Hi all! We want to fill you in on a new high-priority project that’s in the pipeline. We have decided to fast-track the revamp to healing and shields that was originally slated for a larger rebalance of the combat classes. This means that Shield Monkey is going to get some love soon!

While the specifics are still under review, I can tell you that we are focusing on creating a more active role for Shield Monkey in squad-based play. If you enjoy playing this class, we would love to hear your thoughts on how we could make your experience more engaging.

In related news, we have decided to hold off on some recently proposed changes to the tech 22 alien drones, most notably the Samgrahaka Bhisajvar. After extensive testing and a ton of helpful feedback from community members, we decided that these changes would be unnecessarily disruptive to the current drone meta if we put them in without the rest of the planned changes to healing and shields. We will hold these changes till the rest of the project is ready for release, at which point we’ll open things up for testing again. Thank you to all the folks who hopped on test server to try out the drones!

The balance sheet containing pulse guns and mag cannons has undergone a significant revamp and upgrade to bring it into the newest format that we are using for balance sheets.  A lot of DPS values, sizes, and ranges for these weapons will have slightly different numbers as a result of simplified and refined formulas and new look up tables. All the new values can be found on the test server, and here I want to point out some of the bigger changes.  So far, these changes are only to pulse guns and mag cannons, but the general ideas will be applied to other weapon types in the future.

Under the previous version of the balance sheet, range gave a lot of size to the weapons and there were some weird interactions possible.  The range and size classifications have been simplified, but the main effect is that very long range weapons aren’t necessarily so big and very short range weapons aren’t necessarily so small.  Some short range weapons, like Venusian Jackhammer, were taking advantage of a quirk of the previous formulas to gain more power than they should. Such weapons will be a little bit weaker, while more normal weapons with normal ranges, like Solarian Pulse Gun has gained significant power so there isn’t as much of a DPS gap between short range and normal range weapons.

The parasite damage was previously very erratic and hard to account for.  There is a new parameter that weapons can have that specify an exact percentage of damage that should be inflicted via the parasite versus upfront and new balance formulas to balance parasite weapons.  Some that were previously very powerful by accident, like Kalthi Fiery Pulse, are slightly weaker than previously, while most weapons that inflict parasites are much stronger. All fire weapons in this sheet will now inflict fire parasites, including the fire burst.

Bursts, which were originally Sebastapols, and then mag cannons, are now going to be pulse guns, since that fits their niche a lot better.  Their tracking has been reduced to where their bullets will converge at the edge of their range if a player has no tracking augs or skills, but they will now inherit the velocity of the ship firing them.  The power bonus from self-damage has been reduced significantly, but Bursts, probably being the most important pulse gun/mag cannon, have had their DPS help constant, while on average, all other weapons in this sheet got about a 35% increase in DPS to close the gap.

Augmenter stats on weapons used to just make the weapon do less DPS.  For example, if a weapon had a +10% damage stat on it, then that weapon would do 10% less DPS to compensate.  This lead to weapons as stat-sticks and people just equipping weapons that they would never use. Going forward, weapons with aug stats on them won’t lose DPS because of it.  Instead they will gain in size. In addition, several new aug stats were added to the sheet to potentially be used on weapons, including “weapon slot” for theoretically externally mounted weapons.

Projectile movement and tracking has been standardized into several categories now instead of just whatever random numbers were typed in before.  The main effect that you’ll see is much higher speed on high level weapons as well as generally higher tracking. Weapons with low speeds or tracking will now get a power bonus to compensate.

Lastly, all of the “+” and “Micro”, “Oversized”, “Gigantic”, etc weapons have been removed from the balance sheet and replaced with options for the code to generate those variants.  This will result in slightly different stats, but a leaner and more maintainable balance sheet. There is now the option to easily add “+2″, “+3″, etc gear which might start showing up as very rare drops.

Hello Sonatians! There have been whispers amongst the playerbase that Fighters, and by extension Fleet Commanders, would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that Fighters are definitely being rethought and redesigned in some very specific ways. The first step towards these changes are now available on the Test Server.

