Patch 0.9.4.0 (Thursday 24 November 2022)

Orbital bombardment has cometh ! Fear the spinal cruiser and its long range spinal canon. In this patch we're introducing a new chassis system for all ships. The different chassis change the base stats (some chassis have a higher amount of hitpoints, or armor, but less shields, and so on) and provide a different hardpoints layout. Some chassis will favor lighter hardpoints with maybe more upgrade slots, while a heavier chassis would have higher mark hardpoints with less available upgrade slots. We tried to provide at least one new chassis variant per ship, but we have ideas to expand on the chassis system in the future.

The spinal cruiser is a variant of the default cruiser. A massive spinal canon, dealing 40K damage per shot every 30s after charging, can be mounted on its bow. The spinal cruiser only has light defense turrets, so it is weak to stronger capital ships and becomes an important target to take down during battles.

The land base assault gameplay loop has been revamped. Our previous implementation, back in June, was only half of the puzzle, as we were missing the orbital bombardment stage as we had envisionned. With the spinal cruiser able to bombard the base from low orbit, the battle gets split in two areas of operation: smaller ships mostly focus on ground objectives while capital ships stay in orbit, to protect or attack other capital ships.

As you can imagine, all those changes have made the high-level balancing equation much more complex. We still need months of work to tweak values everywhere and take all scenarios into account. At the moment, it is possible that a side is favored more than the other one, or that battles with pure AI get stuck or progress awfully slow. We'll try to address those problems as soon as we can, but we can only do so much in our local tests with only AI, so any feedback you provide in terms of balance with players involved is precious to us.

In this patch we're also introducing a bunch of new weapons and upgrades. See the list below for details. A gray HUD color theme is now available for players with information overload. And as usual, a long list of bugs have been fixed (and new ones introduced, no doubt about it.. ).

You may be wondering what's next ? After we stabilize this new version (with a minor patch addressing the most urgent bugs or balance issues in the coming days or weeks), we'll move on to the final piece of gameplay: the carrier revamp (and the ability to deploy and give orders to AI squads). This will require heavy improvements to the AI, especially in the way they (currently don't) coordinate with each others or with players. There is no ETA for the next major patch, but heads up: it is unlikely to be by the end of this year.

We've seen a rise of players in the past few months and sales have been increasing, despite our lack of marketing (which we reserve for our 1.0 release next year). We're pretty happy about that and to see more activity on the servers. Let us know your feedback about the game, what could be improved, what confused you the most at first (unfortunately tutorials will probably be one of the last features we work on) and what you'd like to see in the game in the future. See you in battle and have fun !

-Flavien Brebion

New Chassis System

• Introduced a chassis variant system for all ships. They are available for customization through the loadout system. You can select a loadout with a non-standard chassis variant and customize it as before in the ship menu
  
• Different chassis have positive or negative effects on your base ship stats (base stats here meaning when the chassis is naked, with no mounted hardpoint)
  
• The following loadouts are available on non-standard chassis: Heavy interceptor, Light bomber, Tank corvette, Low tech destroyer, Heavy cruiser and Spinal cruiser
  
• The heavy interceptor has 2 points of armor, giving a nice reduction of damage versus other interceptors, at the cost of some of its mobility
  
• The light bomber loses its torpedo pod, but has mobility rivaling an interceptor with some more hardpoints
  
• The tank corvette is very slow, but has more armor and the ability to launch heavy missiles (as opposed to light missiles on the default corvette)
  
• The low tech destroyer loses its MK6 hardpoints but now has more MK4 hardpoints and more mobility
  
• The heavy cruiser trades any hardpoint below or equal to MK5 for 7 MK7s.. and a lot more mass
  
• The spinal cruiser is the only loadout/chassis that can fit the new spinal canon. It has a very high amount of armor, no MK7 hardpoints, which make it bad against other capital ships at near range. It can compensate its lack of firepower with the spinal canon, either against other capital ships or land base's infrastructure. It also has light missile pods to mount SSM batteries
  
• AI ships can make use of the new loadout/chassis variants as well
  

Spinal Cruiser Canon

• Added Spinal Cruiser's long-range canon: fixed aiming, charging for 10s (with a red aiming sight laser), dealing massive 40K damage at up to a 150 Km range
  
• The deadly projectile travels at 5 km/s
  
• The spinal cruiser loses -80% mobility while charging
  
• The aim laser deals no damage, and is only there to signal the battlefield (and especially the land base) that a devastating shot is incoming. It might also signal the firing direction to other capital ships to dodge the shot, however please note that like any other projectile, it takes time for the shot to travel, so the lead aim might offset from the target but still hit it
  
• The cooldown is 30s, and the canon can get interrupted if it doesn't have enough energy anymore to fire (requires about 75% energy capacity), or if it gets damaged, or if you turn power off/disable the weapon group
  

Land Base Assault

Land assault gameplay loop revamp: the primary objective is now (for attackers) to destroy the power plants. Their force-fields are powered by shield generators. Orbital canons are now a secondary target and not the primary target anymore. A part of the fleet now spawns in low orbit in land assault. Spinal cruisers AI tries to take down the land base from orbit. A part of the defender's fleet tries to engage the attackers in low orbit to destroy their spinal cruisers. The idea is a competition between the two fleets to see which side will take down the spinal cruisers/carrier first (defenders) or the land base's infrastructure (attackers) first.

