Star Sonata 2 News

(+changes require a new uni)

 
[Item Changes]

• Unt Faranji Gatling Laser X has had its size and stats adjusted.

• Almost every Tech 0 to Tech 20 engine makes use of the new particle system.

• Jujo’qii Augmenter was not sticky, changed to be sticky like it should.

• Moved excessive initial prom requirements on the Andaman, Achilles, and Annihilator Station Exterminator Blueprints to periodic.

• All energies have been given appropriate rarities, for most energies this will result in no change. For some energies it will result in an improvement. For other energies it will result in a reduction.
  • Low tech AI base energies have had their stats shifted a bit so that there is more variety in Energy Bank sizes.
  • Amped Zeus Olympios Energy and Amped Jupiter Olympios Energy have been changed from Ultralight to Normal, increasing their power beyond the base versions instead of them being weaker.
  • Primal Lion Heart now uses 1 Promethium every 300 seconds, this brings the electricity regeneration back to where it was previous to the energy rarity changes.

• Vulcaroid Missiles are no longer shipbound.

• Updated Missile Crates descriptions to list the Tech and Damage Type of the missile they contain.

• The Rainbow Force Field holoprojector is no longer neurobound.

• Fixed a bug preventing planetary expedition from working.
  • This was already pushed in a hotfix.

• Adjusted the IC Extractor BP’s to properly show build amount in the build menu.

• Wasp Chamber is now a factory that produces Tamed Killer Wasps.

 
[AI Changes]

• Added credit drops to UZ mini ubers.

 
[Missions]

• Fixed issues with Bule and Vo’kii ship missions start and end points being missing from the Twisted Agent station.
  • This was already pushed in a hotfix.

 
[Universe Changes]

• Fix to Blue Emperor’s stadium arena exit using a red wormhole visual instead of blue.

• +Moved Bipolar from DF220 Perilous to DF160 of North Arm of Earthforce Layer.

• +Locked Iq’Bana to the South Arm of Earthforce Layer.

• +Removed Ship Tech Upgrades from common AI base tradebays. You can still acquire all of them from Beta Antares.

• +Converted the Christmas letter turn in to AC turn in at the station in Lapland.

• +The Z axis values of Enigmatic Sector objects have been set to zero. This will stop ships from flying below the planets and stars in that system.

 
[Typo Fixes]

• The mission “Marco’s Demise” now correctly states it requires 20 Paxian Pacifier Fighters in its summary in place of the old generator requirement.

 
[System]

• Added command “/ShowStatSources” to list where the different components of your ship stats come from.

• Converted /showsquaddamage info to a dialog box.

• Reduced rank required to abandon your own base in team territory from operator+ to soldier+

• Removed the concept of galaxies “freezing” when no one is in them for 5 minutes. Instead replaced by a deep sleep state, when in deep sleep objects in the galaxy can still act in a limited fashion, traveling, trading etc will continue working albit much slower than normal. This means bots will no longer end up trapped in DGs because they froze while they were coming out, nor will AI get stuck in a sleeping galaxy while they travel.

• AI (and by extension combat bots) will now only unpack 1 missile/fighter crate of every type that isn’t already unpacked in its inventory.

• Fix for destroyed fighters not updating quantity when added to player ship inventory.

• Added a failsafe to handle cases where an AI drifted too far out and got lost. This will only bring the AI back to the center if there are no players in the galaxy or any galaxies near it, this is not meant to simplify recentering after a failed fight and instead to reduce the likelihood of stumbling into a galaxy with no visible boss because it went too far and never came back.

[h2]Happy 2020, Star Sonata![/h2]
2019 was a busy year for us, with an active dev and QA team and lots of little improvements that have been patched in. In addition there are some huge changes and improvements that are currently on test2 server being thoroughly tested before an early 2020 release. Some of the things that we added in 2019 are:

• AI Empires
• Instance Scaling
• Improved the graphics for many weapons and engines using a new particle system
• We fought Rattie Moe by the hundreds, and the server is running so fast now, there was almost no lag
• Bonnet Expansion
• Lots of conversions of clunky trade in missions to the new alternate currency system
• Revamp of Strontium-90 missions
• Ongoing improvements to Kalthi Depths
• Comet improvements
• Market check improvements
• V Formation improvements and other bot AI improvements
• Improved Zebucart boss fight
• Revamp of cloaks
• Revamp of overloaders
• Rebalance of exterminators
• Rebalance of fighters and fighter bay improvements
• Rebalance of drones
• Rebalance of engines
• Torpedo rework and rebalance
• Rebalanced Pulse Guns and Mag Cannons
• Improved parasite code and balanced parasite damage

