I hate the asteroid.

[Tipper]

So just a half-hour ago the asteroid destroyed me and my friend's home world.

---

I'm so incredibly angry because in my mind we did everything right to try to prevent it:



We built a city from the dirt and huts of our home world.

We created industry, electricity, technology, and ultimately spacecraft.

We took to the stars and pulled resources from every planet we could within our system.

We fashioned an empire and a wonderful supply chain to create a marvelous space station, armed to the teeth.

Then we built them. We built space station and spacecraft with weapons to destroy the looming threat.

Finally we staffed them with crew, who were ordered to attack at any asteroids.

We had followed all the guides and we were ready.



Unfortunately, the asteroid didn't appear until 8hrs before hand, while me and my friend was at work. But alas, I took the back half of today off to prepare for this!
But once our city's detected it, we couldn't locate it. But alas, we had constructed and manned as many weapons platforms as we could!


And when it finally appeared on our monitors, the whole system became a latency-ridden hellhole. We couldn't open a door to board our ship, let alone command our fleet.

Our space station's officer refused to perform the only job he had ever been given. The commander on our weapons platform simply watched. And we tried to do everything within our power to get aboard a spacecraft.

But my friend was stuck next to the inactive space station, unable to command the fleet from above. And I was unable to board a ship from the ground. I was forced to stay on our home world as the asteroid destroyed our prized gem.

It taunted us, with the system so incredibly laggy it sat and crashed into the planet for 10 minutes.


And now it's all gone. 

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Why even try to play this game when it fights you every step of the way? This was so incredibly dissatisfying.

Let us see and destroy the asteroid earlier. Have the crewed space station actually work and attack it.

And can you please not have the space system be laggy as hell at the most critical even of this game? Me and my friend just wanted to have fun and conquer the challenge, but really it just underlined how fucking infuriating this game is at times.

[Deantwo]

I have updated the wiki page a little to include specific notes about space stations and added a known issue warning about spacecraft remaining stationary while under the Noncombatant protection.
See: hazeron.com/wiki/Asteroid

Yes, the current server issues and some specific bugs especially makes it hard to combat the asteroid. It is very hit-and-miss rather a new player can successfully handle the asteroid even without the server issues.

I am not entirely sure what the intended goal of the asteroid is, but I assume it was an attempt to create some urgency and also try to make players not feel too attached to their homeworld. I guess it is safe to assume that the asteroid fails in both of these goals. I think the story in the game might add something for it to make sense, but from a gameplay prospective it is still badly implemented.

The asteroid's attempt at urgency is broken simply by the fact that not everyone has the same amount of free time to play the game every day for that first week. For example, plenty of causual players only have time to play computer games on weekends. It is made worse by the fact that players have no idea how long it will take them to get ready for the asteroid if they have never played the game before, and therefore asking them to be ready within a week is a bad idea. The fact that we also can't go out and meet the asteroid as soon as we have a ship leads to this weird forced scheduling for being online, which many new players won't know how they will need to plan for.

It would probably be better if the asteroid was completely optional, maybe as a challenge mode for veteran players. The impact date could be set to any date, even a month after starting. Would also be best if the player can engage the asteroid at any time before the impact date, if you have a ship ready on day 3 of starting than allow them to fly out and destroy it well ahead of schedule. But it might be better as a story mission triggered only after the player already has a ship capable of dealing with it.

As for attachment to the player's homeworld. This might be tricky as it depends a lot on the player and rather or not they even know their homeworld might be lost. A lot of new players might accept that their first city is built horribly and losing it might be fine motivation for them to make a new one, but this isn't true for all. For example I simply refused to play for the first week because I knew I didn't wanna attempt beating the asteroid, instead opting to just wait for it to get over rid so I could build slowly in peace.

After the homeworld is destroyed, new players still have plenty of weird issues that might not have obvious solutions. Such as if their only other cities are some small moon colonies, the best strategy is to just bulldoze them and recall to a new habitable world. Even if some players might enjoy the challenge of recovering from losing their homeworld, there are many cases where recovery is impossible but not apparent.

[Rockinsince87]

So just a half-hour ago the asteroid destroyed me and my friend's home world.

---

I'm so incredibly angry because in my mind we did everything right to try to prevent it

So sorry that happened. A lot of work and energy goes into building your first city and it's seriously depressing to watch it disappear.

When the asteroid mechanic was first introduced, I started playing again after a bit of a hiatus and I was freaking out too. Wife and kid on top of work. How will I find time to beat this thing. Starter system had no cryo so no beam weapons for me. I had to hurry up and I decided to just pickup and relocate to another system out of fear. 

I even watched the thing run into my planet, crashed the server I was on and when I did come out of limbo it said the Asteroid harmlessly flew by. 


