We are making changes to the method of acquiring and the power provided by class skills, so that they are relevant to low level players without feeling like a skill point trap.

We will make sure that there is still plenty of variety and choice in how you build your character! I want to stress that we are looking to make these changes as endgame neutral as we can. We may end up having to adjust outliers, but our goal throughout this entire revamp is to avoid taking power away from end game players. 

This is going to be a rather long post, so buckle up and get ready to Focus!

Current Problems

Before we begin, I think it’s helpful to explain our understanding of the problems with the current system. We’ve identified three core problems:

• Low level class skills are not worth getting because each level has such marginal effects, and the costs go up exponentially. The “bang for the buck” just isn’t there.

• Having a ton of class skills that each do very little isn’t fun.

• Players don’t find their identity or play style until later, since class skills are hard to find and you don’t get them until later in the game.

With this in mind, here is how this blog post will be ordered.

• Explain the current system for class skills, and the goals for our revamp.

• Provide the general overview of our revamp and how skill levels will work.

• Share our intended path of progression.

• Wrap up the post.

Phew! Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Current vs New System

Once you’ve maxed out all of your class skills and advanced class subskills, the class has reached the peak of its power via its class skills and every class is properly scaled with each other. The skill system was designed with the end game in mind, but because of this the lower levels have been unbalanced for quite some time. This was further compounded by the strength of AI relative to the player and their assets, which would mean that certain playstyles breezed through AI without worrying about the skills. Other classes struggled even more and were caught in a situation where they were spending valuable skill points on skills that did almost nothing for them. If you were an endgame player making an alternate character, you could power through most of this frustration with game knowledge. New players, however, were immediately faced with an unreasonable power disparity.

Our goal is to ensure that all classes feel fun and exciting to play at all points in the game, and that players have access to constant progress. The current system of Focus and Class skills going to level 22, and Class Subskills going to level 20 will be removed. You will be allowed to level your two Advanced Class Subskills at any point during your class advancement.

In order to make sure this transition does exactly what we want it to do, we are keeping 5 clear goals in mind that we will refer back to during and after the skill revamp.

• Allow meaningful class skills/class picking at a low level (within the Nexus), while taking up an appropriate number of skill points.

• Reduce the number of levels of class skills, so that each additional level is more impactful.

• Have all the class skills sum up to the equivalent of what they currently are at endgame.

• Make class skills more accessible by putting them in a character tab, rather than hidden in random AI bases.

• Give big chunks of class bonuses for free at specific points of character progression, and smaller bonuses through expensive class zen skills to get the rest of the class bonuses.  The zen skills will be class locked, but not considered a core class skill.

So… what does it look like? Good question!

This may be confusing, allow me to explain.

How are you changing Focus Skills?

Current Focus Skills will be broken into two skills, with the new Focus skill being 50% of the old Focus skill at the new max level of 3, but its bonuses will not be restricted to ship type. The other 50% of the power from the Focus skill will be restricted only to the correct ship type in the form of a Zen skill that stops at level 50. You will have 100% of the old Focus power at [Fleet/Combat/Recon/Support] Focus 3 and Zen of [Heavy Fighters/Light Fighters/Freighters/Capital Ships] 50.

How are you changing Class Skills?

The above system will be modified slightly for Class skills, but there will not be any ship locked bonuses for them. The first level of the Class skill will have ~33% of its total power in the current system, another ~33% will be provided by the second and third levels combined, and the last ~33% will be provided by the Zen skill at level 50. You will have 100% of the old Class power at [Berserker/Sniper/Fleet Commander/Gunner/Engineer/Shield Monkey/Seer/Speed Demon] Class 3 and Zen of [Berserker/Sniper/Fleet Commander/Gunner/Engineer/Shield Monkey/Seer/Speed Demon] 50.

How are you changing Class Subskills?

