2022-01-13 FYI

[Celarious]

Requested Bug Fixes

2. Building Sites Do Not Override player terrain leveling: Currently if a player levels an area in order to build a city, the building sites will not really be seen because they are being overridden by the local terrain modification. If the building's own site had priority then it would allow me to make hills, mines, and other unique designs which currently I cannot do now.

7. Save Deletion Bug: Hazeron Starship routinely deletes its own save. I have no idea what causes this but it seems to happen 1 out of 10 times or so when I start up Hazeron Starship. The only workaround I have is to manually copy and paste the safe file into a different area to protect a copy from the game itself.

Just wanted to add that these are the most severe bugs that affected me in Starship. While it is possible to deal with the graded area overriding the building site, it makes for some very weird looking cities and is irritating. In terms of the save deletion bug, this seems to happen because the game starts writing a new save, deletes the old one, but the game closes before it can finish writing so you're left with a wiped savefile.

[Deantwo]

Avatars accumulate points based on online time. 

Some large number of those points could be spent to establish a new empire. 

The game could start up with two to five existing empires that always allow new players to join.

If you put it along with the "pay $10 to get your own empire right away", maybe?

The biggest issue I see with it right now is what happens when you transition from being part of the large starter empire to a self owned empire. At least assuming you do so with your existing character it would mean that you can't currently get any cities transferred over with you, and your starmap info is also completely reset when you create the new empire.

If the new empire is made with a newly created avatar I guess there is less issues, but we still have a lot of play te that is now basically over and nothing major can be transferred.

Forcing a player to do an activity they don't want to do before they can do what they actually want to do is normally a bad idea. Unless that work directly feeds into helping the future activity that they want to do.

Even if you spend all your time in that large starter empire just surveying for a location to settle your own empire, you will be in a situation where that large starter empire now knows your exact location because of the survey information. Well we can't see colonized solar systems on the starmap anymore unless we have a city near it, but it still becomes pretty obvious that someone settled in that area with all the surveyed Q255 resources.

[Tracyn Kyrayc]

Well, I haven't been around in years, but it's nice to see those news.

I'm really glad to see SoH coming back. I used to play the game back in 2013-2014 or so, along with my brother. We talked about it recently and we're kinda bummed to see it had died. So, yeah, really happy to see it coming back !

As far as this discussion goes, however, I feel like I gotta take part in it.

The non-combatant state is quite a good idea. Raid-off is a bitch on every game, and I'll feel better knowing that people who can only play a couple of hours a day won't end up being rent by those who can play all day long.

Regarding the fee, though, I feel like going back to F2P or B2P would be best. Not P2P. I know some people don't mind pouring 10 to 15 bucks in a game every month, but some of us do. For some, it's because 10 bucks is a big deal. For me, it's because once I subscribe to a game/servuce/whatever, I feel like I gotta get my money's worth, maximize the time I spend on the game, and it becomes a second job. I feel forced to log in and play as much as possible so as to not waste money.

If you are worried about going F2P because of players who will create infinite empires, there's a way around it : make the players register a credit card/PayPal account/whatever but without charging anything. Kinda like how you prove that you are an adult on YouTube.

This way, every account will need a payment method linked to it, and you can prevent the same credit card/PayPal account from being linked to several accounts.

OR make the game B2P. And one-time payment, and you get the game for life. That's how Guild Wars worked. I'd be fine with buying the game for 30 or even 40 bucks.

And of course, you can still accept donations alongside either of those methods.

F2P + Donations, or B2P + Donations sound fine to me. Forget P2P, it is a thing of the past, and it should remain so.

Or, you can make the empire creation process so tedious that making multiple empires would not be worth the time, but this feels like a bad idea.

Anyways, glad to see SoH coming back from the darkness. I am excited to play it again.

[Athena]

F2P + patreon would be the best option. A subscription model will gaurantee a peak online player count in the low single digits and approximately zero player interaction outside of galaxy chat. Peak during the patreon era was in the 30s and growing every week. And there were empires everywhere to leave beacons and high tech gifts on.

[Haxus]

Wormhole Drive only. This would give more a feeling of galactic terrain (choke points and long travel times to distant colonies)

Ironically that was the original plan. I never intended to introduce anything like a warp drive for that precise reason.

Can't do Star Trek without a warp drive. They are fun.

[Haxus]

Thank you for the bug reports. I will put a high priority on fixing them before the next update. I am planning an update before the end of February, when the servers come back up on line. Trying to fit in as many disruptive changes as possible while there are no players.

[martianant]

Everyone keeps talking about how to fix the problem with weird over complicated solutions like "Safe space" or "civilized space" and a bunch of NPC empires that would end up introducing weirdness mechanics wise.

The bottom line is combat and war need to be fixed. War needs to take longer. It should have some kind of lead up period, so the defender can rally allies/friends. It needs to take time to actually take a system, so the defender and friends can field a fleet. There can be no epic battle stories if the battles take play within hours while everyone else is offline.

If people can live near by other people and not fear total destruction while they are asleep, if they can have some kind of guarantee that the friends they live near by could actually help defend them, then they would probably live near each other! We don't need to have an artificial reason for a civilized space to exist. And I don't want to speak for Haxus, but I feel like he would rather see this kind of space develop organically by players with player empires interacting.

I also think having 20 galaxies is way too much. Especially given the player counts. One galaxy is plenty of space, and if there was ever a case where it wasn't then adding another galaxy would be pretty easy.

Honestly I'd even prefer if the one galaxy was a little smaller, not box size of course but 1/5th the current size or something. It's still vast. It's still a huge galaxy! I think people don't understand just how huge the Shores of Hazeron galaxy is. It has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of stars right now. For the player counts the game has been getting, even going back to the box days, every player could have thousands of star systems with no competition.

