We have made another batch of adjustments to the recurring mid universe contest to take the Imperial Throne. If you want to understand the context of these changes, take a look at the previous Dev Diary. The latest suite of changes are a result of closely monitoring the outcome of our previous set of changes over the past couple of contests. In this blog, we will describe what is different in the new system!

Arena Size

Every galaxy within the expanse has had the size of its arena significantly reduced from 24,000 to 15,000. The asteroid belt encircling every galaxy now forces everything back towards the center using a friction cloud. This allows for plenty of room for large fights, but it also shuts down the tactic of dragging Midas’ champions to the outermost portions of the galaxy.

Strategos

Midas no longer sends Polemarchos or Taxiarhos to maintain order in his domain. Now, he will send 6 Strategos champions as a display of his might. These champions announce their presence globally, and spawn 5 times a day. As players fight them, they will spawn strong minions worth a good deal of Influence who also drop a generous amount of Anatolian Crests. While calling forth their minions, they will hunker down and become immune to damage while simultaneously slowing to a crawl. After 25 minutes, all of his champions will despawn. If they are not killed before they despawn, no Influence will be awarded.

Each Strategos is worth 30,000 Influence, and the minions they spawn are worth more than 30,000 in total. This means that every 24 hours there is more than 1,800,000 Influence available from Strategos alone.

Claiming the Throne

Influence is what is used to determine which team will be crowned Emperor. 30 days after a new universe is formed, killing soldiers inside the Anatolian Expanse provides any teams that took part in killing any given soldier with Influence.

At the start of the contest, there is an Influence cap of 1,000,000. No team is able to gain more influence than the cap, and the cap increases over time to 4,000,000 by the end of the 3 week period. If the 1st place team does not have 1,000,000 or greater Influence than the 2nd place team, the Influence cap is removed and the contest continues until a team has 1,000,000 more Influence than the 2nd place team.

Any team in the #1 spot loses Influence when a Player, Bot or Temporary Drone on their team is killed in Anatolia. Player deaths cause 5000 Influence to be lost, Bot deaths cause 1000 to be lost, and Temporary Drone destruction causes 200 to be lost.

Imperial Signets and Imperial Skills

All three stations in Anatolia now allow players to train the Imperial Seal skills up to level 7, at the cost of 2 Imperial Signets each. Imperial Signets are crafted with an Imperial Restoration Forge, which can be rarely acquired from defeating Strategos. In order to craft an Imperial Signet, teams will need to acquire Fragmented Imperial Signets which are earned through participation in the contest for the Imperial Throne. Once teams have accrued at least 100,000 Influence, they are eligible to earn a portion of the 2000 Imperial Signets available to all. These Imperial Signets are split based on the amount of Influence a team has in relation to the total amount of Influence in the pool.

For example, if a team has 100,000 Influence and the total amount of Influence earned by all teams is 9,000,000 then that team is eligible to earn roughly 22 Fragmented Imperial Signets. The team that claims the Imperial Throne is not guaranteed any Fragmented Imperial Signets, their proportion of Fragmented Imperial Signets is based on the exact same rules as everyone else. This means that their total Influence is the only thing that determines the amount of Fragmented Imperial Signets they earn.

These exact same rules also apply to the 250 Imperial Seals awarded at the end of the contest.

Note

The Anatolian Expanse and associated Emperor Contest is a labor of love by us to support an active PvP event that breaks up the day to day activities in Star Sonata. We appreciate the many rounds of feedback the community has given about this experience. We are committed to continuing to support this activity and monitoring its success and failures. This blog post includes all information on the current system used to ascend to the throne to become Emperor, but like with many things in Star Sonata, it changes often. This system will likely be iterated into the future to bring an experience that promotes competition. You can stay up to date on what is involved in the contest to become Emperor by visiting our wiki page on the topic. https://www.starsonata.com/wiki/index.php/Emperor

Hey Sonatians,

We thought we would work up a helpful guide to highlight several new and old features that help make universe resets more of a breeze!

Limboing Tow Service

Every universe players get one /limbo to redock all of your ships if you’ve placed them in a location and need to change your mind. If you’ve used up your free one and require another you can purchase Limboing Tow Service for 5 billion credits at Friedman AI station in Free Market. This will “limbo” all your ships and let you choose a new AI station for them all to be placed at. This can be extremely helpful for moving large storage ships like Thatch that lack an engine.

Item Teleporters

Item Teleporters are station builder’s best friend when packing or unpacking. Located at the Friedman AI station in Free Market for various times and prices. Or if you want a less stressful experience, a 3 day length teleporter is also available in the in-game Store via the Gold Icon at the bottom for Space Points. These useful tools allow for teleportation of items within team space between ships and/or stations (if you’re docked at the station) provided those possessions are also in team-owned space. The item teleporter timer starts immediately after purchase so be prepared to equip it and utilize immediately!

