New Universe

Attention Star Sonata, on Saturday March 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time, there will be a universe reset to a 1 week temporary universe.  That means that all deployed bases and the entire universe itself will be destroyed, but after a short delay, a new universe will manifest into existence.  All of your ships and bots will transfer over into the new universe, but be aware of the last ship that you are in before the universe implodes, because that will be the ship you will be flying in the new universe, and you won’t want to dock all your ships in the wrong place just to switch out of your storage Thatch.

New Classes

At the same time as the universe reset, we will be patching in the new class system.  The new class system moves away from all class skills being regular skills that you have to train at special locations.  Instead, upon reaching certain level milestones (5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 1000), you will be able to train a new skill from the class skill tree inside the character dialog. In addition to the new class skills which don’t cost any skill points, there are new Zen skills for each focus and class which do cost skill points and roughly equal the old skill point costs of all the previous class skills.  The overall power and stats of each class is designed to be very close to the previous classes at end-game, but much more powerful and impactful at early game.  We do plan to do a class rebalance later, after this new system is in place and everyone has had a good chance to try it and give feedback. When you first log in, all your old class skills will be automatically reset, and you can choose/re-choose your new class skills from the character dialog.

Another New Universe

Because of the way a lot of the AI use existing class skills, we needed to patch in the classes at the same time as a universe reset.  But we don’t want to force people to deal with re-classing and building on the same day, so we are doing a 1-week temporary universe to try out the classes and maybe some other random stuff.  There will be a new-new universe on March 18 at the regular time. If all goes well with the classes and the new universes, we will be announcing the official Steam launch date shortly thereafter.

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on a new Cleft Claw to roam around earthforce and wildspace layer. Bringing abit more hell fire to the universe.

He’s also going to start working on the base extractor changes, where only one type of each extractor can be equiped for next universe.

Hober Mallow

On test are also some changes to a variety of Pulse Guns, Magcannons and Laser Beams. Many of these weapons that had less than 1 second rate of fire now have between 1 and 1.5 second rate of fire (this is especially true of the Speed Demon locked weapons like the Hell Raiser, and other weapons that impart parasites/fires). The reasoning behind these changes was to preserve their DPS (they have the exact same DPS listed on the weapons) while enabling Speed Demons and other fast rate of firing characters to use the weapons without wasting DPS due to the rate of fire cap. It should be very hard, if not close to impossible, to hit the rate of fire cap with them now. Weapons that chain or splash, have been increased to 2-5 seconds as well. This was to make the Gunner weapons feel more thematic and heavy hitting. Let me know how these changes feel, or what effects they have on your setup.

Dark Steel

Dark Steel, mainly went over with the rest of the development team what Augmenters should be given a unequip due to changes.

This also applies to the following ships to recieve a free Augmenter reset:

• Prawn
• Resistance
• Hephaestus Machine
• Wattage
• Delquad

Q/A

Masterful: Reset? Still in the works sadly as we’re still sorting out issues. The current goal is sometime March but don’t take this as a solid deadline.

Chrono: Are termites being more buffed again ontop? Yes next universe they’ll be unleashed into the wild to test your resolve!

First and foremost, I want to acknowledge that I have taken the feedback that was given by the playerbase in response to the previous Developer Blog thread. I hear you loud and clear: the removal of power from Wild Bots, along with shifting that power into an Advanced Class Subskill that would lock you out of fighters if you picked it, in exchange for the reworked fighters is unacceptable to you. Thus, I have decided to do the following: Fighters will be released into the game in their reworked state, with no adjustments to Wild Bots. At a later date, when are ready to do a class rebalance, we will revisit this topic. For now, have fun with the new fighters next patch!

TL;DR:

• Fighters will no longer need to be bought or built. They will instead be generated by Fighter Generators.
• Fighters will always stay out for their entire duration, following the user through warp and transwarp.
• Fighters will come in 3 different variants: 1 slot, 1 minute lifespan. 2 slot, 2 minute lifespan. 4 slot, 3 minute lifespan. (Numbers may change.)

