Stars of Icarus News

• [p]All things Stars of Icarus and where it’s headed[/p]
• [p]The glory days of Guns of Icarus[/p]
• [p]Diving into nerdy tech details[/p]
• [p]And answering any questions whatsoever![/p]

Not to get mushy, but there's a special pleasure to working together with other people to achieve your goals. While many of the best multiplayer games keep the requirements for actual teamwork to a minimum, I tend to find myself favoring those that reward it. It's why I've long had a soft spot for Dota 2 (and now Deadlock), and why, long before the launch of Sea of Thieves, you could find me playing Guns of Icarus. So I'm overjoyed that developer Muse Games is back and taking us into space with Stars of Icarus, which has just kicked off a two-week playtest on Steam.

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• [p]We now define ammo effects as modifying projectile speed, or projectile range. If it just says it modifies projectile speed, it does not impact range. If it talks about modifying projectile range, it will not affect projectile speed. [/p]

• [p]The Squid is a speedy and lightly equipped two seat corvette. As the fastest and most manoeuvrable crewed vessel, it can keep up with fighter combat and make quick hits against other crewed vessels, but requires coordination and upkeep of automated systems. Its gun layout encourages an assault approach before passing by and laying in supporting fire with the side gun. When it’s time to leave, the back gun provides cover, or can be used as a finisher. Although its maneuverability can mean a skilled pilot with good crew communication can find other ways to use its layout and positioning to full effect. Unlike other crewed ships, it lacks point defense guns and a tech station.[/p]

• [p]The Albatross is a heavily armored and shielded single seat fighter. It maintains the effective maneuverability, and boost enabled drift engines of fighters in its class, but trades off the mobility drive and top speed for its extra survivability. It excels at interception by jousting lighter enemy ships and staying within the attack envelope of larger friendly craft.[/p]

• [p]A long lava filled map full of smokey corridors. Fly into the center for long but exposed sightlines, fly to the sides for a stealthier flank, or stick low along the jagged floor to catch your enemies by surprise.[/p]

• [p]Highly customizable community hosted dedicated servers. Find your favorite place to hang out![/p]

• [p]Available during limited test sessions, jump into a locked loadout deathmatch, where your strategic choices in the lobby matter just as much as your tactics and communication in combat.[/p]

• [p]We’ve decided to make a significant pass at the crew gunning experience for this Alpha. We wanted to make gunning more engaging, with active decision making and to make human gunners definitively better than automation. We’ve also tried to create an entry point for new players to be able to jump on without understanding every nuance of ammos. Lastly, we wanted to give ourselves some space to balance crewed guns against fighters and against other crew ships in slightly different ways as well as adjust some of the style of “prepwork” play to focus more on power mechanics.[/p]

• [p]Reloading a full magazine only takes 1s penalty time, instead of a full reload[/p]
  • [p]This also affects fighters.[/p]
• [p]Reduced the amount Overheal decays on all stations.[/p]

• [p]We’ve added two new “Gunner Tools” (not available to fighter pilots). We hope these active abilities help power up human gunners in ways that aren’t accessible to automation, and give players more interesting decision points while operating a gun. Fighter pilots already have a lot of buttons to juggle, we’ve changed how they interact with ammo a bit, and this gives us another lever to balance fighters and crewed ships, so we decided not to bring these to fighters.[/p]

• [p]Gun Station Override is now also considered a “Gunner Tool”[/p]
• [p]Arc Extension Tool[/p]
  • [p]Extends your guns turning arcs and projectile range for 30 seconds.[/p]
  • [p]60s cooldown.[/p]
• [p]Reload Tool[/p]
  • [p]Instantly reload your weapon with bonus ammo.[/p]
  • [p]60s Cooldown.[/p]

