Background

Currently, AI bases purchase any non-commodity item at reduced rate, unless its server value is above a certain amount.  Players have been using this mechanic to convert unlimited quantities of raw materials such as Metals into credits.  The most popular conversion is through Station Extension Y’s, which net 17.435 credits per Metals when built by the thousand.  This project expands the idea of converting resources into credits by creating similar options for all basic commodities, not just Metals.  It also makes the whole system more natively supported by game mechanics by introducing a proper player-driven economy.  Finally, it creates new possibilities for trading by encouraging players to ship resources beyond team territory and seek out arbitrage opportunities between AI bases.

Overview

We have created seven new lines of manufactured commodities that are all produced by base-equipped factories.  Like standard commodities, these items can be bought and sold by AI and trade slaves and appear in the same trading tab.  The lowest tier of each theme is manufactured from a tier 0 resource such as Metals.  Higher tier manufactured commodities are constructed from higher tier extracted resources such as Plasma Crystals or Adamantium.  Each AI base has a theme that goes with one of the lines of commodities, and will only trade in manufactured commodities of that theme.  AI bases will consume their supply of commodities over time in order to balance the total number of credits created per day.

Details

The average value of the new commodities is balanced to be comparable to the exchange rate for Metals that is obtained in current mechanics.  Resources that extract slower than Metals are valued proportionally more.  Higher-tier commodities are produced from multiple lower-tier commodities in addition to high-tier resources.  For example:

• Steel Girders (1000 Metals): average value 20,000
• Adamantium Reinforced Girders (1,000,000 Metals, 50 Titanium, 5 Laconia, 1 Adamantium): average value 155,000,000
• Sentient Chatbots (500 Silicon): average value 15,000
• Overclocked Chatbots (100,000 Silicon, 300 Psion Icicles, 5 Plasma Crystals): average value 20,500,000

Actual prices will range between 50% and 200% of the average value depending on AI base supply levels.  Since AI bases will steadily consume their supply of each commodity, it will be possible to fully automate the process with trade slaves.  Of course, if too many players attempt to route their manufactured commodities to a single AI base, the market will saturate and someone will have to ship goods to another base instead.  We want AI bases to gobble up plenty of resources, but we don’t want them to be infinite resource sinks either.  In order to get the balance right on this, we have done a careful review of AI base placement in the universe generation code, and will adjust pricing and consumption rates on an ongoing basis if the first draft doesn’t get the balance right.

Important notes

We are planning to add the manufactured commodities and associated factories to the game before the end of the universe on test server so players can get a head start on figuring out the new system. Also, along with the introduction of the new manufacturing economy next universe, AI bases will no longer buy items that have been built from blueprint.  The code governing AI base purchases is only intended to allow players to sell unwanted loot such as augmenters and tweaks.  There will no longer be any reason to build an item just for the purpose of selling it to an AI base, so that functionality will be removed.  We are committed to replacing that old system with something that is not only comparable in economic reward, but also truer to the free market principles of the game and more rewarding to industrialists and traders alike.  We look forward to player feedback when the new economy goes live so that we can achieve that goal as soon as possible.

Hello again everyone! It’s been a long time since our last dev blog, but don’t fear we’ve still been having our meetings and stuff is stll going on behind the scenes (as many of you have seen on the forums).
I must confess the fault is mine, really, our last blog was 16th December which was also our last before Christmas. After we picked things back up I was back at university with a nice shiny new 9AM start every day, naturally this doesn’t fit well when our meetings often ended at 1 or 2AM my time so I had been missing meetings. We’ve now moved our meetings back by a couple of hours though, meaning I can attend and resume doing our weekly blog post.

Enough jibber-jabber with missed posts though, time for some 4 weeks worth of updates!

A new member has joined our team, known to us as Dokimastis.

Theodore

A large portion of you may not know this, but there exist six more skills in the same lines as the five Imperial Seal skills, while the skills were implemented and work they were never made available in game for players, a small number of lucky players were awarded levels in some of these skills for various things. Theodore has been working on getting these so far hidden skills being available to players to train. Once the work has been done all six of the new skills will be added to the current five. The current Imperial Seal Skills will not be changed.

Theodore has also been working on the Tweak Super Item suggestion that’s residing in our suggestions system, although with some slight changes from the original proposal, such as moving the source to be from Blueprints obtained from Shadow instead of missions from Perpetual Motion.