With that out of the way, lean back and get ready for a nice and lengthy post about fighters!

Problems

Fighters have been in an odd spot, both in terms of balance as well as function. They have found their niche somewhere between missiles and drones, but they were neither as cheap and expendable as missiles, nor as big of an investment as drones. Especially with the (somewhat) recent changes to drones which made them break rather than disappear when destroyed, the position of fighters needed to be re-evaluated.

At the lower levels, fighters have very low energy costs for (in some cases) a substantial amount of damage output. On the other hand at the higher levels, many fighters were mostly useless, costing very little energy while doing negligible amounts of damage.

Goals

While missiles will remain as high damage, high DPE consumable weaponry, fighters will fill the role of doing significant amounts of damage over a longer period of time with very high DPE. The drawback of course is that the longer a fighter stays deployed and active, the more likely it is to be destroyed. In order to offset the higher chance of them being destroyed, fighters need to become easier to replace. Just like Engineers no longer need to fear for their drones as much, no Fleet Commander should have to worry about their precious fighters.

Solutions

Fighters will no longer need to be bought or built. They will instead be generated by Fighter Generators. These Generators will be available through the same means that Fighters were. Blueprints that built Fighters will have their costs adjusted and build Fighter Generators instead, AI stations that sold fighters will sell Fighter Generators instead, etc. Generators will be relatively large in size, however the Fighters will be size 0, bound to the ship they were generated on and unsellable. Getting rid of unwanted fighters is easy, simply right click and “Destroy”.

(This also means that to make the transition phase from the old to the new system less inconvenient, you should move all your current fighters to the ship you want to use them on! In case you find yourself with misplaced Fighters shortly after the changes hit the live server, feel free to send in a Support Ticket or contact Bobbo directly. The changes we are implementing are significant and we’d like to reduce the inconvenience caused to a minimum.)

Fighters will no longer retreat as quickly as before. They will always stay out for their entire duration and no longer waste energy by docking prematurely. In fact, Fighters will now also be able to follow their user through warps and transwarps!

Fighters currently take a variable amount of slots, but with the rebalance, there will be 3 distinct categories.

• 1 Slot: High damage over a short amount of time, they need to be constantly redeployed in order to deal with extended fights.
• 2 Slot: Medium damage over a medium amount of time, they stay active for longer than 1 Slot Fighters and also have some interesting effects and/or more varied damage types.
• 4 Slot: Very High damage over a long period of time. Out of all the Fighters, they are the most energy efficient, have relatively high upfront damage and are much more durable than 1 or 2 Slot Fighters.

In addition, fighters now have a standard flight time based on the amount of slots they take.

• 1 Slot Fighters last 1 minute.
• 2 Slot Fighters last 2 minutes.
• 4 Slot Fighters last 3 minutes.

This may be subject to change in the future, but these changes are meant to put fighters in a better place relative to the other deployables a player may use. These changes are currently on the test server, and I am ironing out issues as I find them. But fear not, you will be able to enjoy your new and improved fighter swarms on the live server with the upcoming patch!

Christmas is here, or near enough, with our Christmas event kicking off this Saturday. Astro-Ginch better watch out, as those pesky terrans will seek him out for his tweak generator and other goodies.

Christmas will run from the 10th December for a bit over three weeks, extended from what we said in the weekly blog to avoid ending on New Year’s Eve. The Christmas event will now end on the 2nd of January in the new year.

The event this year will feature the normal festivities, including the return of Astro-Santa, spreading his jolly cheer and giving all the (nice, and definitely not naughty) citizens of the universe their presents. Rumor has it that the Gingerbreads have formed an empire and are lurking in the depths of space.

Missions and related content can be found from the Lapland system, which’ll appear from a new wormhole in Sol when the event starts.

