Space Clouds

Star Sonata 2019

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!

Universe Reset January 12

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Universe Reset

The Paxians have been busy this Christmas keeping many of the strongest Aveksaka forces at bay around the Subspace dimension. In a show of poor holiday spirit, the Aveksaka have activated the device in Kumari to destroy the universe in return! Lyceum scientists calculate the destruction of our universe to occur on the 12th of January, 13:00 EST (server time). With the destruction of our old universe, a new one will be created! All characters, their skills, ships, and bots will be transferred over, but deployed drones and userbases will be lost, as well as anything on the userbases! You’ll have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again.

Extended server maintenance

Tonight at 10h30pm server time, the servers will be taken down for maintenance, during that time the website will become unreachable.

This maintenance is to allow the technicians at the datacenter to change one of the drive thats beginning to show signs of failure and at the same time to do some of the server maintenance i cannot do while the servers are running.

The estimated downtime will be 2 hours, discord will be used to provide updates if anything happens.

Battle Beyond the Stars!

Recently the development team have been in talks about the potentiality of a new zone designed to give rewards to players and squads tough enough to take it on. We have considered the idea that this could be a scaling scenario, where the game gets tougher and tougher as a battle rages on, meaning that there will be something for players of all strengths, even at lower levels. For anyone able to complete this new zone, there would be a great reward, and for people who try but fail there would potentially be consolation prizes depending on how close you come. Whilst we have laid out some ideas for the zone, we’re keeping things pretty secret for now!

There is also a rumour that a new boss might be entered into Kalthi Depths, and that it might not be as fluffy and cute as it looks! (Be careful out there!)

Our Paxian allies have been doing some research into several pieces of equipment, and are looking to improve some classic that have been forgotten to time, upgrading them to Tech 22 level, allowing for more adaptive and interesting endgame builds!

Forging the Path to Improvement!

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.

We’re introducing a new Secret Halloween Uber which will terrify all but the most hardy of players! We’re really excited on seeing how players react to something so insidiously evil being in the game! :) (Try not to get eaten folks!)

We’re making some adjustments to the Kalthi Commander, Wrathful Commander, Armored Commander, Destroyer and Terminator. They will have Sup. Augmenters equipped on them as standard which should make Kalthi Depths more profitable so players won’t end up in Kalthi Debt. ;)

Shields are going through a new re-balance and some changes have been made to the Zombie Bunny Stop and Kidd’s Resilient Shielding to scale back their damage mods and bring them more into line with other offensive shields.

A new Cargo system is being coded into the game in order to make the game more enjoyable for low hull classes. This Cargo system will influence the way drops and dungeon rewards work. When items drop, they will drop with a Cargo tag on them, and their item size will be capped at 10. If the Cargo tagged item is used or equipped in any way, this will remove the Cargo tag permanently.

This will be a huge positive change in terms of a quality of life improvement. We are also considering the idea that PVP acts will make targets drop a percentage of their Cargo tagged loot upon death to make PVP a little more thrilling. yet viable for the discerning pirate.

We are considering Super Loot weekends which should make the game a lot more fun at the peak times when people can play!

We are considering increasing the loot from Bana King!

Weekly Dev Blog – 14th October

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Hi all, we have a new volunteer on staff who’s been managing our social media. He’s also offered to step up and provide reports from our weekly meetings. Enjoy!

From Retyu (Social Media Manager)

We have recently been looking into fixing some of the sneaky tricksy bug the game which have potentially been lowering the quality of life for some players.

Many of you just wanted to kick back in life and be simple space rat farmers. We understand the stress and hardship of raising the little blighters, but we also took note that the hatcheries did not grow as many space rats as they said. This has been rectified so you can breed and cull space rats without regret, allowing you to feed your hungry workers!

In order to transport your space rats to their slaughterhouses, we have fixed an issue with your merchant navy contrivers which was impacting on their engines. This has been fixed so you can pack your merchant navy contriver full of space rats and listen to The Blue Danube Waltz whilst you spin merrily out of control in Sol (Just like Zerendalus!) Vacuum scoops should be fixed now, so you don’t have to worry about those pesky space rats throwing augmenters out of the hold of your ship, as you can suck them all up without issue!

We are looking into an issue with drones wherein they don’t fire at space rats (and other nefarious enemies) immediately. A lot of players have been experiencing that their drones take some time before they actually open fire.

We have been looking into the negative impacts of lag on the player base, and we’ve managed to nerf it significantly. The Server Hamster now gets proper medical treatment during server down time, and we’ve replaced his water with energy drinks.

There has been some discussion regarding people’s feelings in regards Gunner. Recently we gave missiles a huge buff in order to make Gunner a more attractive class to play. Gunner will soon be undergoing a few minor buffs in order to make the class more enjoyable whilst we wait on the Great Expansion!