Jey

Jey’s been working on his global event system that’ll eventually encompass the AI trading events.
He’s also been working on fixing client and server crashes and working on the recent server lag that’s been a result of the recent BvB battles between Red Faction and Resident Evil.
Lastly from Jey, a full server and client patch is coming up soon, expect the announcement some point this or next week.

Ryan

Ryan has been working on lots of things of late, from working on more things to get us on Steam and fixing the colony suitability bug to our current top voted suggestion; Item Rarity Tiers.

He’s also implemented a new kind of item like the station tech upgrades but for ships. Using this item will increase the tech level of your ship by one, however it’ll also limit your ship to the normal number of augmenters for that hull class (sorry, no T22, 4 aug Prawns for you). This can also be done multiple times to the same ship but it will get very costly.

The synchronized lockout system is done and is has been setup for the Serengeti for next patch, before being pushed out to more bosses. Instead of being locked out for so many days, the lockouts from the new system will reset together at a set time resulting in less coordination required between teammates and friends as your lockout cycles are always synchronized.

Ryan has also been helping Pixel a lot providing code needed for various UI changes that some of you have already seen on the forums, and will see soon in the client, but more of that in Pixel’s section. Speaking of which….

Pixel

Pixel has been doing loads of cool stuff.

Going back a few weeks he was working on creating a new set of items which have already hit live, but I’ll cover them briefly if you missed it. Blueprint Packs are a new swish style of blueprint item which actually contain multiple blueprints, this means you can set your station up with blueprints for the full Achilles station gear suite from just one item.

He’s also been on more of a spree of making everything look AWESOME. From fancy looking holoprojectors for your space stations to reworking sections of the user interface. You can see a lot of his changes in his forum topic over in Star Sonata General Discussion. Here’s a picture of the new space station control panel.

Also, say hello to the shiny new and red Annihilator Pulse Gun.

Stronium-90 missions

On Saturday night, a large portion of your lost your progress on your Strontium-90 missions. This was due to a funky bug and was kind of intentional in the way you wouldn’t expect. The issue is unlikely to strike again and we’ll be fixing it so that Strontium-90 missions don’t forcibly abandon themselves. Apologies for inconveniences.

Jey

Tracked down and fixed weird crash issue relating to Control bots.
Preperation for Christmas to go live in a few days.

Ryan

I’ve been working on some brand new christmas content! I think everyone will like it a lot, there are 11 new gals and a boss that scales based on how many people are attacking it (and everyone will get personal loot).

Pixel

Worked on some lots more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, as well as some cool sounding items

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

The Astro-Santa letter competition is now drawing to a close with just a few hours left, so if you want to be in with a chance to win, you better send your letter to Astro-Santa!

You can find out more about this here.

Universe Reset

The Scientists have been at the eggnog, getting their party on early and in their drunkness have missed the prediction of the universe’s imposion. Fortunately, being the time of Christmas, Astro-Santa’s Astro-Elves have been hard at work making all the presents as well as conducting research for new ideas! Amongst their research findings the Astro-Elves have learnt that the universe is becoming unstable and have predicted that it’ll eventually suffer a total collapse at 540 on 9th of Aer, 153rd Grand Age of the Elves. However, due to also being drunk the Elves have made a mistake and actually the date of the collapse will be around 14 Earth days later, making the demise of our universe occur on January 16th, 2016 at 1PM EST.

We’re back after a week of downing Turkeys and some weekend shopping madness which seems to infecting the grand British empire!

Jey

I finalized an improvement I’ve been working on to optimize the performance of large inventories. The final result was an improvement by a factor of 60 (30s to 0.5s when transferring 24,000 item stacks).

Patch preparation to make Christmas event patch run smoothly.

More work on the global trading event

Ryan

Working with a Steam employee who contacted us to help get things in line for them so we can get on Steam!

Pixel

Worked on some more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, hopefully.

Blue Dwarf

Not really an update, just a plug that our annual Astro-Santa letter competition is now running and you can find details here.

Player questions!

Didn’t do any this week, we’re running low on the good ones! So ask us more more!

I would like to briefly address where we’ve come from, where we are at, and where we are going as far as base versus base combat (BvB) is concerned in Star Sonata.

