Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for! Star Sonata 2 is available on Steam!

As we’ve already highlighted in previous posts, it is super crucial for us to get as many of our existing players to play with the Steam version of the game during the Launch Event (June 12-July 12). By playing the game through Steam, and buying any Space Points through Steam, you are directly helping the game increase in visibility and standings which allow us to grow the game and share it with more people!

Don’t forget to check out the details of our Launch Event and the Starter Pack.

If you are a new player to Star Sonata, welcome! We are so excited to have you here. Check out our Quick Start Guide, or pop on over to our Discord server for more information to help you get started in the universe.

If you are an existing player to Star Sonata, you probably have a ton of questions about this Steam launch. Here are some questions we’ve heard that we’d like to answer.

• Will I still be able to download the client through the website?
  Yes! If you don’t want to use Steam at all, you don’t have to!

• Can I use my existing account on Steam?
  Yes! When you launch Star Sonata 2 through Steam and you come to the login screen, there is a button to switch to a non-Steam login, then you can log in with your existing account. Currently, there is no way to actually link your account with Steam, but you can still use your pre-existing account.

• How do I get the bonus of the Launch Event? 
  Launch the game through Steam and log in either with a Steam Account or a pre-existing account. When you log in you will get the bonus Raging Steam holoprojector, and the EXP bonus will activate. You will only get the EXP bonus while you are on the Steam version of the client.

Kilando has put together a video for existing players that shows how to access the game launch the game through Steam. Check it out below!

Many people play video games as a way to unplug from the worries and responsibilities in their lives. This is especially common in role-playing games, which encourage players to escape to an entirely different persona and explore a world or universe that’s not quite like our own. In Star Sonata, our friendships and conflicts mostly play out in our virtual world between our virtual characters. It’s easy to forget that even your sworn enemy in-game is just an ordinary person like yourself, with hopes, dreams, fears, and faults. Right now, there are people in our community who are scared, anxious, and hurting. We owe it to them to respond with compassion and solidarity, not only because there would be no Star Sonata without its community, but because helping those in need is the right thing to do.

Police brutality is wrong and unacceptable. Police infringing on citizens’ rights to peaceably assemble is wrong and unacceptable. Police assaulting, arresting, and maiming journalists is wrong and unacceptable. Racist and discriminatory policing practices in the United States must be brought to an end.

I am running a donation-matching campaign with a fund of $1,000 of my own money. I will match up to $100 per contribution to any local organization that is working to end police brutality in the United States. I specifically ask for donations to local organizations because of the immediate impact these organizations can have on the communities they serve. For more information, reach out to @enk#3571 on Discord.

In compassion and solidarity,

Anil “Enk” Venkatesh
Lead Content Developer

Hi everyone! I want to give you a quick update on some improvements we have been making to the player feedback system. Earlier this year, Community Manager Kilando set up the #ideas and #feedback channels on the public Discord server, and we have collected a lot of great feedback from you all. The one downside we see with the current system is that it’s hard for devs to catch all the different ideas as they fly by in the chat, resulting in some good ideas getting buried.

New Suggestion System

In order to keep track of everyone’s comments, we are launching a community suggestions page. On a weekly basis, we will create focused discussion channels on Discord for the top-voted suggestions to help keep everything organized. On top of this, Senior Content Developer Hober Mallow will hold a weekly town hall meeting to discuss the top suggestions of the week. He will be assisted in this role by Kilando and myself, in addition to a number of community members who have volunteered their time as “Paxian Balancers” to help keep the new discussion channels flowing well. With the new system in place, we hope to collect and act on community priorities much more quickly than ever before.

How To Participate

So you’ve got an idea that would make Star Sonata better. Here’s how you get it into consideration.

1. Create a suggestion explaining your idea and why you think it would improve the game. You may wish to first workshop your idea informally in the general Discord channels so that you come up with the best presentation.

2. Vote in favor of your suggestion, and encourage others to do the same. If you see any other good suggestions posted, consider voting for them as well! It’s not a competition–any reasonably popular suggestion will get its own dedicated discussion channel.

3. Keep an eye out for the dedicated discussion channels that will be created for popular suggestions. The better a suggestion gets polished in these channels, the sooner it will be placed on a town hall meeting agenda.

4. Accounts that are either subscribed or have a level 100 character are eligible to vote/create a suggestion. Eligible accounts start with 30 votes and get 30 new votes every month. Creating a suggestion costs 3 votes. Eligible accounts can only vote 3 times on a single suggestion.