Packing

Buy and equip the Item Teleporter then head to the location of your stations in a galaxy your team has ownership of. Open the Character window and then select the Possessions tab. Find the ship you wish to “store” your stuff in and right click and select Open Inventory. This will open a remote inventory window of the ship. Go ahead, leave that window open and then dock at the station you wish to pack up. Then highlight and drag and drop the items from the station inventory onto the remote ship inventory. This will make the items instantly transfer. Dock to another station and repeat.

Alternately, you can right click on a Station and select Open Inventory in the Possessions tab. It won’t display anything in the window but you can drag and drop the items onto that window to transfer them to that station (again restricted to an owned team galaxy).

Unpacking

Once you have ownership of a galaxy and laid the Stations in the locations you want for the galaxy, you can purchase and equip the Item Teleporter. Open the Character window and then select the Possessions tab. Find the ship you have your station items in and right click on it and then select Open Inventory. Dock at an appropriate station and drag and drop from the remote inventory window of the ship with your station items onto the station.

Again alternately you can do the same with a a station you deploy strictly to unload your stuff onto for sorting. Unpack the goods onto that station and then you can right click on another Station and select Open Inventory in the Possessions tab. It won’t display anything in the window but you can drag and drop the items onto that window to transfer them to that station.

Trade Bay Import/Export

Trade Bays can be exported or imported during the packing/unpacking process.

To Export, dock at your Station. Go to the Control tab. Press Trade Goods. Then press Export. This will open a window that allows you to copy paste the text for later importing. Follow the same process but press Import on the Add Trade Goods page when importing your template you’ve previously exported. This can be extremely useful for include things like your shop or a main production station, but also any trade bay that is worth re-using such as a colony or extraction setup.

Transferring Stations and Bots to Characters on the Same Account

One of the major changes of the last few universes has been the ability to transfer Stations and Bots within the same account! This helps streamline the ability of a player to centralize most of their Station construction builds and supplies onto a single character. To utilize this new feature – select your bot/station and press “X” if the menu below the targeting box is not visible. For stations, Transfer Ownership will be on “X” menu. For bots, you must press More Bot Options and then press Transfer Ownership. You must have a character, on the same account, that you wish to transfer to, offline within the same galaxy for it to be a valid choice, provided the receiving character has sufficient skills and/or slots for the transfer.

Bot Orders

A new search window has been added to help players better sort through the huge commodity lists. This should help players more quickly set buy and sell orders. We also have further improvements regarding orders coming in the near future!

We hope you take full advantage of these tools and enjoy a more efficient and less stressful universe reset experience. Happy packing and good luck in the next universe!

The Economic Assault update has been live for about six weeks and it’s already made a big impact on the Star Sonata economy. We’ve seen high levels of participation in the Active IC events (including a fair bit of good natured PvP) and a lot of productive experimentation with the Colony IC system as well. We have been loving all the engagement on the community Discord server when it comes to questions and comments about the new system. Let’s dig into some of the key feedback we’ve received and a few updates we are planning for the near future.

Key Feedback and Upcoming Changes

One significant piece of feedback was regarding the location of sale events for the lowest tier of Active ICs. Players rightly pointed out that holding these events in the Earthforce Layer could lead to trade bot automation, circumventing the “active” in Active IC. To address this, we have moved these events to Perilous Space.

Feedback from early entrepreneurs in the Colony IC space led to another big discovery. There was an unnecessarily complicated interaction between colony population and an internal “maximum storage” custom value that could be set on each commodity. The upshot was that four of the five Colony IC’s were achieving maximum sale volume at around 1 billion colony population, while the fifth Colony IC (Genetically Modified Trobbles) was never reaching its intended sale volume. This is also the reason why the Storehouse bonuses on colony enhancement items were absurdly large, yet didn’t seem to have much effect. We have torn up this old code in favor of a simpler version, while still keeping much of the well studied theory of colonies intact.

1. The trade volume of a colony now depends only on its population and its Storehouse bonus (if a colony enhancement is present). It no longer depends directly on your level of Colonial Administrator since higher suitability means more population anyway. This is a substantial buff to any colonies that are not owned by Colonial Administrator characters.
2. Storehouse bonuses now do exactly what they sound like: a colony with +80% Storehouse will buy 80% more of every commodity than it otherwise would, increasing your revenue by 80%.
3. As part of simplifying the formula for colony sales, we have made a few numerical adjustments so that the net impact on traditional commodities (e.g. Nuclear Waste, Entertainers) is neutral or a slight buff for mature colonies. Since the Storehouse bonuses on colony enhancement items are now a lot more impactful than before, we’ve adjusted the size of those bonuses on some of the items to keep their overall impact on colony revenue roughly constant.
4. As was always intended, the five Colony IC’s will now only trade in large volumes when the colony is mature. We have run fresh tests on the new system to make sure that the optimal credit sourcing of these commodities is aligned with our design. The tests confirmed that Colony IC nodes are tremendously valuable if occupied by a mature colony and traded with in an optimal fashion. As part of these adjustments, we have also modestly increased the peak sales volume of Colony IC’s so that you can not only get back to the bugged rate but even exceed it by 9% with a really good colony.

These changes will be in the next patch, expected by the end of March.

