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!

If you haven’t checked out Part One: Click Here.

Here we go again! In our previous post, we shared with you some upcoming changes to mechanics and items that mainly affect ship-based combat. In this post, we will be focusing on enhancing the experience of claiming territory in Wild Space. We touched a variety of systems and mechanics in order to get things to a point where we felt confident it would be a net improvement for the game, and just like with the previous changes these are intended to promote a more dynamic and engaging game. We want players to have the opportunity to think critically and make strategic choices based on a consistent and intuitive game state.

We’re confident that these changes will bring about a more intriguing experience in Wild Space, so without further ado here’s what we’ve got for you in the next patch!

Wild Space: Generation & Layouts

For quite a long time, Wild Space has been a place that wasn’t that much different from Earthforce Space. This generally meant that as soon as a player acquired Warp Navigation 2 they could go into Wild Space and explore, setting up a base and testing their ability to hold onto a galaxy. But it didn’t look or feel different at the galaxy level, and that’s because at its core Wild Space was not much different!

Over the years, we’ve made adjustments to Wild Space which made it stand further and further apart. As we looked to make changes to the layer, we realized we could do a better job at truly setting Wild Space up to be a special place. Here’s how we did it.

We’ve changed the minimum danger factor of all galaxies in Wild Space, raising it to 120. This makes all WS galaxies warp 3, setting a clear expectation on the part of players entering the area for the first time that it is supposed to be dangerous.

We are reintroducing Juxtapositions and Concourses into Wild Space (no Subspace shortcuts), with a new way to handle their placement more suitable for how we design and generate Wild Space.

We have completely overhauled our solar system generation tools. This allows us to easily define different types of solar systems that can be generated in Wild Space galaxies. While this will only be true for Wildspace in the upcoming patch, we have the ability to expand to the other layers in the future. We have set up three different solar system types; realistic (normal systems with planets), seismic (stars which produce asteroids, like fermium stars), and proto (a system with a star and gas clouds).

Using these solar systems we can ensure that each galaxy has multiple stars to allow for Command & Control stations to be safely deployed a good distance from each other, while still keeping the number of planets in the galaxy under our control.

This might not sound very exciting by itself, but we also now have new controls on how resources are distributed throughout the galaxy, primarily through the addition of a “colocation” modifier, which causes resources to have a very high chance of being placed on a solar body that already has resources. This will make it so that resource amounts should be much more concentrated than they were in past universes, particularly in the most highly desirable galaxies.

Wild Space: Qualities

Now that we’ve outlined the more technical aspects of our changes, let’s get to the first thing you’re going to notice: The Wild Space layer map.

Every wild space galaxy will now be assigned a quality (common, uncommon, rare, or exotic, for now), and it will immediately be visible on the map, coloring the dot with the appropriate color, and in the tooltip for that galaxy. We want to make it clear to players (as soon as they warp into the galaxy) that there is something desirable about it, and making them immediately visible on the screen is the best way to do so.

This will not be the layout of Wild Space for next universe.

Quality is not purely a cosmetic feature, but rather the major driving factor for the value of the galaxy. There will still be quite a bit of variation, but in general quality will be able to tell you how good a galaxy is overall. Here’s why:

Quality is going to determine three things:

1. The number of planets and moons in the galaxy, with planet counts going up as quality goes up. In order to keep lower quality galaxies from having their resources too easily accessed, planets in these galaxies will always have more moons.

2. The quantity and distribution of Tier 0 resources (Nuclear Waste, Metals, Silicon, etc.) in higher quality galaxies will be very tightly packed. You will notice that the highest quality galaxies will have many planets with very little to no resources on them at all, and the planets with resources will have very high levels of resource density. In lower quality galaxies, resources will be spread amongst their planets and moons. This will make them less desirable to players looking to set up a massive colonial empire, who will want to look at higher quality galaxies in order to have the best colony profits possible.

3. Termite Strength. We’ll elaborate on this in the following section, but termites in higher quality galaxies will be much more difficult. Termites in lower quality galaxies will be significantly easier to handle.