Previous to our base rebalance about a year ago, there were a number of problems with bases, but foremost was that it was too easy for a player or couple of players in very strong ships to fly through and destroy an entire galaxy worth of bases with no cost to the attackers. It was just too easy to attack, and it was too important to be online in order to defend.

Many changes were proposed, discussed with all the devs and the players on the forum, and agreed to. Mainly, bases were made much stronger in comparision to ships, so BvB supplanted PvB as the way to attack galaxies. This has been tremendously successful in deterring wanton griefing and piracy of bases, as used to run rampant. Now, if someone wants to attack a galaxy, the attacker has to declare war, put down and defend an outpost, have that outpost survive counter-attack for 24 hours, then spend the time and effort to actually BvB at great cost. Not only is it no longer cheap and easy to destroy bases, but the defenders have a real chance to actually defend. Since the base rebalance, we are not aware of any base griefing or piracy as used to occur, and the only bases destroyed in anger have been in wars between teams.

Balancing bases and BvB will continue to be an ongoing project. We already had in the works a change so that, starting next universe, bases will no longer be able to equip or use any gear that isn’t specifically for bases. This includes weapons, shields, tweaks, augmenters, grav disrupters, etc. This is to address some instances where very expensive or rare ship gear feels required to compete at the highest levels of BvB. We are also creating some new base items to fill the slots where we consider that ship gear is currently legitimately being used on bases, and the BP’s for the new gear will come out in advance of the next universe, so people will have a chance to build the new items.

In addition, we have a proposal that I would like to put forward to the players to discuss, and that is a new rule in the game where permanent bases and drones in a galaxy owned by the same team can not be aggressively tractored. This means no dragging out drones or bases one at a time in order to isolate and kill them, and less need for the defending team to be online in order to fight off tractor ships or pop disruptors. The defenders can still tractor attacking bases, though. The dev team feels like this would be a good change, but we would like to hear what you guys think.

**Update** issue has been fixed and server is back up. **

If you recently used spacepoint in game, had them removed from your account, but did not receive the aug reset / skin / ship form. Please make a ticket in the account category with for title SP Bug:accountname where youll replace accountname with the name of the account on which the problem occured obviously. http://support.starsonata.com/

If you already had a ticket, for simplicity sake (and to expedite it), please make a new ticket under the specific name format provided here and include the tracking ID of the previous ticket in the ticket message.

In the ticket be sure to include which ingame transaction had the problem, and if you attempted it multiple times or not. You are welcome to add how much SP you think you lost altho I will still have to verify everything before refunding spacepoints. The special name format is simply so that i can handle those tickets asap since i do not normally handle tickets. Those tickets will be handled as fast as i can do them, but depending on the volume please expect up to 48hours delay.

Jey

Steady progress on the global event system. All the code required to implement the event system is done, prototype for the trading event is nearly functional.

Pixel

More even fancier visages for ai stations!

Col Legno

I finished up the palace fixes.

Ryan

After getting everyone’s opinion on team skills, it was pretty solidly in favor of making team skills small perks so we’ll go forward with that. I added a “Blueprint Pack” item type that will add several blueprints of a certain type, so that we can remove some clutter from AI bases and drop tables. Website patching is in progress, so we’ll have Blue Dwarf’s shiny new website map up soon as well as a publicly available api for anyone to grab map data from.

Player questions!

Didn’t do any this week, we’re running low on the good ones! So ask us more more!

The Problem

As many of you are aware, we have a problem currently with team skills. There are a small number of them (namely Roster and Galactic Control) that are absolutely essential for teams to function beyond a certain size while the rest of the skills are mostly ignored. This also creates additional difficulties for new teams as they don’t have the required skills. After several discussions we have a couple possible solutions, and we’d like to see what everyone would prefer.

Solution 1

Team Skills reset every uni and the acquisition rate is increased significantly. Skills like roster and galactic control would not fit under this system and would be removed. Other skills would be beefed to have pretty sizable effects by the end of the uni. This would eliminate permanent team progression, which could be seen as both good or bad.

Solution 2

Team Skills stay in their current form, but are re-balanced to all be “nice perks” with skills such as roster and galactic control being removed/nerfed. New teams would have accelerated XP gain for the first several levels, so that they can get some meaningful perks faster.

