Deep Space Battle Simulator News

This update adds a new 3d radar for smaller fighters that helps pilots find their targets easier, it can show the location of enemy ships, fighters, and the space station in all three dimensions! Pilots will also notice new countermeasures against homing missiles and a new fire suppression system for the Light Fighter, that regenerates some hull HP without having to land and repair the fighter. Different fighters now have different amounts of flares and homing missiles depending on their role in the space battle.


The UI of the energy controls and all mid-round purchasing stations for upgrades, droids, and fighters have been reworked to be more immersive, players can now interact with them as part of the world, instead of getting an UI window popup.


There is also a new EMP torpedo, if it manages to reach the enemy capital ship it will disable all engines, shields, and weapons for ten seconds, allowing you to unleash a super laser attack on the disabled ship or use its downtime to reposition your own ship! Once a capital ship hull section gets too damaged, more interior damage will be visible with ceiling parts crashing down, killing everything that happens to be below them and permanently blocking a pathway, so the crew needs to find alternative ways to reach the engine room or hangars!



Additionally, multiple other improvements and bug fixes have made it into this update, with solo players now getting more B1 droids as crew per default, making the huge capital ship interior a bit less empty and helping the player more with maintenance and combat tasks. You can read up on all the other changes, improvements, and fixes in the full changelog below!

If you have any kind of feedback or questions please let me know!

Full changelog:
- ADDED: new UI interaction system that allows players to interact with 3d screens inside the ship, currently used by all mid-round purchase stations and the energy controls
- ADDED: flares countermeasures to fighters (destroys any homing missiles that fly through the flares)
- ADDED: new interior damage that blocks pathways if the hull section they are located in gets damaged too much and kills units caught beneath
- ADDED: new 3d radar to fighter cockpits
- ADDED: ability to sabotage wall panels in enemy ships
- ADDED: new EMP torpedo disables the enemy ship for 10 seconds when it hits it
- ADDED: capital ship interior and exterior lights now go out when its firing its superlaser or got hit by an EMP torpedo
- ADDED: torpedoes, B2 attack, and Fireo pods can now be locked onto with homing missiles
- ADDED: fire suppression system to light fighter
- ADDED: small "wall of honor" display to the capital ship bridges
- ADDED: AI now uses the EMP torpedo

- IMPROVED: capital ship interior lighting
- IMPROVED: security station now shows the droid type of all available droids
- IMPROVED: 3d radar location, capital ship displays on the 3d radar, and added field of view lines to the 3d radar
- IMPROVED: homing missiles damage reliability against AI interceptors
- IMPROVED: droid mid-round purchasing screen now greys out droids that the player can't afford
- IMPROVED: 3d radar now automatically zooms in to objects that are closer, allowing less cluttering when multiple objects are close, while still being able to show objects that are far away

- REDUCED: B1 Robot HP from 150 to 100, B2 Robot HP from 600 to 450
- REDUCED: B1 Robot cost from 250 to 150, B2 Robot cost from 350 to 250
- REDUCED: torpedo purchase cost at the start of a round from 300 to 200
- REDUCED: fire suppression heal from 10HP in 5 seconds to 5HP in 5 seconds
- REDUCED: smaller fighter HP from 25 to 20
- REDUCED: homing missile damage against smaller fighters slightly (to reduce one-shots by homing missile turrets)

- CHANGED: default game mode to epic/station size
- CHANGED: teams with only one human player now spawn with 4 B1 Robots, larger teams spawn with 2 B1 Robots
- CHANGED: different fighters now have different amounts of flares and homing missiles
- CHANGED: increased individual asteroid size
- CHANGED: different asteroids now have slightly randomized hit points, some might require more hits (so fighters have to maneuver around them instead of just shooting them)
- CHANGED: enemy AI will now deploy AI Interceptors more often when the enemy has a smaller fighter advantage