We have assessed the resource requirements to hold a galaxy as well as the production value of existing high value galaxies to determine resource abundance by quality level. A Common galaxy will provide enough resources to hold ownership of that galaxy and have a small production value that is ideal for a small or new team starting out. Exotic galaxies provide serious industrial and production capability and would be the most suitable for production bases.

We are not completely getting rid of the effect Danger Factor has on galaxy resources. It will still affect the distribution of tier 1-3 resources (Petroleum, Diamonds, Adamantium, etc.), DGs, wild AI, and prospecting nodes. None of these things is affected by quality. Danger Factor also affects a few small details like the number of asteroids or resources in an asteroid belt.

What about AI Empires?

We didn’t forget about AI Empires!

We’ve made sure that players cannot build in AI Empire galaxies while the galaxy is owned. In fact, AI Empires cannot be attacked at all while their galaxy is owned, so if you want to try to wrest control of their territory you will have to own the adjacent galaxy (causing the AI Empire’s ownership to lapse). All AI Empire HQs will be marked as Exotic, and XYZ will be Rare.

Wild Space: Termites

We want termites to be a constant pressure threat that galaxy owners must take into consideration when staking and fortifying a claim. In the past, it was possible to build in Wild Space for literally years without having a serious assault on your galaxy. We want players to understand from the very first time they own a galaxy onwards that Wild Space is Wild, and you will need to make sure your assets can protect themselves from the terrible termites.

At the same time, we know that the current distribution of termite power levels doesn’t work for everyone. We’ve been listening to your feedback for months now, and here’s what we’ve decided to do:

We’ve made termite strength and galaxy quality linked. Each quality level has a different termite strength, and this strength corresponds to the minimum value of the galaxy. Galaxies with a higher minimum value will have stronger termites and you will visually be able to tell what kind of termites are going to attack your bases by looking at this quality.

If you own a common galaxy, you will only get the weakest (common) termites. If you own an Uncommon one, you get the slightly stronger uncommon termites. Uncommon and Rare termites are the same as the Warp 2 and Warp 3 termites we have on the live server. You can expect Exotic termites to be 30% stronger then Rare ones, and Common termites are going to be dramatically weaker than the Warp 2 termites. This should give players looking to push into taking more lucrative territory a very clear idea of what they need to plan for before they set down a single base.

Finally, Termites will no longer despawn if all of the assets in a galaxy are killed. The mound will stay around for its entire lifespan of 7 days and 6 hours. They know what you’re trying to do, and they’re not happy about it. If you fail to defeat them, you’ll have to wait until they decide it’s over…

Termite… Bait?

Before we move on, let’s talk about Termite Bait.

One of the most frustrating things about the current situation with Termites was that players didn’t have a way to figure out if their base configuration and galaxy defenses were powerful enough to repel termite invasions until the invasion was already upon them. Since the termite invasion was random, it could happen while you were offline and you would have no way of knowing why a base died. This made it very difficult for players to make the necessary upgrades to their bases, leading some to feel compelled to either greatly over invest in defense or else monitor their galaxies day and night.

To address this, we’ve added Termite Bait. When you use a Termite Bait, you will spawn a wave of nasty termites looking to tear your bases to shreds. You can use this opportunity to get a feel for how your galaxy will fare against a full blown assault.

WARNING: These are full blown, REAL termites that will kill your bases dead. Termite Bait must be used responsibly!

You can build Termite Bait from a cheap pre-equipped blueprint on the Command & Control Station in your owned galaxy. There is a different type of bait for each of the four quality levels of termite, and you can use any type of bait in any galaxy. When you equip the bait to your station, it will spawn a single wave of termites with quality level matching the type of bait you used. The termites will despawn after 30 minutes and will not respawn after being killed, and there is also a 30 minute cooldown between termite bait uses.

Since you can experiment with any quality of bait irrespective of the galaxy’s quality, you can work your way up from the weaker termites and tweak your defenses as you go.

Our goal with these changes is to give players the opportunity to prepare for the threat of termite infestations on their own time, no matter what quality galaxy they own.

