Gaming Shores of Hazeron

[Ghostrider]

Well, in 20 years from now you'll be able to emulate today's internet on a beowulf cluster made out of future arduino- or raspberry-likes. Hopefully. Complete with spam, porn and scammers. Not so hopefully. The real danger is DRM.

 

[Hielor]

See, I look at it differently--the number of times I've wanted to pick up a 20-year-old game for a "quick play" in the last year is pretty much zero, so whether or not a game will still be usable in 20 years is somewhat irrelevant to me.

More important is whether or not I feel like my actions in the game are having any effect, which definitely favors online games, since they have an effect beyond just my hard drive...

 

[TerraMimic]

Well, I decided to give this a shot. I've so far managed to start 1 city (barely). In the process of trying to expand, I have been killed by wild animals about a half-dozen times already.

It took me a couple days to figure out what I was doing enough to start a city, and I haven't even seen as many wild animals as I have in the last day or so since I started building. Is there something attracting them? Or is it just poor luck?

Is there any way to protect the city from them?

 

[Hielor]

Animals ignore you before you found your first city, to give you a chance to explore and find a good spot. Once you found a city, you're fair game.

The town square is a "safe spot" from animals--animals won't see or attack you there, so as you're laying out a city you can stand there to be safe.

The citizens you see standing around at buildings won't be attacked by animals, so you don't have to worry about them.

As for longer-term protection...animals only spawn on undeveloped tiles, not developed ones, so if you fill all undeveloped tiles in and around your city with parks (or slabs, although parks don't have the levelling effect and are easier to build), no animals will be able to spawn and bother you. When you want to build something else, just bulldoze the park and put something else down.

 

[TerraMimic]

Thanks.

Umm, also I was wondering if you can bulldoze completed buildings? Or at least upgrade them? I built my first mine and house constructions at lvl 1 because I didn't know it was possible to change levels, and I figure it would be a better to rebuild or upgrade. (well, that and I accidentally built over a place I wanted to mine, so...)

I figured out how to delete the roads I accidentally placed that required materials I didn't have, but that's about it.

Oh, and is there any way to get food from the farms? My hunger stat keeps running low, and I keep finding myself wandering farther away from the city to get food.

 

[Hielor]

Thanks.

Umm, also I was wondering if you can bulldoze completed buildings? Or at least upgrade them? I built my first mine and house constructions at lvl 1 because I didn't know it was possible to change levels, and I figure it would be a better to rebuild or upgrade. (well, that and I accidentally built over a place I wanted to mine, so...)

Yes, you can bulldoze completed buildings. You can also add levels to buildings by just "building" more of the same on top of itself. Use the mouse scrollwheel to increase or decrease the number of levels to add.

Oh, and is there any way to get food from the farms? My hunger stat keeps running low, and I keep finding myself wandering farther away from the city to get food.

You can click at the base of the plants on the farm to get one unit of food, but you can only get one unit per tile per (i think) five minutes.

More sustainably, you need to make money--literally. At the machine shop, you can turn metal into bullion, which will put money into the "civilian account" of your city. You are "paid" 1c when you click the "run" button on a building, but you can also set taxes via the F12 window, which will move money from the civilian account to the government account if there's a bank in the city, and then you can withdraw money from the government account at a bank.

You can also confiscate money directly from the civilian account into the government account, but remember: it does this for all cities simultaneously, and doing so causes you to lose twice as much loyalty (at all cities) as the amount you confiscate. So if you confiscate 20%, all your cities will lose 40% loyalty. So, never ever confiscate half or more of your lowest loyalty on any of your cities.

 

[TerraMimic]

So, get money, then buy food from store? Hmm... gonna have to build a store then. Maybe it will help with my 33+% unemployment.

 

[Hielor]

So, get money, then buy food from store? Hmm... gonna have to build a store then. Maybe it will help with my 33+% unemployment.

Yes, sorry, left that part out. You can buy food from a cantina or broker (brokers sell everything, cantinas only sell food related stuff). You can also buy directly from a farm, all buildings can buy what they need and sell what they produce.

