With the new Bonnet expansion out and live, here are some teasers for what all the new ships look like!

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Hi all! I just want to quickly announce a decision made during today’s dev team meeting.

For quite a while, we’ve been having internal conversations about the state of PvP in the galaxy Paxian Stronghold. We find it a bit odd to permit PvP but also have invincible “police” ships in the galaxy who will attack anyone who breaks the peace. It feels inconsistent from a design perspective. Since Paxian Stronghold is a hub galaxy of the Kalthi Depths layer, we’ve decided to disallow PvP there to bring it into line with the hub galaxies of the other layers (e.g. Sol and Perilous Outpost). This change has just been applied to the live server.

Hi all! We want to fill you in on a new high-priority project that’s in the pipeline. We have decided to fast-track the revamp to healing and shields that was originally slated for a larger rebalance of the combat classes. This means that Shield Monkey is going to get some love soon!

While the specifics are still under review, I can tell you that we are focusing on creating a more active role for Shield Monkey in squad-based play. If you enjoy playing this class, we would love to hear your thoughts on how we could make your experience more engaging.

In related news, we have decided to hold off on some recently proposed changes to the tech 22 alien drones, most notably the Samgrahaka Bhisajvar. After extensive testing and a ton of helpful feedback from community members, we decided that these changes would be unnecessarily disruptive to the current drone meta if we put them in without the rest of the planned changes to healing and shields. We will hold these changes till the rest of the project is ready for release, at which point we’ll open things up for testing again. Thank you to all the folks who hopped on test server to try out the drones!

This is another small patch, as we are finally more or less caught up with our svn backlog for patches. Hoping to keep those small patches coming every 2 weeks~

* Implemented an automating throttling on instance creation. If you recreate the same instance too often, a cooldown is enforced of 15second * number of attempts. This is per instance and reset automatically. It should not affect anything unless an instance is purposely destroyed and recreated a lot of times.
* Fixed a possible client freeze / heavy lag when very long distance lightnings effects are generated. (sometimes happened in twisted)
+ Added cybernetic interceptors to Kalthi Depths
* Torpedoes will now correctly inject parasites
* Gave Demented Delquad Kalthi Depths loot
* Added descriptions of what the kalthi skills do to mission text.
* Increased depot extension hullspace from 100,000 to 125,000
* Decreased cost of depot cargo extension from 100,000,000 to 10,000,000
* Removed mention of deprecated turn in mission from spirit of the x augmenter bps
+ Reduced the speed of the rats circling the Giant Space Cheese in The Nexus by 50%
* Reduced the power of the AI only weapons Xeno and Xenos Torpedo (Affects Omege Battlestations, Forgones, etc.)

On August 31, the universe will implode and a new amazing and wonderful universe will be reborn from the ashes!

With the destruction of our 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 will have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again. Some Lyceum scientists have even rumored that rare empires have found ways to enrich their territories. With hidden spoils come unseen threats, beware!

Note: Make sure that you retrieve all credits from your bots before the universe reset, as a bot’s credit holdings will not be carried over into the new universe!

* Added some new drops to the zebucart boss
* Hopefully improved v formation priority
* Comets will now state how long until they start ejecting materials when scanning them
* Comets will now be treated as their own separate object groups. They no longer show as moons.
* Potential fix for anti-cheat messing with microwarpers
* Moved scrap value field in /mc to be at the top, near the averages section
* Small Nexus Drone Fighter Generator is now a Super Item, and the fighters that are created do not return to the ship when they expire.
** As a result, all Nexus Drone Fighter Prefab’s have been marked as AI Only. This will cause them to be erased from player hulls.
* Further improvements to V-Formation target priority
* Re-enabled Stay Close
* Bug fix for prospecting beams spamming event chat when trying to use them on non solarbodies
* Irradiated ships will no longer attempt to fire
* V Formation improvement revisions
* Fix for a rare crash on instance destruction.
* Hopefully fixed the timed notification in the client (like shutdown timer).
* Internal changes to some datastructure and thread synchronisation to improve server stability and performance.

== Typos ==
* Fixed a wording from Barg to Barf in mission description.

== Cosmetic ==
* Gave the t23 pax ships correct visuals

== Quality of Life ==
* Added name color highlights for squad, team, and enemies
* Increased debris visual size

== Bug Fixes ==
* Fixed Cybernetic Bart’s main torpedo weapons.
* Fixed thorax projectile sizing
* Fixed flight controller not affecting fighters.
* Fixed a bug allowing item generator to go above their limit
** Item generator should now generate items more smoothly instead of generating in bunch every few seconds.
** Item generator now remove any item they generate above their limit*2 to prevent extreme cases of hoarding/bug
* Fixed a crash on client when 2 many effects needed to be loaded.