Future Plans and Adjustments

We’ve also identified some aspects that we’d like to adjust, but we need to wait until the end of the current universe. The biggest change relates to the distribution of the original five colony commodities in Wild Space (e.g. Dragon Eggs, Astral Silk). We have roughly twice as many sources of these commodities compared to last universe, meaning that there is way more supply of these commodities than mature Colony IC nodes are willing to consume. I am working with Bobbo to adjust the universe generation code so that in the next universe we will have more control over how many sources of these commodities appear. In the meantime, it’s unfortunately the case that there will not be as much demand for these commodities as projected, since the supply is about twice as high as we had forecast. To any players who aggressively claimed colony commodity sources in anticipation of liquidating these commodities via Colony IC nodes, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and assure you that the relative abundance of colony commodities to Colony IC nodes will be much more dialed in starting next universe.

When it comes to the Active IC sale events, we feel that they have been the standout success of the system and certainly don’t want to derail that success. We just want to inject a little bit more randomness to help keep traders and pirates on their toes. Our plan is to randomize the event locations so that you can’t predict where each Active IC will be sold next time, and also introduce some random variations in the price that the server will pay during each event. Our idea is that these measures will help keep the events fresh and also add a bit more nuance to the strategies around shop pricing.

Lastly, toward the end of the current universe we will take stock of the consumption rate of Active IC’s, colony commodities, and Colony IC’s. Depending on our findings, we may make some adjustments to the volume of ingredients that go into making Colony IC’s. We have high hopes for this new economy and are committed to doing things carefully and methodically. We understand that it takes a lot of time and effort on the part of the players to learn and begin to profit from a new system like this, so whenever we make adjustments we’ll endeavor to keep things simple and conservative in scope to avoid invalidating the knowledge you have gained about the system.

Conclusion

It’s been a real pleasure to see players from all corners of the game trying out the new economic systems and sharing their thoughts in the chats. We believe that the release of the Active IC economy marks the beginning of a very positive new direction for Star Sonata. We are committed to closely monitoring the economy’s evolution and methodically adjusting its various components when necessary. Our aim is to promote a healthy amount of collaboration and competition in the economy of the game, while ensuring that every individual player has multiple paths to profit from their time online.

Stay tuned for more updates and developments in the Star Sonata universe!

Hello Sonatians! We have two exciting new projects that will go live with the upcoming Universe Reset on February 3. While these two projects are very different in the specifics, they stem from one core vision that we have for Star Sonata: we want to give players fresh and exciting ways to collaborate and compete with each other as they progress through the game. So let’s dive right in!

Active Industrial Commodities

Industrial Commodities have been in the game for ages and were originally envisioned as a way for players to liquidate extracted resources for credits, providing a simpler passive income process to the somewhat arcane art of colonial administration. Over time, the Industrial Commodity economy has become increasingly automated and saturated to the point that it’s not living up to the vision that originally created it. We’ve decided to graft an active-play component onto the existing Industrial Commodity system that, while entirely optional, may yield a lucrative credits-per-hour rate for players who choose to pursue it.

Vision

We’ve known for quite some time now that we need to do a better job of rewarding players for going out into the universe and playing the game with each other. Our previous changes to Dungeons and Instanced Content are an example of our commitment to this. This project focuses on augmenting the Wild Space economy to promote these goals, relying on two main principles:

1. New sources of passive income should have a connection to active gameplay.

2. Players should be substantially rewarded for participating in the player-driven market as opposed to running their industries entirely solo.

A huge difference between the existing Industrial Commodity economy and the new system we’ve created is the reduction* of demand-side scarcity. When players are limited in the amount of commodities they can sell, this encourages them to keep everything in-house and discourages player markets. If a credit source can dry up when too many players are selling, the best thing to do is to max it out on your own and not share it with anyone. As you read the details of the Active IC project below, note that we’ve reduced* demand bottlenecks to encourage a player market to develop.

Per our core vision for this project, the raw goods that feed into the Active IC system have to be gathered via a substantial active play component. This ensures a linkage between credit generation and player activity, which in turn means that everyone has something profitable to do the minute they log into the game.

Three-Sector Model

Taken together, these goals drive us toward establishing a three-sector game economy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-sector_model for more on this). In the first sector, Gatherers collect raw materials while playing the game. In the second sector, these raw materials are refined by Manufacturers. In the third sector, the refined goods are sold to AI bases (or colonies) by Traders for credits.

Note that Gathering requires active play, while Manufacturing requires bases and trade bots (passive play). Trading will require active play for some commodities, and passive play for others. This means that players with holdings in Wild Space are free to Gather and Trade as well. However, it will be impractical for any one player to specialize into Gathering, Manufacturing, and Trading. This means that avoiding participating in the broader market is disincentivized and players should instead find it more profitable to do business with each other.

Wild Space Resource Flow

There are two types of commodities that will be added in this upcoming universe.