 

[TerraMimic]

That makes sense. And I need to start printing (smelting) money in order for the citizens to have money that I can get back through taxes?

I guess I would also need a bank for that, right?

 

[Hielor]

That makes sense. And I need to start printing (smelting) money in order for the citizens to have money that I can get back through taxes?

Correct, you can smelt metal bullion at a machine shop.

I guess I would also need a bank for that, right?

You need a bank in the city in order to collect taxes in the city, and you also need to have declared a capital.

Not sure if you've seen it yet, but http://hazeron.com/manual.html is quite good and mostly up-to-date. The "how to"s at the top are all pretty good, with the exception that you can completely skip space rockets in "how to build your first moon bace" and just make a spaceship with rocket drive modules instead...

 

[TerraMimic]

Awesome. I'm finally home and have time to play... and the whole thing is dead! :facepalm:

 

[Hielor]

Yeah, the game's definitely still in alpha, which means server downtimes are fairly common.

 

[TerraMimic]

Tue Oct 2, 8:30pm CDT · Still fighting a server data load issue that cropped up at the restart today. May need to rollback farther. Will continue working on this in the morning.

The first rollback put me at just after I built my first mine but before I built any homes. If it rolls back any further, I'm gonna have to create a new character. :compbash2:

(wish i had something to occupy my time with, but my orbiter install is currently stranded on another hd, along with all the rest of my games)

 

[Lucy]

Haven't played in a while myself. I recently "started again" after my whole home system got limbo'd for about a month - which prompted me to effectively leave it for six months or so and work on other things. When I came back to it I had my TL11 starship and nothing else.

While I enjoyed rebuilding, the issues with the alpha bumped me out again, so I think I've given up for now. Though reading the mail tells me I've advanced to TL24 or something, which isn't really helpful when 60% of the time I can't log in. It's a shame, and it's something I really hope gets properly tackled before the game hits beta stage since it's so gamebreaking.

 

[TerraMimic]

My city is finally progessing along nicely. Except... I can't seem to find any ore. Kinda puts a wrench in the works. Any suggestions for where to look to find some? I've got more stone and minerals than I know what to do with, but no ore.


-------EDIT-------

Wed Oct 3, 3:14pm CDT (UTC-5) · Servers restarted after fixing thread deadlock bug that plagued the servers all day. Database rolled back to the backup made last night at midnight Oct 3, 00:01am MDT (UTC-6). All new login accounts, characters, empires, ship designs and city construction after that time was lost.

Nevermind. Looks like all my work was lost. Again.

 

[Hielor]

Yeah, you seemed to have picked a rather bad time to start playing. This is the first time I've seen a database rollback in six months of playing :/

As for ore...my only recommendation would be to not start a city someplace that isn't near ore :lol:

 

[TerraMimic]

Well, I found the ore. Turns out it is just beyond the limits of where it will let me build my current city. Looks like I have to make a small mining town or something just for the ore.

 

[Gumok]

I am still thinking... play Shores of Hazeron, don't play Shores of Hazeron... Isn't it strange to you that distances between planets are reduced and what about interstellar travel? Stars are closer to each other too? And how interstellar travel looks? Because i like realism in games. Maybe realism is balanced by complexity in this game.

 

[Hielor]

In this case, the game is sufficiently complex that having realistic sizes/distances would do more harm than good. There aren't too many other games that let you walk around on the surface of a planet but also fly anywhere in the galaxy.

Spreading things out more would just make it take longer to get anywhere, which isn't a good thing, since travel is boring.

 

[TerraMimic]

Even the planets are not realistic sizes. I am currently on a moon with ~55km diameter that has an Earth like climate and atomosphere. But, as I have discovered the hard way, it is sufficiently large enough to make exploration on foot a chore. Things have gotten a little better since I've gotten a sailboat, but it's still slow going.

I'm thinking I should start again with a species that is capable of flight. The question is, is the tradeoff to gain speed an agility worth the massive cost in HP?