(You can select the Test Server from the drop down menu within the Beta Client.)

On the Live Server, there are a few Fighters that are powerful and sought after by the playerbase, but many Fighters go unused due to exhorbitant energy costs or because they just aren’t worth using over a higher tech Fighter due to said fighter always doing more damage. As such, we have taken the first step towards significantly shifting the way Fighters work within Star Sonata. These changes will affect both overpowered Fighters and underpowered Fighters. The overarching plan is to make Fighters more of a reactionary and flexible tool within a Fleet Commander’s arsenal, and allowing that Fleet Commander to quickly react to the changing battlespace without draining their entire energy bank to do so.

An added bonus is that those who fly Freighters will now be able to launch far more fighters as well. These Fighters will be nowhere near as strong as a Fleet Commanders fighters, but should a Fleet Commander be nearby their fighters will be a solid addition!

We have spent weeks working to get the math just right so that there is still a strong sense of progression and differentiation between Fighters, but your feedback is neccessary to ensure that all Fighters feel usable.

Click here for the latest information.

As most of you know from Jeff’s post, and my recent work, I have been placed in charge of the QA department. I would like to announce a restructuring of the Quality Assurance Team as it stands, to have official rankings in the group. These individuals will be joining the Dev Team as a whole and bringing them out of the dark as a proper subdepartment of the Development Team. These changes are hopefully going to allow us to better move forward and provide fixes/issue resolution in a more structured manner. If you would like to join this team feel free to pm NCCIntrepid#0664 on Discord. These new ranks, a summary of their responsibilities, and roles that are similar to ranks on the content side of the dev team are as follows:

QA Lead: This individual is in charge of the entire QA team. The primary focus of this role is personnel management and issue resolution. Anything that someone else needs assist with on the team. This individual is also in charge of being the final decision maker on policies and bug tracking handling. If you have any feedback for the QA team etc, please PM this individual. As of this moment it is ran by myself, NCCIntrepid#0664.

QA Coordinator: These individuals are of the highest rank other than the QA Lead itself. They are responsible for assisting in bug fixing. They will have access to the content documents to allow them to be able to perform this bug fixing. Some may be coders, but some won’t as many bugs simply require us to make content changes. These individuals are also in charge of coordinating the Investigators on testing the Livetest patches for bugs by managing patches that cannot be parsed through their notes to properly test. They would be akin to a Content Developer in the Content department. Individuals joining this rank are newman233 and Tornado.

QA Investigator: These individuals are provided with Test/Livetest server panels. They are in charge of probing the livetest patch cycles for any bugs they can locate. Secondarily, they also are to assist the Correspondents with verifying repeatability of bugs reported, provide fallback on the Correspondents if there are times that bugs are not being forwarded at a proper rate. They can also be used by Coordinators to assist in larger bugs requiring multiple people. Individuals joining this rank Jv2, Dark_soul, and Joshua.

QA Correspondent: These individuals are provided access to the QA chat channels, and in charge of forwarding/finding bugs on the live server to our bug report sheets. They are also tasked with assisting the Investigators with testing things on test/livetest when required. Any new members to the team start here. Individuals joining this rank are Cammy, Maxathron, Blizz, Keef, and Sammeth.

Discuss in Forums

While converting the engines balance sheet to the new style, we are making a few small systematic changes to the stats of engines in Star Sonata.

All stealth engines are being given a significant increase in engine power, and the medium-stealthy ones are getting reductions in their engine visibility. I understand that stealth engines aren’t used much at higher levels because we don’t have a lot of good high tech stealth engines and because people can use the “tapping” technique with regular engines, but we are also adding a few high tech stealth engines and we will be looking at the tapping issue as part of the upcoming visibility revamp. For now, a stealth engine should be much more viable for stealthy ships, and should be more maneuverable than using a high vis engine and tapping.