We have some major changes to BvB that will be added with the new universe this month, and termites 2.0 to be patched mid-uni.
[h2]Healing Revamp and Other Things on Test2[/h2]
On test2 are the exciting changes we’ve been working on revolving Shield Monkey and healing changes. Healing no longer manufactures shields by big reductions to the shields lost with resistances, so you don’t get the weird situation where cross healing is super efficient. HPS has been generally increased, but those shields have to come from somewhere. At level 1 of Shield Monkey, ShM’s get 1 extra shield slot in support freighters, and at level 2, they gain the ability to steal shields from enemies with shield transference weapons.

Zen of the Shield has been changed to +5% shield max and +1% shield regen per level, so everyone can have a much higher shield bank and not be so worried about being 1-shot by bosses and in PvP. Long battles will still be about shield sustain, but with more margin for safety. Shield Monkeys can alternate between healing and stealing without needing to worry about constantly healing the tank without him dying. Shield chargers have been made incredibly stronger, but now only operate out of combat. They won’t suck up your energy during a fight, and when the fight is over, you can quickly fill back up again. For recon class, that means they can even dip in and out of fights to fill up their shields if they can get away from the enemies for long enough.

Transference Power now increases the strength of shield transference lasers while healing, and Transference Efficiency increases the strength of shield transference lasers while stealing. Damage tweaks and buffs now only apply to shield stealing and not healing, but overall, HPS has been increased, as the intended bottleneck is not how fast you can heal, but how fast you can get the shields with which to heal. Many augmenters with transference power and/or efficiency have had their stats slightly altered.

Most resistances have been removed from most ships and replaced by a combination of a new armor stat and higher shield banks from Zen of the Shield. This is in an attempt to move away from the Pokemon-like system where you have to memorize what is vulnerable to what and the only difference between the damage types is just needing the right type for the right enemy. Armor works mostly as a “resist all” stat, with the exception that it is doubly effective against physical, and half effective against mining and transference stealing.

Since the various damage types are no longer as useful as ways to bypass resistances, some types have been increased in power and/or utility. Physical weapon strength has been increased in power by 22%, making them the strongest damage type, generally, though higher in DPE and lower in DPS than energy. Radiation weapons have been increased in power by 33%, and are now the ethereal type of damage. “Laser” damage type no longer exists. Surgical damage on a target is now tracked, and when an AI dies, it has up to twice as much change to drop augmenters and items (but not items from drop tables) based on how much surgical was used to kill it, with the last hit being slightly overvalued in the calculation. Kills against players and their possessions can cause up to twice the item damage and drop up to twice the credits based on how much surgical was used.

For now the way that bases heal will be left mostly how it is on live as to not disrupt the current BvB meta. Base healing will probably get changed at the uni reset following this one, but we will be sure to let you know.
[h2]Road Ahead[/h2]
We had some lofty goals at the beginning of 2019, mostly a full class rebalance and release of tech 23 content. Those got delayed because we wanted the ability to fully branch code and content in order to really test and polish and not hold up our regular patch schedule for minor improvements and bug fixes. But being able to fully branch like this is dependent on me converting all of our many balance sheets over to a new system that I devised, which is powerful, but takes a lot of work. All the various rebalancing of engines, cloaks, weapons, shields, etc that you’ve seen over the last year or so are the results of the new balance sheets. It just takes a ton of time, and I spent almost the whole year personally working on Excel sheets and VBA macros. What I thought would take about a month has been about a year and a half now, but a lot of the changes to the sheets have really improved the way we can make and design items, and should pay off in the years ahead.

Because it was taking so long, we decided to do the Shield Monkey and healing first, rather than waiting for everything to go in one gigantic update. The Shield Monkey rebalance has gone really well and received very good feedback from testers. It will be ready to go soon, and possibly will be paired with some minor changes to Engineer class skills and rebalancing of all of the support freighter hulls. We have a new balance sheet for ships that is really cool, using a “perk” system, but it will result in a lot of changes, since our current stats for ships are largely unbalanced. To minimize disruption for the players, but to push updates out without waiting for everything to be done, we are thinking to rebalance classes two at a time by related hull type, and rebalance ships of that hull type together.