- FIXED: homing missile warning sometimes persisting after missile ran out of fuel
- FIXED: B2 attack pod and torpedo upgrade descriptions
- REDUCED: light fighter HP from 30 to 25
- CHANGED: cockpit model to add windows below and make more space for the 3d radar
- FIXED: midround robot prices not being the same as the pre-round purchasing prices
- FIXED: midround torpedo price not being the same as its pre-round purchasing price
- FIXED: team selection UI not getting mouse focus correctly sometimes
- FIXED: midround fighter purchase UI not showing the number of missiles and flares the fighter has
- FIXED: all fighters having the same amounts of homing missiles/flares
- FIXED: AI interceptors being able to see cloaked fighters
- FIXED: ceiling damage not getting reset correctly between rounds
- FIXED: team selection UI focus issues

This update adds a brand-new Captain's Chair to the middle of the capital ship bridge. Only usable by that ship's captain, it offers a quick overview over the battle, allows direct firing of advanced weapons like torpedoes, can be used to relay information to the ships helm and turret stations, which are displayed to human operators and instantly followed by robots manning the stations, so make sure you assign a B1 robot to a station if you want your commands to be followed!



The Captain's Chair also includes a new navigation system, showing an overview over the battle, and allowing the captain to assign a waypoint the human or robot at the ship's helm will try to fly to!



To accommodate the new waypoint system, the AI flying behavior when controlling a capital ship got improved, and homing missiles received a buff to their damage to be more useful! Another common issue was the accuracy of the laser turrets when firing manually, I improved their accuracy greatly, using them should feel a lot better now!

If you have any questions or issues, please let me know below or on the game's discord, where you can also find other players to play with!


Full changelog:
- added new Captain's Chair to the capital ship bridge
- Captains can assign an enemy capital ship section to focus, this info gets transmitted to both AI and player turret operators, and smaller fighters
- Captains can also fire advanced weapons like torpedoes from the Captain's Chair
- Captains can also see information about their ship, and the enemy ship (if available) and have a small map they can give orders on
- increased captains chair map size
- increased "focus section" part of the captains chair UI
- added frigate to "focus section" part of the captains chair UI
- added ship orientation (relative to the enemy capital ship) command to the captains chair
- improved AI general ship driving skills (better navigation/path finding, now rotates the ship forward instead of awkwardly drifting to the target)
- added new "navigation system" tab to the Captain's Chair, opens a map of the space surrounding the capital ship and allows the captain to place a waypoint
- added new capital ship navigation waypoints, shown on the Captain's Chair navigation system and to players flying the capital ship, AI also follows them
- fixed captains chair UI persisting into the next round if it was opened at the end of a round
- added enemy shield info to the Captain's Chair UI (if available)
- Captain's Chair target frigate option now only shows when the enemy team has a frigate
- added keybinding info to the nav system
- can now zoom/move the nav system camera
- fixed orders showing on the nav system screen
- drastically increased turret accuracy when manual shooting
- Captain's Chair order now has a seperate cooldown (15s) to the class ability (since classes other than Officer can be Captain)
- new chair order cooldown is now displayed at the Captain's Chair UI
- potential fix for homing missile lock-on not being removed correctly
- increased homing missile damage from 10 to 20
- increased homing missile damage multiplier against AI interceptors from 1x to 3x (2 homing missiles now should destroy an AI interceptor)
- fixed nav system waypoints not appearing for clients

This smaller update takes some of the firepower of the smaller fighters away, and increases the damage of the capital ship turrets, to shift more power to the capital ships while keeping fighters viable. The damage of the Heavy Fighters rockets got decreased as well, while the bomber only got a slight reduction of bomb damage, which is compensated by reducing the bombers speed and mobility, making teamplay more important since he needs escort fighters, or the team has to destroy enemy fighter defenses prior to making bombing runs.

The engine overclock was also rarely used to resulting in random overheating very fast, to make this feature more viable there now is a 5 second period after overclocking before the engine has a chance to overheat, this is increased to 10 seconds if an Engineer overclocks it.

There are also some bug fixes, mostly relating to tutorial issues where players could die in some situations, making the tutorial incompletable and requiring the players to restart the tutorial. Random fighter models spawning in the blue ships science bay should also be fixed, with the space station receiving some fixes regarding fighters landing in its hangars.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know!


