Thanks for posting this, looks really interesting. Yeah the eye candy is lacking but the scope is amazing! IMO this is what a game like spore should have been about for space. It seems like you can build anything and like a settlers game many dependant resources for.products. I can see myself.losing hours in this type of game.

Drats lost all that long post I typed, but I will just say, I been playing this all weekend and I can say without a doubt its one of the best space sims I have played in along time. I havent had a game keep me up til 9a the next morning in years but this game is really fantastic. There are some glitches but nothing yet I havent seen that was worse than some published games out there. Even universal combat or any elite never made me feel like a starship commander like this one did. You want to feel like Captain Kirk, this is the game for you, altho since there doesnt seem to any NPC activities other than wildlife, so I would say if you want space action, your gonna to have to go against players that already have ammassed huge empires...Not that I mind, I havee been burning hours just playing around, hell I havent even left my solar system!

I think it one of the more interesting online game out there and if I ever get a decent broadband connection I would give it a go.

I remember hearing a lot about this last year on the forums for the game Dwarf Fortress, sadly the game seemed to be plagued by bad lag as well as poor balance, not sure how much things have improved these days though.

It certainly is an interesting game though.

Lag can be bad at times and ai sundiving ships occur but ispent most of my vacation glued to this game. I been moving slow to get feel of game and just goofing off but I finally got a scotship with shields and transporters to start some serious exploring. If STO was done the way this.game was, I think it would have done much better..

While the idea of the game sounds promising, it crashed/froze several times before even letting me log onto the server.

Actually, IF it works, it is a nice little game, and i haven't even built my first city yet. Listening to all the guys in glactic chat when the epidemics hit their colonies was priceless :3

Sorry for double post.

I have been playing SoH for a few days now, and it really blew my mind 😛

The game includes almost anything you could ask from a space sim. In fact, it got more features already than the holy Infinity probably is going to have, should it ever be released. The downsides are, of course, the "simplistic" graphics (meaning it will likely give you instant eye cancer if you are used to Infinity trailers or even X:TC <- 2008 game), the not-yet-fine-tuned game mechanics that allow for some nasty exploits (just read through a 24-pages-thread about the universal war and the empire that came out ahead is heavily accused of having abused/exploited the game mechanics) and the lag issue that takes place with more than ~60-70 players online at the same time.

So, combat seems not to be really polished yet.

Half the time if i log on, i have to exit the client and log on again, because i can only move around and not interact with the environment or even see the chat messages.

And without reading the "how to get started" pages, the game manual or the tutorial.pdf you are pretty much screwed at the start, because the game is rather complex and the ingame tutorial guy doesn't tell you too much.

But the building up your own city as your own species on your own planet in your own solar system in an mmo setting is simply unmatched. Ok, only thing i got mmo-wise in the game so far is the galactic chat, i haven't left my home system yet and only just gotten to my homeplanets moon, but found lumenite and eludium (though of "poor" quality : / ) so now i can finally begin to build spacecraft 😈

Thanks for letting me know about this gem of indie developed space sim!

Correction: Server rollback ate my moonbase. Then, some stupid carnivore wildlife ate me. Off to fill out this form...

Post some pic if you can Torric be interested in seeing some from someone who playing the game.

Servers went down, so i cannot build my moon base again for now or make screenshots. Here are two Screenshots i happened to have lying around.

/

That is my imperium's capitol city. I had the building symbols turned on while taking the screenshot. You can see my housing area in the background (where the skyscrapers are), the Townsquare with me empires flag in the center (quite), bottom right you can see part of my spaceport. Also you can see the TL (technology level) of my buildings^^ It is a newb town anyway 😉

/

Here is my space rocket, that has been standing there and waiting to take me to the stars...well.. at least my moon... for quite some time now, hence the corrosion damage it took from the wheather. I had some food shortage after the rollback that made things go way worse than they were going before, so i still do not have a moonbase-.-

In the background you can see the two gas giants of my home system, my homeplanets ring, and other planets or moons of the gas giants.