5. If you are especially passionate about game balance, you may consider applying to become a “Paxian Balancer” community volunteer. If you are interested, reach out to Hober Mallow to learn more about the roles and responsibilities of Paxian Balancers.

The Story

The Seer subskill Psionic Shrouding has been on our “radar” lately. On April 27 we began to receive reports that Seers were dodging beam attacks from bases while sneaking around killing trade bots. This surprised us because Seer doesn’t have any source of Evasion, or so we thought. After a look in the code, we discovered that Psionic Shrouding provides a hidden source of dodge chance: a hefty 20% per level! Based on how the code was written, this bonus is only meant to apply versus non-targeted damage, i.e. when a stray shot happens to pass over the Seer. The logic is that a cloaked Seer should have a pretty good chance to avoid getting hit by shots that are intended for someone else, or when the attacker can’t see them anymore.

The Problem

The problem is that the scenario being reported didn’t match our expected behavior. The bases could see the Seer and shoot at it, and yet the Seer was able to dodge. After further review of the code and comprehensive testing with the help of some players, we figured out the problem. The code was checking if the Seer was “invisible” to the attacker, not “undetectable.” As a result, any time the Seer was detected by radar, but not in visual range, they would receive the bonus 60% dodge chance from Psionic Shrouding.

Why Now?

This isn’t the first time Seers have been reported sneaking around galaxies to “pop” trade bots. That type of sabotage has been a staple of player conflicts for years. Why is it that we have only just identified the problem? In this case, unlike all previous ones, the player who reported the issue was able to provide us with new information we had never heard before: that Seers were dodging targeted beam attacks from bases. In all previous instances, the reports we received were solely that Seers were killing trade bots, which could have simply been due to lacking radar bonuses on the defensive bases. We had no reason to suspect a bug until now.

The Changes

1. The Psionic Shrouding bonus of 20% dodge chance per level has been changed to only apply when the attacker cannot view or detect the Seer.

2. The client description of Psionic Shrouding will be updated next patch to include the 20% dodge chance per level versus attackers that do not detect the Seer.

Disclaimer

I want to be frank that this mechanic was brought to light by the war between Eminence Front and Star Revolution X, and that the proposed change may have some effect on that war. Large-scale conflict between endgame players always tends to expose quirks and bugs in the system, so this is nothing new. However, I want to respect players’ time and not make unnecessary changes to the game while a war is in progress. For that reason, I sought feedback from twenty-four current members of the affected teams (Eminence Front and Star Revolution X) who also work in various roles on the dev team. The proposal received unanimous support as a sensible change that addresses an obvious bug.

As many players already know, I am always available on Discord @enk#3571 if you have any questions or comments about the game or the operations of the dev team. Drop me a line!

Overview

We have been working on finalizing our proposal for an Engineer revamp to go live alongside the Shield Monkey and healing revamp (which is nearly finalized) and a rebalance of all the support freighters. Our proposed changes aim to make Engineers more engaging to play. We are especially focusing on making each new skill immediately impactful and gameplay-changing. In order to get a feel for our proposed changes to the class, we will be implementing the items listed below on the test2 server for playtesting and player feedback. Nothing is set in stone, but at least this is what we’re going to start with.

Skill Changes

Engineer Skill

Engineer Class 1: 1 Additional energy slot in support freighters and capital ships
Engineer Class 2: +25% drone ops. (More on how drone ops will now work below.)
Engineer Class 3: 1 Extra aug slot.

Drone Mastery

+1 drone slot per level (no drone ops anymore)

Beam Mastery

+33% tractor power, +33% tractor range, drones will prioritize your tractor target (both friend and foe if applicable), and do 33% more crit damage against that target (all per level for 3 levels)

Damage Control

Engineer overloads his shield with extra electricity. 20% of incoming damage per level is absorbed by the energy bank, scaled with current energy percent. When maxed at level three, this skill will grant the Engineer up to 60% damage mitigation, although that figure will scale down as their energy bank drains. Provided the Engineer has good energy stats, this skill will outperform the current Damage Control skill for mitigation.

Adv Subskills

Mechanical Engineer: +3 temporary drone equip slots, can repair while in combat

Computer Engineer: Your attacks leave a computer virus, causing your drones to do up to double damage to target up to 100% of the value of your attacks. Also works with healing.

Electrical Engineer: Your weapons do 10x damage, but take 10x more energy per damage to fire, scaled with your energy bank percent.

