Infinity: Battlescape News

This patch is focusing on stability (3 client crashes were fixed), an upgrade to the mission system and many AI improvements. The mission system now supports side missions, and to "validate" its implementation, we are first testing it with two kind of side missions: bounty hunting and nemesis NPCs.

Bounty hunting already existed in the game previously, but was sort of hidden to new players as it didn't have proper exposure to the missions list. The new system shows up to 5 bounties, and prioritizes the ones matching the selected player's ship class. Bounties are fully optional, but provide a small credits bonus if you successfully accomplish them. It is now possible to place a bounty on to an enemy player in the leaderboard menu (right-click on an enemy name and select the bounty you want to place on him). Only one bounty can be placed on each enemy at a time.

Nemesis missions are a variant of the bounty system. Every few hour or so, a powerful AI/bot is deployed to hunt the player. This "elite" AI has a higher skill level, is more precise and will exclusively focus on the player until he dies. Killing the nemesis provides a nice credits reward, but if you die to it it will stop hunting you and focus back on the rest of the battlefield.

In the future, we'd like to experiment with this new side missions system and react dynamically to various events on the battlefield to provide more focused directions to the (new) players. Examples: a mission to destroy an enemy spinal cruiser's canon; a mission to launch a torpedo on an isolate capship that has no AMS, etc..

Note that side missions are optional, so you can fully ignore them and continue to participate to the battle as normal. They only serve as to provide more objectives and small rewards to the players that want to get involved with them.

This patch also includes a long list of AI fixes and improvements. Some of these can affect the balance of battles (offense vs defense power) quite a bit, so it may require further iterations or a hotfix if we get feedback that a side gets reliably favored in battles versus the other side.

Also please note that the voice-overs (computer and transmission voices), as well as showing the max amount of HUD targets during combat, are now enabled by default.

-Flavien Brebion

• Added support for Bounty hunt missions
  
• It is now possible to place bounties on other players (Note: right-click on the leaderboard on an enemy player and select the bounty to place)
  
• Added support for Nemesis missions (Note: requires rank 3, and fairly rare, to not be too distracting. If players like them, we might increase their frequency in the future)
  
• Updated missions menu with updated descriptions and details panel (for new missions too)
  

• tweaked aiming precision, improved dodge boosting, improved energy management
  
• Fixed a small bug related to AI targetting priorities based upon rank differences
  
• Fix for AI spinal cruisers not firing their spinal canons
  
• Improved pathing and nagivation to attack fixed objectives (this should make the AI's capships more easily attack static objectives and finish battles instead of getting frozen in space)
  
• Improved capship's pathing around base shields
  
• Improved players targetting priority, now better taking the rank difference into account, and giving more challenge (higher ranked AIs) to higher-ranked players. Overall, players should find the AIs to be more proactive at attacking them
  
• Improved warping AIs to avoid bumping or dying into obstacles as they slow down
  
• Improved turbo boosting behavior of AIs
  
• Increased turn rate of interceptor and bomber's AIs, so that they can track fast-moving targets more easily
  

• Fixed transmission popup being incorrected centered on star map in certain screen resolutions
  
• Fixed behavior of cycling groups, it is now skipping abilities and only works on manual weapons
  
• Fixed tooltips twitching by a few pixels when touching the edges of the screen
  

• Fixed a client crash related to empty weapon groups displayed on HUD, which then caused a crash while in spectator mode
  
• Fixed a client freeze when trying to cycle weapon groups with an empty loadout
  
• Fixed a rare crash related to some space stations spawning too many asteroids around them, exceeding the client's capacity
  

• Added support to loading FMOD assets by guid in audio config file
  
• Player max credits are now capped to 100K
  
• The game now defaults to showing max (200) combat targets
  
• The game now defaults to voice-overs enabled
  
• Tweaked gravity attenuation formula, as it was too weak around the gas giant
  
• Reduced gas giant's mass
  
• Added 2 station battles in low orbit of the gas giant
  
• Small reduction (-15%) of hitpoints on station's large shield generators
  

Hey everybody,

We are introducing a new patch today to improve game systems related to our future carrier update. Radial menus have received a polish pass, with a new design and description details, and should now properly reflect the state of each sub system or weapon (like cooldowns). Abilities have been reworked and integrated to the loadout/weapons MFD and can now be used with their group number keys instead of their own dedicated keys. This allowed us to clean some obsolete keybinds and introduce a few new ones for targetting primary or secondary mission objectives, or auto-targetting sub-systems on the target (this should massively improve the value of interceptors vs capital ships).