The point of all of that? Yes I agree with Deantwo that the Asteroid should be optional for new players. It's fun up until it's not. New players should be able to learn in peace. 

Perhaps the trade off of starting a game with the asteroid enabled could be a guaranteed better starting system, one with all the major resources (in random qualities of course) so veterans can hit the ground running with access to most of the resources and have a fun mechanic to balance it out.


Tipepr, If you see me in game (avatar LimboWarrior), I'm willing to give you a warp ship stocked full of resources. You can have it and fly off and find a new better asteroid free system to play in.

[QuakeIV]

Honestly the asteroid is kindof a filter and I'm half okay with it because you can usually just ditch the homeworld, which is usually really sloppily built by necessity anyhow.

It might be a good idea to try to encourage players to go that route.

[Rockinsince87]

Honestly the asteroid is kindof a filter and I'm half okay with it because you can usually just ditch the homeworld, which is usually really sloppily built by necessity anyhow.

It might be a good idea to try to encourage players to go that route.

That is an honest option and yes it's an eventual necessity that can't be denied.

Flip side of the coin is that requires new players to learn the game quickly, get to space, and then figure out how to setup a independent colony outside of their home system. That's a tall order in a week or less. For veterans, we can get to space on day one with a fully stable home city in neat order ready to expand with a full plan in our heads how to pull it off. 

I'm not saying to dumb anything down or hold anyone's hand. There honestly could be a start system that works for all. A new player start and a challenging start. New player start has basic resources, perhaps no cryo, no plasma etc... Challenging start could be the exact opposite, better base resources in terms of availability and an asteroid that can and will blow you up if you can't take it out. 

There has to be a solution for both new players and veterans.

[SpaceGeek]

Check out these ideas I had for alternatives to the asteroid catastrophe.

[Wander]

A half newbie here, to share some curious experience.

So i started a new game, did derp some, and now almost a month later still no asteroids. Here's what went wrong:

- My starting village consisted of ugly bushes in my face, noises of spooky human insect that tried to eat me, and annoying spam of targoss messages. I never seen the stargazer and found out about his role only much later from wiki. Ran for my life and sanity to another continent.
- Targoss still found me there after i made the flag, and started instructing how to build a mine and a lumber yard. Then he got stuck next to the mine and never spoke to me again, i've continued building by guess without his help.
- A few days later i realized that my species is a bit too annoying to interact with most things due to their design and how this game handles players character control. I made adjustments and as only known to me way, created that as new avatar, joined my own empire and transferred all the rights from original emperor to the new guy, then deleted original avatar.

I think some of those events may have broken the asteroid so it never appeared. You may try to test this out if you will, and use it if it's reliable.

[SpaceGeek]

A half newbie here, to share some curious experience.

So i started a new game, did derp some, and now almost a month later still no asteroids. Here's what went wrong:

- My starting village consisted of ugly bushes in my face, noises of spooky human insect that tried to eat me, and annoying spam of targoss messages. I never seen the stargazer and found out about his role only much later from wiki. Ran for my life and sanity to another continent.
- Targoss still found me there after i made the flag, and started instructing how to build a mine and a lumber yard. Then he got stuck next to the mine and never spoke to me again, i've continued building by guess without his help.
- A few days later i realized that my species is a bit too annoying to interact with most things due to their design and how this game handles players character control. I made adjustments and as only known to me way, created that as new avatar, joined my own empire and transferred all the rights from original emperor to the new guy, then deleted original avatar.

I think some of those events may have broken the asteroid so it never appeared. You may try to test this out if you will, and use it if it's reliable.

Sounds like changing your avatar and transferring ownership before you triggered the asteroid story prevented it. Also there is a "yeet bug" that I have encountered which throws the asteroid out of the sector, so far away that you will never have to worry about it but I think that is less likely in your case.

Yay for new science! Thanks for posting this.

[Deantwo]

I think some of those events may have broken the asteroid so it never appeared. You may try to test this out if you will, and use it if it's reliable.

None of those events would affect the asteroid event. The asteroid event is tied to the world your avatar spawns on after avatar creation.

However server-side issues, such as server-side lag or crashes, can cause the asteroid to not spawn or miss its target. This has been somewhat common this universe since servers aren't in the best state as of late.

[SpaceGeek]

I think some of those events may have broken the asteroid so it never appeared. You may try to test this out if you will, and use it if it's reliable.

None of those events would affect the asteroid event. The asteroid event is tied to the world your avatar spawns on after avatar creation.

However server-side issues, such as server-side lag or crashes, can cause the asteroid to not spawn or miss its target. This has been somewhat common this universe since servers aren't in the best state as of late.

This is worthy of the wiki!