The first are actively-sourced Industrial Commodities (Active ICs). These take a single commodity that can be gathered in the game (such as a Blue Dust or Rosemary Sprig) and combine it with basic materials to produce an Active IC (a Fragrant Arrangement in this case). Each new Active IC can then be sold to special AI bases that will only buy it when an event is active and indicating it can be sold. The factories that make these commodities can be purchased in Capella. So, if you’re looking for a new way to build wealth in the game, you can spend some time farming commodities and converting them into Active ICs, which you can then hold and sell during the new events or else sell them to other players who will have their own uses for them (read on…)

The other new kind of commodity are the Colony Industrial Commodities (Colony ICs). These commodities require ordinary colony commodities (such as Astral Silk or Dragon Eggs) to be purchased from colonies and then combined with a variety of Active ICs and regular ICs. The resulting Colony ICs (​​Shimmering Astral Brocades or Luminescent Dragon Scales, in this case) can be sold to certain special colonies that are on planets capable of purchasing Colony ICs. There are only a limited number of these special planets in Wild Space, and they are only found in galaxies whose quality is Rare or higher. The factories that make Colony ICs are constructed with a blueprint that can only be acquired as a drop from Perilous Space. These factories require Goop to build, so you will need to secure some Goop from a Fractured Galaxy if you are lucky enough to claim a colony that can purchase Colony ICs.

While Colony ICs require colonies in order to passively liquidate assets for credits, these colonies can’t earn anything for their owners unless they also obtain Active ICs as well. Similarly, while Active IC factories and the raw materials from Wild Space are the only way to manufacture higher quality Active ICs, they can only do so if they connect with Gatherers. And in all cases, we have set up these new economies with limited* demand-side scarcity. Suppose you’re a player who is lucky enough to own a colony that purchases Shimmering Astral Brocades; since your fully mature colony will purchase a very large number of these items*, you have every incentive to buy Astral Silk from everyone in the universe who can provide it… at the right price, of course! You’ll also buy the Active ICs that go into making Shimmering Astral Brocades, creating multiple market relationships between yourself and Gatherers and Manufacturers.

What’s the role of the Gatherer?

The Gatherer wants to figure out what they can farm the easiest for the highest profit per hour. So they’re going to search the Market Check to see which station is buying the commodities they can gather with the least amount of effort. Then, they’re going to gather as much of these commodities as they can and sell them to the highest bidder before they end their session. Additionally, highly active Gatherers may also keep a keen eye out for the new kind of server-wide event in which a randomly selected Active IC will be purchased by an AI base at a generous price.

What’s the role of the Manufacturer?

The Manufacturer puts money and capital up on a base, buys the materials from other players, and subsequently sells them at a markup to players who bring them to the relevant AI bases during the sale event. Otherwise, the Manufacturer can hoard them and try to sell the materials themselves. Manufacturers who control colonies with commodities such as Astral Silk and Dragon Eggs will likely find that these items are now demanded by other players!

What’s the role of the Trader?

The Trader spends time looking to get good deals on various Active ICs, so they’ll be checking the prices to see how things look. They’ll also watch for cheap farmed commodities that can be sold to Manufacturers. If a surge in demand happens, they will take whatever they have stockpiled and haul them to the station with the demand surge. If they are selling one of the three Common Active ICs, they can safely offload them in Earthforce Space. However, if they want to sell the higher quality Active ICs, they will need to venture into Perilous Space. Because of this, they may need to enlist the help of other players to defend them while they bring the commodities to the base in question so that they can safely sell their goods.

What are Surges in Demand?

Intermittently, throughout the week, certain Active IC’s will be infinitely demanded by specific AI bases in Earthforce or Perilous Space, at a generous price. The Active IC will be specifically indicated in an event notification. During this time, players can sell as much of these commodities as they can move at a time to these AI bases.

Conclusion

By implementing a three-sector economy in Star Sonata, we’re creating new ways to generate credits through active play, deeper manufacturing paths to wealth, and most importantly, the potential for greatly increased interaction in the player-driven market. The Active IC and Colony IC system should create many new opportunities to collaborate with others in the economy, and just as many opportunities for healthy competition as well!

*Edit from Enk (2024-02-13): I helped Hober write the section on Active IC’s but I must have had a bit too much of Doctor L’s Cure-All Life Tonic at the time because I mistakenly wrote that there is absolutely no demand-side scarcity of Colony IC’s. I have edited the offending lines in this post to be more representative of the system. If you happen to control a colony that purchases Colony IC’s, what you need to know is that you definitely should grow that colony’s population up to mature levels in order to see large sales volumes, but if you do so you will find that it buys a TON of the relevant Colony IC, most likely far greater than you and a few friends could source on your own.

Fractured Galaxies

Fractured Galaxies are special galaxies in Wild Space that can’t be owned by any team. Consequently, they are pretty risky to occupy since you can be attacked by any player at any time. We envision Fractured Galaxies as a way for advanced players to flex their strength and potentially work off some ancient grudges against their opponents. As our first universe with Fractured Galaxies draws to a close, we’ve reflected on the  feedback we’ve received and have some adjustments queued up that should greatly improve how they work. Players generally found that Goop, the special commodity you obtain in Fractured Galaxies, wasn’t useful enough to warrant the risk of obtaining it. We are addressing this concern by making Goop essential in the Colony IC system (detailed above) and will continue to iterate until its value is in the right spot. We also received feedback that assaulting a Fractured Galaxy was nigh on impossible when the defender was heavily fortified. To allow for more contest over these Goop sources, a new station kit is going to be added in the coming universe.