• [p]The ammo archetypes apply the following buffs/debuffs to all ammos in that archetype:[/p]
  • [p]Anti-Fighter Spec[/p]
    • [p]+20% Projectile Speed.[/p]
    • [p]-15% Damage.[/p]
  • [p]Anti Crew Spec[/p]
    • [p]+15% Damage.[/p]
    • [p]-20% Projectile Speed.[/p]
• [p]Anti-Fighter Ammos:[/p]
  • [p]Overvelocity[/p]
  • [p]Zip[/p]
  • [p]Fighter Proximity - Increases effective size of projectile against fighters[/p]
  • [p]Scattershot - Fires more, weaker, less accurate projectiles, saturating an area.[/p]
• [p]Anti-Crew Ammos:[/p]
  • [p]Lochnagar[/p]
  • [p]Penetrating Shrapnel[/p]
  • [p]Hack[/p]
  • [p]Incendiary[/p]
  • [p]Jump[/p]
  • [p]Shield Lifesteal - Takes a small percentage of damage done to enemy shields and spreads it among your active shield segments.[/p]
• [p]Balanced Ammos:[/p]
  • [p]Repulsor[/p]
  • [p]Firewall Protocol[/p]
  • [p]Convergence[/p]
• [p]Many of these ammos received small changes in order to have them mesh better with the ammo archetype stats they received.[/p]

• [p]Added Broadside “Wing Mirrors”[/p]
  • [p]Includes friendly and spotted enemy ships.[/p]
  • [p]Enemies that enter your broadsides cause a flashing alert on your wing mirrors, including hotkeys to immediately snap your view left and right.[/p]
  • [p]Adjusted default bindings for Snap View Left/Right to Z and C[/p]
• [p]Added Fighter Rearview “Mirror”[/p]
  • [p]Shows a simplified version of ships directly behind you, allowing you to see if anyone is on your tail[/p]
  • [p]The helm HUD now displays the aim and status of your weapons. [/p]
  • [p]See a quick view of what guns are being operated, what their status is (destroyed, reloading, ready to fire), and who or what is operating them.[/p]

• [p]Viewfinder now always in 5th tool slot[/p]
• [p]Viewfinder is now raised, but unzoomed, by default, and pressing Tool5 again will switch back to your previous tool[/p]
  • [p]One of the major issues we’ve had with the viewfinder is that it was disorienting and slow to use, instead of allowing you to immediately peek through the ship and spot enemy ships.[/p]
• [p]Captains have access to the Viewfinder, and can be toggled on and off with Tool5 to see through their own ship’s hull.[/p]
  • [p]You’ll find this especially useful on our new crewed ship[/p]
• [p]New Active Scan on Left Click, spotting an enemy from any distance or cloud cover for 10 seconds if aimed accurately.[/p]
• [p]Crew can press T to mark terrain while using viewfinder to communicate locations while using the viewfinder[/p]

• [p]The tractor beam is now a standard weapon, and can be equipped in standard and battery slots (but not dedicated support slots).[/p]
• [p]Tractor beam increases linear and rotational drag on hit ships [/p]
• [p]Tractor beam now does a moderate amount of non piercing kinetic damage [/p]

• [p]Tech stations were a little too spammable in Alpha 1. We’ve tuned them a little longer, so enemy ships have a chance to punish a poorly used tech activate without risking getting hit by it again midway through an engagement.[/p]

• [p]Active time reduced[/p]
• [p]Cooldown increased[/p]
• [p]Speed drive now applies 2 levels of power drain to ship weapons[/p]
• [p]The speed drive simply made the Raptor unhittable, while still able to shoot back. Now, shooting back is further limited. Other ships rarely needed long active times or frequent usage rates to use the speed drive to engage or disengage. Now usage should be a similar level of commitment for crewed ships, but a more proper commitment for the Raptor.[/p]

• [p]Now less powerful in the centre, while still having the same pull at max range. More ships should now be able to use weaker manoeuvrability tools to escape more consistently. [/p]

• [p]You should now spawn near larger friendly ships more constantly away from enemy players, and in less situations that would put you in immediate danger. [/p]

• [p]Raised forward speed and acceleration on all ships slightly[/p]
  • [p]All ships were coming in a little slow without additional tools or engine buffs. Getting into and out of cover or combat was harder than seemed reasonable.[/p]
• [p]Raised turning acceleration of Manta and Taurus[/p]
  • [p]Similarly, Manta and Taurus piloting was also too tool dependent, and made crewed ships feel unresponsive by default. Larger ships are supposed to require more commitment, but not completely fall apart the moment they have to change targets.[/p]