Our nearterm roadmap for 2020 is to release the Shield Monkey and possibly minor Engineer changes described above very soon, finish the few remaining balance sheets, release the mod rework and the new cargo system, and then proceed with the other class rebalance two at a time. We have a lot of design work done of the tech 23 stuff, but we want to get the class rebalances done before that can be released.

Happy 2019, Star Sonata!

2018 brought with it a lot of new things. Enkelin was named as lead content developer and he created the Press Corps to give more transparency to the player base. NCCIntrepid took the lead of Quality Assurance and has been adding more rigor to our testing and bug tracking processes. The dev team as a whole is probably more vibrant and active than ever before.

We had a galaxy assault / BvB revamp to make BvB more interesting and balanced. We added Electrified Georg Ohm. We added several new specialized base kits. AI's and combat bots gained many improvements to their AI, and combat bots gained the new "V Formation" where they form up on your wing to fight, rather than fly all over the place. There was a major change to the shape of Kalthi Depths, with lots of roaming mini-bosses dropping KD dg loot. We revamped the way that planet terraforming blueprints work. Energies and shields were both buffed and rebalanced, making fuel much less necessary on energies and regen much stronger and less costly on shields. We revamped Junkyard and the junkyard tweaks, and added a new "alternate currency" system, where items can be bought and sold at AI bases for commodities in addition to credits. Gunner class received some tweaks and was made more offensive. We had a "Mega Moe" world boss event for Halloween, pitting the player base against the toughest boss ever for special Halloween prizes. Hull extensions and cloaks have had improvements and rebalances that are on the test server and will be patched soon. Jey has done a lot of improvements on the back end, and the server is running faster than ever, and aside from a few days of crash bugs, has been very stable.

Some of the most exciting things that the dev team worked on in 2018 haven't been seen yet. We have been doing a ton of design work on an upcoming expansion for 2019 that will bring both a tech 23 expansion with a bunch of new bosses and areas as well as some sweeping gameplay improvements. We have scores of pages of finalized design docs on the upcoming expansion and spent hours and hours in meetings finalizing much of what we have planned. I'm going to leave some of the details about the theme and content of the tech 23 part of the expansion for another blog post, but for now, I want to write about a few of the big gameplay changes we have in mind.

Healing

We have designs to reduce the strength and the efficiency of healing while simultaneously increasing player shield regen, increasing shield banks by a factor of 10x, and greatly increasing out of combat healing. Instead of gaining massive shields from healing efficiency and cross healing, Shield Monkeys will have to steal shields from enemies to redistribute to their team and engineers will actively use a much stronger +100% transference vulnerability beam to buff the healing from their drones and allies on a single target. We hope that these changes to healing will make healing much more balanced and a more active component in playing the game.

Resistances

The current state of resistances in Star Sonata is more like a weird Pokemon rock-paper-scissors thing than anything else. The planned change with resistances is two-fold. First to bring almost all existing resistances into a new "Armor" stat on ships, where each ship will have an armor that represents the average resists to all damage types, and then have at most one vulnerability or resistance to a specific damage type. Capital ships, heavy fighters, and bases will get the most armor and other classes will have much less. We will also make it so that the game remembers what ships you've scanned with a ship scanner, and for those ships already scanned, present the armor and resistance information in the target box.

Second, we will be revamping the damage types to make them more about the utility that each damage type brings and less about rock-paper-scissors. "Laser" damage will be removed. Energy damage will be the default damage type for both pulse guns and non-ethereal lasers. Surgical damage will cause onboard item damage as you damage the target, potentially disabling them over time, and cause an increase in credit, augmenter, and item drops (including from drop lists) when an AI is killed based on how much surgical damage he took in the battle. Heat damage will remain the damage-over-time damage type of choice and the amount of DoT will be increased and standardized across all heat weapons. Mining damage will still be used on asteroids, but gain the additional property of being armor piercing, and ignore the armor stat on the target. Physical damage will continue to knock things back and have a high DPE. It will gain even more DPS than it currently has, but also become subject to double armor mitigation. Radiation will be the ethereal damage type, with ethereal lasers being radiation, and possibly radiation bullets being ethereal. Hitting an enemy who is below some fraction of shields with radiation will irradiate them and no longer require the killing blow to irradiate.