We've also been experimenting with voice-overs for incoming transmissions and computer alerts. They are currently disabled by default, so if you want to give them a try, make sure to turn the options on in the audio settings. Some of the abilities have been tweaked or reworked to make use of the new ability system.

Coming next, we'll probably release another intermediary patch by the end of June with tweaks and improvements (mostly ability-related) before the main carrier update (likely in July). After that we'll pretty much be done with core gameplay and move on to the rewards system (medals, achievements, skins, cross-server persistency etc..).

We aren't sure yet how the single player mission editor, tutorials or modding will fit in terms of development priorities, but they'll probably keep us busy at least until the end of the year. After that we'll have to do a final polish/optimizations pass and we should be good to go for the release. It's been long coming (better late than never) but it seems like we're finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. We appreciate your patience and support in that adventure.

-Flavien Brebion

• New visual design
  
• Info details displayed at center of the wheel
  
• State are better displayed, including cooldown/requirements notifications, associated hotkey etc..
  
• Radial menus can now be opened/closed by tapping a key and clicking on one of many items (holding and selecting an item is still possible though)
  
• When hovering over a weapon group on the weapons radial menu, the corresponding group is now highlighted in the loadout/weapons MFD
  
• Added a new targetting radial menu (accessible through holding T, G or H keys). Mostly convenience for people that do not want to learn all hotkeys (or on gamepads with limited buttons)
  
• Added a new targetting keybind: auto-target best sub-system/hardpoint on target (will automatically choose a hardpoint to destroy, and switch to the next one upon destroyed). Default hotkey: Y
  
• Added a new targetting event: target closest primary objective. Default hotkey: U
  
• Added a new targetting event: target closest secondary objective. Default hotkey: I
  
• Removed hotkeys from unused targetting modes: cycle through previous/next targets (default hotkeys on Y and U, now been replaced by the new targetting events)
  
• Removed hotkey to deploy a mine (default: M)
  
• Added a dedicated overcharge radial menu (default: holding B)
  
• Added a dedicated formations radial menu (default: holding N)
  

• Abilities are now bound to weapon groups and will be accessible through the 1-9 keys like weapons. Their state is also displayed in the loadout/weapons MFD as well as the weapons radial menu (default: RMB)
  
• Ship/loadout menu now displays the ability type in the preview card (if any)
  
• Removed targetting assist upgrade (Note: you can still toggle the assist option in the gameplay settings)
  
• Fixed repairing hardpoints on an ally using a repair-field, not providing repair notifications or rewards
  
• Revamped Stealth upgrade to be a toggle (now depleting energy over time)
  
• Fixed being able to engage Stealth while in warp
  
• Stealth no longer gets disengaged while turbo boosting
  
• Warp jam no longer affects allies in standard (Note: removed Warp Jammer II upgrade as that's what it provided)
  
• Warp jam now costs 150 energy points for every use
  
• Introduced a new warp jam boost upgrade that increases the jam duration (at the cost of a small range reduction)
  
• Introduced a new energy regen rate upgrade that increases the regen rate at the cost of max energy (Note: not available on bombers and cruisers, and incompabile with the capacitors upgrades)
  
• Improved reliability (mobility + slight hitpoints buff) of proximity mines (this should make them more of a threat)
  
• Improved AI usage of mines (they will no longer waste mines at large distances, or if the enemy isn't a cap ship, and increase the mines drop frequency when fighting against a nearby capital ship target)
  
• Increased mines launch speed, so that they get away from the source ship more quickly before they're fully activated
  
• Unactivated mines without a target no longer get shot at by turrets
  

• Added a male and female officer voice over for HQ transmissions (Note: some of the female transmissions are not complete yet, so it is possible that not all transmissions will have a proper voice over)
  
• Added a synthetic female computer voice for alerts and warnings
  
• Both of those options are turned off by default. We need to evaluate if they're too spammy and cause audio fatigue before we promote them to be the standard. Feedback here is appreciated
  
• If you want to give them a try, turn the settings on in the audio menu
  
• Renormalized audio volume (Note: this will reset the volume settings other than general volume)
  

• Hardpoints now have a min repair time of 3 minutes
  

• Added an option in controls settings to toggle the keyboard helper screen on first deploy
  
• Fix for extended MFD title name
  
• Empty MFD pages no longer show their title on the HUD (exemple: an empty squad will no longer show "squad" floating on top of the MFD on the HUD)
  
• Fixed formatting of text in loadout/weapons MFD (not properly aligned to bottom MFDs, and could not fit 10 groups before)
  
• Removed beeping sound when lock is sub-optimal
  
• Locking HUD's circle now gets bigger as target is aligned and differencial velocity is minimized (note: the logic also got swapped, previously the circle was getting bigger when the aim was inaccurate)
  
• Fixed guided weapons (missiles/torps/mines) indicators not properly highlighted on HUD when they're targetting the player (their color/brightness should've been increased)
  
• Improved reactivity of "incoming" missile alert: there was up to 1/4th of a second of network delay for the alert to trigger after a guided weapon got activated/detected. There is no delay anymore
  
• New notification added to depleting ammo on a weapon (+chaffs, mines etc..)
  