== Content ==
* Marked Auric Sector as no PvP
* The Capital Vortex Laser (tech 9) will now properly drop from DGs.
* Added oly fighter super items
* Added some of the stella zone super items
+ Added Comet- prefix to all comet names.
* Corrupted Missile now takes 1 space instead of 0 space.
* Corrupted Punch tweak is now Tech 22.
* Changed tardis extension bp from t20 to t14 to match tech of the extension

== Balance ==
* +DPS and +Damage effects will act as +HPS and +Healing effects when healing

Wild Space is about to get a whole lot more wild! In addition to the primitive and easily dispatched mini-bases that inhabit Wild Space during a fresh universe, some of the richest parts of Wild Space will need to be taken by force.

Starting next universe, AI Empires will inhabit Wild Space. While in this first iteration, they are merely (very pretty) obstacles, they are in truth the beginning of a new dynamic sweeping through Wild Space.
Prepare for the opportunity for an opportunity to smash into an AI controlled team that follows all the rules of a normal player team, but doesn’t hold a grudge!

They will expand, attack, trade, and offer unique rewards for both killing their assets and leaving them alone. Their assets, barring a few minor quality of life changes (such as killed bases disappearing instantly), follow all the same rules that player bases do: Irradiate them and see what goodies they hold (though be aware that currently these goodies are purely visual goodies that are in-line with existing gear)!

Current Features

AI Empires! 4 unique factions with visually distinct themes, ripe for the killing.
Each AI Empire follows the same rules as normal teams: Declare war and start the attack!

Planned Features

On the offensive: AI Empires will attack galaxies they consider valuable with massive assault ships. Put your defenses to the test.
Better be prepared for what lies beneath: The “civilized” AI empires are quite predictable, but new fledgling (“Termite”) empires might just decide that the ill-defended galaxy in your team’s territory might make for a great new Headquarters.
Good Neighbours: Certain AI Empires may buy and sell rare items, attract rare AI not usually seen in Wild Space and might even be diplomacized into attacking mutual foes. Good relations can lead to good things!

Likely Questions and Answers

“Wild Space is already pretty crowded, won’t it be worse now?” – Wild Space will be quite a bit bigger! The AI Empires will take roughly 40 galaxies, Wild Space will however have far more than 40 extra galaxies available.

“Can you kill off an empire completely?” – Yes! No invincibility shenanigans. They’ll be dead. And I will only be a little bit sad about it.

“When are the new features coming?” – Offensive empire capabilities are likely coming mid-uni. Termite Empires shortly afterwards.

On April 27, the universe will implode and a new amazing and wonderful universe will be reborn from the ashes.  The size of Wild Space will be increased, but there will be new established civilizations there, guarding some of the best galaxies.  Take care, because some of them will be aggressive!

Happy 2019, Star Sonata!

2018 brought with it a lot of new things. Enkelin was named as lead content developer and he created the Press Corps to give more transparency to the player base. NCCIntrepid took the lead of Quality Assurance and has been adding more rigor to our testing and bug tracking processes. The dev team as a whole is probably more vibrant and active than ever before.

We had a galaxy assault / BvB revamp to make BvB more interesting and balanced. We added Electrified Georg Ohm. We added several new specialized base kits. AI’s and combat bots gained many improvements to their AI, and combat bots gained the new “V Formation” where they form up on your wing to fight, rather than fly all over the place. There was a major change to the shape of Kalthi Depths, with lots of roaming mini-bosses dropping KD dg loot. We revamped the way that planet terraforming blueprints work. Energies and shields were both buffed and rebalanced, making fuel much less necessary on energies and regen much stronger and less costly on shields. We revamped Junkyard and the junkyard tweaks, and added a new “alternate currency” system, where items can be bought and sold at AI bases for commodities in addition to credits. Gunner class received some tweaks and was made more offensive. We had a “Mega Moe” world boss event for Halloween, pitting the player base against the toughest boss ever for special Halloween prizes. Hull extensions and cloaks have had improvements and rebalances that are on the test server and will be patched soon. Jey has done a lot of improvements on the back end, and the server is running faster than ever, and aside from a few days of crash bugs, has been very stable.

Some of the most exciting things that the dev team worked on in 2018 haven’t been seen yet. We have been doing a ton of design work on an upcoming expansion for 2019 that will bring both a tech 23 expansion with a bunch of new bosses and areas as well as some sweeping gameplay improvements. We have scores of pages of finalized design docs on the upcoming expansion and spent hours and hours in meetings finalizing much of what we have planned. I’m going to leave some of the details about the theme and content of the tech 23 part of the expansion for another blog post, but for now, I want to write about a few of the big gameplay changes we have in mind.

