This week’s update is going to further cover the changes and additions coming to the alien invasion announced last week. Keep reading to find out more!
Firstly, I’ve made some changes to the way overall alien ownership is calculated. Currently, it’s extremely easy to keep the overall ownership down (and negate any of the effects that alien ownership has) by clearing out the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms of the layer. So I’ve added an ownership weight to each arm and instead of taking a true average of the ownerships of each arm, I’m taking a weighted average. This means that ownership in the lower level arms is valued less while ownership in the higher level arms is valued more. With the current weights, 25% of the overall ownership is contributed by the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms and the remaining 75% is contributed by the Katur, Pajca and Sas arms. This was especially important to do considering ownership is going to control a lot more than it currently does. Not only will it affect colony income, but it will control a lot of spawners in both Subspace and P-Space.
This past week I did a lot more work on the back end of things as the major features discussed last week were mostly implemented. This mainly meant updates to the alien invasion page of our admin control interface. There were some things we couldn’t set without changing the configuration files for the invasions (which means a server restart!) and all of them are now accessible via the control panel, including the new ownership weights. These additions are good for two reasons. First, it makes testing out anything invasion related a lot faster and easier — being able to manually set the alien ownership levels made testing out the ‘growth’ factor of the world boss a lot simpler! Secondly, it will allow us to make tweaks on the live server to some aspects of the invasion we couldn’t before as well as some extra manual control for events if we want.
Finally, I’ve done a small pass at the alien loot. I’ve added a few new items, but more importantly, I’ve added some rolls from the instance loot tables onto some of the harder aliens spawned by the subspace invasion! Paired with an experience increase, this will hopefully address some of the risk vs. reward issues we have with killing the harder outposts in subspace.
That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!
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