Space Clouds

Calypso Update 9.8.14

This week’s update is going to cover a bevy of changes and additions that are being made to Subspace and Alien Invasions! Keep reading to find out more!

gurujana_ekam

Over the last few weeks the dev team has been internally discussing subspace, alien invasions and what we can do to motivate players to participate in the layer a bit more. Most importantly though, we wanted to recapture the feel and fun factor of the first universe after we added the layer. I am sure everyone remembers how hectic and overrun the layer was and more importantly, how epic the battles there felt. So this past week I’ve been working on quite a few changes based on our discussions to shake up the layer and really bring back the invasion feel.

Firstly, I’ve made some small changes to the default parameters for invasions in order to increase the number of aliens that spawn dramatically during invasions. The new parameters will increase the number of eggs in a clutch, the overall number of clutches that spawn during an invasion and increase the duration of the invasion. The new parameters also allow for a much faster and more dramatic ramp up. This will make the actual invasions a lot more hectic. As an added bonus for fighting during invasions, the aliens spawned by invasion spawners will have a significant XP bonus. Finally, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at the loot you can get from invasions to make sure that it’s worth facing the alien hordes. Invasion alien loot will definitely see a boost in quality.

aliens

Secondly, I’ve made some substantial changes to the way alien garrisons work. When the aliens ‘win’ an invasion, they set up an outpost and a limited number of  roaming guards. For starters, I’ve tracked down an fixed the bug causing multiple outposts to spawn — this will make recapturing an alien galaxy a lot less tedious. Additionally I’ve increased the numbers of guard aliens quite a bit. This was done to address the issue of the layer being barren between invasions. The biggest change I made however was a change to how the number of guards scale. Previously, they scaled over time (much like the invasion spawners do), with the changes they scale based on the proximity of their galaxy to other alien owned galaxies. This means a galaxy in the middle of a clump of alien owned territory is going to create more alien guards than one on the outskirts.

To further facilitate this, I’ve changed the way aliens pick which galaxies they plan on invading. Currently they just pick a random galaxy in their slice of the layer from the pool of remaining galaxies. With the changes aliens will prioritize picking galaxies adjacent to currently owned territory. The effect is they will create pockets of alien owned space in the layer in order to better take advantage of the new way garrison spawning works.

alien_map

Finally, I’ve added a new spawner feature that will allow us to do a lot of really, really cool things. It’s a prerequisite to spawn based on the ownership percentage of the alien layer. We have two planned uses for it. The first is a set of alien spawners that will be added to Perilous Space. These will kick in when the aliens have ownership of a chunk of the layer an the aliens spawned by them will be aggressive towards both players an AI. It should definitely add an interesting twist to P-Space if players let the aliens build up in Subspace. Secondly, this feature will control the spawn of a brand new roaming boss in Subspace.

This boss is called the Gurujana Ekam and will make Astro-Santa look like a chump. This alien will only spawn when the layer is at least 25% occupied and his strength will go up and down based on alien ownership. At his weakest he will take multiple squads to down, at his strongest he will be next to impossible. In return for killing him players will receive a token that can be traded in for a substantial amount of credits and a special mystery reward. The rewards haven’t been entirely decided upon but they will not be limited to items from subspace and will definitely include some rare and hard to get items.

That’s all I have for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then keep posting your questions, comments and suggestions to the forums!

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