Topic: Shores of Hazeron

Shores of Hazeron

A free (currently in BETA) massively multiplayer galactic empire sim.

In the beginning, you can start as a member of an empire, or an architect of a new empire. (As a member, you aren't authorised to make policy changes, but you can build colonys for whatever particular empire you become a part of (unless prohibited). You can also leave and join empires at will.

But the first thing you'll actually do (assuming you aren't joining an empire, in which case, you take on a predefined form) is design your race. Humans, monstrosities, even bipedal bears are possible (although the character crature is fairly limited).

When you are finished, you spawn on an empty planet with no clothes and a knife, and it's down to you alone to start building a city.

Once you've laid the infrastructure down and fended off native creatures, residents will begin moving in, and will take care of the many jobs available, including resource gathering (mines, wharfs, etc.), industries (from refinery to manufacture), construction (buildings and roads) and eventually, research.

Advance far enough, and you can construct a space rocket to take you to moons with resources that will enable you to build spaceships and spaceports that you design, allowing you to travel to planets, set up colonies (don't forget installation supplies and environment suits/helmets) to gather higher quality, and in some case, unique (to certain climes) resources.

Eventually, you'll need to travel further. See a bright star in the night sky? You could visit that, but it would likely take a long time. More advanced materials grant access to starships that can travel through wormholes, allowing you to explore the whole galaxy.
Furthermore, you can assign officers to ships, and send them on patrols or trade missions.

However, there are other people out there (the user base isn't too big at the moment, but the servers apparently can't handle too many people anyway), who may either ally with you or declare war with you.

There are a few problems, however. The aforementioned server strength doesn't make for a smooth game at the best of times, it's very user-unfriendly to begin with, the graphics are fairly basic and there is a nasty bug where your character gets stuck in limbo, whereby you get stuck on a loading screen (at which point, you will need to post on the forum and ask the administrator to effectively rescue you).

But I'm having great fun with this, and I wouldn't mind a bit of company - whether I'm joined by you, or we make a secondary, new empire especially for us.

Read the documentation on the site (and download the pdf manual in the game manual area), watch a few videos, and hopefully, it might interest you.

Ask me any questions, and I'll try to answer them. I'm no expert, but I've got the basics down.

Has anyone tried it out?

Only yesterday, I piloted a starship to a neighbouring solar system - without the aid of wormholes. It took me about 3 hours there and back, and there was no-one there on the other side, but it's in its nature as an MMO that has unfortunately very few people playing at the moment. I then traversed a few wormholes, and found a system with the holy grail of astral bodies - a Ringworld (a strip of land that encircles a sun, offering many times the surface area of your average planet or large moon). I'll colonise that asap.

However, the game suffers a lot from server downtime (it's been down all day for me), and along with it being extremely laggy at times (and moderately laggy at the best of times), this serves as an obstacle to really getting into the game - if indeed it is your sort of game anyway.

I'll understand if anyone read this thread, tried it out, but was turned off by the lagging and stuttering. There are some things to bear in mind:

On the main page, there is a link to the section on the website for server status. This will tell you if the servers ("scene" for the game, "mail" for the mail service (whereby you can check up on the happenings of your empire) and "login" for logging into the website of client) are currently operational, whether they are being debugged and how many people are playing at that particular moment.

If the scene servers are down (or at below 4), you won't have a smooth time. If the servers are running the debug tool, you'll probably experience locking up as a bug is trapped in the system. If more than 40 people are currently online, you can expect to experience moments of extreme lag.

Secondly, as updates are released, the downloadable game client and mail client become obselete, and you need to patch it to the new version before you can log in. There was a pretty nasty bug in a release a week back where every time you logged in, the client would crash - that is, unless you minimised or hid the client window behind another one while it loaded up.

Nethertheless, I look forward to hearing any opinions on this game, if and when anyone gives it a try.

I came across this game a while ago. Just briefly read a bit about it, then moved on. I was looking for something different at the time. I may check it out some day.