Healing

We have designs to reduce the strength and the efficiency of healing while simultaneously increasing player shield regen, increasing shield banks by a factor of 10x, and greatly increasing out of combat healing. Instead of gaining massive shields from healing efficiency and cross healing, Shield Monkeys will have to steal shields from enemies to redistribute to their team and engineers will actively use a much stronger +100% transference vulnerability beam to buff the healing from their drones and allies on a single target. We hope that these changes to healing will make healing much more balanced and a more active component in playing the game.

Resistances

The current state of resistances in Star Sonata is more like a weird Pokemon rock-paper-scissors thing than anything else. The planned change with resistances is two-fold. First to bring almost all existing resistances into a new “Armor” stat on ships, where each ship will have an armor that represents the average resists to all damage types, and then have at most one vulnerability or resistance to a specific damage type. Capital ships, heavy fighters, and bases will get the most armor and other classes will have much less. We will also make it so that the game remembers what ships you’ve scanned with a ship scanner, and for those ships already scanned, present the armor and resistance information in the target box.

Second, we will be revamping the damage types to make them more about the utility that each damage type brings and less about rock-paper-scissors.

• “Laser” damage will be removed.
• Energy damage will be the default damage type for both pulse guns and non-ethereal lasers.
• Surgical damage will cause onboard item damage as you damage the target, potentially disabling them over time, and cause an increase in credit, augmenter, and item drops (including from drop lists) when an AI is killed based on how much surgical damage he took in the battle.
• Heat damage will remain the damage-over-time damage type of choice and the amount of DoT will be increased and standardized across all heat weapons.
• Mining damage will still be used on asteroids, but gain the additional property of being armor piercing, and ignore the armor stat on the target.
• Physical damage will continue to knock things back and have a high DPE. It will gain even more DPS than it currently has, but also become subject to double armor mitigation.
• Radiation will be the ethereal damage type, with ethereal lasers being radiation, and possibly radiation bullets being ethereal. Hitting an enemy who is below some fraction of shields with radiation will irradiate them and no longer require the killing blow to irradiate.

Mod Rework

The mod rework that has been talked about in the past is almost completed, and will be released along with the big 2019 update. The two most exciting things about the mod rework are the addition of “primary” mods, which are much stronger and have a strength associated with them, and “re-modding” an item, where a modded item can go back to the neurodoc, and a player can pay increasing amounts of credits to have a chance to increase the strength of the primary mod, add another secondary mod, change a secondary mod, or even change the primary mod. This brings a very fun mini-game of continually crafting and refining your best equipment, but the increased cost each time you do it means that you want to pick carefully from the options presented in re-modding. Existing mods will remain as secondary mods, and existing modded items that are eligible for primary mods will be able to be remodded and gain a primary mod, though if already neurobound, they will lose their current secondary mods. Un-neurobound items with mods can be modded and retain their existing mods.

New Cargo System

We’ve developed a more straightforward design of a cargo system than previously talked about which will be released with everything else. The new cargo design is where items will drop with a “cargo” tag, similar to a mod, such that any item with the cargo tag will always take exactly 10 space. Equipping, using, or transferring an item will remove the cargo tag, but tossing will retain it. Items with the cargo tag will have square brackets around the item name in your inventory. This should hopefully free up a lot of hull space for some people, and let others feel like they can DG in whatever ship they want without sacrificing too much for holding loot.

Improved Visibility/Cloaking System

Enkelin has a complicated but elegant design on revamping the visibility and cloaking system that will make things much easier to balance for stealthy ships.

Giving the Skill Trees more Impact

We want to make the skill trees have more impact and each skill change the way you play the game, rather than just give some stats. Focus skills will give different damage mitigations and add extra slots for different equipment types. Advanced sub-skills will all have large effects and make your choices even more meaningful.

More and stronger super items

We are planning to add a lot more, powerful, super items. This will give those extra slots in capital ships a lot more meaning. Keep an eye out for “broadside” super items built from dg drops and doing massive damage to the left or the right.

Overloaders

Overloaders will no longer self-destruct, but instead cause item damage to your weapons as you use them.

Rebalance of Fighters

Another rebalance of the fighters, giving more fighters useful side-effects, giving more power to fighters launched from a players ship, and making more noticable difference between fighters that take different amounts of slots.

Rebalance of Drones

Drones have a new balance sheet with rarity, range, mobility, and other factors that give a desired DPS for each drone. We’ve already done a quick balance pass on drones that is on test, but there will be a more in-depth look at drones for the big update.

And Much More

And lots of other little things are planned, as well as a light rebalance to the power of classes, with an overall balance between offense, defense, and utility for each class and trying to hit those targets for a fully kitted out player of each class. A lot of the work done in 2018 was actually preparing for a big branch in our source code so that we can work on this upcoming release while maintaining a main branch for small changes and bug fixes. Look for a post about the tech 23 stuff in the near future!