Wild Space: Player Bases

We want player bases to be in a league of their own, powerful tools that players erect to leave their mark on the universe for fame, glory, and wealth. Bases are meant to be very important tools that can greatly further your aims when placed thoughtfully and strategically. It’s kind of hard to see them this way right now, so we’re going to make the following adjustments to ensure that bases are something everyone knows are a big deal.

First, we’re going to make sure that when bases die they don’t drop as much stuff. We know how frustrating it is to put really valuable equipment on your bases, only for them to drop after your base got a little unlucky in a fight with a termite. We know it happens sometimes, so we’ve decided to make that outcome less of a pain.

Next, bases will have their transference resistances increased to 75%. We don’t want players leveraging external shield regeneration in order to feed healing into bases because it creates a huge amount of effective shields due to how powerful base mitigation is. At the same time, we don’t want bases that have just been deployed to be brought down without some effort. To make sure that your enemies don’t pop your bases before they’ve got a fighting chance, we are adding a large amount of transference vulnerability during the construction phase. Your base will take 50% more healing while being constructed, making it easier to keep alive when first deployed.

Finally, we think that permanent assets can too easily be destroyed from outside of their engagement range. We are adding a new form of ranged-base damage mitigation to all player bases and permanent drones, making it significantly harder to kill them from distance. Specifically, any damage dealt to the base from beyond 1,000 distance is subject to extra mitigation, capping out at a whopping 90% bonus resistance for attacks originating from beyond 7,000 distance. Our idea here is that while bases can still die to a concerted attack from range, they are much more resilient to that type of threat and will likely shrug off a lot more punishment than before. We recognize that this is a relatively conservative improvement to the overall combat performance of player bases and are prepared to iterate further if indicated by the evolving metagame.

Long Term

All of our work in this update is intended to set us on a path for more additions, content, and opportunities for interesting experiences and meaningful conflict in Wild Space. We will closely monitor the effects of our changes over the next universe cycle and will always be open to feedback based on experiences that players have in the system. We appreciate the continued support of our players and look forward to seeing you in Wild Space next universe! Thank you for playing!

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming Refined & Reforged patch. This update focuses on enhancing active play and promoting a more dynamic and engaging game, where players must think critically and make strategic choices to succeed. In addition to several new mechanics that are designed to promote active play, we’ve also made a couple changes that should greatly reduce the lag players have experienced in large-scale PvP battles. Our development team has been working hard to bring you new and exciting gameplay opportunities, and we’re confident that these changes will add a new level of depth and excitement to your time spent in the game.

Gunner’s Deathblossom

The Deathblossom has been one of the most powerful effects that any class has access to in Star Sonata. It has allowed one class to deal high amounts of damage to many targets while only paying a modest electricity cost. The role of Gunner is inextricably linked to the feeling of the Deathblossom, so we knew that we needed to keep that feeling alive no matter what changes we made to the mechanic. The most major change we’ve made is that the Gunner will have to pay some amount of energy for each shot it fires. The exact amount of energy depends on the number of valid Deathblossom targets with efficiency rising greatly when several targets are being fired on. Based on our testing, we feel that this positively rewards using the Deathblossom tactically, as opposed to keeping it enabled at all times. Rest assured, Gunner still very much owns the role of indiscriminate destroyer, laying waste to a battlefield around them.

We’ve added a scaling electricity cost to the extra shots on the Deathblossom. This change makes Deathblossom mode much less energy efficient, particularly when firing against only 2 or 3 targets. Additionally, Deathblossom mode now disables your normal “selective firing” mode, meaning you cannot target a planet or moon to get an additional stream of shots on the target. This will encourage players to toggle the Deathblossom on and off based on what they are fighting. We have fixed a longstanding bug preventing Damage mods on Deathblossoms from working and have added these mods to various  Deathblossom items for an added level of complexity. On-hit weapon effects (splash, area of effect, chain, etc.) no longer occur while the Deathblossom is equipped, greatly reducing visual lag and freeing us up to buff weapons with those effects for use by other classes as well. Finally, targets are no longer shot simultaneously, instead they are fired at a fixed rate, which will lead to a significant gain in server and player client performance, especially in larger engagements.