We want to encourage player interaction, having 20 huge galaxies means everyone spreads out (especially because being near someone means you can wake up tomorrow and have lost everything!) leading to a social heat death of the universe.

I am happy to see Hazeron is not dead, but please please please consider improving the combat/war system so it can stand a chance of having a different outcome than universe 5 and 6's slow heat death and decline in player count.

We can't build a galaxy full of adventure and quests and fun without some kind of change happening.

EDIT:
Just want to touch on how huge the game is with some numbers before people say making it have a single galaxy that's smaller would "ruin" it by making it "small"

Shores of Hazeron is 5,000pc in diameter. it's probably an average of 100 maybe 150 pc in height? that means roughly a box of 5000x5000x150 pc of space.
A sector is 10x10x10pc, so the galaxy is roughly 500x500x15 sectors of space.
That's 3,750,000 sectors. Sectors near the core are very dense, and near the rim are pretty sparse. Let's just say the average density of 10 systems per sector.
That's 37,750,000 systems

Box days the game had maybe a 100-200 players? That's 187,500 systems assuming the generous 200 players. Maybe the game explodes unexpectedly and we get 1,000 players! That's still 37,500 systems for every single player.

The universe has 20 galaxies... One galaxy 1/5th the size would be 7,550,000 systems still. That's still a huge galaxy! Even that might be too big!!

If we ever actually ran out, it would be pretty easy to add back in the intergalactic wormhole to a new galaxy with another million+ star systems.

I was informed that my density and height was incorrect. At the core it's 80 thick and probably 60 systems a sector in density. As a pure average, I will instead use 40 thick and 24 density
this is 500x500x40x24 or 240,000,000 systems in the Shores of Hazeron galaxy alone. I was doing the math on total system count in the game and with my previous (incorrect) assumption of 15 sector height and 10 density I got 269,385,000 total systems. that means the approx number in Shores of Hazeron is even greater than my bad guess of the entire universe! Guys I promise a smaller galaxy won't hurt us.

Assuming every galaxy has an average height of 40 sectors with an average system density of 24 systems/sector, the entire universe has 1,724,064,000 systems!

EDIT 2:
Another thing that might help if we want to give a reason for players to congregate is if there was an uneven distribution of resource qualities, so only a few regions in the galaxy had Q250+ resources. It would mean fighting would probably occur just to have those resources.

[Wincil]

I don't think a universe or galaxy being too big I don't think having 20 galaxy's
is too much I don't think players have to be closer together I wouldn't want a smaller galaxy tbh There should be a separate server for that tbh.

[Celarious]

Everyone keeps talking about how to fix the problem with weird...

I agree with most of this, plus what a few other players have discussed in Discord. Alongside shrinking the universe a bit, maybe to 1 or 2 galaxies, plus changing PVP mechanics to make city conquest/wars/construction be a longer-period affair may result in higher player interaction and activity in the long term. Basically, anything to ensure overnight empire stomping isn't as easy and to encourage non-PVP interaction with things like trade and so on

[Yurk Embassy]

As I said earlier to you folks on Discord, I'm one for that feeling of endlessness of space. But even I am forced to admit the current map is way too wide. Which is why I wholeheartedly agree with Martianant above. This is something on which a great deal of optimisation could actually be done: removing the other galaxies would already make the game hella smoother (I remember the Box being a rather fluid experience, compared to previous instances of online SoH). Shrinking down the SoH galaxy, furthermore, seems necessary to me as well. It would still leave us with a gigantic area.

Lorewise, the SoH galaxy being cut off from the others could easily be justified as a part of the Ringworlds' activity, considering those can generate portals if I remember correctly. The Ringworlds' energy would have started interfering with the Shores of Hazeron galaxy core, making its trespassing impossible and fatal for an undetermined amount of time (some sort of cycles that can very well last from years to centuries, a part of the "galactic weather" being somehow affected by the remnants of an ancient, yet powerful technology). Hell, that could even be the plot for a player Adventure!

A disclaimer to conclude on my post: I am not in favour for a return to the good ol' "Box". I simply agree with shrinking down the playable area to reduce the distance between players, while having the map retain some sense of wideness and void. Compromise. And, I believe, a fair one, from which Diplomacy and overall player/empire interactions would benefit greatly. That's what it's all about, and for that reason, I can only support Martianant's point on that regard.

PS: Wincil, I don't get why you keep disagreeing with everything people say without bringing proper arguments onto the table. I don't believe you've ever seen a limit to the playable area in Shores of Hazeron. Me neither, by the way, it's just a way to say this: shrinking down the map will literally have no real visible effect as far as the player's perception towards the map's limits is concerned. Changes that could be noted in game would likely be:
- Performance increase. The game would be more fluid, bugs and crashes less frequent, since there would be much less space for the server to handle.
- More lively galaxy. Empires would be closer to one another. Sure, it would be a bit less safe, but it would also be more interesting, more epic. More diplomacy, more wars, more treaties, more trade, maybe, who knows? Wincil, you keep saying size isn't the problem, that the issue is that there aren't enough people. Well, we can't magically make thousands of players interested in a game all of a sudden. But a map resize would be extremely simple to perform. As Martianant stated in his post, it would likely be easy to include another galaxy if space came to lack, which I highly doubt will happen even with thousands of players considering the size of that hypothetical shrunk galaxy.

Ultimately, it's up to you, Haxus. Our experiences as players have shown that having a galaxy too wide tends to kill the activity, and that bringing players closer to one another has made the game much, much more lively. The map, even reduced to a smaller, single galaxy, can still retain that sense of giantness you want to give to the playable area.