Full changelog:
-BUFFED: increased large and double laser turret damage by 10%
-BUFFED: increased gauss turret shield penetration from 35% to 50%

-NERFED: reduced smaller fighter damage by 15% for all fighters
-NERFED: reduced heavy fighter rocket damage from 50 to 40
-NERFED: reduced bomb damage from 500 to 450
-NERFED: reduced bomber speed from 75 m/s to 69 m/s
-NERFED: reduced bomber turn speed by 20%

-CHANGED: engine overclock now takes 5 seconds before randomly failing, instead of possibly failing earlier
-CHANGED: engineer has 10s instead of 5s overheating protection after overclocking the engine

-FIXED: resource points resetting on every death when "allow mid-round class changes" was enabled, instead of only when switching classes
-FIXED: being able to shoot while in the selection menus
-FIXED: one station hangar slot not being set up correctly, resulting in landed fighter not spawning there, but in [0,0,0] location
-FIXED: player being able to die in the first and third tutorial missions
-FIXED: players frigate being able to be destroyed in the tutorial missions

This update is the first one after the game's full release from Early Access, and features the most requested improvements, as well as a new optional win condition!



Players can now choose to allow "self-destruction" as a new win condition in the server host menu, this will add a terminal to each bridge that requires all three keycards to initiate a 60-second countdown, if the countdown does not get cancelled by the crew, the whole capital ship will self-destruct. To help defenders with defending their bridge, a second bridge sentry was added. Keep in mind those sentries won't work if your generator gets destroyed!



There are also improvements to hitmarkers, which now get activated when flying in a bomber and hitting something with a dropped bomb, and they also show the amount of damage dealt, this can be disabled in the settings. Bombers now also deal more damage with their bombs but have had their speed reduced, so they are even more vulnerable now and work best with allied fighters protecting them!

If you infiltrated the enemy ship, you might have noticed that enemy robots respawned quite fast, this has been reduced from 8 to 16 seconds to give players more opportunities to sabotage the enemy. You will also notice that the AI now deploys Barsk security guards at higher difficulty settings. There are also two new server settings, the first allowing uneven teams, if you want to play 1vs3 PvP for example, and the second one allows class changes mid-round, giving players the opportunity to change their class after they died, with the trade-off of losing their resource points when doing so. Also included in this patch are loading screen tips, more AI spawn variations so enemy AI doesn't always spawn in the same locations, and a few bugfixes!

Thank you all for your support, if you have any feedback or issues let me know!



Full changelog:

-ADDED: hitmarker for bombs dropped by the bomber fighter
-ADDED: impact sound inside the capital ship when B2 attack pod hit the ship
-ADDED: B2 attack and Fireo robot spawn locations are now randomized
-ADDED: "Allow Self-Destruct" host option
-ADDED: self-destruct terminal to the bridge, after a 60 second timer it blows up the whole capital ship, AI will try to stop the timer
-ADDED: "allow uneven team" host option (allows for 1vs3 games for example)
-ADDED: AI will now utilize Barsk Security Guards on the two highest difficulty settings
-ADDED: loading screen tips
-ADDED: second bridge sentry (remember you can deactivate the sentries by destroying the generator)
-ADDED: dealt damage amount to hitmarker
-ADDED: damage amount toggle option
-ADDED: new self-destruction warning UI
-ADDED: "allow mid-round class changes" server host option

-NERFED: reduced bomber speed by 30%
-BUFFED: increased bombers bomb damage by 20%

-CHANGED: AI respawn timer increased from 8 to 16 seconds

-IMPROVED: self-destruct terminal is now completely hidden if self-destruct option is disabled
-IMPROVED: slight changes to selection phase UI to improve chat visibilty
-IMPROVED: self-destruction countdown sound

-FIXED: potential fix for smaller fighters sometimes spawning inside the science bay
-FIXED: every player getting a hit marker if a drone hit something
-FIXED: sweepo robots can now use the medbay doors
-FIXED: potential fix for intruder alert not disabling itself after a while