Sizes of engines are getting slightly adjusted.  Engines with very strong aug mods used to just have worse engine stats to make up for it, but that created a weird situation where players would just use the engines with the best aug stats they could and just suffer the bad engine stats because DPS trumps all.  The old Hydra Engine was a prime example of this.  This didn’t feel right, so engines will no longer be worse for having aug stats, but rather be bigger.  At the same time, the overall sizes of engines have been reduced such that the new average size of all player-obtainable engines is 2 size less than before.  Engines with a lot of aug stats will now be bigger and more powerful and engines without aug stats will be smaller and with the same power.  I think this creates much more balanced engines and the possibility of more interesting and powerful engines, since giving up hull space for aug stats makes a bit more sense than giving up quality of life maneuverability.

The price curve on engines has been adjusted to give higher tech engines higher prices so when you get something as DG loot that you want to sell, you can sell it for more credits.

We have created 6 new tech 22 engines, 2 as DG drops and 4 as KD loot, including class 1, 2 and 3 stealth engines.

Happy 2019, Star Sonata!

2018 brought with it a lot of new things. Enkelin was named as lead content developer and he created the Press Corps to give more transparency to the player base. NCCIntrepid took the lead of Quality Assurance and has been adding more rigor to our testing and bug tracking processes. The dev team as a whole is probably more vibrant and active than ever before.

We had a galaxy assault / BvB revamp to make BvB more interesting and balanced. We added Electrified Georg Ohm. We added several new specialized base kits. AI’s and combat bots gained many improvements to their AI, and combat bots gained the new “V Formation” where they form up on your wing to fight, rather than fly all over the place. There was a major change to the shape of Kalthi Depths, with lots of roaming mini-bosses dropping KD dg loot. We revamped the way that planet terraforming blueprints work. Energies and shields were both buffed and rebalanced, making fuel much less necessary on energies and regen much stronger and less costly on shields. We revamped Junkyard and the junkyard tweaks, and added a new “alternate currency” system, where items can be bought and sold at AI bases for commodities in addition to credits. Gunner class received some tweaks and was made more offensive. We had a “Mega Moe” world boss event for Halloween, pitting the player base against the toughest boss ever for special Halloween prizes. Hull extensions and cloaks have had improvements and rebalances that are on the test server and will be patched soon. Jey has done a lot of improvements on the back end, and the server is running faster than ever, and aside from a few days of crash bugs, has been very stable.

Some of the most exciting things that the dev team worked on in 2018 haven’t been seen yet. We have been doing a ton of design work on an upcoming expansion for 2019 that will bring both a tech 23 expansion with a bunch of new bosses and areas as well as some sweeping gameplay improvements. We have scores of pages of finalized design docs on the upcoming expansion and spent hours and hours in meetings finalizing much of what we have planned. I’m going to leave some of the details about the theme and content of the tech 23 part of the expansion for another blog post, but for now, I want to write about a few of the big gameplay changes we have in mind.

Healing

We have designs to reduce the strength and the efficiency of healing while simultaneously increasing player shield regen, increasing shield banks by a factor of 10x, and greatly increasing out of combat healing. Instead of gaining massive shields from healing efficiency and cross healing, Shield Monkeys will have to steal shields from enemies to redistribute to their team and engineers will actively use a much stronger +100% transference vulnerability beam to buff the healing from their drones and allies on a single target. We hope that these changes to healing will make healing much more balanced and a more active component in playing the game.

Resistances

The current state of resistances in Star Sonata is more like a weird Pokemon rock-paper-scissors thing than anything else. The planned change with resistances is two-fold. First to bring almost all existing resistances into a new “Armor” stat on ships, where each ship will have an armor that represents the average resists to all damage types, and then have at most one vulnerability or resistance to a specific damage type. Capital ships, heavy fighters, and bases will get the most armor and other classes will have much less. We will also make it so that the game remembers what ships you’ve scanned with a ship scanner, and for those ships already scanned, present the armor and resistance information in the target box.

Second, we will be revamping the damage types to make them more about the utility that each damage type brings and less about rock-paper-scissors.

