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!

Ladies and gentlemen, please collect your belongings and prepare to depart as this is the last stop of the universe.

This universe is coming to a close. Scientists predict the full collapse will occur on the 7th of May at 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 17:00 GMT).

Earthforce would like to remind you to pack your stations, recover your drones and for the paranoid, dock your bots before the collapse.

We hope to see you on the other side!

Jey

Tracked down and fixed weird crash issue relating to Control bots.
Preperation for Christmas to go live in a few days.

Ryan

I’ve been working on some brand new christmas content! I think everyone will like it a lot, there are 11 new gals and a boss that scales based on how many people are attacking it (and everyone will get personal loot).

Pixel

Worked on some lots more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, as well as some cool sounding items

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

The Astro-Santa letter competition is now drawing to a close with just a few hours left, so if you want to be in with a chance to win, you better send your letter to Astro-Santa!

You can find out more about this here.

Universe Reset

The Scientists have been at the eggnog, getting their party on early and in their drunkness have missed the prediction of the universe’s imposion. Fortunately, being the time of Christmas, Astro-Santa’s Astro-Elves have been hard at work making all the presents as well as conducting research for new ideas! Amongst their research findings the Astro-Elves have learnt that the universe is becoming unstable and have predicted that it’ll eventually suffer a total collapse at 540 on 9th of Aer, 153rd Grand Age of the Elves. However, due to also being drunk the Elves have made a mistake and actually the date of the collapse will be around 14 Earth days later, making the demise of our universe occur on January 16th, 2016 at 1PM EST.

Astro-Santa is soon returning to our universe to dash our systems with his presents. He’s made his list and checked it twice but he doesn’t know what to get anyone?!

Can you help out Astro-Santa by writing him a letter claiming what you want?

Yes, it’s time for our annual Astro-Santa Letter competition.
The challenge is simple and easy to do, write a letter to send to Astro-Santa and submit it to us. Your letter doesn’t even have to be a letter, it could be a song you’ve made up, a poem or haiku about Christmas. As usual bonus points for apt references to Star Sonata.

When the competition ends, we’ll choose a few of our favourites, depending how many entries there are (maximum of 5), and award the players who submitted them. Winning players will get their letter added to the game with a corresponding mission to go with it and a collection of items will be given to each player too.

• Players are allowed to make multiple submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is Thursday 17th December, 00:00 EST (05:00 GMT).
• 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.

** Update **
The issue has been found and fixed. There may still be other crashes out there so keep an eye out. But right now it appears to be stable. Thank you to the players who sent me informations on how to reproduce the previous crash.

The patch brought a new crash that is unfortunatly very hard to track down. I am currently working on it but knowing the cause would go a long way into fixing it fast.

If any player think its crashing on a specific action they are doing, please head on livetest.starsonata.com port 3030 and do the action here. Both servers are running on the same code currently, if you do crash livetest with the same action, please send me a forum pm detailing the action so that i can reproduce and fix it quickly (pm Jey).

Offcourse im hoping to find the source of the issue using the crash data, but its one of those weird crash that can take an unknown amount of time to track down without something to narrow down on.

If you have problems with some skins and ships not appearing correctly after the most recent server patch, you can go to the following post in the forums with instructions on how it can be hopefully fixed.

http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=61028

Jey

Still working on fixing the issues on the current beta client, progressing steadily but still unable to give an eta, could be now or could be this weekend. There is a full patch in preparation, date will be announced once it’s certain. I also did some slight tweaks to our database configuration to reduce the website slowdown whenever the team scores are updated.

Blue Dwarf

Not a lot of interesting stuff going on in my world of late, but I’ve got some good stuff on my plate for next week!

Col Legno

I have had a horrible frustrating week of no internet! But despite that, I managed to fix the sentinel spawner issue in Trials of Adum. After it’s patched in you’ll be able to do the trials without being auto aggro to the sentinels.

Ryan

Moving!

Jeff

Working on a new look for the new account dialog.

Player questions!

Question 1

What are your favorite aspects of Star Sonata? Such as combat, building bases or the colony/ruin system.

Col Legno: I like having alts on everyone’s teams and know peoplg. Game politics and social interactions.
Jey: trading and politics
Jeff: building bases
Ryan: bases and teams
Blue Dwarf: Story, lore and universe generation and teams in the days when I was more active.

Question 2

Anything more you can tell us about the Steam launch, understanding you cant reveal everything now. Such as when it happens will be it be something mid-uni or timed to align with a uni reset? Are servers prepared to handle that big of a influx of new players in the Nexus? Any big changes or other things in the works you guys are doing specially to support and refine the game for the steam launch?

Jey: Uni reset is not needed for steam
Jey: Server have a queue system planned to handle the influx
Jey: Rest is content so I cant answer those, but i hope more cleaning / bug fixing to ensure as smooth as possible experience for new players

Here’s the link to submit a question!

Universe Reset

Ahab’s Bubble and Squeek brews have been dropping in quality lately and that can only mean one thing! The Space Rats are falling ill. Enquiring with Farmer John, Ahab has established this is because the binding forces of the universe itself are breaking apart! Creaky the Robot predicts the final collapse will occur at August 29th, 1PM in the Earth time of Eastern Daylight Time. We hope to see you all on the otherside!