Civil Engineer: +100 armor on temp drones (done)

Changes to Drone Ops

Drone ops will no longer give drones a bunch of stats, but instead give drones 1% of your ship’s augmenter stats. All four drone ops bonuses are converted into this new stat.

How this will play out is that instead of Engineers trying to maximize for the most Drone Ops possible, almost at the expense of everything else, they will need to get a mixture of Drone Ops and the stats they want their drones and ship to actually have. We estimate that (with the extra aug slot) drones will overall be a little bit more powerful under this system, but also much more specialized. Drones will also have access to stats they didn’t have before, like electric tempering and transference power. Players will be able to specialize for burst DPS, sustain, tankiness, range, etc. much more than they could before with only a single drone controller. Of course, we will make sure to thoroughly test this change on the test2 server in order to verify our theorycrafting, and make changes accordingly.

Drone controllers will still work the same, to get dynamic changes in drone abilities, but the new Drone Ops will allow a much more personalized baseline and create much more interesting augmenter choices than before. In addition, the Engineer’s ship will share a lot of stats with their drones now, making it possible for Engineers to actually use their weapons in combat.. Hello, spacebar!

Item Changes and New Items

Elec Beam

Instead of giving a constant elec amount to target, elec beams link the two ships’ energy, sending a portion of the elec consumption of the target to the Engineer’s ship to be consumed there instead. If either ship banks out, the beam disconnects. Different beams have different percentages that go to the engineer, with higher constant additional elec cost for higher percentages. We came up with this concept because we weren’t happy with the lack of scaling in the current elec beam mechanic. Once the Engineer can power their end of the beam, there is no advantage to further developing the character’s energy stats. While this new concept will take a lot of testing to balance, it will encourage Engineers to really develop their energy stats, rewarding them with potentially even higher energy support abilities than they can currently get with the highest-tier elec beams.

Repair Drone

Repair Drone generates a short range field around the drone with nanobots that repair allied ships at a rate of 1% per second as long as the ally can pay the docked repair cost. Can be used in combat. Requires Mechanical Engineer

Tesla Field Generator

Tesla Field Generator is a new type of field generator that will wirelessly transmit elec to allies in range (500ish) at a rate of 1% of their missing bank per second scaled by the engineers energy bank percent, doubly effective with drones. (With lightning graphical effects) Rename Super Capacitor and Super Capacitor Mk II to be Tesla Field Gens. Disallow use on slaves.

New High Tech Non-Mobile Drones

Create new high tech non mobile drones that do more DPS and more HPS than the current high tech mobile drones so that mobile drones will no longer be best DPS or HPS for any given tech or damage type.

New God Aug Drone Controllers

Zeus, Ares, Athena, and whatever else looks appropriate. Possibly also create plus versions made out of the God+ augs.

Questions and Comments

Please direct all questions and comments about this blog post to the forum here: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=63599

Happy 2020, Star Sonata!

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

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

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

Healing Revamp and Other Things on Test2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Road Ahead

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

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

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

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

Main Objectives

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

Stronger Fighters

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

Active Management

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

Growth and Differentiation

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

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

With the recent issues that arose from the recent galaxy assaults we would like to cover a few points in regards some of these issues.

• Using base thrusters to fly away from defenders an unlimited distance

We have known about this strategy of flying your bases out an unlimited distance for some time and it is why we implemented the current system of requiring all bases to be within 30k from system objects. At this point we believed we had resolved the issued.

It has become apparent that our original solution to issue was not satisfactory and is now occurring in the current universe.

• Using base thrusters to fly out while staying within the 30k limit, then placing new bases on the other end of the system.

It would be inappropriate to make a change to the current system mid-universe as players are not using any unknown mechanics to their advantage. They are stretching the system that was built to its limit, showing that our original concept wasn’t clever enough. We are also holding to our policy of not intervening in wars, for example the “sun tanking” controversy two years ago.

We know a lot of players are worried about the upcoming shield and healing rework that was announced. While we are still in the early stages of development for this we want to keep everyone as updated as possible. With that in mind we have decided to start doing developer video blog posts that will answer some of your questions!

The first few videos will cover a couple questions we felt that you would like answered and can be found on the Star Sonata youtube page.

We know that these will not answer all of the questions you may have, so feel free to submit those questions here!

While we will not be able to answer all of the questions you submit. We will try our best to keep everyone updated with the many changes that are coming to this revamp so that nobody is left unaware of what is happening.

~Kilando

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

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