Star Sonata 2 News

[h2][Empyrean Zone][/h2]

• Added additional drops to bosses and added additional gear exchanges at the Celestial Encampment base (new AC will be added within 48 hours after patch).

[h2][Engineer Changes][/h2]

• Engineer Class Skill 3 now gives 33% Resistance to Damage when in a Support Freighter.
• Zen of Engineer gives 1% of Resistance per level to Temporary Drones (the skill doesn’t currently list – will be fixed in future patch).
• Took 1 of the shields off of all non-super item bubble drones. Reduced the diameter of all non-super item bubbles. Each Bubble drone now gives nearby drones a chunk of flat shield bank, starting at 30k with the Droplet Drone and reaching 500k with the Twisted Galactic Bubble Drone.

[h2][UI/Client Changes][/h2]

• Generic Gear and Augmenter debris now have visuals that reflects the quality of the item.
• Client now takes player’s level of nanotech plating into account when calculating repair costs instead of giving wrong costs
• Cargo hold tooltip no longer goes negative when out of cargo slots.
• Added a new Neon Blue Delquadrikamdon skin.
• Added a new Neon Red Phoenix skin.
• Added a new Jelly fish Model and texture.
• Added a new Space Grey skin for the Space Blue family of ships.
• Added a new Kelvin Advanced skin for the Kelvin.
• Fixed Delquadrikamdons engine placement.
• New models and textures, and glowmaps for the following: Goblin Family, Cleft Thorns, Voltage Family, Inferno Family, Kelvin Family, Constable Family, and Monochrome Family.
• Missiles no longer appear in the squad/assets bar.

[h2][Skill Changes][/h2]

• Update description of Bot Ph.D. to clarify that it gives 2 extra combat/wild bots on swarm limit.
• Fixed skill description of team roster skill to say starts with 70 slots.

[h2][Item Changes][/h2]

• Faranji Pulse Charger aura on Unt Faranji Wingship now works on combat bots.
• Adjusted stats on Astranomologica Augmenter so that it is strictly an upgrade.
• Platform Augmentation Alpha, Beta and Gamma blueprints no longer require Drone Mastery to install.
• Reduced Galactic Junk Station Kits starting credits from 10 mil to 100k.
• Reduced the manhours from 400,000,000 to 100,000,000 for the blueprints for Kalthi Commander, Kalthi Deployer, Kalthi Stinger and Kalthi Warrior.
• Shattered Celestial Core again decays on universe reset per previous patch notes now there’s a use for it.
• Reduced Particle Stream augmod from 30 flat speed to 25.
• Coordinator Gemini Support Platform class-specific super item inbuilt to the Kalthi Armored Deployer has had the 20% damage reduction buff granted by the Sub Drone removed.
• Renamed Small Pax Cosmologica Fighter Generator Crate to Small Pax Cosmologica Fighter Crate.
• Fixed the Sas mission to give proper Pax Cosmologica Fighter Crate.
• Kalthi Armored Sanctuary, inbuilt to Kalthi Armored Warrior electric cost reduced from 2,500 per second to 300 per second.
• Kalthi Blazing Engagement, inbuilt to Kalthi Armored Warrior, has additional damage and -range, +vis debuffs if you manage to charge straight into an enemy.
• Updated description on the Kalthi Blazing Engagement.
• Adjusted the Wrathful Snare Mine’s effects: Additional +4500 vis to enemies within the drone’s active range, Resistance reduction increased from +10% to +20%, Speed reduction increased from -85% to -95%, increased drone lifetime to last 10 minutes, fixed the visibility adjustments so it stealths better; still susceptible to suns and detection like Seers.
• Changed the Wrathful Snare Mine Device to have a cooldown of 2 minutes and updated the description.
• Reduced the maximum opacity of the Deployer Weak Point Cover Up super item’s visuals (used to be a blinding green).
• Increased all the Kalthi Warrior Focus super items charge time from 90 seconds to 120 seconds.
• Kalthi Heart Focus superitem: add a -electric tempering at the end along with new visuals. Consumes shields instead of reducing Shield Max.
• Kalthi Warrior Focus super: grant immunity to grem and critical hits while in regen phase. Extra 5% life steal afterwards. Fixed the visual color to blue.
• Kalthi Warrior Mind focus super item: removed the -energy max penalty, deploy a huge electron cloud revealing surround objects.
• Kalthi Armored Commander’s Fighter Overdrive Blitz class-locked superitem fixed to actually work. Drawback effects are no longer a separate aura tweak, so only the fighters that receive the benefits suffer the drawbacks of the ability.
• Kalthi Armored Commander’s Commander Coordination Array cooldown was reduced from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.
• Converted Pax Stratos & Heliosoleta ships and Grand Navigator capital augmenters in “Allied Staging Sector” to trade bay exchanges (will need to be live edited shortly after patch).
• Added new super item to Voulge, Gravity Well Stabilizer, that reduces speed of self, allies and foes greatly and gives a forced thurster tweak.
• Reworked Voulge Thruster and Flamberge Thruster super items to be powerful Oilheart Afterburners, with the electric regen utility from the old version preserved.
• Adjusted the Voulge and Flamberge Charge Drones: Increased the electric regen tweak, Increased the HPS on the drone, now gain Energy Damage resistance when healed.
• Zeus’ Energizing Beam will no longer be Neurobound on purchase.
• Crawl Wyrm Blueprint now requires 50 Petroleum, instead of 5000.