Class Subskills will not require you to level separate Zen skills in order to obtain your old levels of power, they will simply be 33% of the current level of power per level and will stop at level 3. You will have 100% of the old Class Subskill power of each of these skills at level 3.

Class Zen Skills?

Class and Focus Zen skills will take increasing amounts of skill points up to level 50 in order to obtain the full power of your Class. They will take 510 levels worth of skill points in order to fully max them out. This should push the scaling of your total power to roughly the same point that it is currently.

How am I supposed to level my class skills?

Great question. Gaining Focus, Class, Class Subskills, and Advanced Subskills will all be locked to level. When you get to the appropriate level, you will be given a special skill point that can be spent on any of the available Focus, Class, or Class Subskill skills. There will be a notification that will alert the player to the ability to gain a new class skill, and gaining the skill will be through a new class tab in the character dialog.  Gaining the skill will not cost regular skill points or credits, and can be trained anywhere. Zen Skills will be trained in your Focus and Class base in Lyceum.

Players will get their full class skills by level 1000, which is a further increase of power to low-mid level players. Our tentative path of progression would see players receiving class skill points at levels 5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 1000 for a total of 15 of these skill points.

Closing

We want to move away from punishing players for making wrong choices before they understand how the game works, and adjusting class skills is the first step. We will determine whether or not more steps need to be taken at a later date. Again, here’s our plan.

• Focus and Class skills are being split into 3 levels, with the majority of their power being distributed throughout those 3 levels. The rest of their power will be shifted into Zen of Focus and Zen of Class skills.
• Class Subskills will be split into 3 levels with all of their power distributed into those 3 levels.
• Players will gain their full class skills by level 1000, with class skill points being awarded at specific levels.

With all of this happening, we understand that things can be a bit confusing and you will have questions. Feel free to post questions, comments and concerns on the forums.

Stay tuned, there are more things yet to come!

Ryan

I added the UI for team skill resets, so that project is finished up now. I continued work on our new ingame store for our existing microtransactions, and added support for a new one that we’re working on.

MicroCapacitor

MicroCapacitor has been changing Olympus Expander Blueprints to be more consistent with eachother and changing the expanders themselves to be a tad bit useful.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on lots of fancy ideas, I’m not sure what to tell you about it because he hasn’t told me what to say, so I’ll just say it’s Fancy Tuna fancy.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve fixed another bug with Sniper Analysis, but I need to do testing on it before it can go live. Testing been withheld because I’ve working on the database support for the automatic event system. Once this is done, the first version can go live and start running the weekend bonus events for us.

Hober Mallow

Updated the Delquadrikamdon, you can check this link to see what I’ve done and provide feedback. There may be some minor tweaks as time goes on, but I should be able to get it out to you guys in this upcoming patch.

We have come to a decision about how to deal with class scaling, and are putting the finishing touches on it. I will be sharing the overall vision on the forums shortly, we plan on being as end game neutral as possible. We do not want to disturb the balance as it is at present.

I will be actively engaging in discussion with the playerbase in the coming days about specific low and mid game content, look out for that as well. Other than that there’s nothing big to report! Stay tuned for the patch!

Pixel

Pixel’s been working on a new twisted zone!

Its finally here! New content relating to tech 21 & 22! Past few days me (Pixel) and many other developers have been working to make a self contained mini new zone to add to Perilous Perilous Space. This new zone contains a whole slew of new ships, scoops, engines, weapons and much more.

Here’s some of what is coming next universe with this new zone regarding to new tech 21 & 22 build-able ships:

There will also be a whole series of missions allowing players to exchange unwanted gear for twisted tokens. These tokens will allow the ability to interchange them for other pieces of twisted gear of desire.

Some of the new items to give you a taste what will be included:

Do you want your fate decided? Well you can find out next universe!

Ryan

Ryan is back from his honeymoon! He has been taking it a bit easy since he got back, and finished up the team skill / team xp revamp that was started awhile back. There will be a blog coming up detailing the changes as soon as they are up on test server.