And it seems like there is awesome drama going on as well, but this is not only drama, this is a story no theme park mmo could ever tell:

http://hazeron.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1238

How big are the planet and can you go into the sea ❓ also I noticed that there were some ground vehicles in one of the vids as I see from the pic you have some road laid out. so I take it that you can drive around the planets. ❓

Just had a look at that form you posted early. 😆

Has anyone got out there own solar system yet. ❓

I dont have any screenshots to post but to answer some questions.

1. There are regular vehicles altho again the graphics are not like any fps type thing. But there are water vehicles , a sailboat and submarine altho its hard to see anything underwater. In chat they talked about future updates where can build underwater but not sure if when that would be. There are also motobikes, SUV's and APC's altho the APC dont have guns yet. You have a helicopter that really flies like a jet as no hover control. Space fighters and a space shuttle.

2. This is a HUGE galaxy, you could technically point your ship 1 way , get engines to light speed and leave it for days and possibly still only be a few sectors away. 1 parsec - 10 mins travel and close vicinity systems are anywhere from 5 to 25 parsecs away. There is wormhole travel but they have set routes and dont always go where ya want.

3. If you colonize you can name the sector which houses several solar systems, name the solar system itself and of course your cities. For some reason there really isnt a planet name. They just go off of there ring count, so Earth would be Alpha III..

4. Starting ships are rockets which are clunky but used to find the resources on the moon to start building your own spaceships. These can be designed by yourself, and have everything from shields, transporters,sickbays, weapon bays for combat or harvesting off atmospheres or asteroids,sensors, vehicle bays. Every ship is fully explorable you can roam around it during space travel or take over any of the crew stations, helm,engineering, fire control, sickbay, transporter room,etc. If you have an officer you can give complex commands for them to follow and basically make them trader like X series only alot more diverse, but they can only go where you explored and it does get tricky trying to give them long space runs. You basically have to ride shotgun the first time to chart the course for them and burn it onto a mission disk and from there can alter what they do along the way.

5. You can also design your own space stations but basically these just allow trading via the whole solar system without having to land on planets, you dont dock with them just approach em, but you can design them with a crew and rooms that travellers can explore.

6 It is in alpha state so it does have lag, crashes and problems, but I been playing over a month now and no slowing down, there are definately some things I would hope would improve but it has me hooked. No other game around can compare, and I thibnk this will be my home for quite some time.

My thoughts exactly.

Right now there is a crazy limbo-wave going on together with Haxus (the sole Developer) being busy and not having time to look after the game every day. So all of my characters are stuck between system at the moment. There is a screenshot thread on the 'official' forums you might want to have a look at:

http://hazeron.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=77

This game has nice stories happening all over. While i was still in the early exploration phase of my homesystem, the emperor of a neighboring star empire came across my solar system (solar systems have names like LNZK when they are not colonized, so it's quite easy to tell if there is a someone already there) and paid a brief visit. Was quite a sight when his TL23 supercolonizer ship entered the atmosphere of the planet i was exploring at that time (i had no sensors on my ship back then) and landed next to me. Our species were of the same skin color (though his' had two heads and each head had three eyes... and they had wings, too) so we got along very well, he gave me a nice bunch of cronodollars to help get me started, and our empires are on friendly terms ever since.

Now with my maincharacter stuck in limbo, i logged onto my alt. Sadly, as my empire is a theocracy, i cannot simply assign every citizen a rank, instead each citizen may request an unoccupied rank and then has to win a vote of the other citizens that are of the same rank. Nice idea, but doesn't work so well if you are the only player in your empire 😉

As a result of this, the sole Lander Mk1 Class Vessel that was on the ground in my empire's capitol didn't give a sh** about my orders or attempts to open the door. So i took one of the space fighters i had left standing around on my spaceport and flew up to my space station, and i even was able to land on the outer hull of my space station (i had not given my space station design a vehicle bay....) and to my surprise, there was a Harvester spaceship of my neighboring empire parked there. So i spacewalked over to it, found the doors unlocked, requested the captains berth, sat down in the captains chair and ordered them to take me to the next solar system, where another of my empire's starships was parked, and off we went.

Granted, my alt now is in limbo, too, from the attempt to travel between the systems... but the game offers so much to explore, not even the consistent serverlag, the graphics or the possibilities of being conquered by more advanced empires or simply players that exploit the still flawed game mechanisms can make me want to play any other game more than this at the moment, and that says something (i currently was playing Rift and Mass Effect...).

