Happy 2020, Star Sonata!

2019 was a busy year for us, with an active dev and QA team and lots of little improvements that have been patched in. In addition there are some huge changes and improvements that are currently on test2 server being thoroughly tested before an early 2020 release. Some of the things that we added in 2019 are:

• AI Empires
• Instance Scaling
• Improved the graphics for many weapons and engines using a new particle system
• We fought Rattie Moe by the hundreds, and the server is running so fast now, there was almost no lag
• Bonnet Expansion
• Lots of conversions of clunky trade in missions to the new alternate currency system
• Revamp of Strontium-90 missions
• Ongoing improvements to Kalthi Depths
• Comet improvements
• Market check improvements
• V Formation improvements and other bot AI improvements
• Improved Zebucart boss fight
• Revamp of cloaks
• Revamp of overloaders
• Rebalance of exterminators
• Rebalance of fighters and fighter bay improvements
• Rebalance of drones
• Rebalance of engines
• Torpedo rework and rebalance
• Rebalanced Pulse Guns and Mag Cannons
• Improved parasite code and balanced parasite damage

We have some major changes to BvB that will be added with the new universe this month, and termites 2.0 to be patched mid-uni.

Healing Revamp and Other Things on Test2

On test2 are the exciting changes we’ve been working on revolving Shield Monkey and healing changes. Healing no longer manufactures shields by big reductions to the shields lost with resistances, so you don’t get the weird situation where cross healing is super efficient. HPS has been generally increased, but those shields have to come from somewhere. At level 1 of Shield Monkey, ShM’s get 1 extra shield slot in support freighters, and at level 2, they gain the ability to steal shields from enemies with shield transference weapons.

Zen of the Shield has been changed to +5% shield max and +1% shield regen per level, so everyone can have a much higher shield bank and not be so worried about being 1-shot by bosses and in PvP. Long battles will still be about shield sustain, but with more margin for safety. Shield Monkeys can alternate between healing and stealing without needing to worry about constantly healing the tank without him dying. Shield chargers have been made incredibly stronger, but now only operate out of combat. They won’t suck up your energy during a fight, and when the fight is over, you can quickly fill back up again. For recon class, that means they can even dip in and out of fights to fill up their shields if they can get away from the enemies for long enough.

Transference Power now increases the strength of shield transference lasers while healing, and Transference Efficiency increases the strength of shield transference lasers while stealing. Damage tweaks and buffs now only apply to shield stealing and not healing, but overall, HPS has been increased, as the intended bottleneck is not how fast you can heal, but how fast you can get the shields with which to heal. Many augmenters with transference power and/or efficiency have had their stats slightly altered.

Most resistances have been removed from most ships and replaced by a combination of a new armor stat and higher shield banks from Zen of the Shield. This is in an attempt to move away from the Pokemon-like system where you have to memorize what is vulnerable to what and the only difference between the damage types is just needing the right type for the right enemy. Armor works mostly as a “resist all” stat, with the exception that it is doubly effective against physical, and half effective against mining and transference stealing.

Since the various damage types are no longer as useful as ways to bypass resistances, some types have been increased in power and/or utility. Physical weapon strength has been increased in power by 22%, making them the strongest damage type, generally, though higher in DPE and lower in DPS than energy. Radiation weapons have been increased in power by 33%, and are now the ethereal type of damage. “Laser” damage type no longer exists. Surgical damage on a target is now tracked, and when an AI dies, it has up to twice as much change to drop augmenters and items (but not items from drop tables) based on how much surgical was used to kill it, with the last hit being slightly overvalued in the calculation. Kills against players and their possessions can cause up to twice the item damage and drop up to twice the credits based on how much surgical was used.

For now the way that bases heal will be left mostly how it is on live as to not disrupt the current BvB meta. Base healing will probably get changed at the uni reset following this one, but we will be sure to let you know.

Road Ahead

We had some lofty goals at the beginning of 2019, mostly a full class rebalance and release of tech 23 content. Those got delayed because we wanted the ability to fully branch code and content in order to really test and polish and not hold up our regular patch schedule for minor improvements and bug fixes. But being able to fully branch like this is dependent on me converting all of our many balance sheets over to a new system that I devised, which is powerful, but takes a lot of work. All the various rebalancing of engines, cloaks, weapons, shields, etc that you’ve seen over the last year or so are the results of the new balance sheets. It just takes a ton of time, and I spent almost the whole year personally working on Excel sheets and VBA macros. What I thought would take about a month has been about a year and a half now, but a lot of the changes to the sheets have really improved the way we can make and design items, and should pay off in the years ahead.