Auxilium

Auxilium has reduced the shieldbank of Ancalagon the Black by 40%. The fight was very tedious already and with the recent change to the Sniper analyzer it got even worse.
Additionally, Timotheus the Red has had it’s shieldbank increased by roughly 350%. The boss mechanics for this fight were often completely ignored and players focused on bursting the boss down as soon as possible.
Finally, the Bana King has received a 15% decrease in shieldbank because the nerfs to the burst series of weapons indirectly made this boss harder.

He’s also increased the spawners for the Earthforce AI ships that players need to kill for Piracy gear after some players were unhappy about the availability of these AI.

Jeff

Changed animation loop code so that effects can loop over longer periods than 32 seconds. Working on changes to Matura Scrapyard in pirate side of the Nexus.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been working database support required for the automatic event system and making it so that wild bots will enter stasis instead of blowing up when inside arena galaxies (e.g., The Colosseum).

Hober Mallow

Hi, I’m the newest Developer!

I joined with the intention of improving the early and middle game experience for players, here’s what I plan on doing this week.

Support Focus and Fleet Focus are much better at engaging with solo oriented content due to how powerful Drones and Bots are at the lower end and the innate survivability these classes bring to the table from jump. Fleet Commander’s gain bonuses to Bots and Fighters, and have tools that augment those Bots and Fighters as they progress, so at lower levels they are effectively always in a squad. Gunners scale with Missiles, which are already potent before any bonuses and allow them to efficiently combat multiple targets before being overwhelmed. Engineers and Shield Monkey’s don’t scale as hard offensively, but they make up for it with good defensive scaling and efficiency with Drones and Bots. They both can use Bots and Drones, and their class skills (just like Fleet Focus) encourage them to use ships with ample hull space and solar panel slots. They get to use tools that other classes can’t necessarily fit. I’ll be looking at ways to mimic that flexibility for the other classes.

As you can see, these 4 classes all have a lot of wiggle room and allow the player to adapt themselves to different situations with a bit of intelligence. I plan on looking at ways to level the playing field for the Recon and Combat focus classes (Berserker, Sniper, Speed Demon and Seer) at the low end in order to encourage players to explore those classes the way they are played in the end game without feeling penalized for not using Bots and Drones. This may involve reworked super items (I really want to do this anyway), it may involve altering the progression of class skills (Something me and JeffL are going to look into later this week), or it may involve light touches to AI that were balanced with 1v1 combat in mind. More than likely, it will involve a combination of these things.

I’m also in the process of hashing out a rough outline for solo players to acquire Tech 20 skills via Daily Missions without being forced to group up, think Weaponry 20 and Shielding 20 “Dailies” of sorts. I really like the daily system and think it can be used to prevent players from feeling brickwalled as they make their way towards the end game.

I also plan to look into some of the underutilized Class Super Items. Class Super Items should be meaningful, and if they’re not being used then they are probably lacking in some way. I’ll see if I can get the OK to share some tentative ideas with the player base at large for feedback purposes by next week.

That’s all for this week, sorry for being long winded!

Jeff

Working on rebalancing the untanglers. Wormholes will now be smaller when they’re locked and animate nicely back to normal size when they unlock. Wormholes will temporarily pulse a little larger whenever anyone jumps through, and they will play warp sounds when anyone jumps in or out of a wormhole instead of just hearing yourself warp.

Pixel

Pixel has been working on new shiny planets for next universe! Click here to find out more.

Jey

Server code for the patch has passed all my automated tests. Livetest blog post alongside patchnotes will come up soon™

Blue Dwarf

I’ve removed the levels some people had gained from a mission XP exploit, I’ve also done some behind the scene code stuff to reduce possible future issues with missions and help track down issues involving missions.

SunDog

SunDog will be adding a new mission to Strontium-90 as well as an identical item book that will explain to players what Strontium-90 is, how to complete the missions and what rewards they should expect. This may be done for other star systems and zones as well.