• “Laser” damage will be removed.
• Energy damage will be the default damage type for both pulse guns and non-ethereal lasers.
• Surgical damage will cause onboard item damage as you damage the target, potentially disabling them over time, and cause an increase in credit, augmenter, and item drops (including from drop lists) when an AI is killed based on how much surgical damage he took in the battle.
• Heat damage will remain the damage-over-time damage type of choice and the amount of DoT will be increased and standardized across all heat weapons.
• Mining damage will still be used on asteroids, but gain the additional property of being armor piercing, and ignore the armor stat on the target.
• Physical damage will continue to knock things back and have a high DPE. It will gain even more DPS than it currently has, but also become subject to double armor mitigation.
• Radiation will be the ethereal damage type, with ethereal lasers being radiation, and possibly radiation bullets being ethereal. Hitting an enemy who is below some fraction of shields with radiation will irradiate them and no longer require the killing blow to irradiate.

Mod Rework

The mod rework that has been talked about in the past is almost completed, and will be released along with the big 2019 update. The two most exciting things about the mod rework are the addition of “primary” mods, which are much stronger and have a strength associated with them, and “re-modding” an item, where a modded item can go back to the neurodoc, and a player can pay increasing amounts of credits to have a chance to increase the strength of the primary mod, add another secondary mod, change a secondary mod, or even change the primary mod. This brings a very fun mini-game of continually crafting and refining your best equipment, but the increased cost each time you do it means that you want to pick carefully from the options presented in re-modding. Existing mods will remain as secondary mods, and existing modded items that are eligible for primary mods will be able to be remodded and gain a primary mod, though if already neurobound, they will lose their current secondary mods. Un-neurobound items with mods can be modded and retain their existing mods.

New Cargo System

We’ve developed a more straightforward design of a cargo system than previously talked about which will be released with everything else. The new cargo design is where items will drop with a “cargo” tag, similar to a mod, such that any item with the cargo tag will always take exactly 10 space. Equipping, using, or transferring an item will remove the cargo tag, but tossing will retain it. Items with the cargo tag will have square brackets around the item name in your inventory. This should hopefully free up a lot of hull space for some people, and let others feel like they can DG in whatever ship they want without sacrificing too much for holding loot.

Improved Visibility/Cloaking System

Enkelin has a complicated but elegant design on revamping the visibility and cloaking system that will make things much easier to balance for stealthy ships.

Giving the Skill Trees more Impact

We want to make the skill trees have more impact and each skill change the way you play the game, rather than just give some stats. Focus skills will give different damage mitigations and add extra slots for different equipment types. Advanced sub-skills will all have large effects and make your choices even more meaningful.

More and stronger super items

We are planning to add a lot more, powerful, super items. This will give those extra slots in capital ships a lot more meaning. Keep an eye out for “broadside” super items built from dg drops and doing massive damage to the left or the right.

Overloaders

Overloaders will no longer self-destruct, but instead cause item damage to your weapons as you use them.

Rebalance of Fighters

Another rebalance of the fighters, giving more fighters useful side-effects, giving more power to fighters launched from a players ship, and making more noticable difference between fighters that take different amounts of slots.

Rebalance of Drones

Drones have a new balance sheet with rarity, range, mobility, and other factors that give a desired DPS for each drone. We’ve already done a quick balance pass on drones that is on test, but there will be a more in-depth look at drones for the big update.

And Much More

And lots of other little things are planned, as well as a light rebalance to the power of classes, with an overall balance between offense, defense, and utility for each class and trying to hit those targets for a fully kitted out player of each class. A lot of the work done in 2018 was actually preparing for a big branch in our source code so that we can work on this upcoming release while maintaining a main branch for small changes and bug fixes. Look for a post about the tech 23 stuff in the near future!

While converting the old cloak balance sheet to the new-style balance sheet, it occurred to me that for a lot of players in the game, cloaks are just used as stat sticks and are pretty boring.  Upgrading to the new balance formulas doesn’t really work with cloaks, especially since they are so often used as stat sticks, because the old method was to take power budget out of their cloaking ability based on any secondary augmenter stats that a cloak has.  Taken to an extreme, a cloak under the old formulas could give +50% damage, but be really bad at cloaking, which would obviously be a broken item.

