Lost Fleet News

This week's update focuses on the camera system that drives turret aiming, combined with improvements to the aiming reticle capital ships should now be a lot more fun to play. Here are the details:

Improvements:

• Improved camera system for turrets: Turret cameras are smoother and adjust your view point when obstructed.
  
• Improved zoom ability: zoom is now instant, position/rotation stays in sync with other cameras
  
• Upgraded most ships to set point of aim reticle at the distance to current target.
  
• New option to use the virtual stick horizontal axis for Roll and A/D for Yaw (for those of you that preferred Elite Dangerous controls)
  
• Zeus sniper now has separate angular drag value while aiming
  
• You can now press 'z' to swap cameras in map view
  
• Changed Talon missile weapon to new lock on system
  

Fixes:

• Fixed stage lights interacting with tactical map holograms (ice stage was washed out).
  
• Fixed an out of range index error related to turret systems.
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed Red team players to make a ton of money selling ships in campaign mode (thanks PantsAdvanced)
  
• Fixed AI Sabre being unable to fire (thanks Ouch Crab)
  
• Fixed Boxer weapon particle and sound effects not playing reliably, AI engagement distance improved
  
• Increased Zeus boost force
  
• Increased Hammerhead tac reload frequency from 4 to 1.5
  
• Reduced Boxer damage per pellet from 2 to 1 now that it is firing all its projectiles
  
• Slightly reduced projectile passthrough leeway time (most projectiles have a fraction of a second before they can collide with anything to prevent physics weirdness)
  

Hey everyone! Patch notes are at the bottom, but here are the highlights:

Sabre Heavy Fighter
The Sabre has been part of our testbed for improvements to smaller ship combat, and you can expect a number of improvements to trickle down to all the other ships in the coming weeks.

Specifically the Sabre fills a critical gap as a dogfighter that doesn't rely on auto-aim for it's primary weapon. It features a new missile lock-on mechanic that will be coming to the Talon in the next patch and an improved distance-based aiming reticle that should greatly improve capital ship aiming in the near future.

Tactical Map
Fleet management features have been highly requested, and the ability to give basic orders, request healing, and AI improvements to take the load off the player in singleplayer are coming. In the meantime you can now press 'm' to bring up a mothership focused view of the battlefield, this screen will be going through a number of iterations before we're done with it but we hope it'll help make sense of the fray.

New Buy Menu
The buy menu has been overhauled with new art, animations and sound. The old menu wasn't able to provide feedback when navigated with a controller, so this is a big step forward on that front. Improvements in the future will include illustrated descriptions for the weapons and abilities on each ship, so stay tuned.

Camera Improvements
Improvements to flight experience are an ongoing process, we've tweaked the camera system for all of the smaller ships to make them feel more dynamic. Head over to the Steam Forums and let us know if you think things are improved and especially if you have specific ideas on changes you think still need to be made.

More to come
Moving forward our highest priority is getting out rebindable keys and full controller support, this will be a multi-week process so expect regular content updates as we chip away at it. We'd like to thank each of you who has decided to support us in Early Access and encourage all of you to hit up the forums with any ideas you have for how to make the game better, if you have a cool idea for a ship we want to hear about it . Thanks again!

Update notes:

• Added Sabre heavy fighter
  
• Pressing 'm' now brings up the new Tactical Map
  
• New art, sound and animations for buy menu
  
• Mule miners now auto target the nearest resources when you take control
  
• Fixed target UI getting stuck when taking over a ship that already had a target
  
• Fixed sync issues for late joiners
  
• Disabled shadow casting for lowest graphics setting
  
• Ice Ships freed in Stage 4 will no longer be deleted going to Stage 5 (thanks Banana)
  
• Disabled self destruct debug command
  
• Fixes to Refinery thrusters not firing/updating
  
• Computer players in campaign mode will now upgrade their ship even if they are in combat
  
• Escape menu now pauses the game in singleplayer
  
• Adjustments to the cameras for all strikecraft, expect additional refinements in the future
  
• Increased flak damage from 3 to 4
  
• Increased Talon health from 68 to 70
  
• Reduced cost of Raven, Talon and Boxer from 200 to 100
  
• Reduced Zeus cost from 450 to 400
  

Our first update to Lost Fleet is focused on ship handling, many of you have had issues with steering and we've reworked both the way drag is applied to your motion as well as the thrust values for every single fighter. Be assured that we'll keep working on this until it's right, and we make a point to read and respond to as much of your feedback as possible.

Here are todays update notes:

• Separated the drag values for fighter craft so that steering and aiming are much less punishing
  
• Thruster vertical and horizontal torque power adjusted for all fighters to match
  
• Reduced mining bonus from 34 to 20
  
• Added player resource collector bonus to Mule description (resources income is split among players, anyone piloting a mule gets a personal 20% bonus to the resources they collect)
  
• Zeus health increased from 175 to 200
  
• Computer Players no longer buy refineries if no resources remain on the map
  
• Updated tab menu formatting for player cards, kill counter shouldn’t be cut off anymore
  
• Boss enemy wreckage no longer despawns before map change
  
• Enemy shipyards now have an effect to indicate they are building enemy ships, spawn time increased from 90 to 100, armor increased to from 0 to 1
  
• Cursor is now confined to the game screen
  
• Fixed Deadzone, Virtual Stick Size and Orbital Cam Speed sliders
  
• Updated repair ship tooltip to let players know they can use ‘t’ to find the nearest ship in need of repairs
  

We're excited to announce the launch of Lost Fleet into Early Access! Lets talk about our plans and how you can help shape development.

EA Release Trailer
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Learning to Play
We'll be rolling out a Guide as well as additional in game tutorial content as quick as we can, in the meantime for those of you wanting to see the game we recommend the excellent Wanderbots.

Early Access Plans
We're a small 2 man team so choosing where our Early Access time is spent will be critical, here's what we're looking at right now:

Expanding the roster of Ships: There are 21 playable ships right now + 2 more coming in the next few weeks. We'll be looking closely for feedback on designs you'd like to see added to the game as well as ways we can improve our current lineup.

New Modes: We've already started work on a limitless survival mode in which you hold out against an endless wave of enemies from the campaign. If you have an idea for a game type you'd like to see, hit the
Community Discussions and let us know! (also we want to do gun game but with ships)

New Areas and Bosses will be coming, expect some teaser soon.

Controller Support, HOTAS and the Deck: Fans of flight games are passionate about their controls so we hope you'll bear with us as we work to get support out for each of these. Support for Steam Deck will have to be unofficial for now but I'll be spending some spare time with my Deck getting it running as well as I can.

We'll be running some Skirmish Events to test the hard limit for max number of players. We want to see how many players we can get into a skirmish match before we set any in-game limits.

Thank you!
Finally a big thank you to everyone supporting us, we couldn't do this without you and we're very excited for what comes next!