Gunner’s Destruction Debuff and Advanced Sub Skill Changes

The Destruction effect has been decreased from 45% to 15%. This change was made as Gunners were adding substantial amounts of multiplicative DPS to a squad in spite of not being construed as a class with that role. However, the Automated Reloader advanced subskill now grants a 10% destruction bonus, bringing Destruction’s effect up to 25%. The Advanced Targeting Computers advanced subskill now grants +50% tracking and -15% range, instead of adding additional targets to the Deathblossom.

Missiles and Missile Launchers

We’ve made some changes to the missiles and missile launchers as well. Missile launchers are no longer usable on bots and they no longer have a missile queue. The time between missile launches has increased but they now do much greater damage with longer-lasting effects. Missiles no longer fire in a volley in most cases and instead fire in a salvo of a single missile. Players are able to target and engage a singular missile much better than a volley of missiles. The Disintegrator missile effect has been changed to negative damage debuff.

Shield Monkey and Its Tools

Funky Monkey now has new functionality that allows you to put on a stacking healing parasite on whatever you are healing. The best part? This healing parasite doesn’t cost shields from your shield bank, making Shield Monkey considerably more efficient in healing. It does come at the cost of an overall HPS penalty so this should be an interesting choice for players to make.

Next, Monkey Mantle has undergone a few changes. It is no longer usable on capital ships and now requires an increased amount of constant electricity to be equipped. Additionally, we’ve decreased the size of the Monkey Mantles to encourage more tactical and situational use.

We’ve also made changes to Last Defense and Last Stand neurotweaks. Their bonuses have been adjusted to help you heal others and steal more shields, making them more effective in keeping you and your allies alive in the heat of battle.

Weapons Changes

We’ve made some changes to certain weapons. Super long-range weapons have been recategorized into the same category as long-range weapons. This reduces outliers of extreme range weapons that were obtaining such extreme ranges that it wasn’t very fun to fight against them (or even to fight with them as you were so far from visual range of your own target).

All projectile weapons other than Sebastopols now have at least a little bit of tracking. Transferences with low tracking had their tracking and HPE increased.

The ranges of on-hit weapon effects now scale with tech of the weapon. This causes the overall range of the effect on these weapons to be much farther at higher techs, a change that we believe will make these weapons viable for use by a variety of classes (and couldn’t have been done as long as AoE weapon effects were permitted in Deathblossom mode). However, the initial hit damage for on-hit effect weapons has been lowered, and the damage that the effects do has been raised. This means that the single target damage that these weapons do is overall lower but the damage done to additional targets is quite a bit higher. Overall, we view these changes to be a net buff to weapons with on-hit effects and anticipate that a variety of classes will find them situationally useful.

Energy Changes

Energies are being buffed, mostly.  Energies with high regeneration for their tech level will see a significant increase in bank size, while energies that had middling regeneration have had an even bigger increase in bank size. These changes should make Energy Bank bonuses much more useful across the board, and they should increase the amount of time players are able to fire their weapons at full power. Not all energies will retain the exact stats they had previously and could see weight, size, regen and potentially other changes but we attempted to prioritize regeneration numbers above all.

We have also added a fuel indicator to the user interface. When your energy is running low on fuel, the indicator will blink red to alert you to this fact and you can hover over the energy bar to know an estimation of how much fuel is left.

Tractors and Graviton Disruptors

As we were analyzing the overall experience of large-scale PvP, we realized that the enormous range of tractor beams was distorting gameplay and encouraging people to engage their enemies from many screens away. We felt that tractor beams would be more engaging to use if they were restricted to somewhat shorter ranges than currently seen in game. The biggest change to know here is that the Tractor Power stat will no longer grant range along with strength. Also, we’ve shifted most of the power of the tractor subskills onto the baseline stats of tractor beams themselves. Lastly, since it will be a lot easier to avoid tractor beams than before, we’ve increased the cooldown of graviton disruptors so that you can’t use them to achieve near-immunity to tractor beams. As a whole, we hope that these changes lead to a more engaging experience when tractoring or being tractored.