Given that we’ve had some enjoyable battles over Command and Control stations, this new station is going to follow a similar gameplay loop. If you would like to disrupt someone’s stations in an unowned galaxy to make attacking them easier, you would place a Disrupt and Dismantle Station station in their galaxy. You would then have to construct one of two Station Disruption Field Generators on that station to begin disrupting all stations in the galaxy. This includes all friendly, neutral and enemy stations except for the station generating the disruption field.

These auras debuff damage, rate of fire, and shield regeneration of all other stations in the galaxy but differ in build time and strength of the debuff. The stronger aura generator takes about as long to build as a Nullification Generator. This is where we see an experience similar to a Command and Control station. If you get a notification that a Disruption station is placed in your galaxy, you’d better get in there and destroy the attackers’ station or pretty soon they’ll make your stations in the galaxy much more vulnerable to siege!

If you are looking to lay siege to someone else’s Fractured Galaxy, be aware that these Station Disruption Field Generators are not cheap. Fortunately their build costs are primarily periodic materials and are aligned with materials generally used for building strong stations. If you get a third of the way into building one and defending the disruption station isn’t going well, it may be wise to abandon ship and cut your losses on that build!

Additional Changes

To help make the process of getting colonies established, and to promote their broader use, the Colony Booster base items (e.g. Mobile Mani-Pedi SalonBot Housing) will no longer decay on reset. Instead they will be sticky, meaning once equipped they cannot be unequipped. Now you can store as many of these boosters as you’d like!

Good evening Sonatians. The contest to take the Emperor’s Throne has gone through a few iterations over the past few years, from a game of “escort the payload” to the battleground oriented fights we have seen more recently. We have carefully monitored the experience of the Emperor mechanic since its inception and plan to continue iterating on the design as we learn more about player patterns and preferences.. In this blog, we will describe every aspect of the current system! It will be detail oriented and should answer any questions you may have about how engaging with it works.

The Anatolian Expanse

First, let’s talk about the Anatolian Expanse. The Anatolian Expanse is a layer of space found by traveling to Anatolia (which can be found off of Earthforce Perilous Outpost), then heading past King Midas into his domain. Here you can find Midas’ soldiers waiting to engage whoever comes to challenge them. The soldiers come in a few forms: Midas’ mining crew, his foot soldiers and his champions. All of these soldiers drop Anatolian Crests, a currency that can be used to get rewards for participating in the Anatolian Expanse and provide your team influence. I will elaborate on that later.

This layer has a few other rules that make it a PvP battleground. You cannot transwarp in or out of this layer. You must go in through one of the entrances, and there are no other ways out. Logging out of this layer will also cause you to be kicked out of the layer, which means no hiding large fleets logged out in deep space. Every galaxy within the expanse also has a set arena size. There is a 24,000 radius asteroid belt in every galaxy, and each galaxy emits a deadly aura past that point! This allows for plenty of room for large fights, while also preventing some extreme cases of kiting Midas’ Champions. (The early fights in the expanse took place tens of thousands of distance away from the center of the galaxy)

Midas’ Soldiers

Midas’ miners and foot soldiers aren’t too interesting. They will fight anyone that engages them, but they don’t give much influence. However, they are a good source of Anatolia Crests. You can find them at all times in the expanse, but compared to the champions they are significantly weaker.

Midas’ champions are where his might is truly on display. They are capable of fending off entire squads of players. They also provide large numbers of Anatolian Crests and a large amount of influence. These champions come in three different ranks that drastically increase in strength and rewards. There can only be one of each champion in the Expanse at a time, and they spawn on timers that can be seen in notifications next to the chat. If you do not see a notification there when you log in regarding these bosses, they are either already alive or not respawning soon. The ranks and champions are as follows:

• The lowest rank champion, Taxiarhos, is worth 30,000 Influence.

• In the middle is Strategos at 180,000 influence.

• And, finally, the strongest and most legendary champion is Polemarchos worth 900,000 influence.

Anatolian Crests

Anatolian Crests are one of the two things that are obtained by defeating Midas’ soldiers. Their concept is relatively simple: you kill soldiers, they drop crests. Gather lots of crests and take them to any of the AI bases in the Anatolian Expanse to turn them in for lots of wonderful rewards! Be careful, if you are killed while transporting these crests you will drop them to whoever killed you! These PvP items have a few other attributes that go along with them.

• Crests drop on death.

• Crests drop when you leave the layer. This can happen due to logout kick or just warping out.

• Crests prevent undocking while they are in your inventory. You will have to sell them back to the base for credits if you are unable to get other rewards for them.

• Crests stick around longer than other debris.

• They provide visibility to a ship that holds them.

With 100 crests you can purchase an Anatolian Trove. These are loot boxes that contain a bunch of very useful items, including a low chance at a Tarnished  Imperial Seal! Crests and troves can be obtained before, during, and after the Throne is claimed, so come on in and fight for some crests!