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

This years competition will take a bit of a change from previous years, it’ll run as normal but the letters submitted will appear in next year’s Christmas event. This year’s event will feature all the letters we’ve ever had, going back around the last 8 years. In addition, all the letters will use the egg carton system, grouped by year, to save you from some tedious clicking.

Standard rules for the competition apply:

• You are allowed to make multiple submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is Friday 23rd December, 00:00 EST (05:00 GMT). Submissions after this date will be ignored.
• Submissions to be posted in the topic for this post.
• If you want your letter to be counted as from your player name instead of your account name, include it.
  • Ideally, put your letter in a [quote][/quote] block and leave other comments outside to make it clear what you want in your letter.
• Submissions may be excluded for reasons we see fit (such as plagiarism).

Once the deadline has elapsed, a maximum of five winners will be chosen, which’ll have their letters created for the following year. They’ll also recieve a unique permanent holoprojector, Frozen Snowflakes, and various Christmas items.

Currently

Augmenter Tweaking (AT) gives the player 4% increased effectiveness on his augs. This means that, at the max level of 25, augs are doubled in their stats. So if an aug gives +50% shield you’ll get +100% shield from this aug with AT 25.

Okay, so what is being changed?

What we will be doing is giving all the augmenters the values that they would have if they player had AT 25. What this means is that all stats on all augs will be doubled.

The new AT will increase the effectiveness of augmenters on your ship by 0.5% per level up to maximum of level 10. Players will be able to obtain the new AT skill just like the old one: through a chain of missions in The Acropolis.

Why are we making these changes?

We’ve come to realise that lower tech players are at an incredible disadvantage until they get their AT skill up to a reasonable level (often players would have far lower AT level than they would be able to acquire), especially because the AI in the early – mid levels do have AT. Missiles and Bots have been very popular in the early game and we feel that AT is partially responsible for this. Low tech augs already have low stat values, and the lack of AT makes it even worse. With this change, players will really feel an increase in their effectiveness after equipping an augmenter when they start playing the game.

What is happening to my current Augmenter Tweaking?

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 0 – 4 will have their skill reset back to level 0.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 5 – 9 will have their skill lowered to level 1.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 10 – 14 will have their skill lowered to level 2.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 15 – 19 will have their skill lowered to level 3.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 20 – 24 will have their skill lowered to level 4.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 25 will have their skill lowered to level 5.

This will help players get through the missions without having to do content that is far lower than their current tech level (preventing largescale grinds).

Universe Reset

Ahab has contacted us recently about the Space Rats he’s been observing. The AI attack patterns have spread to them! Before he could dispose of them, the rats have coordinated an assault on the fabric of space time itself! These tears in the fabric of space time have destabilized the universe, the universe will implode on 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 17:00 GMT), on the 17th of September. Fortunately in the rubble of the old universe, a new one will be created! All characters, their skills, ships and bots will be transferred over, but deployed drones and userbases will be lost, as well as anything on the userbases! You’ll have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again.

Hober Mallow

I’ve gone through and redone all tech 20+ ubers to use the daily/weekly lockout timers similar to the current system used by The Serengeti. I’ve also gone through and improved some underused and underpowered class super items, and plan to do more for the rest of them. I’ve also adjusted the difficulty of the Daily missions in Olympus, they should all be of relatively similar difficulty now. Eventually the Subspace Daily missions will work similarly to the Olympus Dailies. There’s a lot of other little things I’ve changed, but they don’t need to be talked about in the blog. Look out for the post I made on the forums in regards to a Video Trailer Contest! Go here for the details!

SunDog60

I’ve been working some more on Iq’ Bana, connecting all the wormholes. Aside from that I’ve also finished up the new Completionist Missions, they will be available at Sai’s Retreat next universe and will require you to complete most mission chains in the game (such as the Paxian exploration chain and the 4 Subspace mission chains). As a reward you’ll be given the Completionist Holoprojector by Pixel himself!

Blue Dwarf

The Emperor notification changes are done and are coming next patch, I’ve picked up a little bit of exciting stuff for next universe and been working on the event system save with the database.