We are aware of an issue which is causing a lot of server lag and we’re looking into taking steps to deal with it.

In regards to the game, are there any pressing issues that you believe need to be fixed? – Any bugs you’ve found or problems within the game? If so, let us know so we can work towards improving the quality of life for everyone!

Ring Station

Universe Reset September 15

It’s that time again.  The fabric of space-time is becoming unstable and the universe is expected to completely unravel on September 15 at 1:00 PM Eastern / server time.  A new universe will be born shortly afterwards.

Expect to see drastic changes to the Kalthi Depths, bases buying and selling items using the new alternative currency system, and new and improved combat bot AI.  There is also reported to be some interesting changes in the Anaconda instance.

All Deployed user bases and permanent drones will be destroyed but your ships and TSL items will transition over to the new universe.  Whatever ship you were last flying will be the ship you fly in the next universe, so make sure to log out while in your storage thatch to give everyone else a good laugh as you try to find a good galaxy to colonize in that thing!

 

July 28th Server Rollback and Compensation

On July 28th we discovered a bug causing certain database writes to not go through for several hours starting on the 27th. This didn’t impact gameplay as a whole but the worst effect was that it allowed an item duplication and deletion bug when withdrawing/depositing items from the TSL. Making matters worse this issue also meant that our normal event log was not being written to, so we would be unable to see who had withdrawn items during this time period. We made a decision to shut down the server and rollback 19 hours to the start of the issue once we realized we would not be able to reverse any that had taken advantage of this or those who had lost items to it.

This is obviously a very unfortunate circumstance that we normally would like to avoid if at all possible, but the potential scale of the issue forced our hand in this case. The timing is especially bad as everyone’s Friday evening progress will be wiped. In understanding of this, we will be running a special bonus event for 48 hours with most of our normal event modifiers turned on at the same time. We will also be giving everyone a day’s subscription time as compensation for the lost game-play.

We are extremely sorry to have to do such an impactful rollback, but we hope you understand and that this event can help make up for it.

The compensation event will be as follows:
* Double XP from all sources
* Double aug drop chance for augs equipped on AI ships
* Double Bindomite drop chance
* Half item damage taken on death
* Double mod chances from dropped items
* Double construction speed
* Double prospecting rewards.
* We will turn on global holiday drops from one of the holiday events based on a poll that will be posted on our Discord server.

Update: The compensation event has been extended until Tuesday the 31st.

Quality Assurance Improvements

Developer Blog

Hi everyone! I’m pretty excited about some improvements we have been making to our testing and quality assurance protocols. What this means for players is that we’ll have more frequent patches, better oversight on what goes live, and better balance testing of upcoming changes to the game.

These improvements have been made possible by several volunteers from the community. My colleague NCCIntrepid has taken the lead on Quality Assurance, assembling a team from the Press Corps to identify and fix bugs before they go live. His team has already covered the two most recent patches. Once a bug is discovered, they have worked out a rapid reporting system so that Developers and Contributors can resolve the issues and provide you with a smooth gameplay experience.

Some of our Press Corps volunteers have also been doing great work testing new content for balance before it’s finalized. I’d like to recognize the hard work of Joshua, Tornado, and Newman (Kanga) in particular.

If you would like to try your hand at testing or quality assurance, please drop me a line and we’ll go from there!

Ring Station

Galaxy Assault Revamp

BvB Revamp

BvB Revamp

Hello everyone! In this post, I will fill you in on the final details of the galaxy assault revamp that will go live for the upcoming universe. Until that time, the changes detailed in this post will be up on the test server for everyone to experiment with.

Summary of changes

Issue

Resolution

Players tanking pulses

Base mining vulnerability removed, base projectile damage increased, and base resistance increased to match.

Sun tanking

Unattached bases and permanent drones will receive serious vulnerability auras when near a sun.

Players spectating in spirits

Base and permanent drone target prioritization is revamped. Players won’t be shot by bases if they have anything better to do.

Base healing meta

Base transference resistance is increased somewhat to reduce the effectiveness of cross-healing between bases. However, base shield transference weapons are buffed to keep healing output constant.

Players having no combat role

Testing has confirmed that Unidyne Core Dumps are very effective at turning the tide of BvB.  Players are no longer priority targets of enemy bases, so it will be possible to actively participate in this way.

Buffer gal use

Active war and adjacent ownership instantly allows 1 BvB kit. Full 24 hours of adjacent ownership still required for 5 kits.

Junkyard kit spam

Junkyard kits now have the full 10 minute construction timer, but come with more junkyard hydros for convenience. Also, ALL kits that are under construction now receive a substantial vulnerability aura.