[h2][AI Changes][/h2]

• Ruined Sanctuary and Empyrean zone bosses are now listed on the Instance Scaling Leaderboard.
• Fixed issue with Darkerhole’s reflectivity so its harder to see then Darkhole.

[h2][Universe Changes][/h2]

• Added Translator Droid for purchase on Earth Central in Sol.

[h2][Next Universe Changes][/h2]

• Preventing the placement of Warp Beacons in Emphatic Biology and Empathy Field. You cannot transwarp to an engineless galaxy anyways and prevents players from wasting warp beacons.
• Removing planets in Building Academy Entrance.
• Increased the drop chance of Holochart Fragment Epsilon within Tortuga.
• Renamed “Undergrowth” in the Protoplasmica to “The Undergrow” due to being a duplicate name to a galaxy within The Jungle.
• Added additional loot to Kalthi.
• Adjusted some Kalthi Armada Commander’s minions’ attack patterns to work properly.
• Moved Imperial Tweaking level one to Earth Central with other Imperial Skills and removed the AI Base from Anatolia.

[h2][Mission Changes][/h2]

• Fixed the “Get Piloting 7″ mission to require “Get Piloting 5″ to be completed prior to becoming available.
• Removed some improper xml tags from the description for the Constable mission “Undercover Investigation”.

[h2][System][/h2]

• Expanded base log system. See this dev diary for more information.
• New fuzzy Market Check search. See this dev diary for more information.
• Attempting to transfer, capture and/or dock bots/wild bots will now list all of the items that have skill levels too high to the prevent the action from occurring.
• Changed use condition for base upgrading to be using a kit while docked in a base, rather than while targeting a base. Will allow players to place bases without having to deselect another base.
• Can now upgrade bases within the same tech without the owner needing to be online, tech increasing will still require them to be online. Error messages now communicate this better.
• Transwarp no longer factors in avoided galaxies when determining distance.
• Negative Transference resistance reduces healing again.
• Resistance to Damage auras reduces healing.
• Wild Bots can no longer scoop items via RTS command.
• Made AI/bots think faster when they are in combat. This should result in better and quicker weapon choices if the target’s resistance profile changes.
• For items that have a tech requirement, their info box now properly states “base” instead of “ship” when it is a base only item.
• Dungeons will now reflect the premium status of the galaxy they’re in.
• Bases will now consider envelopments at the same weight as the target they were trying to hit if they expect to hit the envelopment instead of the target when prioritizing targets.
• Galaxy scanners can no longer be used remotely.
• Reduction of excessive graphical and network spam with warhead effects.
• Event chat now includes the new buy/sell price on ‘Updating prices for’ message when updated.
• Updated self-destruct error message when already in spirit form.

[h2][Bug Fixes][/h2]