Mod Rework

The mod rework that has been talked about in the past is almost completed, and will be released along with the big 2019 update. The two most exciting things about the mod rework are the addition of "primary" mods, which are much stronger and have a strength associated with them, and "re-modding" an item, where a modded item can go back to the neurodoc, and a player can pay increasing amounts of credits to have a chance to increase the strength of the primary mod, add another secondary mod, change a secondary mod, or even change the primary mod. This brings a very fun mini-game of continually crafting and refining your best equipment, but the increased cost each time you do it means that you want to pick carefully from the options presented in re-modding.

New Cargo System

We've developed a more straightforward design of a cargo system than previously talked about which will be released with everything else. The new cargo design is where items will drop with a "cargo" tag, similar to a mod, such that any item with the cargo tag will always take exactly 10 space. Equipping, using, or transferring an item will remove the cargo tag, but tossing will retain it. Items with the cargo tag will have square brackets around the item name in your inventory. This should hopefully free up a lot of hull space for some people, and let others feel like they can DG in whatever ship they want without sacrificing too much for holding loot.

Improved Visibility/Cloaking System

Enkelin has a complicated but elegant design on revamping the visibility and cloaking system that will make things much easier to balance for stealthy ships.

Giving the Skill Trees more Impact

We want to make the skill trees have more impact and each skill change the way you play the game, rather than just give some stats. Focus skills will give different damage mitigations and add extra slots for different equipment types. Advanced sub-skills will all have large effects and make your choices even more meaningful.

More and stronger super items

We are planning to add a lot more, powerful, super items. This will give those extra slots in capital ships a lot more meaning. Keep an eye out for "broadside" super items built from dg drops and doing massive damage to the left or the right.

Overloaders

Overloaders will no longer self-destruct, but instead cause item damage to your weapons as you use them.

Rebalance of Fighters

Another rebalance of the fighters, giving more fighters useful side-effects, giving more power to fighters launched from a players ship, and making more noticeable difference between fighters that take different amounts of slots.

Rebalance of Drones

Drones have a new balance sheet with rarity, range, mobility, and other factors that give a desired DPS for each drone. We've already done a quick balance pass on drones that is on test, but there will be a more in-depth look at drones for the big update.

And Much More

And lots of other little things are planned, as well as a light rebalance to the power of classes, with an overall balance between offense, defense, and utility for each class and trying to hit those targets for a fully kitted out player of each class. A lot of the work done in 2018 was actually preparing for a big branch in our source code so that we can work on this upcoming release while maintaining a main branch for small changes and bug fixes. Look for a post about the tech 23 stuff in the near future!

We are continuing to work on all the in-game store features that Steam requires in order to launch.

Subnavigator Xibesh, commander of the P.S.S. Excelsior, has reported increasingly large hordes of Aveksaka Suta in the Vihara region of Subspace. The Suta will soon breach the blockade and reclaim Subspace entirely. In response, Paxian scientists plan to use the device in Kumari to destroy Vihara and the countless Suta swarms inside. Lyceum scientists believe losing this region will destabilize all of Subspace and result in our universe imploding on the 5th of May, 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 17:00 GMT). With the destruction of our old universe, a new one will be created! All characters, their skills, ships, and bots will be transferred over, but deployed drones and userbases will be lost, as well as anything on the userbases! You'll have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again.

With the activation sequence of the Kumari device, Lyceum scientists also predict the arrival of two waves of ancient outposts surfacing from the depths of time. They will be reappearing some time around the 22nd and 28th of April.

Discuss in the Forum

Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.


Additionally their’s been a topic made about suggesting changes to current tractor beam mechanics. Click here to find out more…


Finally witness the fully operational Battle Sphere! Yes, the Battle Sphere is currently being worked on to add a super laser that will be able to cut through almost everything.
Here’s a mock demostration of the current progress on the superitem visual, this is probably going to change at the final result, as discovered some issues occur with this current animation after multiple uses.




In other news higher resolution background textures for all dialogs in the games user interface, this will reduce artifacting that the previous version used to produce.




As you’ve probably noticed via this blog’s background image, ring stations! This is currently in concept stage but most of the visual work is done. Here’s some image content produced so far:

• Ring Frame (deployed)
• Ring Facilities (building/resource focus)
• Ring Habitat Supports (colo resource focus)
• Bio-ring (colo focus)
• Ring Enhancers (galaxy effects focus)

Discuss in the Forum