Other changes

Team Skills Resets

If we go with solution 2, we will add the ability for teams to reset their skills for a cost. This should allow teams to experiment with their skills without feeling locked in permanently. The cost would scale based off of how long it has been since the team last reset their skills.

Alternate Team XP sources

We’ll be adding new sources of active team XP aside from just the passive xp gain from score. The primary of these will be boss kills with teammates. Teams will be able to get roughly equivalent XP through this system as a current top 5 team gets passively through score (as a max) and will be the primary method for new teams to get their XP.

Survey

We’d love to hear your opinions on these two directions we could take team skills! We have a poll setup here that we’d like you to fill out to get a rough feeling for how everyone feels about where we head from here.

Jey

No real changes on my side, still working on the global event controller stuff. It’s progressing pretty well. Lots of internal changes in the code, but nothing that players can really see xD.

Pixel

More snazzy base visages: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?p=747470#p747470.

Col Legno

I fixed some bugs including one in which you couldn’t transfer higher tech base bound gear to lower tech ships. I also changed the SM 21/22 commod dynamics from being a palace like base to a commodity that can be put onto any user base to make the SM commod spawn. Put in a fix for current palace issues that needs some testing, but then should be good to go for patching.

Blue Dwarf

Coursework done! Hopefully will get some time to work more on the item viewer over the next week.

MicroCapacitor

Tracking down and removing galaxies using the neurokey system and replacing them with the auto unlocking system on their wormholes.

Theodore

Began working on creating superitem versions of common tweaks as per on the suggestion system!

Player questions!

What race would you be from Star Control?

Jeff: I’d be the Shotfixti.
Jeff: So I could get the 1000 Shotfixti maidens or whatever that was.
Jey: Orz !
Blue Dwarf: Isn’t there special also the fact that they could commit suicide?
Jeff: Yeah, but they get 1000 Shotfixti maidens before that.
Blue Dwarf: Also you hope.
Jeff: That was a plotline, there was like one old Shotfixti that was the last guy and then they like found a bunch of women him, then he repopulated the whole race by himself.
Blue Dwarf: Pretty sure that counts as incest.
Jeff: Nah.
Pixel: You sick.
Blue Dwarf: Um… I don’t know what race I’d be. I quite like Pkunk, just flying around shooting in all directions and shouting insults at your enemy.
Pixel: Ur-Quan Kzer-Za
Pixel: totally not iq’bana
Pixel: Syreen.
Pixel: Oh sorry, got a bit carried away with this.

How did you find Star Sonata?

Jey: I… don’t remember…. too long ago ><
Theodore: Found it on one of the list of mmo websites.
Blue Dwarf: The 3d Monochrome Tint advert back in late 2007 on http://freewebarcade.com while playing silly flash games.
Jeff: http://goproblems.com
Pixel: I wanted to build bases in a MMO environment where I knew they would function while I’m not online, and then I found SS.
Ryan: I was slacking off on schoolwork and stumbled onto it from who knows where.
MicroCapacitor: I found it randomly on a computer downstairs and played it with a friend.
Precursor: I was searching for a sci fi mmo and found SS in early 2003, back when Adum / Jeff / Kilroth and Mhammett still played off and on lol
Precursor: Or was in 20002. I don’t remember now

How did you come up with the Ur’qa and subspace alien languages?

Jeff: You’d have to ask Calypso about that.
Blue Dwarf: I kind of know about that anyway.
Jeff: I think Adum made the original, some of the original, ur items just kinda randomly, but maybe I’m wrong.
Blue Dwarf: Pretty much yeah, from what I know he he sorta came up with stuff and then Calypso just like added stuff and then made that translation document.

Blue Dwarf: For the Aveksaka, Calypso looked and picked a real language to use to base the language on, he found a translator and we started translating and concatenating words together. The language he chose was Sanskrit.

Before that though, we need some more questions as we’re running low on the good ones! So please ask away.

Jey

Still working on the global event system

Ryan

Web server stuff in preperation of somethings waiting to go in.

Pixel

Lots of snazzy base visages

Col Legno

Discussed ways to rethink the SM21 commod base to make a more seamless experience in obtaining SM21 and 22 commods. Going to get working on that.

Player questions!

We didn’t do any, but I have a snazzy idea to make them better in the future.

Before that though, we need some more questions as we’re running low on the good ones! So please ask away.