like to see changed is just: IF (checkbox in settings or better yet at the airport/broker is marked=false) THEN Airports autoimport goods = false. (idk if it's that easy) It could be set to autoimport by default. Or perhaps link it to the broker: no broker => no autoimports.

However if making it a setting at the airport, that is NOT marked by default, it would mean you would have to finish an airport first, before being able to set it to autoimport: no more unfinished airports importing things. => back to the old way of establishing colonies, which actually needed a ship or crates filled with materials.

Here are some ideas on how I think the capturing system could be improved, please do add your own suggestions.

Capturable Military bases, possibly MWS and capitols too.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Right now the way to capture a planet is to just destroy all Military Weapon systems (MWS), turrets and shield generator , then destroy the military base. That's it. No infantry needed. All cities on the world suddenly yield. In the old system you needed to destroy the MWS to get close to the city to beam down troops to capture flags or you could be sneaky and go in with troops from outside the firing arc of the MWS or use a spacetransport or small ship. Basically there were many more options and it was actually fun to capture the flags. It was also kinda fun to capture a city at a time, so a planet could have cities owned by different empires. I understand there were some exploits with placing flags in/near other cities, multple smaller cities, etc.

Instead it would be nice if all military buildings could either be destroyed by ships OR be captured by infantry. A Military building would not be a valid design, unless it had doors and hallways leading to a command chair (or the shield/firing console), which you could then defend by placing lots of troops around it and some turrets perhaps. (maybe with some restrictions to avoid 100 turrets, possible troop mumber restrictions and having to spread them over different sites)

So in addition to destruction from orbit, infantry/special forces gameplay would become an option again.

Having to capture each city capitol as well would be neat also. Each city could have a small garrison of troops/police officers stationed at the capitol or even each police station. That could however lead to the exploit of placing alot of police stations or even alot of small cities, so I'm not sure about capitols needing to be captured. We could perhaps have max 1 city per zone, but that's a bit of an artificial limitation. Other possibilites are a minimum number of inhabitants and morale. Or a minimum number of police jobs for the city to matter in the control of the planet, to avoid spamming many small cities. Maybe someone else has better ideas on how to tackle this.

A capitol could perhaps only become capturable once the military base has been captured or destroyed.

Doors also need to be destructible again with C4 to enable this.

Troop control:
-------------------
Also I think it would be good if a person in the chain of command of a World (City) was able to control the garrison of the Miltary base (and the Capitol/police stations) in the same way that you can now control troops from your ship. It aways bothered me in the past that this was not possible.

Perhaps even a list of active troops should be added in some menu concerning military bases (or cities) somewhere.

1. Instead of forcing player to scroll trough long list of items for an item player might not even remember the name off, provide a button that opens UI to select an item or category like it is done in 'chat'.

2. Please add an option to specify not just minimum but also maximum quality as well.
Reasons: send low quality items away to be forgotten, or to provide a planet with a 'jump start' material wise without touching high quality stock fresh planet doesn't need for construction.

3. Stop sending shipments if planet stock is lower than defined.
Reasons: you might want to keep some food or tools in system if you overestimated production capacity. You also might want to send away only unused excess to free space for more production.

Example UI in attachment.

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
   

Drop Pod
This one has been on my list for a long time. There is a room on the Atlantis called the Pod Bay that has always been empty.

This has been a fun one. I added a new vehicle called a Drop Pod. The model was designed in the Designer.

• Drop pod is rocket propelled, like a space rocket.
  
• Flight controls use the Space Rocket controls.
  
• Drop pod is manufactured at aircraft factories.
  
• Drop pod has retractable landing gear. The default key for this is I. You also get an on-screen 'Landing Gear' button. That button appears and the state of landing gear is depicted on the screen when the current vehicle has retractable gear.
  
• New Aircraft Factory and Colony Aircraft Factory blueprints are included. They now have a drop pod shop so there is a place for the drop pod to be parked when manufactured. There is a dozen parking spots so there will be a lot of pods handy when a ship needs to load them.
  
• Buildings do not fetch drop pods to drop pod parking spots, in case the aircraft factory is used for some other purpose.
  
• A 'Launch' button appears when you are in a drop pod aboard a spacecraft. The engine does not have to be on. Launch is immediate, placing the pod just outside the bottom extent of the hull heading away at 200m/s with its engine on and gear retracted.
  
• Recovery system can recover drop pod if the ship has a drop pod parking spot.
  
• Atlantis was updated to carry drop pods in the Pod Bay.
  

Undersea Buildings
Someone reported being unable to place a wharf at an undersea city. This prevented the undersea city from being connected by sea with surface cities that have wharves.

Fixed an error checking placement of coastal buildings at underwater cities.

Designed a few buildings specifically for undersea cities. They can be found in the exchange.

• Undersea Capitol - I decided to give this building an interior, so I could go inside while building and managing my underwater city. It features a bottom entry up into a dive chamber, like on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and other sea fiction. This presented some challenges because a number of small bugs prevented this from working properly; they are fixed.
  
• Undersea Factory 5 - A basic factory with 5 shops.
  
• Undersea Nuclear Power - Single generator nuclear power, nothing fancy.
  
• Undersea Wharf - A simple wharf with a few submarine parking spots.
  

Hull Volume Calculation Inconsistency
Hull volume is not calculated consistently between unfinalized and finalized blueprints that have a turbo lift. This makes finalizing the blueprint impossible.

Fixed.

Hull Volume Calculation Error
Buildings do not consider weapon bays when reconciling hull volume. This makes it impossible to finalize a building with a weapon bay.

Fixed.

Helmet Status Indicator for Suit Broken
When my suit is broken, the status indicator in my helmet blinks faintly yellow.

Fixed. Blinks red now like it was supposed to.

Season on Planetoid
Compass should not show season on a planetoid.

Fixed.

Disable Subscribe Button
Subscribe button should be disabled while a blueprint is being downloaded.

Done.

UI Freeze Making Spacecraft
Selecting a huge spacecraft in the spacecraft buy/commission/build dialogs causes a gigantic lag.

Fixed.

Achievements on Accounts Page
Accounts page should show my Steam achievements.

Done.

Exchange Size Sort
Size column does not sort properly in the building and spacecraft exchanges. Sorts alphabetically.

Fixed.

Finalize all Spacecraft and Buildings
All of the spacecraft and building blueprints included with the software were finalized. A few of them needed slight changes.

Done.

Achievement Graphics
The last of the basic set of achievement graphics were received from the graphic artist. Now all achievements have a graphic.

Done.