Pixel

Pixel’s added a new boss to the Twisted Zone, to a total of 3 minibosses and 3 bosses. The boss is a giant eyeball with multiple mini eyeball guards. The items it drops are radar and cloaking based, including misc. items such as lighthouses with special bonuses.

Jey

Jey’s been trying to track down an elusive bug on the beta client where the client would flash while on low graphics. This issue has been around for a while but only happens frequently with the new compiler, as well as other bugs and crashes allowing them to be reproduced and fixed.

Hello all, this is a quick note detailing the upcoming changes to industrial commodities (effective next universe reset).  I have gone through and reduced AI base inventory size and consumption of all tier 1-3 industrial commodities. The new consumption rates are 50/day for tier 1, 15/day for tier 2, and 5/day for tier 3.  Inventory sizes are seven times these figures, across the board.  These changes were made in order to align the consumption rates of these commodities more closely to the actual extraction rates of tier 1-3 commodities.

The basic value of Metals, Nuclear Waste, and Silicon has also been adjusted. Steel Girders now price Metals at 15 credits.  Nuclear Waste is now priced at 75 credits, and Silicon is at 25 credits.  These changes were made in order to bring the credit sourcing of the system down somewhat from this uni.

The value of Promethium and Enriched Nuclear Material has also been reduced via the pricing of Sub-Shield Buffers and Reactors.  Promethium is now worth 10,000 credits and E-Nukes are worth 2,500 credits, down from 30,000 and 20,000, respectively.  Also, AI base consumption rates for these commodities have been changed to 25,000/day for Buffers and 2,500/day for Reactors.  These changes were made in order to rein in the amount of income from these particular commodities.  Our data from the current universe has shown that people were making a lot more profit than we had wanted from the Sub-Shield line of industrial commodities, so this change should rectify that issue.

As always, the calibration of industrial commodities is subject to change, usually on a once-per-universe basis. We will continue monitoring the market and make revisions to the system as needed. We welcome your input on this process.

First and foremost, this idea is still in its planning stages so anything posted here may change at any given time. The purpose of this thread is to give players a chance to weigh in at an early development stage.  We welcome any questions, concerns, and suggestions.

Why are we doing this rework?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a redesign for the Emperor contest. The current contest hasn’t been very fun or competitive for some time now. Long ago, the goal of every endgame team was to become Emperor of the universe. Today, the Emperor contest is a shell of its former glory. What used to be a very cool system that rallied players together to fight against the team claiming the throne has devolved into a system where players do not feel it is worth their time to even bother with it. We want to give the title of Emperor meaning again.

What exactly is changing and why?

We are planning to move Anatolia, which will be surrounded by a cluster of galaxies (more on those later) to Wild Space. This means that the galaxies will all become buildable. We made this design choice because permanent drones have become less powerful compared to player ships over the years and a small squad can take down 30 permanent Drones without too much trouble. As such, Anatolia requires a 24/7 active watch from the claiming team. While there is nothing wrong with the Emperor system being dependant on a team’s activity to some extent, the current lack of interest in defending Anatolia makes it clear that the player base would prefer a new system.

Anatolia will still be the galaxy where the Palace rests and it will be surrounded by a cluster of galaxies. We haven’t settled on a layout of the zone just yet, but you can expect something along the lines of this:

All these systems, including Anatolia itself (which is in the center), will have multiple planets of a new kind in them that doesn’t allow the construction of colonies. The planets will also have no resources other than a small amount of Nuclear Waste (which is required for the bases that will be built to stay fully operational). We’re taking these steps to ensure that players do not take these systems to make profit off of them, but only if they want to compete for the Throne.

The lore behind this area is that the war for the Throne has annihilated all surrounding star systems, leaving only ruined worlds behind.

How do you claim the Throne and how do you dethrone another team?