Claiming the Throne

As mentioned before, killing Midas’ soldiers provides influence to the killers team for killing them. Influence is what is used to determine which team will be crowned Emperor. However, you cannot just go and get influence in the Anatolian Expanse at any point in the universe. The Emperor’s contest is a timed event. At exactly 720 hours (30 days) after a new universe is formed, killing soldiers inside the Anatolian Expanse provides any teams that took part in killing any given soldier with  influence. This influence is provided proportionally based on how much damage each team did to the soldier. 20% of a soldier’s influence is also provided to the team that landed the killing blow on a soldier. At any given moment you can see the total amount of influence a team has by looking at the bulletin board in any AI station.

The contest itself lasts 3 weeks (21 days). When this time period ends, the leading team will be crowned Emperor, with a few conditions. After 3 weeks, if no teams are eligible to claim the throne, the contest continues until the moment a team becomes eligible. For a team to be eligible they must have at least 1,000,000 influence and they must also have a 900,000 point lead ahead of the team in second place. If a team is not crowned by the universe reset, all influence is wiped and an Emperor will not be crowned for that universe. Since the contest is a one time event, once an Emperor is crowned that Emperor will hold their throne for the rest of the universe.

The Contest’s Spoils

The current rewards for the Emperor contest take 4 major forms. Three of which are only provided for the Emperor and their team:

1. A 5% tithe is applied to scooped credits and colony sales to players not on the Emperor’s team.

2. The Emperor can dock at the palace in Anatolia and receive three augmenter reset modules and three ship dry dock modules

3. A galaxy in wild space will forever be named after the Emperor.

Additionally, there is another reward that is distributed amongst the top 10 participating teams who have  accrued at least 100,000 influence. A pool of 250 Imperial Chests are proportionally provided to these eligible teams based on their teams percentage of the total influence earned by all teams. The greatest amount of these will always be provided to the winning team, but there’s still chests to be earned by whoever can snag a spot in the top ten!

Round up

The Anatolian Expanse and associated Emperor Contest is a labor of love by us to support an active PvP event that breaks up the day to day activities in Star Sonata. We appreciate the many rounds of feedback the community has given about this experience. We are committed to continuing to support this activity and monitoring its success and failures. This blog post includes all information on the current system used to ascend to the throne to become Emperor, but like with many things in Star Sonata, it changes often. This system will likely be iterated into the future to bring an experience that promotes competition. You can stay up to date on what is involved in the contest to become Emperor by visiting our wiki page on the topic. https://www.starsonata.com/wiki/index.php/Emperor

Emperor Contest: Now a Time Based Event

Hey Sonatians! We’ve made a few adjustments to the Emperor Contest, (see https://www.starsonata.com/blog/dev-diary-emperor-system-wild-space-and-aug-sourcing/ and https://www.starsonata.com/blog/dev-diary-anatolian-expanse/), but we aren’t done with making adjustments to the system quite yet.

In the next universe, the Emperor Contest will last three weeks and the team with the most points at the end of that time will be crowned the emperor. As previously stated, the rewards will be split among the remaining teams proportionally based on the amount of influence they gained.

We hope this variant of the system is more enjoyable for everyone. It should remove the feeling of having to sprint to claim the throne as fast as possible before others get a chance to join the fray. As with previous adjustments, we will continue monitoring player feedback closely and keep an eye out for additional areas of improvement.

Something else to note is that the number of non-boss spawns has increased. We expect this will play a large role during the next contest because many more points are available per day through the roaming AI. This should move the contest away from being as boss-focused as it once was.

Fractured Galaxies

Now for the big news. In the next universe, there will be new galaxies in Wild Space called Fractured Galaxies. These are galaxies that have all the properties and resources of standard galaxies but with two major differences. They cannot be owned, and brand-new resources can be found on some of the moons. This resource can be used to increase the productivity of other Wild Space galaxies’ extraction. More on that later in the post.

You will be able to find these fractured galaxies on your universe map by either seeing their unique name (which does not follow the normal naming scheme of Wild Space galaxies) or by seeing a sword icon on the map. They are unownable and therefore permit PvP at all times. This means that any bases there are vulnerable to attack for the entire universe. Of course, there must be something valuable in these fractured galaxies to justify the danger. Fractured galaxies have a brand new resource to harvest and you will not be able to find this resource anywhere else in the game.

To keep things simple on initial release, we’ll be just adding one new resource: Goop! Using a factory purchased from the Building Academy Entrance, you can turn Goop into Goop Juice. Goop Juice has an entirely new property, unlike any other item. If you place it on a Command and Control Center station, when the base consumes Fusion Cells to own the galaxy, it will also consume Goop Juice. This will cause the entire galaxy’s stations to have their extraction rates boosted by 25%. We may consider other galaxy boosters in the future, but this is what we are going to be working with for now.

Both the raw resource (Goop) and the galaxy booster (Goop Juice) follow the rules of industrial commodities. They cannot be transwarped or put in storage and they decay on universe reset and drop on death. To extract Goop, you can purchase a Tech 20 extractor from Building Academy Entrance Galaxy. Also note that these extractors do NOT benefit from Extraction Expert! Feel free to use your strongest bases to extract Goop.