Because it was taking so long, we decided to do the Shield Monkey and healing first, rather than waiting for everything to go in one gigantic update. The Shield Monkey rebalance has gone really well and received very good feedback from testers. It will be ready to go soon, and possibly will be paired with some minor changes to Engineer class skills and rebalancing of all of the support freighter hulls. We have a new balance sheet for ships that is really cool, using a “perk” system, but it will result in a lot of changes, since our current stats for ships are largely unbalanced. To minimize disruption for the players, but to push updates out without waiting for everything to be done, we are thinking to rebalance classes two at a time by related hull type, and rebalance ships of that hull type together.

Our nearterm roadmap for 2020 is to release the Shield Monkey and possibly minor Engineer changes described above very soon, finish the few remaining balance sheets, release the mod rework and the new cargo system, and then proceed with the other class rebalance two at a time. We have a lot of design work done of the tech 23 stuff, but we want to get the class rebalances done before that can be released.

Hello Sonatians! The last time I spoke to you about Fighters it was to tell you that we were in the process of changing them and we needed your feedback. As a result of that feedback, we settled on some long term goals that I am about to lay out for you. While implementing the features neccessary to make those goals a reality, Fighters were left in a place that was a little too one dimensional. Now, we have finally implemented everything and I am happy to share that what looks like!

Main Objectives

1. Fighters will be more powerful when launched from the Main player ship, and less powerful from Bots. Fighters should be able to account for roughly a third of the Fleet Commanders total damage output, more if they decide to specialize.
   1. Bots that launch fighters should, roughly, output a third of the damage their Owner is able to output.
   2. Players will either be able to launch lots of smaller, weaker fighters OR a few bigger, stronger fighters.
   3. Some fighters will have secondary effects of some sort.
2. Fighters will benefit from a player actively managing them rather than passively deploying them.
   1. Fighters will no longer be generated from generators, and instead they will enter a destroyed state that can be repaired by the player.
   2. There will be rarer Fighter bays with faster deployment times to enable faster reaction to changing scenarios.
3. Fighters will have more opportunities for growth and differentiation by way of Fighter Bays, Auras, the Flight Controller skill, Advanced Class Subskills, Imperial/Kalthi skills and varied types of Fighters.

Stronger Fighters

Fighters will be situated halfway between drones and bots. This means they will fly to intercept a target of your choice (like a bot), but cost energy to deploy and enter a destroyed state that requires repair when damaged (like a drone). Fighters will generally be more resilient as well. Players should see a greater variety of fighters, with different damage types and energy requirements across said fighters, making your choice of fighters even more important.

Active Management

Fleet Commanders’ will use short duration super item aura’s to significantly increase the power of fighters, and only fighters. The deployment of the right fighter for the right situation will be important, as having your fighters destroyed will mean you need to repair them ( In order to repair your combat bot’s fighters, you must select the bot and press X. A menu will appear and at the bottom, you will see a Repair option. If you click it, your bot will repair everything on it, including their fighters). Players will be able to recall their fighters by using the fighter bay itself in the event that they need to get their fighters out of harm’s way. This will cause the player’s fighters, and also their combat bot’s fighters, to instantly be teleported back into the ship that launched them.

Growth and Differentiation

Fighters will have far more variety based on the type of weapon that they use, the type of damage they do, how resilient they are, how fast they are, and whether or not they have a powerful secondary effect. These may be further augmented in the future by Advanced Class Subskills that allow a player to really embody the roll of a carrier. At present, Advanced Flight Controller is the only skill that directly affects a Fleet Commander’s fighters. In addition: Your Fighters will inherit the same skills bonuses your Bots and Drones inherit. This means things such as Imperial Skills will affect them. All Bots, Drones and Fighters inherit 50% of these skill bonuses.

All of these changes should be coming in with the upcoming patch, keep your eyes peeled!

Hello again!

A weekend event is now active! Enjoy your 2x prospecting bonus, 8x prospecting node refill rates, and 25% boost to comet drops!

Enjoy the event,.
Kilando

Hello again!

This weekends event will feature a 2x increase to Mod drop chances!

Thanks again to the players who helped test Mega Moe on the 17th.
We will be giving an additional 2x increase to prospecting rates, 2x increase to aug drop chances and a prospecting refill rate boost of 8x!
Enjoy your event!

~Kilando

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

[If unable to view video via ingame news, click View on the Web to see the video]

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.