• Tweaks to alerts/warnings priorities
  
• Volume levels are now locked behind a "customize" checkbox in the audio settings (the goal here is to have players avoid touching them by accident unless they really want to)
  
• Tweaks to HUD color themes
  
• Updated help screen (F9)
  

• Fixed crash bug when loading old/obsolete input profile XML files (Note: this could have affected old returning players)
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the locking HUD to disappear while the ship is being repaired/resupplied by an ally
  
• Fixed guided weapons triggering "incoming" beeping alert despite not being detected by the player target (note: the alert text did not show up, but the alert beeping sound did, which wasn't coherent)
  
• Fixed incorrect welcome transmission being sent when selecting Scoria instead of Havok upon first joining a match
  

As you may have noticed, for the past 3 months we've been experimenting with a bunch of major gameplay/balance-related changes on the PTR (beta branch) test server. We focused on improving the feeling of flying with small ships, making them more nimble as many players were hoping for. The interceptor in particular has received a massive linear thrust buff. As a result of small ships (interceptor, bomber and the corvette to some extent) being more maneuverable, we significantly nerfed the turbo boost on all these ships and removed the "jolt" boost. We also introduced asymmetrical thrust to add depth to the flight model and removed the ability to form up on an enemy. A simplified damage model was introduced for propulsion (losing thrust as your ship gets more damaged) and we improved various issues related to the spinal cruiser's canon.

However, all these changes might have introduced some new balance issues, especially in relation to weapons (some of them might need an accuracy boost to better track the more nimble ships now). As usual, any feedback on these changes is appreciated so do not hesitate to let us know on the forums or comments. As for the next step in development we are looking at a patch in 1-2 months for the first iteration on the carrier gameplay changes and, hopefully, a new planet/moon. Once this is done, we'll probably consider the core gameplay near completion and move to finalizing the rest of the game/content.

• longitudinal linear forward thrust massively increased by +100% (x2)
  
• longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-40% of forward thrust)
  
• horizontal linear thrust increased by +20% (still symmetrical)
  
• vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +100%
  
• vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-30% of upwards thrust)
  
• speed cap increased by +20%
  
• rotational thrust increased by +50% (pitch, yaw)
  
• removed turbo boost initial jolt
  
• turbo boost provides a constant +50% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +250%)
  

• longitudinal linear forward thrust massively increased +90%
  
• longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-25% of forward thrust)
  
• horizontal linear thrust increased by +60%
  
• vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +120%
  
• vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-25% of upwards thrust)
  
• speed cap increased by +10%
  
• rotational thrust increased by +25% (pitch, yaw)
  
• removed turbo boost initial jolt
  
• turbo boost provides a constant +75% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +150%)
  
• increased turbo energy cost per second by +25%
  

• longitudinal linear foward thrust massively increased by +70%
  
• longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-10% of forward thrust)
  
• horizontal linear thrust increased by +60%
  
• vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +40%
  
• vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-15% of upwards thrust)
  
• rotational thrust increased by +40% (pitch) and +40% (yaw))
  
• swapped rotation speed cap between pitch and yaw (the ship will now turn faster on yaw than pitch)
  
• removed turbo boost initial jolt
  
• Note that turbo boost thrust bonus remains unchanged (+100%)
  
• increased turbo energy cost per second by +50%
  

• it is no longer possible to get in flight formation with an enemy
  
• it is now possible to accelerate over the combat speed with flight auto-assist (previously holding forward was capped to max combat speed)
  
• implemented a simplified propulsion damage model based on HP damage (-25% thrust between 15% and 30% HP and -50% thrust below 15% HP)
  
• removed ability to share credits or ship points between players
  
• removed GyroBoost upgrade on all ships (it would be redundant with the rotational thrust increase changes)
  
• removed speed cap option
  

• added auto-zoom to spinal canon's charge
  
• added 3 seconds of warmup to charge sequence (not affected by propulsion dampening)
  
• spinal canon's charge sequence is now exclusive to other weapons firing
  
• increased damage by +25% (25K damage per shot)
  
• improvements for network jittering when firing the spinal cruiser's canon
  
• added a charging progress bar on HUD when firing the spinal cruiser's canon
  
• fixed being able to charge the spinal cruiser's canon in invalid match state (starting/ending match)
  