Previously tractors in player conflict were used as long range harassment and to pull bots out of a squad’s position. While you will not be able to use the tractor from nearly as long ranges, those being tractored will not be able to maintain close to 100% uptime of their gravitation disruptors anymore. This creates a new paradigm where you have to actively work around tractors and use the gravitation disruptor when the time is right instead of repeatedly using it on cooldown to negate tractors entirely. As for the tractor beam range reduction, ships without a lot of tractoring bonuses can expect their tractor beams to continue functioning with similar range and strength.

Along with these changes, tractors stats will now scale up more aggressively with tech level. Be sure to check out the stats on any higher tech tractors in your arsenal to see whether they’ve become more competitive..

Drones

We’ve also made some changes to Drone behavior. Automatic cross healing of stationary healing drones has been disabled and temporary drones will no longer automatically heal other temporary drones with transferences. However, they will still automatically heal drones without transferences. You can still make healing drones heal other drones by using RTS. Additionally, we’ve fixed the Drone RTS to make sure that drones properly follow your RTS commands. With RTS fixed, Engineers have a new tool in their arsenal for actively contributing to their squad while inactive Engineers will no longer benefit from automatic cross-healing of drones.

Miscellaneous Changes

Stasis has been adjusted so that you no longer benefit from your shield regeneration while in stasis. You will only heal from Death Stasis healing, making all classes be in stasis for the same amount of time regardless of their shield regeneration and shield bank.

Finally, the Speed Demon Overdrive Device has had its Energy regeneration amount reduced but now grants an extra Electric Tempering bonus. Berserker Class 3’s Damage bonus now requires piloting a heavy fighter to receive its benefits.

Long Term

From the beginning, our work on this patch was focused on lifting up interesting tactical choices and rewarding active gameplay, particularly as informed by the various snags we’ve observed in squad-based PvP since the Anatolian Expanse update. Along the way, we have attempted to follow any nerfs with new opportunities, such as the removal of on-hit weapon effects in Deathblossom mode paired with the overall buff to weapons with such effects.  We’re particularly glad to report that we’ve addressed several sources of lag that have unfortunately weighed down the game in recent months, particularly in large PvP engagements. Overall, it’s our hope that this update helps to inject some fresh and exciting gameplay into Star Sonata. We appreciate the continued support of our players and look forward to hearing your feedback as you explore the new and improved features. Thank you for playing!

Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary! Today we’re going back into the Emperor system, talking about new Wild Space improvements and the new ways to target farm for augmenters.

How to become Emperor?

Let’s dive into the mechanical details of the new Emperor system. To be crowned emperor you need points called Influence.

These points are gained from 3 types of Anatolian bosses that spawn within the Anatolian Expanse:

• Polemarchos gives 900,000 Influence

• Starategos gives 60,000 Influence

• Taxiarhos gives 3000 Influence

The harder the boss and the more influence it gives, the longer it takes to respawn. Influence is awarded on a teamwide basis and any team that participates in killing an Anatolian boss gets some Influence from the total pool. Because Influence is apportioned for different things, any time spent dealing damage to a boss will make you eligible for points; however, getting the finishing blow is also worth a heavy portion of the bosses Influence pool. Influence is awarded instantly upon kill via an event chat notification of your team’s share and does not require scooping anything or having to turn anything in.

Once a team has greater than 9 million Influence and a sufficient lead in Influence over any other contenders, they will automatically be awarded the Imperial Throne and the contest will be over. After crowning an Emperor there is a cooldown period of three weeks during their reign where no Influence can be earned. After the cooldown period all teams have their influence points set to zero and the cycle starts again. However the incumbent Emperor remains in position and still gets the perks of being Emperor until a new one succeeds them.

Fighting for Emperor up until the very end is still worth it, even if there are only a few weeks left in the universe. This is because the majority of the rewards for becoming Emperor are granted immediately upon claiming the throne.