So cloaks are getting reworked in a few ways.  First, any aug stats on cloaks will increase the energy that it takes to run the cloak, rather than make it worse at cloaking.  Second, aug stats on cloaks will only apply when the cloak is turned on.  And third, most aug stats on existing cloaks were doubled to make them more impactful.  Note that mods on the cloak will still always affect your ship whether the cloak is on or off.

In addition, AI and bots have received an upgrade to their cloaking AI, so they will intelligently activate and deactivate their cloak based on their current energy and visibility.  They will turn it on if they aren’t short of energy and the cloak would actually make them reasonably stealthy.  They will turn it off if they don’t have full energy and are not stealthy even with it on.  Bots with cloaks in the same galaxy as their master who has a cloak will turn on their cloak if the master turns on his cloak, and turn off their cloak if they are less than 100% energy and their master turns off his cloak.

These changes should make using cloaks a lot more interesting and pave the way for us to create a lot more interesting new cloaks.  I envision a lot of cloaks that are good for running away, sneaking around, or surviving opening salvos, with shield, resistance, and speed stats on them, so the player will have an incentive to intelligently use his cloak.  Hopefully the energy costs are enough that just leaving the cloak on all the time without thought will not be the optimal play style, and hopefully the bonuses on some of the cloaks are worthwhile enough that most people will have a cloak to use in certain situations, not just Seers, Snipers, or Speed Demons.

Hello Sonatians! There have been many rumors and whispers amongst the playerbase that Drones, and by extension Engineers, would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that Drones and Engineers are definitely being rethought and redesigned in a variety of ways. The first step towards these changes are now available on the Test Server. (You can select the Test Server from the drop down menu within the Beta Client.) It is apparent that there are many drones that are powerful and sought after by the playerbase. This is good, and we don’t want to make these drones useless. Even so, we have to acknowledge that it isn’t good for the overall health of the game to have certain drones far and away outperform other drones. As such, these changes will affect both under performing drones and over performing drones. The overarching plan is to make drones that are not very useful, even more useful. We spent many hours trying to get the math just right so that there is still a strong sense of progression and differentiation between Engineers, but we need your feedback to make sure we make the best decisions possible. As such, here are the changes you can expect to see on the test server:

• Drones now have a DPS tag at the top of their tooltip. This shows the DPS you can expect the drone to do with the first weapon in the drone list, prior to any external bonuses (Such as Drone Operations, Engineer class skills, auras, drone controllers, Imperial Seal skills, etc.) This damage is scaled up or down for each weapon, depending on the difference in DPS between each subsequent weapon and the first weapon. Generally, this means that the first weapon will be doing the most damage.
• Drones have had all Overloaders, Shield Chargers, and Augmenters removed from their inventory. These items helped to give drones a lot of their power previously, but as a result it made figuring out just how powerful a particular drone was an incredibly mystifying experience. We want to remove this confusion going forward, so most drones will simply have a Shield, Energy, Weapon and Radar while a few exceptions may have things like Super Items, Capacitors, and Diffusers.
• As a result of the previous change, many drones have had a variety of stats such as Electricity, Shield Bank, Energy Bank, Range, Tracking, Resistances, etc reduced. Things like Electricity and Energy bank are mitigated by the fact that many of the weapons on drones will not consume vast amounts of electricity from multiple Rate of Fire augmenters. The reduction in other stats such as Range and Tracking was intentional, as going forward Drones will have relatively smaller ranges. We intend to spend a good deal of time finding the most optimal final numbers, so please share your thoughts on this.
• The above points are no longer true as of December 2nd, 2018. Those changes have been pulled back as a result of player Feedback. There will still be some drones that will not have the same level of Defensive and Utility stats due to us fixing a bug that effected specific drones.
• The highest end of healing drones had their healing output reduced (Twisted Drones/Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s). Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s also had their percentage healing aura removed. We understand that, at the moment, people heavily rely on Engineers to provide squad healing. We do not want to make the game unplayable for those who do this, however we do realize that it is neccessary to cut back on the level of healing power Engineers have access to in relation to a Shield Monkey. Expect more changes to Healing and Healing Drones over time. Something to keep in mind is that the adjustment to Shield Regeneration on all shields will increase the amount of self regeneration that drones have. This should help to reduce the negative of drones doing less healing. It will also make Defense Drone Operations a bit more of an interesting choice!
• Transference Facilitator Tractors (as of December 6th, 2018) have massively increased Transference Vulnerability values (from 66% to 100%). This means that any target an Engineer locks onto with this beam will receive substantially more healing. This should minimize the nerf to Engineer’s single target healing while reducing their ability to heal everything around them automatically. This also, interestingly, has the benefit of making a Shield Monkey/Engineer composition more effective than Engineer/Engineer or Shield Monkey/Shield Monkey.
• Last but not least, the Mad Kidd/Mad Kidd+/Hybrid Kidd Drone have had the tracking on their thorax’s reduced, the delay within which their thorax’s are able to do damage increased, and are now immobile (as of December 6th, 2018). These drones had Thorax weapons, which are supposed to be hard to use to justify their high DPE and DPS, that were not hard to use. They may see further changes going forward. 