• Fixed a bug where player assets wouldn’t update with team skill changes on galaxy state changes (ownership).
• Fix for monthly mission reset timer not using the right time zone as the rest of the time resets when determining the current month.
• Fixed bot order limit using the programming characters order limit rather than the bot owners order limit.
• Fixed a bug with re-centering not working correctly sometimes.
• Fixed certain AC trade or normal sales being blocked for items with no scrap value.
• Fixed a issue where super items would still work if already equipped even if the hull tech exceeded the limit the super states.
• Controlbots will now auto unequip if somehow equipped on anything but a bot or if multiple are equipped.
• Fixed a bug where Outpost Drones did not respect the team Outposts skill limit.
• Fixed a bug with bases unequipping items into multiple stacks.
• Fixed a bug with base extenders not unequipping if there’s an unequipped stack of it already.
• Bot fighter/missile selection will no longer select a missile/fighter too high tech for the bay to use, preventing launching.
• Fixed a bug that made you lose the TSL storage bonus during the last 24 hours of a subscription.
• Fixed a bug where drone resists could be included in ship scan results.
• Trade bots are no longer affected by /botsfight or /botsattack.
• Fixed an bug with Concourses at universe generation not properly linking.
• Fixed juxtaposition being able to randomly choose the same gal twice making a dead end.
• Fixed a bug that causes certain custom galaxies to overridden to no PvP rules due to layer settings during universe generation.

[h2][/h2]

Hello Sonatians! There have been whispers amongst the player base that Fighters and Deathblossoms would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that we are definitely making some targeted changes to both of them, and we plan to patch them in soon. We’re doing this because, in our conversations with you during the Healing Revamp, we committed to taking decisive action to fix pain points and problems sooner rather than later. We’ve also found that the way that Fighters and the Deathblossom works causes the game to become almost unplayable in crowded situations.

With that being said, let’s dive into some of the problems we’re going to address.

Note: Things may be subject to change before release. [h2]Deathblossom[/h2]



When enough SOBs (Space Objects) are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. Not only do excessive SOBs cause significant graphical lag, they also lead to severe network latency between players and the server. The more Deathblossoms looking for targets to fire at, the bigger the lag and latency for all players involved.

We decided to target two separate things in order to fix this problem:

• Bots firing Deathblossoms.
  • Bots will no longer use a Deathblossom.
• Deathblossoms firing at fighters.
  • Deathblossoms will no longer fire at fighters.

When a Deathblossom is fired, it creates lots of space objects that need to be tracked. When those projectiles fly towards fighters, and the fighters evade them, those projectiles still exist and will keep trying to track towards the fighters. This causes a significant amount of latency and graphical lag.

Also, when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually use a Deathblossom or splash weapons to kill them fast enough due to the cap on the number of targets splash is allowed to hit (20 at present).

This creates a weird situation where Deathblossoms almost completely counter fighters, until you bring enough fighters to a battlefield and suddenly the Deathblossom is nearly useless against them.

We’ve decided to remove this from the equation. These changes will result in Fighters being much more durable against players and AI that use Deathblossoms. They will also result in Gunner bots doing less total damage than they used to. We’re aware that this will result in lower damage output from high-end bots, but we believe that Gunner is overtuned in DPS in the first place. Any niche situations where the drop in Gunner bot DPS unreasonably affects squad play will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Fighters



When enough fighters are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. There are too many objects with their own particle effects from weapons and engines in play, and when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually figure out which ones you should prioritize shooting down. This means that area-of-effect weaponry are the best way to deal with them, but even this is unreliable because of Evasion and the random nature of target selection.

However, the biggest reason to adjust fighters is the sheer number of fighters players have fielded at once. The presence of this many fighters in play at once creates an enormous amount of client and network lag, and has made it clear that Star Sonata is not able to handle massive swarms of player assets. All of these factors combine to create a situation that warrants a change to fighters.

We decided to target a few things in order to address these issues:

• All fighters will require 1 slot to launch.
• Bots will be disallowed from launching fighters.
• Fighter bays will have a maximum of 2 slots (+2 on Fleet Commanders).
  • The total damage that Fighters do is increased to compensate for the reduction in the total number of fighters launched.
  • Fighter shield bank will be increased, and they’ll be made a little bit bigger visually.
  • Stat bonuses on Capital class Fighter Bays are doubled.
• Evasion will be removed from fighters.
  • Fighters will have a 90% chance of avoiding non-targeted damage. This includes area-of-effect, splash, non-targeted collisions, and so on.
• Fighters with aura generators will no longer have them, and fighters that take very high amounts of energy for extra damage will no longer do so.
  • Death of First Born, Jovian, and Panther Kitten fighters are examples of fighters that have been changed.
• Radiation Expert will no longer apply to Fighters.
  • Flight Controller will give 20% damage per level to Fighters (from 15%, on live).
  • Advanced Flight Controller will give Fighters +15% Damage.
• Pulse Guns on fighters now act like Magcannons, and do not inherit the velocity of the fighter.