After being crowned Emperor

Once crowned Emperor, the Director of the winning team will take ownership of the Imperial Palace, which is invulnerable and takes up no base slots. Only members of the reigning team can dock at the palace and management access is set to Councillors. A Splendid Imperial Trove, a crate with the following unbound items will be placed in the palace awaiting the Emperor’s team once crowned:

• 150 Imperial Chests

• 3 Imperial Augmenter Resets

• 3 Imperial Ship Dry-Dock Modules

Additionally, members of the ruling team will receive win points: three for directors, two for councillors, and one for everyone else. The director also gets Leadership 3 if they do not already have it, granting access to the exclusive Emperor’s Club in Sol. Lastly, a universal 5% tithe on colony profits and scooped credits accrues in the reigning team’s funds until the next Emperor is named.

PvP Items

See: Dev Diary – Anatolian Expanse

There is a new item tag on the Anatolian Crest that drops from Midas’ Fleet within the Anatolian Expanse, with the following unique properties:

• Drops on death.

• Drops on layer change (tow or jump).

• Drops on ship evaporation (1 minute after logoff).

• Decays on new uni.

• Prevents Transwarp.

• Bots cannot scoop.

• Debris has high visibility.

• Gives high visibility if you scoop.

• Debris is persistent for 48 hours via any action other than tossing.

• Once docked, it cannot be transferred to another ship or tossed; it must be used or destroyed (scrapped) before undocking is possible.

Wild Space Changes

We have heard loud and clear from the community that obtaining a foothold in Wild Space at the beginning of the universe was frustrating due to the relatively small number of galaxies revealed at the start. We have recalibrated the reveal process in two important ways: it is now front loaded with substantially more galaxies appearing on Day 1, and the rate of new reveals is much higher early on in the universe as well.

We have also touched up the resource distribution code to make galaxies that reveal later considerably more desirable.

Ownership Process

We also made a number of changes to the Command & Control Station Kit which should provide more depth to Wild Space territory control, especially between teams looking to snag the same galaxy. No longer will your only recourse be to kill the opposing teams Command & Control base.

1. Command & Control (C&C) bases cannot be irradiated. This means that you are unable to capture an enemy’s C&C base without the owner of the base intentionally abandoning it.

2. Command & Control bases must be deployed within 3k distance from the edge of a sun. The universe generation code been updated accordingly so that at least 3 suns are found in every Wild Space galaxy.

3. The Nullification Generator build time has been increased from 2 hours to 3 hours, but a new system has been introduced that can accelerate the build speed back down under 2 hours (see #4 below).

4. We have added a basebound factory called Nullification Generator Construction Support. This factory automatically constructs Ownership Booster Drones as long as it is equipped and supplied with materials. Ownership Booster Drones auto-deploy upon being built and orbit the station at a distance of 8k.

   1. Each deployed drone provides a 16.7% build speed increase to the man-hours required to complete the Nullification Generator Blueprint. In theory, a team can reduce the build time for a Nullification Generator to approximately 100 minutes by constantly building these drones.

Colony Changes

We’ve implemented a few new features and expansions to existing Colony content. We’ve buffed the colony enhancement items (Mobile Mani-Pedi SolonBot Housing, Optimo-Life (TM) Curation Station, Atmospheric Robotic Vacuum Dock) to increase the storehouse of the colony which will increase the number of items it will buy and sell every interval.

We have also added a new toggle within the Colony tab to disable specific bases from trading with that colony. For example, if you have 3 Extraction Expert bases and one Colonial Administration base attached to a planet, you can disable colony trading from the Extraction Expert bases to help maximize profits. You can only toggle this on bases you own.

Common Augmenter Sourcing

Common augmenters (Minor, Basic, Std, etc.) are some of the most iconic items in Star Sonata. They are used extensively throughout the game: countless builds, ship improvements, and outfitting bases for combat are all reliant on these items. Dungeons have always been a great way to gather augmenters, but the variety of augmenters was always inconsistent (looking at you, Good Electric Augmenter). This led to scarcity of certain augs that weren’t commonly found equipped on AI, not to mention a variety of unintuitive farming locations.