Anyway, since i started quite slow, the possibilities for further expanding my empire are limited by my neighboring empires, so my goal is to get to TL (Techlevel) 20+ and build a big mothership, and with that i'll then go exploring the uncharted areas of space in hope of finding that Trinary System with a Ringworld and planets that allow for building TL32 ships from the resources of one single system... =)

I have problems downloading the software. I made an account, log in to the download page but there is no option for downloading the client. Am i doing something wrong?

Hey there, Ikkir from the SoH forums here:

Right now, Haxus has been re-organizing all his site stuff. He merged a bunch of stuff together and is prepping to work on the game full time (as he sold his main company asset off and the rest of his team went to go work elsewhere for the company he sold stuff to). I called him the other day and talked to him about it, he is close, from what I heard, to finishing a patch for improving npc-ai movement, so either he is waiting to put the new client up before he re-implements that page... or he whoopsed while working on website (there are a few other sections inaccessible at the moment as well).

It may be advisable to wait for the new client anyway, as theres a record of limbo'd players and lots of reports of being unable to create new empires (I am down to one character able to log in myself). I can upload a link to the current client later tonight (unless someone beats me to it) as soon as I get home, if you don't want to wait for however long it takes... assuming he doesn't patch today.

Edit2: website and downloads should be fully functional now.

I signed up, downloaded client, loaded, made empire but i would never connect, so i couldn't play 😥

I've talked to Haxus about some of the issues, he knows there's a problem with some of his SQL servers and certain connections are getting dropped (I think). This may include properly saving new empires. Only thing I can recommend at this point is making more than one new empire, as it doesn't seem to happen to everyone (I will make a few accounts later and properly test empire creation for more data, once he finishes his AI patch).

oh Heey ikki, i didnt know you knew about this site! *starts singing its a small world after all*

Problem? Spending more time in a lag situation than playing the game is a problem? Really? Make more than one (in all essence:account) empire because of the incompantant dev?

Get a clue, This is a terrible, mismanaged game where there is more downtime than uptime.

Don't waste your time on this one

Hey i requested the password (registered) but it won't send ...maybe lag is to blame?

I've just got this but every time I actually go into the game I get a rutime error, I think it says "unusual c++ runtime error". A quick look on the forum says it might be ATI graphics cards(which I do have). Anyone know anything about this or if there's anything I can do without getting an nvidia card? Tried looking for updates but didn't find anything which made any difference.

Edit: In case anyone tries this game and has a similar issue, my problem was to do with the the tutorial NPC "Targoss", the game crashes cos of him and my personal fix is to kill him as qiuckly as possible! This may have been fixed by now but not sure.

This is VERY addictive..

I think the Targoss problems have been fixed now but not sure. Once he gets to work on the new shaders, graphic card problems should start clearing up.

I had 3 empires in Shores of Hazeron. All were incredibly fun to play.

The 1st: A total fail newbie empire, we were already having a lot of fun with TL4 ships already. When our empire reached TL7, we were attacked by a far bigger empire, resulting in the destruction of most of our important worlds. After this event our empire slowly decayed into obscurity, both in terms of territory and technology (yes you can have a sort of 'technological dark age').

The 2nd empire was far more successful: We started out in a favorable position: Only one strong empire nearby, and a lot of space to expand to nearby. We achieved interstellar space flight in just 7hr playing (this is extremely fast). We quickly grabbed every good planet we could find, and beefed up our research. In contrary to the previous empire where we played with 6 people in one empire, we were playing with 2 to 3 people now (most of the time 2). Still, we had a large empire which was incredibly powerful. We had officers patrolling all nearby borders in powerful warships. We had a lot of very fast, high cargo capacity traders running around to make sure every planet was supplied and tech diffusion within the empire was good.