• reduced torpedoes max locking range to 50 Km (down from 100 Km)
  
• increased base defense's MK10 Orbital Canon aiming precision and range (to 150 Km, now equal to the spinal cruiser canon's)
  
• interceptor's shield regeneration rate decreased by -20% (to 1 SP/sec from 1.25 SP/sec)
  
• increased corvette's heat capacity by +16% (to 350 from 300 heat points)
  
• decreased Phalanx/CIWS heat generation per shot to 3 (from 4 heat points)
  
• increased min warp entry speed (~66% of combat speed on all ships)
  
• added a per-ship warp speed coefficient to better tune warp speeds per ship
  
• loss of propulsion while warming warp now also applies to longitudinal accelerations
  

• reduced depth scaling for HUD indicators, to make markers scale more naturally with depth. Also applied depth scaling to selected target's marker. Increased transparency over distance to make distant targets more easily noticeable
  
• camera zoom is now applied to third-person camera modes too
  
• weapons aiming direction dots are now smoothed before and not after projection on HUD, which should remove the "latency" in their movements when moving the virtual head around (or with TrackIR)
  
• added thrust buff/debuff change below throttle indicator on HUD (ex.: loss of thrust when damaged, or thrust increase when boosting)
  
• renamed some MFDs to be more clear (ex.: EW is now Ship Systems, Chat is now Comms; System is now Notifications)
  
• increased HUD's default number of navigation and combat targets since small ship indicators are now smaller on screen at a distance
  

• increased AI aiming precision on small ships (small ships being more mobile, they also need to be more dangerous for the game to not get more boring)
  
• AI capital ships are now allowed to fly 15% below the max base defense's range
  

• experimental network change to improve stability of players input queue
  
• added ship debris/wreckage for all small ships as well as cruiser (Note: all ships should have their unique destruction/debris now except the carrier)
  
• added smoke trail behind ship debris
  

Saturday's event will start off with a review of our latest patch notes, with Flavien Brebion.
We'll be hosting an official Live-Stream, links will be posted prior to the event.

We'll follow up our development commentary with some community gameplay. PvP if you'd like, or co-ordinate with others for some team PvE. USEast server this Saturday, at 19:00 UTC

Join us for some PvP and PvE gameplay, squad up or go solo, fleet up with capital ships or dogfight with your favorite fighter loadout.



The most significant changes relate to our "flight model," and have been undergoing iterative testing on the PTR server, currently available via the public "Beta" branch here on steam. In addition to moving some features over to our main branch, we've updated a few visual effects, and are working on UI / UX improvements.
Full release notes will be posted later this week, stay tuned!

Let us know what you think about the update, what you love, hate, or think could be improved upon. We're interested in constructive feedback that can help direct us to make changes that will ultimately end up improving the game, so let us know your thoughts :) #Battlescape-Feedback and #bug-reports channels are ideal, for longer posts you can use our Discord Forum Channel.

---


Join the Discord for Fleet Comms, or use the in-Squad comms to co-ordinate.
Discord Invite Link - https://discord.gg/wTeDTaK

See you in game!

We're starting 2023 with a new patch, introducing various AI improvements and battle AI budget fixes that should help balancing the battles better, especially when players join a battle late after it has started. Also of note, a few nerfs to AMS systems, which felt pretty overpowered (the introducing of the new chassis system in the previous major patch, meant that corvettes can now fit auto AMS turrets, increasing the laser spam in battles and decreasing the chance for torpedoes to deal damage).

We're also happy to unveil our new planet, Tersac, which will remind you of Cinder in many ways (lava oceans, dark ridged mountains). Note that atmospheric glitches can be visible at low altitudes. Fixing those will require some major update work to our atmospheric scattering shaders during the polish phase. This year we want to ramp up a bit on planet environments production to have more variety during our future release, so new planets should be patched in more regularly.

Coming up next we still have to finish the carrier gameplay revamp, which requires more AI work (especially in terms of cooperation between AI ships). You'll already have a taste of it in this patch, as corvettes now properly form up on allies they want to repair/resupply, and should no longer stick to capital ships like parasites. If you notice any more AI behavior issues, please let us know.