To alleviate this disparity and refocus gameplay on DGing, we are taking a new approach to the sourcing of common augmenters. Starting at universe reset, you will be able to “target farm” the augmenters of your choice to a much greater extent than ever before. Dungeon bosses will gain extra loot rolls that are dedicated to Common augmenters, and will often drop several augmenters at once. Each boss is capable of dropping four “flavors” of Common augmenter and the tech level of the augmenters dropped is determined (along with some RNG) by the subjective strength of the dungeon boss. For example a Green Battleship boss might drop from a pool of Damage, Speed, Targeting and Docking Augmenters. Whatever specific augmenters you’re looking for, you will be able to find many different DG bosses that can provide them. To make doubly sure of this, we are also greatly increasing the number of DGs in the game. One final note: ordinary AI ships will continue to spawn with random augmenters but they will no longer carry dedicated augmenters as in the past.

Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary! Today we’re diving into the new Emperor System within the brand new Anatolian Expanse layer: a PvP oriented experience to claw to the top.

Overview

Killing Midas’ Military leaders grants the slayer influence over Anatolia. They have three different ranks, of varying strength, defending their civilians as they gather and transport resources to maintain their domination over the universe. By defeating these military commanders, you prove your strength to the universe and limit Midas’ power.

The Layer: Where it is and what it’s like there

The Anatolian Expanse can be easily accessed in Anatolia off of Earthforce Perilous Outpost. From Anatolia there are 3 paths that take you into the neighboring provinces owned by Midas. Upon entering the expanse, you can either go deeper into the province (to confront powerful Anatolians), or you can travel to the other entrances of the expanse. Make sure you bring some friends and firepower as you attempt to go deeper, because large Anatolian structures block the way to keep their more valuable space and illustrious prestigious generals safe.

There are also stations owned by disgruntled Anatolian citizens in each of the entrance galaxies. They are tired of his rule and applaud your actions, and are even willing to offer you some rewards for putting a stop to his reign.

The Anatolians

The Anatolians are split up into 3 major groups. The first of them is the civilians. These are the laborers and craftsmen, the backbone of Anatolia. However, they don’t have much means to defend themselves. That’s where the soldier’s job comes into play. They form a never ending army of diehard Midas followers who have no concern for their own lives… mostly because they are protected by Midas’ immortal soul! They patrol the expanse and quickly come to defend any leader who is attacked. The leaders are the third group found here. These captains and generals are extremely powerful: killing them is an incredibly heroic act and those who can accomplish this feat will be recognized by the universe for their influence. Killing enough of these leaders will allow your team to claim the Imperial Throne. The stronger the leader, the more influence your team will accrue!

Being Crowned Emperor of the Universe

Being crowned Emperor is a simple process. You merely enter the Anatolian expanse and take on some of the most powerful and well equipped forces in the universe! Kill enough of their leaders, and none can deny your worthiness. The keys to the palace are awarded directly to the leadership of the team that proved themselves worthy, and there they may claim their reward.

It is possible that one group will have shown themselves worthy through their influence, but another group is not far behind. If it is too close to tell, the people of the universe will not be convinced that either is worthy! Continue dominating in the Anatolian Expanse to truly prove that you belong as the Emperor of this universe.

After a team has been crowned, the universe will no longer be worried about Anatolia for a time (a cooling off period of a few weeks). Midas will brood, frustrated with the failure of his people. But, before long, Midas’ influence will begin affecting the universe anew. And, once more, the throne will be open to those who can prove themselves worthy! Some other team will take the throne … if the previous regime doesn’t step back up to repel Midas’ forces again!

Anatolian Crests

Defeating any of Midas’ loyal subjects will award you Anatolian Crests, which are recognized by the Detractors of Midas. Bring these trophies to one of the stations near the entrances to the expanse, and they will handsomely reward you for your actions against Midas with a variety of treasures. However, once you dock at the station you may not leave with these Crests! They will not recognize them once you leave, so you must exchange them before you are allowed to depart.

The detractors do not care who brings the Crests to them, and will recognize any who bring them evidence of an Anatolian defeat… no matter how it was gained! This means that Anatolian Crests drop on death if another player kills you, so be careful! Also you may not leave the Anatolian Expanse, or log off, with these Crests!

May adum always be in your favor! Good luck, Sonatians!