We have heard your cries to bring some wildness back to Wild Space. We hope these Fractured Galaxies add a bit more chaos, uncertainty and spiciness to our current Wild Space ecosystem!

Station Mastery Changes

We’ve been monitoring the weapon range of bases very closely since the Wild Space reworks of last year. While some players have called for us to revert the base weapon range changes entirely, we’re going to try a more surgical change that will strengthen bases overall and make combat in fractured galaxies less player-favored. Characters that have the station mastery skill will impart a 3% range boost per level to all bases owned by that character. At this time, there will be no changes to the weapons or augmenters. We feel that a surgical change like this will positively influence some metas when it comes to claiming galaxies, fighting termites, or battling for these fractured galaxies.

We haven’t seen much base combat out in the universe recently, but in case you may have forgotten, a new system has been applied to bases’ resistance to damage. Bases take decreased damage when the enemy shooting at the base is farthest away. This coupled with nearly doubling Station Mastery base range should make well-geared bases much harder to pop with long-range player ships.

Hey Sonatians,

Read more about the Emperor’s contest in our previous blog post.

Let’s talk about the Emperor system! While claiming the throne is undoubtedly the focal point of the competition, we want to talk about the rewards that are now available to teams who manage to secure a spot in the top 10 Influence earning teams.

For a team to be considered eligible for rewards, they have to reach 100,000 influence. This threshold acts as a filter to ensure that teams that have seriously participated in the contest stand a chance at receiving rewards.

The rewards are in the form of Imperial Chests. There are now 250 distributed amongst the top 10 teams. The amount they will receive is based on their proportion of the total influence gained by the top 10 teams, rounding down. Influence earned by teams outside of these requirements are not considered.

Once the contest is over, and an Emperor is crowned, the directors or councilors of the winning teams, can claim the rewards for their team when they log in by interacting with a floating dialogue box on their client. This reward can be deferred, if they don’t want to immediately claim it, and the prompt will appear again on the next login. This must be done before the universe reset, or the rewards will be lost. The team will have a login message reminding them that they can claim these rewards.

The Emperor team will still get the three Augmenter Reset Modules and three Ship Dry Dock Modules that they got previously via the Imperial Splendid Trove but the seals will be granted separately now. The Emperor winning team will still claim their rewards by docking in the palace in Anatolia, however the number of seals they get will follow the same rules as all other teams. Proportionally based on what percent of the total influence they obtained. Due to how the math is, they are guaranteed to get the highest number of seals of any team competing.

Other notables:

• Getting Emperor now grants Leadership 3 regardless of the Director’s Leadership level.
• Polemarchos’ spawn time increased by 6%. This should allow it to more clearly change time zones with its spawns.
• Ai in Anatolia will now respawn when not engaged. This should prevent them from getting all stuck in one galaxy.

Hello Sonatians!

We can barely contain our excitement for the upcoming Universe Reset! Brace yourselves for an array of incredible updates and features heading your way with the upcoming patch. Here’s just a taste of what’s to come:

Kalthi Depths DGs

After DGing received a Perilous Space expansion recently, we wanted to continue that trend and add another expansion into a familiar space. Kalthi Depths DGs are finally returning, and have been given a facelift, making them much more interesting than before!

There are 10 new DG bosses to fight and farm — enjoy 5 new ship blueprints alongside plenty of other new items to find. 11 variants of mob guards, some of which are brand new, some of which will be souped up versions of familiar foes from Perilous Space. These DGs have been tuned to be fairly difficult with rewards to match whether you’re farming it solo or together. This expansion even comes with brand new Platinum level Strontium-90 missions, making token acquisition scale into the late game.

New Loot Standards

The dev team have been in discussions about drop rates across Star Sonata for a few months now. Enkelin developed a tool that allows us to see the real time investment required to receive drops of specific rarities. Using this tool we’ve gone through many popular endgame zones and applied these rates to them as we can.

Empyrean, Ruined Sanctuary, Akuq’ba, Anomalous Passageway, Dragon’s Lair, Olympus, Zaphragi Emperor, and Bonnet have been adjusted so far, and more will be coming! This tool will allow us to make loot drops much more consistent going forward for newly introduced content zones as well.

Ruined Sanctuary Changes

Ruined Sanctuary has been given new drops including 3 new ships and many items alongside the previously mentioned loot buff.
This zone has also been made to be Star Sonata’s only duo (two player) instance, so you and a friend can go in and conquer these enemies together.

Skill Zone Rebalances

A few zones have been noticeably harder than they needed to be for a while now, and are being toned down to more appropriate levels for their target audiences.

• Olympus has been rebalanced towards a medium-sized squad of tech 20 players.

• Subspace Ubers and minibosses have been given the same treatment but for a squad of tech 21 players.

• Empyreal Fleets and regular mobs have been toned down similarly for a squad of tech 22 players.

