A lot of the previous SoH empires didn't burn out due to boredom, but left because of (a) Haxus's actions, (b) the direction the game had been going, (c) war is not fun, in fact it is pretty damn agonizingly painfully boring, most of the time.
Of course, Hazeron is not an ordinary game. Haxus completely ignores most bugs and exploits, so in any total war, anyone who understands the game is at a significant advantage over anyone who does not. Hazeron, as a game system, has rules, but as Morpheus said in The Matrix, some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.
This. After the game going into... odd directions and personal attacks going back and forth between developer and some players, well we all quit on that day.
Lots of the patches introduced some rather questionable game play decisions. Some of those decisions.. like the new "economy" being more based on some hilariously funny political ideals rather than fun.
Holding a big chunk of cities is something that can get you burned out pretty quickly.
The big empires pretty much figured that there is no point in attacking each other. With access to exploits ranging from causing enough lag to grind systems to a complete halt to simply increasing firepower threefold or moving large quantities of ships and troops across the galaxy within a few hours to days.
So that nice diplomatic arangement there resulted in a whole lot of manpower, infrastructure and experience being available to troll silly people.
Of course that kind of fun doesnt really last for ever. Add a whole lot of bone headed game design choices ontop of that, unhashed passwords being leaked and you end up with a lot of frustration.
There is basically no good way of managing multiplayer empires at any scale. Collaboration between players is something thats desired (both to increase fun and to keep player expansion more condensed) but the game pretty much actively throws obstacles into your way when you try.
The game has an awful lot of potential. But most of the time its just not fun.
Technologically its a pretty neat achievement (stuffing everything from walking in space ships to flying around at interplanetary scales into the same loading screen-free environment is pretty tough), but it also has its own issues there. The recent(-ish) addition of additional servers (both in quality and quantity) did a nice display of of Amdahl's law (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law )
This year a lot of the gameplay design decisions went into actively limiting player expansions by adding time sinks and grind.
Once it was reasonably realistic to build your own TL32 infrastructure, now you have to be a bit more creative.
Your best bet might be to stick with TL30 and figure out all the rule quirks and exploits/bugs.
So how about ending this rant with some advice... lets see:
Write yourself a parser for scanning reports.
It should parse:
- Solar System
- Planets and the best Quality for each Resource
- Wormhole links
Stuff it all into a neat relational database.
Get survey ships (lots of scan range, preferably high warp speeds)
Scan the heck out of some half dozen empty sectors
Figure out a few sets of resources:
- Those required for basic ships
- Above but including shields/weapons
- Above but including fancy crap that could also be imported with ease
Go over all solar systems in your database:
- Add everything connected to it within 1-3 wormholes
- Take the maximum quality for each resource out of that group
- Compute what TL you could produce with above resource qualities
- Pick a convenient location but avoid Ore & Oil deposits on Moons (not enough output)
The odds are pretty good to find a small constellation of 3-4 systems being capable of TL30 production with small scale imports from one or two more systems.
If you render it in 3D it might look a bit like that:
But before you spend that kind of effort...
Please take a good look at the game and its community.
If you want to get empires conquering each other and fighting over turf:
Didn't happen for me, but maybe things changed. Give me a call if it did.
-Idranel