• Revamped battle AI budget allocation: it is now dynamic and better takes into account players at the start of a battle, or joining and changing balance in the middle of a battle. This should result in more balanced battles, especially when players are involved
  
• Updated AI reinforcement budget system to be more balanced between the two sides until reinforcements get exhausted. In practise, this should make battles feel more "alive" and dynamic than before
  
• Fixed AI turrets not firing or targetting structures/modules anymore despite them being selected as the primary target (both for AI and player ships) (Note: due to this bug, AI capital ships could not finish off remaining base infrastructure, dragging the end of battles)
  
• Fixed an issue with the match loop where a reactor or plant core could award match victory points after the battle at this base had already ended
  
• Increased repair rate of damaged base modules after 5 minutes of not taking any damage (this should allow bases that are no longer under attack to repair faster)
  
• Exposed reactor or plant cores will take a small (0.1%/s) amount of damage over time to ensure a stuck battle will eventually end (ex.: AI only that have run out of ammo, or are blocked by asteroids) (Note: this continuous damage may increase if victory adds favor the attacker)
  
• Fixed a rare case of battlescape generation that allowed two bases to get located near each others, messing up the balance of battles happening at those locations
  
• Reduced HP on Orbital canons and central base's shields as it was draging battles too much to deplete them
  

• Fixed an AI bug that made corvettes AMS sometimes fire at interceptors when there were no other targets
  
• Fixed an AI bug that made corvettes only fire one weapon group at once, despite allowing concurrent automatic weapon groups in the previous patch (Note: this will make AI corvettes more deadly overall, as they can now fire both kinetics and blaster turrets at once)
  
• Corvette AI improvements: avoid bumping into capital ships; avoid cluttering on the same target to repair/resupply; avoid repairing targets that have a repair field themselves (ex.: other corvettes or carrier)
  
• Corvettes can now actively fly & repair an ally; ships can actively go and fly towards a corvette (or carrier) to repair/resupply themselves..
  
• Fixed AI not firing at the base's shield from outside when a target is inside the shield, but outside of the firing range (despite the shield itself being within firing range)
  
• AI ships will try to avoid overheating by temporarily shutting down kinetic weapons when reaching high heat levels
  
• AI attacking ships will no longer stay away from a base's main defenses when outnumbering those
  
• AI attacking ships will be more agressive towards finishing off a base despite main defenses being up when the victory odds are favoring the attackers (>60%)
  
• Orbital-range attacker AIs will now prioritize high-importance defense modules (such as shield gens and plants) over other modules
  
• Fixed bugs related to AIs flying and crashing into the ground at low altitudes
  

• AMS lasers no longer fire at unactivated missiles/torpedoes
  
• Reduced AMS laser damage by -25%
  
• Mass modifiers are now based upon the initial mass of the ship, and not multiplicative when stacking ship upgrades that affect mass
  Ex.: A ship of mass 500 tons has 2 upgrades that add +10% mass, previously it ended up at 500
• 1.1
• 1.1 = 605t, it will now end at 500 + 500
• 0.1 + 500
• 0.1 = 600t
  This means that some ships, despite the loadout being unchanged, might end up with a slightly different mass (ex.: carrier's mass in default loadout is lighter, so itsspeed cap was increased by a few m/s)
  
• Repair fields now repair hardpoints on a target by increasing HP order/priority (small damaged turrets first, then bigger ones next, then MK7+ last)
  
• Reduced gimbal angle on railgun to 0.25° (down from 0.5°)
  
• Tweaks to alternative ship's chassis base stats to make them more balanced (and coherent with other loadouts)
  
• Added an Extra Rockets upgrade
  
• Missile retargetting upgrade now properly affects the corvette's missile array
  
• Extra missiles upgrade now properly affects capacity of EMP missile launchers as well as SSM batteries
  

• Warp jam visual effect is now played over on every affected ship and toned down on the source ship/player
  
• Engaging warp jam now informs the player on how many enemy targets were affected
  
• Successfully warped jammed enemies now generate 150 support points per affected target
  
• A jammed warp drive that the player tries to engage now properly shows a warning on the HUD (with remaining cooldown) instead of nothing
  
• Increased warp jam's range to 10 Km (up from 5 Km)
  

• Tentative fix for "AcquireCredentials" error when connecting to a server from Windows 7 without TLS 1.0 support
  
• Fixed left/right sound asymmetry when firing weapons (left/right, sometimes weapons on left side could not be heard)
  
• Fixed a server crash when an administrator manually starts a battle at a neutral base
  
• Fixed a multithreading server crash bug in the players state manager
  
• Reduced desync that caused an error correction snapping the cruiser's orientation back by a few degrees when starting to charge the spinal canon (Note: the root problem is not totally fixed, but should be more subtle now)
  

• Added a new planet: Tersac, a Cinder-like volanic planet with large lava oceans and dark ridged mountains
  
• Added officer portraits during incoming HQ transmissions
  
• Added a transmission notification when orbital canons are destroyed
  
• Fixed misplaced floating shield generator on Xanthar Stn