Guiding System for Missiles/Torpedoes

• Revamped guided weapons (missiles/torpedoes): added tracking cone, target gets lost if it goes outside tracking cone
  
• Unactivated missiles (guided by the parent ship before the guiding system takes over) generate no smoking trail, until it starts thrusting
  
• Reduced chaff duration to 8s (down from 10s)
  
• Close-by chaffs now appear on HUD with a small icon
  
• Smart Retargetting upgrade now takes its tracking cone angle into account to switch to a new target candidate
  
• Added a notification message when Smart Retargetting gets activated (when a missile switches target)
  

New Weapons

• (Heavy Interceptor) Added a rocket launcher (experimental, might need tweaks). Fixed unguided weapon, firing a burst of low-damage rockets. Hard to use against other interceptors but useful against heavier variants or ships with lower mobility
  
• (Interceptor & Corvette) Added a decoy missile launcher. Deals no damage, but appears on the HUD as a torpedo, confusing enemy AMS laser systems. Has the same mobiltiy than a torpedo. Has a shorter life time (10s)
  
• (Tank Corvette) Added a fixed heavy missile launcher on the corvette "shoulders". The heavy missile has the same stats than on the destroyer's launchers and are primarily aimed at heavier ships/small damage on capital ships
  
• (Spinal Cruiser) Added SSM battery, an auto-aiming/firing battery that auto-aims and auto-fires light missiles at enemy interceptors
  

New Upgrades and Other Tweaks

• Introduced a new category for ammo and renamed the categories to be: light (<=MK3), medium(MK4-MK5) and heavy(MK6+) ammo
  
• Added a "medium ammo" upgrade for MK4/MK5 turrets that increases ammo capacity by +25%
  
• Added a passive "stealth" upgrade for the interceptor: reduces energy emissions so that enemies do not detect a stealthy interceptor that is more than 2 Km away, provided that it doesn't use its weapons/warp/boost/show any agressive behavior. Has a cooldown of 10s
  
• Added "weapons durability" upgrade (increases weapons HP by +25%
  
• Extra chaffs upgrade now has a +5% mass negative effect
  
• Fixed repair crew turrets repair rate (due to a missing timer in the code it was x10 too fast); Some more nerf to the repair crew's hardpoints repair reate (now halved)
  
• Repair crew upgrade's repair rate reduced to 25 HP/s (from 40 HP/s). It can only stack 2 times max (down from 3 max)
  
• Heat dissipator upgrade can now be stacked 2 times max (up from 1 max)
  
• Faster turret rotation upgrade now applies to MK5 turrets too (previously: only applied to MK4 turrets)
  
• Changed gyro boost upgrade rank requirement to 3 (down from 5), making it available to new players sooner
  

Corvette and Other Ships

• Added the ability to turn automatic firing on (+auto tracking) on corvette weapon groups. Manual groups are still exclusive (you can only select and fire one at a time) but while doing so, the groups previously set on automatic will track and fire at the same time
  
• Added back Flaks to the corvette
  
• Phalanx CIWS can now be mounted on the corvette
  
• Due to adding support for autofiring groups, AMS laser can now be turned on passively and target missiles/torpedoes while the player focuses his attention on something else
  
• Increased heat capacity for carrier to 3K (from 2K)
  
• The corvette(/and carrier)'s repair field can now repair partially damaged hardpoints. Same improvement for hangars/docking bays
  

General Gameplay Changes

• Revamped knockback upon projectile impact to be physics accurate (Note: the previous implementation was a hack). This should result in more natural knockback forces when getting hit by a massive projectile
  
• Ship hull's armor damage reduction is no longer applied to weapons on that ship (heavy cruisers have so much armor that interceptor's miniguns could no longer damage them). A weapons durability upgrade has been added instead
  
• Updates to automatic turrets tracking systems, to be more reliable and prioritizing certain ship classes over other ones (ex.: laser AMS will no longer try to fire at bombers if there are missiles/torpedoes in range)
  
• Revamped rank and credits requirements for most weapons other than the default ones: the idea here is to have a more uniform distribution of new weapons to unlock at lower ranks on both major playstyles (small ships and capital ships)
  