Anatolia and its surrounding galaxies will become buildable.  This means that becoming Emperor will be a King of the Hill contest. At the start of the universe King Midas will be the Emperor of the universe. Anatolia (and likely its surrounding galaxies to a lesser extent) will be defended by a good amount of Midas-type stations that players will have to BvB. We’re doing this to prevent players from instantly claiming Anatolia when the universe resets.

Once King Midas has been dethroned and his galaxies laid to waste, players will be able to own the Emperor zone for their team. With ownership also comes the standard rules that apply throughout Wild Space: you must own an adjacent galaxy for 24 hours before you are able to lay BvB kits in the galaxy you want to assault. The only difference is that you can only own the galaxies in this area by using outposts. The reason we don’t want them to be ownable by linking them up to a team’s HQ is simple: we don’t want a team to absorb these galaxies into their teamspace, making it more difficult for other teams to assault. The only way to dethrone a reigning team will be to blow up their palace, which they will be able to defend with their own stations.

What will the rewards for becoming Emperor be?

A team will get absolutely nothing from owning Anatolia and the palace until they build a Crown ship and manage to dock it in Sol. The rewards for becoming Emperor will be as follows:

• Ability to create one Unclean Imperial Seal every 24 hours on the palace. (already ingame)

• A 10% tithe to the reigning team that applies to colonies, sales to AI bases and credit scoops. (already partially ingame)

• A team-wide aura that will give a percentage boost the reigning team’s experience gained, shield, energy, speed and possibly an increase in hull space. We are still considering whether to apply these boosts to their bases as well (we haven’t decided on any values yet).

• The director of the team that has successfully docked the Crown in Sol will be given the opportunity to create an item of their choice (keep in mind that we do not intend to create new item types, as that would take a lot of development time). If said person would rather not design an item, they will be given a custom holo projector (which will be awesome, we promise).

Closing words

Once again I’d like to remind you all that this is in its beginning stages and nothing is set in stone. Any and every kind of feedback will be highly appreciated so feel free to comment!

Also, this rework will not go live until we are absolutely sure that BvB is stable and will cause no lag. The last thing we’d want is another Anatolia that is unkillable not because it’s so strong, but because your client crashes before you’re be able to kill anything… *cough* old Andaman Drones *cough*.

As you all should be aware, we recently change how item modifications were given to items; some of you have also noticed things aren’t quite right.

I’ve spoken with ylcepticon and we’ve (well, mainly him) done some number crunching and we’ve written the part of the process which decides how many mods you get.

Under the old system, mods were handed out “in order” they were declared in the code, the order is below:

Miniaturized, Composite, Shielded, Extended, Scoped, Dynamic, Amorphous, Radioactive, Sleek, Resonating, Docktastic, Intelligent, Amplified, Rewired, Workhorse, Evil, Superconducting, Transcendental, Overclocked, Forceful, Gyroscopic, Buffered, Superintelligent, Reinforced, Angelic.

Because of this, mods towards the end (such as Superintelligent) were less likely to be chosen.

In the old system, for a T20 ruin item, the probabilities for mods were 0.00275853 for no mods, 0.119395 for one mod, 0.31415 for two mods, 0.347688 of three mods and 0.077762 for four. To simplify and even things out, ruins have 20% chance at 0, 1, 2 3 and 4 mods. In other words, you’ll get a modded ruin item four out of five times, two and three modded ruins will be less common, but four modded ruins will be three times more likely now.
For the other mod sources (drops, droplists, bindomite and spawning (like on AI)) we’ve adapted a similar pattern with different numbers.

The changes are coming with this next micropatch, around 17:30 BST (12:30 EDT) today.

Hello!

The dev team has decided to put out a call for volunteers who are interested in helping Star Sonata grow.  We are especially looking for folks in the community who can help us record or edit promotional content for the game.  If you have skills along those lines, please send me a forum message and we’ll go from there.

We are also interested in expanding our referral system.  If you are interested in promoting Star Sonata on commission, please also get in touch with me about that!