Above is a preview of the star system Elysion, part of the new zone he’s working on. The Hades zone will be a mini version of Olympus, similar to how Jungle is to The Serengeti. This zone will be available for both freemium and premium players at a level range of about 600-900. Five new Pretenders will be introduced in this zone; Demeter, Medusa, Nyx, Styx and Hades. For more information, see the design document he’s made here.
The document will be updated as the zone is being made, if you have suggestions or ideas for the Hades zone (not all boss fights have been finalized yet, and some are still awaiting ideas), you can contact him ingame or on discord.

Pixel

Pixels been adding some new skins surrounding the Bhisajayu, Samgrahak’ayu, Helga and Super Phunka!

Jey

Jey’s been running some stability testing for the new patch and so far it’s looking good! The next phase will be to get live test running for a few days to ensure it’s fully working.

Other things Jey has been doing is some security fixes and introducing a new anti-lag system that will hopefully stop base vs base combat from lagging the rest of the server as much.

Blue Dwarf

I tracked down some players who had gained XP from one of the new repeatable item missions.

I’ve also got myself setup with a database locally (finally), so I can do the parts of the event system that rely on a database and get it live.

Overall, we’re pretty happy with the Industrial Commodities system that was added to the game at universe reset. We have some tweaks that we will be making though, both to increase the ease with which newer players can enter the system as well as to bring profits closer to where we wanted them to be.

Industrial Commodities in Earthforce Space

This won’t go live until next universe, but we’ll be seeding Earthforce Space with bases that consume Industrial Commodities. These bases won’t consume as many commodities as the Wild Space ones do, but they’ll consume enough to provide some income to players who aren’t yet strong enough to build in Wild Space.

Consumption Changes

We’re changing how bases consume commodities. Because the consumption rate is constant in the current system, the optimal strategy is to sell just under that rate in order to keep the supply close to zero and the price maxed. This runs into the counterintuitive scenario where selling more commodities will make you less money. If you sell just over the consumption rate instead of just under, you’ll eventually fill up the base and end up making 4 times less (50% price instead of 200%).

Instead, we are going to make it so that bases consume less when they’re almost empty (and the price is high) and consume more when they’re well stocked (and the price is low). We’ve optimized the curve so that you never lose money by selling more.  Even though the price will drop as you supply more commodities, your overall profits will still go up. The current consumption rate will be in effect at 50% stock and it will scale significantly higher on the way to 100% stock, as well as very low when close to 0% stock.

Changes to higher tier commodities

We’ve been getting some feedback that the consumption rates on the higher tiered commodities would require too many T1-T3 commodities to reach. We’ll be re-evaluating these numbers and ratios so that we are prepared to make changes to these commodities for next universe. Unfortunately, this change can’t be made mid-universe, but we will make sure to have it in for next time.

Weight tweaks

While we’re happy with the weight of these commodities when moved using bots, we aren’t too happy with how it seems to be inhibiting manual trading. This if very obvious in-game if you do a market check on Steel Girders: there are billions of easy credits to be made trading between the bases but trading in any reasonable volume results in weight that simply cannot be carried.  We will be going through the weight stats in an attempt to encourage more manual trading.

These changes to consumption are now up on the test server (test.starsonata.com port 3030) for you to test before they are patched in.

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.

Ryan

Has finished up the server side code for the cargo slot system detailed here. There is still work that needs to be done in the client-side UI, but it shouldn’t be long until it is ingame. He has worked on some tweaks to the Industrial Commodities such as how the ai bases consume the commodities as well as some other changes discussed in the feedback thread. Expect a blog post that details the changes before the end of the week. He also did a minor code tweak for Pixel so that he could fix the issue where the Singularity Brake would warp you outside the docking radius of the base that you warped to.

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has been making /loads/ of cool sounds!