We eventually managed to infiltrate our nearby rival with a player, who snatched some techs from them and brought them to us. We also got to know then that their empire was falling into disarray (it had 6 active players in it), due to a lot of plagues. Their population wasn't big enough any more to support all the infra. In the meantime, some new empires spawned nearby. We offered them our technologies, in return for them allying with us. This coalition was the major coalition in that area. My empire then produced some very powerful warships, able to withstand TL32 laser towers (those are NASTY!). We then proceeded to take every planet from them, which we did. After we did that, we gave several of the good planets to some local coalition members who were on the frontier with this empire. We only held 1 planet for ourselves. We didn't have any use for them, since they weren't connected to our WH routes (and officers wouldn't travel between systems back then without wormholes).

Eventually we had a big TL32 fleet, were expanding in every direction, with several of the coalition empires also getting a very strong presence. In the end, another coalition rose up, which were trying to invade us. Initially succeeding, they took some quite unimportant border colonies (but in the process gaining some advanced tech). We quickly moved in to push them back with a large TL32 fleet. Their TL7 warships crapped in their pants, and were almost instapopped. After just 8 days of warfare, they abandoned their worlds and moved into the unknown depths of space, never to be found again.

The collapse of the empire wasn't because of any internal or external factor. It was caused by a patch (how ironic). The NPC Pirates were introduced. And this was a very broken feature in the beginning. With most of our fleet guarding key trade posts and the borders, we couldn't handle the big influx of massive amounts of TL32 pirate ships. Our traders got killed quickly, which were critical for maintaining our warfleet. In the end, we had a major revival of our empire after we learned how to fight these pirates (make ludicrously fast, nimble and small trading ships with strong armor), but our local allies had already abandoned their empires (which were in a serious state of decay by now). After this, we took the decision to wait for the Pirates feature to get fixed, and then return to the game.

The 3rd empire was a mediocre empire. It spawned nearby a bunch of the galactic superpowers, which were fighting eachother. We played, again, with 3 people in this empire. Within no-time, we colonized a few nearby systems and had a few ringworlds. We reached TL32 faster than the 2nd empire, but we had to fight off some serious superpowers. Unfortunately, our materials didn't allow for TL32 ships (max we could get was TL22), so we were in a serious disadvantage. We did manage to defend, by fortifying our planets. This was also accomplished due to a very daring raid of me and another empire member on a full TL32 planet. We only needed to hold that planet for just over a week, in order to gain full TL32 capabilities. It had all the TL32 capable materials we lacked. Unfortunately, this planet was also defended to the teeth. There was only 1 tiny bit of the planet undefended, we discovered. So we moved in position, and descended with a fleet of troop transport ships to the surface. It'd be an arduous journey towards the enemy base though, and a lot of risk was involved. After travelling for 3 hours over the surface (yes, even with a very fast vehicle this still takes so long), we reached the base, only to discover some enemy players (yes players, not NPC's) waiting for us. Once we noticed that that was the case, we quickly split up into 2 groups. I would try to sneak in through the back, while my friend would keep the enemy busy and stand for as long as possible. We were hugely outnumbered, but managed to take the planet. We were just TL7, they were TL32. If you know the game, every TL is a 5% difference compared to the previous TL, even for equipment which just requires TL1. You can imagine what 1.05^25 would do for difference. And we even didn't have advanced armors like Vulcium or Magmium armors, they did though. So we managed to take the planet, quickly secured it and waited for the loyalty timer to expire. The enemy didn't try to attack us at that planet any more (knowing their ships couldn't survive TL32 laser towers I suppose).

We managed to hold out for months, while expanding our borders into the unknown frontier. Eventually, RL caught up with me, causing me not being able to devote enough time to this game. This resulted in me being forced to let my empire decay.

This game is very fun, and still improving. Most of the bugs mentioned earlier are largely fixed. Just the lag remains (even though it has gotten a lot less serious).

Give it a try <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Edit:

Full of win! My old empire is still alive, with it's 2 most important cities still fully running! And on top of that, my personal ship is also still alive and kicking! Full of win!

Shores of Hazeron is in the process of being brought back from the dead! Forums are back up and the client is available for download. New accounts are currently not available while things are being sorted out.

The main discussion on the SoH forums is the developer, Haxus, is making it pay to play to try and cover server costs. Also the game will be using a temporary smaller universe to reduce server load and allow (hopefully) easier development.