• [p]Precision Repair increased overheal conversion 50%->100%[/p]
• [p]Precision Repair reduced shield repair value to 200->180[/p]
• [p]Precision Status reduced reboot reduction 5.5->5[/p]
• [p]Both precision tools unselected component cooldown reduced 66%->50% base cooldown[/p]

• [p]Automaton Range Increased Significantly[/p]
• [p]Automaton Repair on non shield components increased[/p]
• [p]Automaton now only connects to a single weapon[/p]

• [p]Our short range engagements are a little further away than we anticipated. The shotgun was almost always ineffective in broadside engagements even at what most people would consider short range.[/p]

• [p]Ammo increased 15->18[/p]
• [p]Burst Delay Decreased .66->.5[/p]

• [p]This slot was rarely used, and a maximum of 1 engineering tool limited the Captain’s ability to deal with anything but simple damage for a large opportunity cost of not taking another pilot tool. Now all Captains have 1 engineering tool at all times, and can choose to take 2 with their any slot for a more interesting tradeoff. [/p]

• [p]Missiles lock on faster[/p]
• [p]Hacking missile reduced to 1 ammo, but damage more than doubled. [/p]

• [p]Now adds a consistent amount of total push per magazine[/p]

• [p]Cloud now blocks more vision and spotting[/p]
• [p]Increased downward speed 100->150[/p]
• [p]Increased cloud lifetime 10s->20s [/p]

• [p]Generally reduced the amount of extra thrust on ships that previously had very high effective speed from booster rockets. This should make it a little more consistent across ships. Players we’re boosting into walls unexpectedly a little more often than we liked, and it could be pretty unpredictably fast on some ships. [/p]

• [p]Larger Fighter Proximity detonation[/p]
• [p]Turns faster and controls tighter[/p]

• [p]Damage done to components was not properly passing damage along to hull in Alpha 1, leading to non obvious inconsistencies and shots doing no damage[/p]

• [p]We expect this will fix most midmatch screen blackout/crash to desktop issues on supported hardware.[/p]

• [p]Engine damage is not intended to cause ship rotation, unlike Guns of Icarus. (That mechanic was moved to engine hack.) But it is supposed to slow your turn rate along the axes those engines would apply torque to your ship. [/p]

• [p]A new full color map rendering solution, with better 3D indicators of ship position and coordinates. On the same screen, we’ve also adjusted the ship diagram to be a quick look at your ships loadout, with clickable stations to bring up their descriptions. [/p]

• [p]Consolidated our “T” marking behavior in a few ways. Marking terrain points is now available on guns, in viewfinder, and on antenna. Players using the helm can also mark enemy ships temporarily. Marking terrain now always indicates distance to that point, which should help coordinate jumps and point out enemies who’ve left your view. [/p]

• [p]See a red glint when enemy weapons are being operated, so you know where to avoid, or when you’ve caught someone’s attention.[/p]

• [p]Earn gold through playtime[/p]
• [p]Unlock items with your gold in the marketplace[/p]
• [p](Prices and gold earning rates are not final) [/p]

• [p]While we’ve made some performance improvements since Alpha 1, we’ve been working hard on some other fronts and haven’t had as much time on performance for Alpha 2 as we might have liked. We have to carefully balance our development time, and optimizing too frequently or too early can slow down other areas of development (as optimizations rely on rigid implementations that make certain things hard to change, and can introduce subtle and difficult to track bugs). We’re hoping to make more progress on this front when we enter Beta sometime next year. [/p]

• [p]We’re still looking into ways to support more control schemes, especially around using multiple joystick/throttle hardware devices at the same time. We know you’re excited to get all sorts of sim rigs hooked up for this game, but we’re going to have to do a fair amount of custom work to make them all work. We’re working on it, but it’s going to take a bit more time than we initially budgeted. We hope we can support most setups in a flexible enough manner in the future.[/p]