If you have any questions please post in this topic on the forums, and I will do my best to respond to them.

We decided that we want to generally increase the power of hull extensions to make them more impactful on ship set ups, while at the same time, simplifying some of the current baked in complexity and generally balancing them relative to each other.

The current balance of hull extensions is really all over the place.  The difference in power between the tech 20 Alien Hull Expander that just gives 26 hull space and the Divine Cargobay that gives 50 space and +10% capacity is huge.  26 hull space is certainly nothing to get excited about, and since most extensions are so weak, they tend to be used more as stat sticks than for their space.  The goal of the new numbers is to give some of the very best extensions modest increases in values, but much larger increases to others, according to standard balancing formulas.

Zeus Expander

A lot of the space, weights, and even built in aug stats of extensions have all been amplified, hopefully giving more interesting choices when deciding on what hull extension to use.  Since the baseline hull space that extensions give has been increased so much, I feel better about allowing extensions that give much less hull space, but give other benefits instead, like an extra weapon slot or some extra resistance.  If you have to choose between an extra weapon slot and 150 space, it might be an interesting decision.  Half a dozen new interesting end-game extensions have been added for next universe.

The other change, aside from general increases in power and balancing of stats, is making the extensions more straightforward.  Currently, one extension might take 5 space but give 10, while another takes 10 space but gives 15, and it’s hard to know which one is better by glancing at it, especially since the hull space granted gets multiplied by capacity augmenters and skills.  To simplify everything, the size of extensions have been homogenized, and the code has been altered so that extensions will always take 0 space while equipped, similar to sticky items.  In addition, all the bonus space from extensions have been converted to constant bonus space, meaning that they don’t get multiplied by augmenters or skills.  So instead of giving 26 space that gets modified, almost by mysterious amounts, by augs and skills, the new Alien Hull Expander gives 170 flat space, while taking zero space when equipped.  What you see is what you get.

I’ve been careful with the numbers so that even the very best extensions on set ups with lots of trans mods and even some capacity aug stat will still come out more powerful than currently.  Set ups in off-focus hull types will come out way ahead, while storage ships with all capacity augs may come out a little behind, but not by too much.  I feel like aside from making extensions more interesting and straightforward, this will also open up some more unique ship set ups that were too limited by hull space before.

This isn’t set to come out in the next patch, but is on the test server and should be out in the patch after next.

Greetings! We have been working on a number of improvements to the game, and we’re taking our time to look into the bugs and issues which have been reported! Thank you for all your positive responses recently! :)

Recently Gunners have been having a bit of a hard time and have felt out of place in the universe. We have added a 20% Resistance increase when the Gunner is in a capital ship so players can focus more on the offensive statistics or have an easier time tanking. This is a temporary quality of life improvement whilst we prepare for the re-balance within the Tech 23 Expansion.