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on permanent drones. Now they work with astral injection like they did before! Additionally the Armada permanent drone series has received some neat visual improvements and some special assortments of weapons and fighters. Here’s the list of the improvements:

• Armada Ambro drone has 2 mini rhino fighters it can launch.
• Armada Ambush has holoprojector of duplicates.
• Armada Bastion now has a superitem weapon.
• Armada Defender now has a point defence superitem and Armada spitter superitem.

Forum topic to give any feedback about the changes: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=61674

Pixel has also been improving our suns!

Lastly, just a friendly word of warning; base holoprojectors may not be obtainable from Junkyard in the future, but some more have been added!

Jey

Patch is being prepared. Should be in a few weeks. There’s no rush for it so a proper announcement with livetesting will be done on blog in a few days.

I am currently working/testing on a system to get rid of the server wide lag when there is a single galaxy under heavy load (large bvb for instance). The galaxy where the action occur will still lag, but the rest of the server will not be impacted nearly as much.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on making Wormholes do fancy graphical things when they lock and unlock and cleaning up some of our old code.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve done my last exam of the year! o/
I’ve removed the restriction that players can only have one Outpost per character, fixed an issue causing low mod rates with ruin items, I’ll also be setting the parameter on live to allow squads larger than 10 players (for now it’s at 15).

Pixel

Pixel been adding new holoprojectors and ships! Here’s a Sneak peek!

He has also been working with Blue Dwarf to finally get those holoprojector super items back into holoprojector form, so when the next update rolls out expect your super item holoprojectors to be converted into holoprojectors!

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has joined us to provide us with some very cool sounds. He’s being working on getting us lots of cool new combat engagement sounds, as well as a few other new sound effects for us.

Auxilium

Auxilium has mostly been working on tweaking the missiles. He’s given the Lancer missiles their old launch ranges back, gave Flare missiles 10 second flares up from 5 seconds as well as the new launch mechanic, and he has improved the way missiles launch to begin with, so there shouldn’t be anywhere near as many cases of missiles missing their target.

He’s also given Junkyard Hydroponics and Extensors a sticky tag, which means you can move them out of a base but you cannot unequip them once you equip them. Hopefully this will prevent anyone from accidentally throwing their entire stack of Hydros or Extensors into one base and crying themselves to sleep.

MicroCapacitor

Through Earthforce’s analysis, statistics show that pirate activity has not been going down at all! Earthforce has lost many units fighting this ongoing battle with many different pirate factions. The scientists at Earthforce Headquarters have been working on a new type of Enforcer that will help put this outlaw scum where it belongs! The Marshal Blueprint will be available in the base on Mars in Sol, Earthforce Headquarters!

Blue photon has been building Capital ships for a long time. The Earthforce Capital ship line for Earthforce has proven to be very popular. Little did people know there was another ship that Blue Photon wanted Earthforce to produce which has an intimidating inbuilt mining laser! The Earthforce Overload Prototype Blueprint will be available in Beta Antares!

Absolution has been a place of exile for many years. A lot of ideas that Bellarmine had were cluttered about after he was sent to hell. A prototype Light Fighter ship was found, which is normally not used by the Absolution. This ship will allow them to pursuit to harm those who injure their space religion more effectively! The Cherub Blueprint will be available in Absolution!

Col Legno

Col Legno is back with us for a bit and will be poking a few bugs out of existance!

Morat

Morat fixed bugs, and is working on other bugs & quality of life improvements adding extraction rates to extractor descriptions.

Jeff

Jeff has posted his design idea for a new battleground-arena area in the Development Notes forum, you can read that here

Ryan

Ryan has been working on a new interface for Space Point purchases, so that they will be available from anywhere instead of specific ai bases. He has also changed account slots to be a flat amount of 150 per account instead of the current scaling system. He also had a lot of progress communicating with Valve for Steam, and a lot of progress was made towards that.