General Balance Tweaks

• Increased warp interruption threshold as damage % so that interceptor blasters cannot interrupt a cruiser entering warp
  
• Increased minimum amount of time between battles to 3' (from 2')
  
• Overheating now dissipate heat 25% slower than the normal heat dissipation rate (Note: this should incentivize players from not overheating by accident, versus letting heat dissipate purposedly)
  
• Balance pass over max ammo count and energy cost vs dps efficiency for most weapons
  
• Balance tweaks to small energy weapons (blasters and plasma cutter) to deal more energy damage
  
• Halcyons and Railguns now have a lower ammo capacity and must be used more carefully
  
• Increased firing rate of Phalanx CIWS by +50% (but reduced burst cooldown to compensate and maintain an equivalent DPS)
  
• Reduced orbital canon's MK10's hit box size and total hit points, as it is now a secondary objective in the assault loop
  

HUD / UI / Controls

• Revamped speed meter to be coherent across ships in terms of soft speed cap vs throttle (so that all ships have the same sensitivity in how much time it takes to reach their target speed)
  
• Note: the speed meter has room for speeds above the cap, for cases such as exceeding the cap temporarily (boosting) or without flight assist
  
• Added a checkbox to toggle head-tracking in third-person camera views
  
• Fixed a bug when showing a weapon's hitpoints HUD icon color status (the wrong red color was sometimes used as it's being repaired)
  
• Friendly fire warning is no longer raised for hitting a friendly base shield with a low damage weapon
  
• Weapons MFD now shows maximum count for missiles/torpdoes and other specialized ammo (Note: this way you'll know when being resupplied if you're close to the max replenished or not)
  
• Fixed capital ships not having HUD in third-person views when using the virtual-cursor control mode
  
• Revamped coloring rules for weapons MFD and weapons aiming direction "dots" in the viewport: they now share the same coherent set of rules, which are: red = all weapons damaged or out of kinetic ammo ; orange = none of the weapons can currently fire due to some reason (overheating, under cooldown, charging..) ; normal color = at least one weapon in the group can fire
  
• Added a gray HUD color theme (Note: this makes colored alerts and targets pop more. If you find the HUD overwhelming, we advice that you give this color theme a try)
  
• Renamed bomber's "shotgun" into "shredder"
  
• Renamed "storage" upgrade category into "payload"
  
• Tweaked base module's icons for turrets/defenses to be smaller/appear at a lower range, to avoid cluttering complex bases with too many icons. Some of the more important base modules now have bigger icons too
  
• Fixed a small bug which caused destroyed turret icons to appear in yellow instead of red while highlighting hardpoints status on a target ship
  
• Fixed altitude meter not showing in the 100-200 Km range
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixes/tweaks related to previously implemented features (ex.: gimbals not working anymore, weapons not auto-aiming anymore, ams laser range going through shields etc..)
  
• Turrets no longer target nearby enemy ships under their detection range (ex.: stealth more or powered off)
  
• Fix for a rare occurence of a Direct Input device's driver incorrectly reporting the max amount of buttons, resulting in a client crash
  
• Fixed a rare server freeze when two mines collide with each others
  
• Fixed asteroids around space stations being destructible and causing negative credits from griefing from friendly fire
  
• Fixed multiple issues related to beams/lasers, not properly hitting the closest actor, or not showing anymore after some time
  
• Fixed a problem with alt-tabbing and throttle (via a HOTAS) going to 100% while the game is in the background
  
• Fixed AI getting stuck at enemy base's weapons max range at a bad orientation
  
• Fixed a rare client crash due to extreme attractor forces in some particle effects
  
• Fixed an exploit with the corvette's repair beam that could get support objective points while using the repair beam on a ship at 100% hull
  
• Fixed a visual glitch with all laser types, which made the laser beam rotate away from a dying target instead of stopping to fire instantly
  

Misc

• Updated network visibility range to take into account a ship's max firing range (Note: ships that were far away sometimes were not rendered on the client, despite their weapons being able to hit at a longer range)
  
• Fixed shields transparency glitches when the shield is fading out (the shields was darkening the background)
  
• Bombing AI corvettes that have targetted base modules will now fire their torpedoes at them more frequently than before
  
• Capital ships AI now fire their missiles/torpedoes more frequently than before
  
• Decreased audio muffle in dense atmospheres
  
• Visual tweaks to missiles and torpedoes (they're now bigger and their thrusters are visible from a higher range)
  
• New audio effects for Halcyon, Plasma cutter and Railguns
  
• Fixed plasma cutter projectile effect (white rectangles causing HDR to blow up). They now have their proper visual effect
  
• Torpedoes now have a thruster effect
  
• Reduced incoming transmission "typing" audio loop volume