These should be much more achievable now for aspiring players to finally be able to earn their own skills and loot, progressing naturally without relying on the help of much more powerful characters.

AI Empire HQs

The AI empire HQs have been improved. There are now four unique and worthwhile galaxies that any wild space conqueror may want to look into taking next universe:

• Scorpius, the mining galaxy.

• Citadel, the tiered commodity galaxy and has centralized T0 extraction.

• Paradise, the perfect colony galaxy.

• Dorado has lots of T0s, but no metals!

The idea behind this expansion to the AI empires was for these galaxies to each have a unique spin on what they offer. Instead of being generally good like an exotic galaxy, they specialize — being better than exotics in some areas but weaker at others

Anatolian Expanse Tweaks

The Anatolian Expanse and the emperor system have been a hotly debated topic in the community. Generally, we agree that our current system is missing some of the key things that made our historical emperor contest and the politics around it exciting.

Our end goal is to bring back some of that intrigue and a bit more risk in the emperor contest than what we have now. However, Rome was not built in a day. We still want to retain having an emperor system in the meantime while we work on this goal. To support this, we’ve lined up some changes for the current system to address some of the biggest pain points, including benefitting smaller groups rather than rewarding only the biggest teams taking part in the system.

Emperor contests will now only take place once a universe, around the middle or a month into each universe. This should address various concerns around the constant slog that was being created by multiple contests per universe.

There will be rewards taken from the emperor team’s spoils and given to the top ten teams with influence above a certain threshold. More will be given to the teams higher on the leaderboard at the time that emperor is awarded. To support this, all teams entering the expanse will require a team HQ somewhere in the universe to receive that reward.

There are some other slight tweaks regarding the layers layout that should improve the experience as well. We’ve made three new galaxies that connect the arms in the layer and removed the gate guards and static turrets to make moving around the layer not unnecessarily cumbersome.

We hope these tweaks make engaging with the expanse clearer, more streamlined, and more rewarding for any pilots who are interested in a dynamic experience! Stay tuned in the future for greater iterations to how the Emperor’s Crown may be obtained!

Hello Sonatians, we have some exciting news to share from a recent change to the system that distributes augmenters as loot. Last October we added guaranteed augmenter loot to all Dungeon bosses, with a spread of tech levels and augmenter types to help standardize sourcing rates. Since then, we’ve tracked the results of the system and found that while most sourcing rates had settled into a consistent pattern, there were a few anomalies in the distribution of loot. Good news! The outcome shows a system that has a more fair and balanced distribution and can be seen in the charts provided below.

October 2022 – April 2023 Augmenter Distribution by Type and Tech Level

This chart shows augmenter sourcing data from October 2022 to April 2023. For the most part, the lower-tech augmenters are dropped more frequently and therefore there are more of them in the game. As the level of tech increases you can see the number of those items decrease, almost across the board.

However, there are a few points where this is not the case. The spikes in “Good” (red) augmenters show that something was off about these items, especially in the Electric, Firing, and Recovery categories. The team set out to find out why their drop rate was not in line with their tech level. They used loot logs to identify the sources of these augmenters and discovered that they were coming from outside of the intended Dungeon areas.

April 2023 – May 2023 Augmenter Distribution per Type

The data one month after the fix shows us getting much closer to the intended distribution of loot. After removing the anomalous sources outside of the dungeon areas, the augmenter loot distribution conforms to what we originally envisioned. Lower-tech augmenters have higher numbers for the most part and the higher-tech augmenters are fewer. Since April, 51% of augmenters are from Dungeon Galaxies and 24% from Dungeon Galaxy bosses. These numbers will continue to rise as we add more bosses.

Top 100 Augmenter Farmers

In the midst of all this talk about augmenter drop rates, a team member thought it would be fun to see how the top 100 augmenter farmers stack up. It appears there are a couple of people really leading the pack!

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to hearing any feedback you have on this update. Thank you for playing!

Greetings Sonatians, we’ve seen your initial efforts to defeat the Matriarch and applaud you! With a little over a week left in “Contest Mode,” this is definitely the hardest piece of content ever released and many squads have given their best to defeat it.

From the footage that has been shared with us, we have been able to identify some unintended issues with the boss. We have fast-tracked a batch of fixes for a patch currently scheduled for Tuesday, May 2nd. This gives players the option to continue fighting the current version and obtain the rewards on the hardest version possible, or you can opt to wait for the fixes and try again with a refreshed squad.

List of fast-tracked changes

• Handmaidens and Nullifier Platforms will now correctly despawn after performing their tasks.

• Aurora is now less agile and the Shield is now more agile to allow them to stay together.

• The 15-minute enrage mechanic (Frigate spawns) is entirely removed!

• Nullifier Mines are now more visible so players can clearly see and react to their AOE effects.

• Mines no longer use Energy damage-type. This eliminates unintended energy critical hit effects so your engines don’t drop out right when you need to maneuver.

Many thanks to everyone who’s bravely gone toe-to-appendage with the Matriarch, and especially to those who’ve hooked us up with footage of their attempts. We are looking forward to seeing how you handle the boss in its revised form and hope to award some trophies before the contest ends!