The most controversial change is the removal of fighters from combat bots. It’s important that we do this because Bots represent an automatic way of engaging targets, and they can be used to immediately launch dozens or even hundreds of fighters in seconds. As long as Bots are allowed to launch fighters, we will continue to see players trying to figure out how to reach critical mass with regards to the number of fighters on the field at once.

To address this, we are going to make fighters more powerful on the main ship.

In addition, there have been long standing requests from the players themselves for changes to be made to fighters.

• Players have routinely asked for fighters with projectiles to be changed so that they continue to fire at targets when in range, so we’re doing that.
• Players have also asked for AoE and Collision code mitigation, and although we’re not giving them resistances or immunity to it they will be highly resilient against it.
  • They also will no longer be targeted by Deathblossoms!
• Players have also asked for fighters other than Radiation to be useful, and we’ve done this as well by removing the Radiation Expert Bonus from fighters but buffing all fighters Damage values through Flight Controller and Advanced Flight Controller.
  • This will result in a reduction to Radiation damage bonuses on Fighters, but an increase to non Radiation damage bonuses.
• Players have also routinely asked for something to be done about holiday fighters, specifically Death of First Borns, being powerful and impactful relative to other fighters. By normalizing them, we’re making them no longer feel mandatory.

[h2]Summary[/h2]

• Fighters will no longer be launched from bots, at all.
• Fighters launched from your main ship will be stronger and tougher to kill, won’t be shot at by Deathblossoms, they will no longer have Evasion when targeted but will evade the vast majority of non-targeted damage.
• Higher tech fighters will be visually bigger.
• Fighters with projectiles will shoot them more consistently.
• There will be much fewer fighters launched at once.
• Gunner bots will no longer use Deathblossoms.
• Gunners will not quickly kill groups of fighters.
• The DPS you do with fighters should be equivalent to what you are able to do on live. This will be higher in some cases, and lower in other cases.
  • If you are a low level player just starting out as an FC and only have a few fighters, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are a mid level player who has a bunch of bots that launch fighters only, you will probably do less damage.
  • If you are a high level player who has good fighters on yourself and your bots, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are an end game player with powerful bots, and powerful fighters, you will do more damage in most situations.
    • The one area you will certainly be less powerful is with Radiation fighters.

While we are doing our best to vet this project from many angles and solicit feedback from the players, it’s always possible that we may overlook something important. If this happens, we will quickly move to address the issue.
[h2]What do the items look like now?[/h2]



[h2]Will you be adding more fighters?[/h2]
Yes, we will be adding more fighters in future updates. We have about ~40 fighters that have been created and will eventually be added to the game.
[h2]Can I test these changes to see how they affect me?[/h2]
These changes are now available on Test.

(You can select “Test Server” from the drop down menu within your client’s login screen.)
All of these changes should be coming in with an upcoming patch, keep your eyes peeled!

[h2][Item Changes][/h2]

• Warp Beacon, Attached Warp Beacon, Native Warp Beacon have had their base Resistance to Damage increased to 87% and added 80 soak excluding Transference, which remains 30% vulnerability. They were also each given Annihilator Shield Z and Annihilator EnergyBank Z instead of their Andaman counterparts.

[h2][Bugs][/h2]

• Fixed a credit exploit with items that decay on jump or decay on leaving an instance. They no longer have scrap value.

[h2][/h2][h2][AI Changes][/h2]

• Fixed issue with Shielding 22 (Vihara Vaidya) having way too much regen and will now give a consistent shout when its changing damage types.
• For Weaponry 22 (Devalaya Deva), platforms do not spawn until the boss is aggroed.
• For Tractoring 22 (Kandara Janayitri), bombs spawn more frequently, have a higher maximum speed, and do more damage. Infected Bombs should now properly heal the boss when they come into contact with it.
• For Cloaking 22 and Radar 22 (Akhara Vizvadrz and Akhara Gupta), during the damage absorption phase, the bosses will heal for 20% of incoming damage instead of 100%.

[h2][Bugs][/h2]

• Fixed a bug where constant dps did not interact correctly with parasite damage.
• Fixed a bug where constant dps didn’t interact correctly with rate of fire tweaks.
• Marked targets (in weapon range) will now be shot by bots from beyond 2k range without needing to mark as team enemy.
• Fixed issue with “A Fair Trade” having a chance of giving no items.

The server will offline for roughly 4-8 hours for a server upgrade, patch, and regular maintenance. It is expected to be up at, or before 8AM EST December 13th.
Check out the discord at https://discord.gg/starsonata for more information!